Themes In World History Chapter 6 The Three Orders

Abbey’ is derived from the Syriac abba, meaning father. An abbey was governed by an abbot or an abbess.

The towns of the Roman Empire had become deserted and ruined after its fall. But from the eleventh century, as agriculture increased and became able to sustain higher levels of population, towns began to grow again.

Peasants who had surplus grain to sell needed a place where they could set up a selling centre and where they could buy tools and cloth. This led to the growth of periodic fairs and small marketing centres which gradually developed town-like features – a town square, a church, roads where merchants built shops and homes, an office where those who governed the town could meet. In other places, towns grew around large castles, bishops’ estates, or large churches.

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The men, who led the life of self-denial and self-control, were called the Monks in Christianity.

The places they lived in were called monasteries. The Monks led the simple life of a self-denying acetic. They had to take a vow not to acquire any kind of worldly possession and not to get married. They also took a vow to obey the cheif of the monastery. Their only mission in life was to pray and preach and to spread moral teachings among the common people.

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1. Free Holders: The freeholders received the land from the lords and paid taxes to them. This category of peasants did not work for their lords.

The merits:
1. Feudalism provided security of life and property to the common people.
2. Feudalism exercised an effective check upon the autocratic rule of the kings.
3. The Feudal lords established order during a period of disorder and confusion.

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The demerits:

2. The feudal lords were always quarrelled with one another to expand their own estates. As a result of it, the peace and order in the society were often disturbed.

3. Feudalism was based on the exploitation of the common man. The feudal lords used to live the luxurious life while the peasants and other common men lived in the miserable condition.

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The rules were: 
i. Permission to speak should rarely be granted to monks.

ii. Humility means obedience.

iii. No monk should own private property.

Long-term changes in population levels affected the economy and society:
(i) A number or towns came into being. They also became the centre of trade and commerce. Society became more advanced and civilised.
(ii) This change brought about new changes in agricultural production. Production reached its peak. Good quality of goods was also produced.It increased the life expectancy rate.

Depopulation resulted in a major shortage of labour. Serious imbalances were created between agriculture and manufacture because there were not enough people to engage in both equally. Prices of agricultural goods dropped as there were fewer people to buy. Wage rates increased because of the demand for labour, particularly agricultural labour, rose in England by as much as 250 percent in the aftermath of the Black Death. The surviving labour force could now demand twice their earlier wages.

A new class sprang up. It was the middle class. Reasons for its development was the coming of new inventions and development of trade and industries.

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Some of the important ceremonies conducted by the Church copied formal customs of the feudal elite.

The act of kneeling while praying, with hands clasped and head bowed, was an exact replica of the way in which a knight conducted himself while taking vows of loyalty to his lord. Similarly, the use of the term ‘lord’ for God was another example of the feudal culture that found its way into the practices of the Church.
Thus, the religious and the lay worlds of feudalism shared many customs and symbols.

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iii. From the eleventh century, Europe entered a warm phase. Average temperatures increased, which had a profound effect on agriculture. Peasants now had a longer growing seasons and the soil, now less subjected to frost, could be more easily ploughed.
iv. Environmental historians have noted that there was significant receding of the forest line in many parts of Europe.This made expansion of the area under cultivation possible.

Though these rebellions were ruthlessly crushed, it is significant that they occurred with the most violent intensity in those areas which had experience the prosperity of the economic expansion - a sign that peasants were attempting to protect the gains they had made in previous centuries.
Despite the severe repression, the sheer intensity of peasant opposition ensured that the old feudal relations could not be reimposed. The money economy was too far advanced to be reversed.
Therefore, though the lords succeeded in crushing the revolts, the peasants ensured that the feudal privileges of earlier days could not be reinvented.

Also, an ineffective method of crop rotation was in use. The land was divided in half, one field was planted in autumn with winter wheat, while the other field was left fallow.

Rye was planted on this piece of fallow land the next year while the other half was put to fallow. With this system, the soil slowly deteriorated, and famines were not uncommon. Chronic malnutrition alternated with devastating famines and life was difficult for the poor.

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(iv) The Knights: The knights formed the lowest category of Feudal lords. Mostly they were the vassals of the Barons and provided them military service. The knights had no direct links either with the Dukes or the Earls.

(v) The Peasants: The peasants formed the lowest class in the feudal society. They cultivated and managed the land which they received from their lords. The Peasants were divided into three classes: (i) The Independent peasant (ii) The Slave Peasants (iii) The Bonded peasants (serfs).

(i) Dukes and Earls.
(ii) The Barons.
(iii) The Knights.

