When we think of feudalism, we tend to think of a
hierarchical state with a king at the top enjoying all the benefits. In my
entry on The Ideal Feudal State, I pointed out that feudalism was in fact more
decentralized and consensual than is commonly thought. Today I want to draw
attention to some of the duties of
kings.
At the most elementary level, of course, kings owed
their subjects what all governments owe their citizens: security and
justice. The security component
consisted (then as now) of protection against foreign enemies (invasions,
Viking raids or terrorism etc.) and protection against lawlessness and crime. Then
as now that first duty bled into the second as fighting crime entails
administering justice, but justice is and was not confined to fighting crime
alone. Justice also includes a just administration of property, labor, scarce resources
such as water, and more.
The parallel to modern society is imperfect, however,
because feudal society was both more personal (men took oaths to individuals
not to abstract ideas) and more stratified. Feudal society was not based on the
principle that “all men are equal before the law” but rather on the notion that
rights and duties depended on one’s social position or class.
Fundamentally, society was divided into three classes
or estates: 1) those who worked, 2) those who prayed, and 3) those who ruled/administered
(not those who fought, as I’ll explain below). While this stratification
oversimplifies both the society itself and attitudes of the time, it is
nevertheless a useful structure for understanding feudal society and with it
the duties of kings.
The workers were responsible for the production of (first
and foremost) food, other necessities and luxuries. The more sophisticated the
society, the more complex this class was, so that it came to include everything
from serfs working the land to great merchants and craftsmen commanding
fortunes and ruling over armies of tradesmen, apprentices, servants and
laborers. Being a member of the “Third Estate” was not the same thing as being
poor! But the Third Estate was viewed as subordinate
to the other two: in spiritual matters to the Second Estate and in secular
matters to the First Estate.
The men who prayed (the Second Estate) were the
clergy, and again this segment of society included poor (e.g. parish priests
who lived little better than the peasants they served) and “princes of the church”
with vast estates and fortunes. Unlike the Third Estate, which was fragmented
into different professions with their own hierarchical structures, before the
Reformation all members of the Second Estate belonged to one, universal
(“Catholic”) church. All members of the Second Estate thus operated in a single,
well-defined hierarchy headed by the pope. Since the Catholic Church required
celibacy of its members, churchmen could not bequeath their lands, fortunes or
offices to their offspring (even if, as we know, they often had them!) On the
other hand, because members of the Second Estate were drawn from the other two,
and the Church as an institution often provided a means for the children of
poor parents to rise to positions of power, wealth and influence.
The First Estate is often described confusingly as a
class of warriors or “those who fight.” While even contemporary sources refer
to the First Estate in this way, the
description is misleading. On the one hand, 50% of this class, the women, did
not fight — but they were still members of the First Estate and often wielded
great power, including power over men and fighting forces. On the other hand, the bulk of fighting men
in any host were not drawn from the
First Estate, but rather from the Third; they were men engaged in the
profession of arms as mercenaries or feudal levies called up for a set period
of time.
It is more useful to look at the First Estate as the
secular ruling class, the people who exercised for and in the name of the king
his fundamental duties of providing protection and administering justice.
Because one man (or woman) could not alone perform either function, the king
depended upon the First Estate to provide military capability, enforce the law of
the land, and administer local justice. The First Estate was effectively the
executive branch, and as such it had a special relationship with the king.
Members of the First Estate were not mere subjects
of the king, they were also his deputies.
Understanding this helps explain why the king and his nobles had a special
relationship, a relationship founded on an exchange
of oaths.
To be precise, the exchange of oaths was only with the
upper strata of the First Estate, with the barons or tenants-in-chief. They
were called tenants-in-chiefs because in feudal theory all land belonged to the
king and he merely loaned it to his designated deputies, albeit on a hereditary basis. This meant the land
passed from the original recipient to his heirs in perpetuity — until the line
of the original recipient died out or he or his descendants failed to fulfill the
feudal duties associated with the loan of land (the enfeoffment). In either case
the land was forfeit to the crown.
