Feudal Economic System

The economic portion of feudalism was centered on the lord’s estates or manor, and is called manorial. A lord’s manor would include peasant villages, a church, farm land, a mill, and the lord’s castle or manor house. All economic activity occurred on the manor. This meant that little to no trade occurred during this time period. Most of the peasants during the middle Ages were serfs. Serfs were generally farmers who were tied to the land. They were not slaves because they could not be bought or sold, but they could not readily leave the manor either.

Serfs were given land to farm in exchange for service to their lord. This service usually involved working the lord’s fields, maintaining roads and the manor, and providing military service in times of war. Serfs paid taxes to their lord in the form of crops. This is also how the paid the fee to use the manor’s mill or other services. Http://regenerates. Org/regents/global/ themes/economic/mid. CFML Feudal land tenure, system by which land was held by tenants from lords.

As developed in medieval England and France, the king was rod paramount with numerous levels of lesser lords down to the occupying tenant. Tenures were divided into free and unfreeze. Of the free tenures, the first was tenure in chivalry, principally grand sergeants and knight service. The former obliged the tenant to perform some honorable and often personal service; knight service entailed performing military duties for the king or other lord, though by the middle of the 12th century such service was usually commuted for a payment called scuttle.

Another type of free tenure was sewage, primarily customary sewage, the principal revive of which was usually agricultural in nature, such as performing so many days’ plowing each year for the lord. In addition to the principal service, all these tenures were subject to a number of conditions, such as relief, the payment made on transfer of a fief to an heir, and escheat, the return of the fief to the lord when the vassal died without an heir.

Chivalric tenures were also subject to hardship, the guardianship of a fief of a minor, and marriage, payment made in lieu of marriage of the vassal’s daughter to the lord. Another form of free tenure was the spiritual tenure of bishops r monasteries, their sole obligation being to pray for the souls of the grantor and his heirs. Some ecclesiastics also held temporal lands for which they performed the required services. The main type of unfreeze tenancy was village, initially a modified form of servitude.

Whereas the mark of free tenants was that their services were always predetermined, in unfreeze tenure they were not; the unfreeze tenant never knew what he might be called to do for his lord. Although at first the villain tenant held his land entirely at the will of the lord and might be ejected at any time, the royal courts eater protected him to the extent that he held tenancy at the will of the lord and according to the custom of the manor, so that he could not be ejected in breach of existing customs.

Moreover, an unfreeze tenant could not leave without his lord’s approval. Tenure in village in England then became known asphodel tenure (abolished after 1925), in which the holder was personally free and paid rent in lieu of services. Http://www. Britannica. Com/Upchucked/topic/205571 ‘feudal-land-tenure Feudal Economic System By Germination’s