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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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feudalism
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System of administration, standard in England after the Norman *Conquest, by which the upper levels of a military society assign land to those below them in return for military service when required. The process begins when a king, at the peak of the feudal pyramid, entrusts large areas of newly conquered or confiscated land to individual barons, as *William the Conqueror did after 1066; these territories are then subdivided as each lord assigns fiefs (parcels of land from which income can be derived) to his own vassals. This is a rapid and effective way of controlling an area, trouble arising only in later generations when those who have inherited fiefs may have less personal loyalty to their lord or king.
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Feudalism developed among the *Franks under *Charlemagne in the 8C and spread eventually through most of Europe. When the *Vikings conquered northwest France in the 10C they adopted the system, and it was their Norman descendants who accelerated its development in England (there is evidence of earlier beginnings of a native feudalism among the Anglo-Saxons).
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At the bottom of feudal society were the peasants, who worked the land on the *open-field system. They fell into two classes. Free peasants paid for their right to farm the land by performing military service when required, or agricultural service at other times; the villeins (or serfs) were tied to the land, for their payment was a given number of days of work on the fields of the lord of the manor. From the 12C the obligations of both groups began to be commuted for payment of a cash 'quitrent', enabling the lord to hire full-time labourers of his own.
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A free peasant taking this option held his land as a freehold of the manor, and a villein as a 'copyhold' (a less secure tenure). By the second half of the 14C the free peasants had been transformed into the distinctly non-feudal *yeomanry, and many of the villeins were wage labourers capable of such equally non-feudal gestures as the *Peasants' Revolt.
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