Main Functions of the Feudal Lords:

Every Feudal Lord was expected to pay homage to his overlord and could then be invested with some formal rights. He also had to provide the military services to his superior lords. Every feudal lord was first a vassal and then an overlord with a number of vassals of the King him.
For example, the Dukes and Earls were the vassals of the King and owed him allegiance. The Barons were the vassals of the Dukes and the Earls. The knights were the vassals of the Barons. They performed military service to their overlords.

The relations of Feudal Lords with the Peasants and the Serfs.

The Peasants and Serfs had land which they cultivated for themselves. But they had also to work on the lands cultivated entirely for their lords.
In fact, the Serfs were the domestics of their lords. They had no right and no freedom. They were living the miserable conditions.

2. Contribution in the Field of Drama: In the Medieval age very few people could read. There was very little to read as books were almost scarce. Therefore drama became the most powerful medium of education.Plays in the local dialects were written to entertain as well as to educate the people who did not know Latin.
These plays were of two types:

(i) Miracle Plays: Which enacted scenes of the lives of saints.

(ii) Morality Plays: Which usually depicted the struggle between good and bad.

Along with the ships came rats carrying the deadly bubonic plague infection, the ‘Black Death’.

i. Western Europe, relatively isolated in earlier centuries, was hit by the epidemic between 1347 and 1350. The modern estimate of mortality in that epidemic is that 20 per cent of the people of the whole of Europe died, with some places losing as much as 40 percent of the population.

ii. As trade centres, cities were the hardest hit. In enclosed communities like monasteries and convents, when one individual contracted the plague, it was not long before everyone did. And in almost every case, none survived. The plague took its worst toll among infants, the young and the elderly.
iii. There were other relatively minor episodes of plague in the 1360s and 1370s. The population of Europe, 73 million in 1300, stood reduced to 45 million in 1400.

2. Cathedrals were designed so that the priest’s voice could be heard clearly within the hall where large numbers of people gathered, and so that the singing by monks could sound beautiful and the chiming bells calling people to prayer could be heard over a great distance.

Fig.: Salisbury cathedral England

3. Stained glass was used for windows. During the day the sunlight would make them radiant for people inside the cathedral, and after sunset the light of candles would make them visible to people outside.
The stained glass windows narrated the stories in the Bible through pictures, which illiterate people could ‘read’.

Developments in the political sphere paralleled social processes. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European kings strengthened their military and financial power.

i. The powerful new states they created were as significant for Europe as the economic changes that were occurring. Historians have therefore called these kings ‘the new monarchs’. Louis XI of France, Maximilian in Austria, Henry VII in England and Isabelle and Ferdinand in Spain were absolutist rulers, who started the process of organising standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy and national taxation and, in Spain and Portugal, began to play a role in Europe’s expansion overseas.

ii. The most important reason for the triumph of these monarchies was the social changes which had taken place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The dissolution of the feudal system of lordship and vassalage and the slow rate of economic growth had given the first opportunity to kings to increase their control over their powerful and not-so-powerful subjects.

1. Instead of the basic wooden ploughs, cultivaros began using heavy iron-tipped ploughs and mould-boards. These ploughs could dig much deeper and the mould-boards turned the topsoil properly. With this the nutrients from the soil were better utilised.

2. The methods of harnessing animals to the plough improved. Instead of the neck-harness came into use. This enabled animals to exert greater power. Horses were now better shod, with iron horseshoes, which prevented foot decay.
There was increased use of wind and water energy for agriculture. More water-powered and wind-powered mills were set up all over Europe for purposes like milling corn and pressing grapes.

3. There were also changes in land use. The most revolutionary one was the switch from a two-field system. In this, peasants could use a field two years out of three if they planted it with one crop in autumn and a different crop in spring a year and a half later.
That meant that farmers could break their holdings into three fields. They could plant one with wheat or rye in autumn for human consumption.
The second could be used in spring to raise peas, beans and lentils for human use, and oats and barley for the horses. The third field lay fallow. Each year they rotated the use among the three fields.

With these improvements, there was an almost immediate increase in the amount of food produced from each unit of land. Food availability doubled. The greater use of plants like peas and beans meant more vegetable proteins in the diet of the average European and a better source of fodder for their animals.
For cultivators, it meant better opportunities. They could now produce more food from less land. The average size of a peasant’s farm shrank from about 100 acres to 20 to 30 acres by the thirteenth century.
Holdings which were smaller could be more efficiently cultivated and reduced the amount of labour needed. This gave the peasants time for other activities.

4. Some of these technological changes cost a lot of money. Peasants did not have enough money to set up watermills and windmills. Therefore the initiative was taken by the lords. But peasants were able to take the initiative in many things, such as extending arable land.
They also switched to the three-field rotation of crops, and set up small forges and smithies in the villages, where iron-tipped ploughs and horseshoes were made and repaired cheaply.