FEUDALISM AND WOMEN IN THE MIDDLE AGES

A form of social structure and hierarchy in medieval Europe, feudalism was a system of social, political, and military relationships based on reciprocal obligations. In its most basic terms, it was simply the exchange of service and loyalty for protection and justice. In practice, the ruler awarded his favored subjects with grants of land. Feudalism was based on land since it was the only true capital in the Middle Ages, which, by and large, did not have a money-based economy until the fourteenth century. The French law stated specifically, “No lord without land, no land without lord.”

Middle- and upper-class women lived largely outside the feudal system. The reciprocal obligations that bound a knight to his king had no equivalent for women. Thus, their role in the feudal world was as the property of men. They were defined primarily in relation to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons.

Feudal estates came with military obligations, thus they passed to men. Only if no male heirs existed could women inherit. A woman’s father was her guardian until marriage; if he died, the father’s lord served as her guardian until she was married. Such wardships could be lucrative. The lord kept any money generated by a ward’s estate, and she had to marry whoever he said or lose her inheritance. These conditions were fairly universal throughout Europe. The lord “sold” the ward’s marriage to a prospective bridegroom interested in taking control of an heiress’s estate. Wardship was considered an investment and, like goods, could be bought and sold.

In the feudal structure, a peasant owed a certain amount of service to the lord in exchange for protection and a small plot of land to work. The lord owed service to his king—military service during wartime and administrative service during peace—in exchange for the fief or the grant of land. The obligations were supposed to be reciprocal, with the king protecting the lord and the lord protecting the peasant, but it did not always work this way. The reciprocal obligations, called vassalage, were not that different from an employer-employee relationship. Some were good, some were bad, some were prosperous and some were not. In the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, forms of sharecropping were common. In this case, the person working the land did not own it. Instead, the farmer (a peasant) gave most of the harvest to the landowner, keeping a small percentage for himself. Female peasants and serfs were expected to work the land alongside their fathers and husbands. Little allowance was made for pregnancy, childbirth, or childrearing.

Feudalism succeeded in tying landholding nobles to the king; the alternative would have been states fractured into dozens of tiny, independent duchies contending with one another. The church was also part of the feudal system. Bishops and abbots acted as lords, even fulfilling military obligations as required.

By the fourteenth century, the institution was obsolete and weak. Wealth was no longer concentrated in land. The nobility had sold their land to raise funds, discontinued the practice of manorialism or communal farming, as it was no longer cost efficient, and sold serfs their freedom.

The merchant class arose outside the feudal world of the Middle Ages. Lords granted liberties to towns because the towns brought them considerable revenues. Towns, and the merchants in them, moved the medieval world from a land-based economy to a currency-based economy. Women were involved in all aspects of trade, often in conjunction with their husbands. If her husband were absent on a trading trip, she would run the business. As a widow, she would take over all trading and merchant functions. Women were also involved in the production of goods, particularly textiles and foods.

By Jennifer Lawler in "Encyclopedia of Women in the Middle Ages",McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, USA, 2008. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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