The Three Orders

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XI (Themes in World History), Chapter 4.

Could a serf just walk away?

Imagine you are born a serf in France around 1100. Your lord owns the land you farm. You owe him labour, grain and loyalty. You grind your corn in his mill and bake in his oven. A tenth of what you grow goes to the Church. You may not leave the estate without his permission. Yet a saying of the age promised: "Town air makes free". If you could slip into a town and stay for a year and a day without being found by your lord, you became a free man. This chapter is the story of that world: who held power, who worked, who prayed, and what shook it between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries.

After Rome: land, Church and Franks

After the western Roman Empire fell, Germanic peoples settled in Italy, Spain and France. There was no unifying political power, so social organisation centred on control of land, drawing on Roman imperial and German custom. Christianity, the empire's official religion from the fourth century, survived Rome's collapse. The Church became a major landholder and a political power.

France takes its name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe whose kings were Christian. In 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor.

Feudalism. The word comes from the German feud, meaning "a piece of land". Feudalism describes the economic, legal, social and political ties between lords and peasants. The peasants farmed their own plots and the lord's land, did labour services, and got military protection in return. Roots go back to Roman practice and the age of Charlemagne, but as an established way of life it emerged in the eleventh century. The French historian Marc Bloch (1886 to 1944), author of Feudal Society, stressed geography and collective behaviour in explaining it. He was shot by the Nazis in the Second World War.

Two views. For the exam: feudalism was a system of ties between lords and peasants, founded on land, that took shape across western Europe. Another reading: historians such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Susan Reynolds argued that "feudalism" is a later label, imposed by scholars, that hides how varied land, loyalty and lordship were from place to place.

The three orders

French churchmen of the time said that society had three parts: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work.

The second order: nobles and knights

Nobles controlled land through vassalage. The king was at the top, nobles were his vassals, and peasants were the vassals of nobles. The lord (seigneur, meaning "senior") protected the vassal, who pledged loyalty. The ceremony used oaths on the Bible and a symbolic object, such as a charter, a staff or a clod of earth, to mark the transfer. The noble's house was the manor.

A manorial estate held the manor house, peasant villages, fields, craftsmen such as blacksmiths, carpenters and stonemasons, woodland, pasture, a church and a castle. In England castles developed after the Norman conquest. Manors were not fully self sufficient: salt, millstones, metalware and luxury goods came from outside.

Knights appeared from the ninth century because of frequent local wars. A lord gave a knight a fief, a piece of land of 1,000 to 2,000 acres or more that could be inherited. The knight paid a fee and fought for his lord.

The first order: the Church

The Church owned land, taxed, and had its own laws. Serfs, women and the physically challenged could not become priests, and priests could not marry. Peasants gave the Church a tithe, a tenth of their produce, and the rich left it endowments for their welfare in the afterlife. A parish is the area under one priest.

Monks lived in monasteries (or abbeys, usually either for monks or for nuns). St Benedict founded a monastery in Italy in 529, and Cluny in Burgundy was founded in 910. From the thirteenth century friars moved from place to place, living on charity. Pilgrimage mattered too, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales describes pilgrims travelling to Canterbury.

The third order: peasants

There were two kinds of peasants. Free peasants rented land and paid labour rent and military service of at least 40 days a year. Serfs cultivated the lord's own plots, could not leave without permission, and had to use the lord's mill, oven and wine press. Kings sometimes imposed a direct tax on peasants, the taille, and clergy and nobles were exempt.

England

In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, crossed the Channel and defeated the Saxon king. He gave land to about 180 Norman nobles who supplied knights to the king. Private warfare by knights was forbidden in England.

Why farming grew: environment and technology

From the fifth to the tenth century Europe was cold and forested. From the eleventh century a warmer phase brought longer growing seasons, easier ploughing and a retreating forest line. New tools followed.

Pause and predict: why would moving from two fields to three raise the amount of food?

Check your answer: because less land was resting each year. Under the two field system half of the land lay fallow; under three fields only one third did. Peas and beans in the rotation also restored nitrogen to the soil.

The effects were large. The average peasant farm fell from about 100 acres to 20 to 30 acres, but it produced more food, and lords increasingly took rent in cash. Europe's population rose from about 42 million in 1000 to 62 million in 1200 and 73 million in 1300.

Towns and a "fourth order"?

Towns revived from the eleventh century around fairs, castles, bishops' estates and large churches. Bigger towns had about 30,000 people. Guilds controlled the quality, price and sale of craft goods. A town offered escape from the manor: "Town air makes free", through the rule of a year and a day. Townspeople are sometimes described as a possible "fourth order".

Cathedrals were built in France from the twelfth century, paid for by donations that included gifts from rich merchants. Their stained glass told Bible stories to people who could not read.

The fourteenth century crisis

Europe's population fell from 73 million in 1300 to 45 million in 1400. The revolt in Flanders came before the Black Death, so tension in the countryside was building before the plague.

Pause and predict: after the Black Death, labour was scarce. Who gained bargaining power, and how did lords respond?

Check your answer: peasants and workers gained, because lords could not find enough hands, and wages rose. Many lords tried to push back by reviving old labour services, and that pushed peasants into revolt.

Two views. For the exam: the Black Death made labour scarce, raised wages and weakened serfdom. Another reading: the historian Robert Brenner argued that the plague alone did not decide the outcome, because similar population loss led to freer peasants in some regions and tighter serfdom in others. In his view the strength of peasant resistance and of the lords determined what happened.

New monarchies

From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the "new monarchs" built strong states: Louis XI of France, Maximilian of Austria, Henry VII of England and Isabelle and Ferdinand of Spain. They raised standing armies, built permanent bureaucracies and collected national taxes. Absolutism has been called a "modified form of feudalism".

France's Estates-General had three houses (clergy, nobility and the rest). It met in 1614 and was not called again for nearly two centuries, until 1789. England's Parliament (House of Lords and House of Commons) grew from the Anglo Saxon Great Council. After Charles I was executed, the monarchy was restored on condition that Parliament met regularly.

Timeline

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Changing Traditions gives the sweep from feudalism to the voyages that this chapter explains in depth.
• Next: Changing Cultural Traditions looks at the towns and ideas that grew once trade and cities revived.
• Class XII link: Peasants, Zamindars and the State lets you compare European serfs and lords with peasants, zamindars and the state in Mughal India.