The tenants-in-chief generally controlled far more
land than they could possibly manage and owed many more fighting men to the
crown than they could personally equip and provide (often in the hundreds), so
they in turn lent out their lands (again on a hereditary basis) to other men,
who owed them — the barons, not the king — fealty. The lowest tier in the First
Estate were simple “knights” holding a “simple” knight’s fief, meaning a fief
whose annual income was sufficient to support only a single knight (which was
not one individual but a fighting unit, as I explained in an earlier post.) If
a fief became too small or poor to support the expenses of a knight, the owner
slipped out of the First Estate and down into the Third, becoming nothing but a
tenant farmer. (This was to become a problem in the latter Middle Ages.) The
landowners holding land from a baron or bishop were called “rear tenants” and
belonged to the First Estate, but not to the baronage.
However, often lost beneath the customs, ceremony,
romance and idealism of chivalry is the fact that the relationship between a
king and his barons (and between lords and their rear-tenants) was
fundamentally one of fee (fief) for service. The Kingdom of Jerusalem shines
light on this relationship because many of the fiefs in the Kingdom of
Jerusalem were “money fiefs,” highlighting the monetary component of feudal
service. Whereas elsewhere it was more
common for a king (or lord) to bestow land that
was expected to produce enough income to support a set number of knights,
in Jerusalem the king frequently paid a set amount of money outright in exchange
for the service of a set number of fighting men. Significantly, La Monte points
out in Feudal Monarchy in the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem 1100 to 1291, many money fiefs were granted with the
provision that “if the revenues specifically granted [were] not forthcoming,
the amount promised [would] be made up from...the general revenues of the kingdom.” The distinction between a fief and
wages in these circumstances is approaching minimal, albeit a fief could be
bequeathed, while wages could not. The more common practice of granting land
deemed to be worth a certain income, of course, obscured and weakened this
monetary component of the king’s duties to his vassals because the value of
land could vary over time based on many factors from acts of God (draught,
flood, fire etc.) and through good or poor management.
Regardless of the nature of the fief, the relationship
between the king and his barons/tenants-in-chief was a direct and personal one.
It requiring the renewal of the oath each time a monarch died and was
succeeded. The oath of a vassal was furthermore, neither unconditional nor unlimited. For example, in Jerusalem the king could not command feudal service outside the borders of the kingdom, either for offensive operations (e.g. against Cairo or Damascus) or even in the defense of the neighboring states of Tripoli, Antioch and Edessa. Another important limit on service was that no man was required to personally render knight's service after he reached the age of 60. Critically — and often overlooked nowadays — is that the oath of
fealty was a two-way bond. Not only did the vassal swear loyalty to the king,
but vice versa. Thus, Richard I of England, as the liege lord of the Lords of
Lusignan, was obligated by feudal custom to support Guy de Lusignan’s claims to
the throne of Jerusalem.
While the case of a vassal being anointed king
elsewhere and then needing support is a rare one, a far more frequent
occurrence were attacks on a vassal's lands — by brigands, raiders, enemy troops. Attacks might come from a common enemy like
the Saracens or Vikings, or simply from a neighbor, who owed allegiance to a
different king (think of the situation in France during the long wars between the
Plantagenets and Capets, or the Hundred Years War). Simply put, if a vassal did not have the
military strength to defend his own territory, he could call upon the king to
come to his aid. In the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where the threat of Saracen
invasion was ever-present, the constitution explicitly stated that failure on
the part of the king to protect the lands of a vassal automatically absolved
the vassal of his oath.
In general terms, then, the duties of a king to his
barons was payment and protection, but in the Kingdom of Jerusalem there was
(at least) one more duty — one that particularly appeals to me, that of “restor.”
Restor was the duty of the king to replace or reimburse any knight or
noble whose horse was mutilated or killed in battle while serving the king. Indeed,
it was one of the most important duties of the Marshal of Jerusalem to assess
the value of all knights’ and noble’s horses before any campaign/engagement, to
assess the value of horses captured during an engagement, then then either replace
horses injured or killed with captured horses of equivalent value or reimburse
the knight/noble the monetary value of the lost stallion. This custom highlights the importance horses
had to the military establishment and social status in the feudal age; see my entry on crusader horses.
Balian d’Ibelin’s stallions are important characters
in all three parts of my biographical novel about Balian, and the duties of
kings and vassals is natural a fundamental component of the historical
developments.
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