GRADE 7 HISTORY

 WHAT IS FEUDALISM?

               

             Feudalism is a social system of rights and duties based on land tenure and personal relationships in which land (and to a much lesser degree other sources of income) is held in fief by vassals from lords to whom they owe specific services and with whom they are bound by personal loyalty. In a broader sense, the term denotes "feudal society," a form of civilization that flourishes especially in a closed agricultural economy and has certain general characteristics besides the mere presence of lords, vassals, and fiefs. In such a society, those who fulfill official duties, whether civil or military, do so not for the sake of an abstract notion of "the state" or of public service but because of personal and freely accepted links with their overlord, receiving remuneration in the form of fiefs, which they hold hereditarily. Because various public functions are closely associated with the fief rather than with the person who holds it, public authority becomes fragmented and decentralized. Another aspect of feudalism is the manorial or seigniorial system in which landlords exercise over the un-free peasantry a wide variety of police, judicial, fiscal, and other rights.

Several of the great civilizations of the world have passed through a feudal period in the course of their history. Some of these feudalisms--for instance, the Japanese are indeed quite comparable with the feudalism of Western Europe and of the Latin East.