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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:33):
This is half our history Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. Last episode, we dove head
first into Renaissance life. Now let's talk about life on
the farm. Today Chris dives into feudalism and how it operated.
He also talks about how people during this time made
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some extra cash and the innovations that made the agricultural
revolution possible. Here's Chris. So this is one of those
topics where we really start to look at what life
was like for the everyday person, you know, eighty percent
of the population. Although we should say that when we
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were talking about monks and nuns in monasteries and convents
and the prior topic, that most of those people were
peasants or they were there was no middle class, but
the functional equivalent of what you and I would call
blue collar people. So feudalism is a structure makes us
think of triangle of a hierarchy, and that's true. But
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the important thing to remember is that feudalism affected the
bottom portion of that pyramid. It was eighty percent of
the population. So you and me in this world. Feudalism
is a topic that historians have been arguing about for
about one hundred and fifty years, and in the last
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twenty or thirty years there's been this very vibrant discussion
among medieval historians as to whether or not there was
even something called feudalism. And it was a very complex structure.
And yes there was something called feudalism, but there was
no monolithic manual. You know, you didn't open up a
manual and it said here, this is how feudalism must
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work in all places and at all times. There were
lots of customs, there were lots of local variations over
one set system. But what I'd like to present to
you is kind of a rubric or a skeleton. Most
feudal systems in most places worked something like this on
that pyramid structure. We have to remember fundamentally that what
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we're talking about is the countryside. This is a rural structure. Now,
some of these rural communities, while I have a castle
connected to them eventually, but those are still towns. They're
in no way cities. As we're going to discuss in
the next topic. This is a rural structure, a decentralized structure.
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Now at the beginning of feudalism, at the very top
of that pyramid, we're dealing with the upper classes mostly absolutely,
there's no question about that. And we're dealing with very,
very large portions of land. The smallest of one of
these portions of land would be several hundred acres. The
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largest of them might be as big as a large
county in your state nowadays, and that holding, that piece
of land was called a feudom or a thief, a
landholding with all the property that was on it, all
of the buildings which is immovable property, and all of
the movable property, which are instruments, wheelbarrows, animals, and yes,
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we must say people. People who are legally free but
tied to the land some kind of in between idea.
They're called serfs, which is normally translated as slaves. And
though they had certain legal rights, they couldn't up and
move on their own without paying a penalty. So let's
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look at kind of three levels. The tiny, tiny, tiny
point of that pyramid level one little bit underneath that
level two, and then eighty percent of that pyramid level
three level one the top of that pyramid. That's where
you're going to find a lord and aristocrat, a knight
who is a vassal of a king or a duke
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or account, and that vassal receives land of feudom in
exchange for military service, and that military service was actually contracted.
There was an oath of fealty where the lord sat
in a chair and the aristocrat or the knight knelt
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before and placed his hands together like this pledging his fealty,
and the king or the duke or the count would
place his hands around those kind of praying hands as
a representation of his protection. And this occurs in religious
taking of vows as well, the person taking the vow
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and then the religious superior. Happens today in ordinations in
certain religious communities. And so when you get these feudal documents,
these oades of fealty, what do they say? It says
that military service is usually capped at forty days a year,
and that the person promises to fight in an offensive effort,
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but not a conquering effort. If you can figure out
the difference between those two, I'd like you to explain
it to me. So if a king wants to kind
of expand the territory for the good of his people,
that seems to be okay. But if he wants to
expand the territory because he wants more money, that doesn't
seem to be okay. How you can extend separate those two,
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I must tell you is beyond me. In addition to
military service, the lord or the aristocrat or the knight
has to give advice or counsel or assistance. We find
all of these words in these contracts. We've talked about
the military help, but also justice. So if a case
has to be heard and the king needs advisors or
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a jury, you show up money. He can say, hey,
I need money to build a castle. I need money
to buy supplies. I need money to raise a ransom
because I've been captured, or my son was captured, or
my daughter is being sold. If you will in a
dynastic marriage and I need money for the dowry, or
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a king is coming and I have to throw a
big party, I have to give hospitality. That's level one,
level two. A little bit below that is a tenant
who is in turn a vassal of the lord. And
these are in the documents as the vassi dominici, the
vassals of the lord. You had the big feudum. A
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piece of that feudum is called a beneficium or a benefice.
It could be a job, it could be an office.
It was usually property. And so when you got that lands,
you became the governor and the judge over the peasants
on that land. But you didn't show up, you didn't
live there. You were an absentee landlord. You get called
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the gentry over time in some documents, particularly in England
and in Ireland. What do you do? You appoint a
steward or a bailiff and you say, hey, you're in charge.
You run the show. You're the supervisor or the overseer.
Who were they overseeing us? Level three most of that
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pyramid the peasant farmers old serfs free but tied to
the land, part of the sale, part of the benefice,
part of the oath of fealty. And you can say
nothing as to whether or not you want to be
part of that deal. Eighty percent of the population and
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seventy five of your income was tied to farming. You
didn't have daily contact with this gentry. You had daily
contact with a steward or a bayliff. If you've read
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the stewards and the bailiffs bad guys.
They were taking graft and taking bribes, and the peasants
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did not want to interact with these people. I guess
a bad example of that would be the sheriff of Nottingham.
If you really exist in existed in robin Hood, there's
an example of somebody who's overbearing, who's telling you what
to do, and if you don't like the way, it
is too bad. So what you want to do is
police yourselves. In theory, those peasant farmers were under everybody
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else in that pyramid. So let's go to the top again.
A king, a duke or account underneath him, an aristocrat
underneath him, a bailiff or a steward, and then you.
So technically you have a lot of bosses to take
care of, but in reality you're living your life and
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you're dealing with the steward or the bailiff. What did
you have to give in return for living and farming?
You had to pay rent and you had to pay fees. Now,
normally the rent for your property and the fees were
not money. It was not a capital relationship. It was
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a Bartner relationship, and this is laid out in the documents.
Once again, you might have to give a percentage of
the fish that you catch, a percentage of the cheeses
that you make. Now, this is largely self patrolled, right,
because who's gonna know if you caught one hundred fish
or fifty fish. And quite frankly, the steward of the
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bayliff just wants his ten. So if the contract says ten,
you can get two hundred. Just give him the ten.
That's usually the way it worked. You also had to
provide three days of labor every week on your boss's fields,
which were call the domain or his roads or his bridges. Now,
let's break this down. You have seven days in a week.
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You're not working on Sunday. You have six days in
a week. Three of those days, half of your time,
you have to work on somebody else's property. You also
don't work on feast days in the church, and those
feast days don't count for the three days. So you
can see that less than half of the time you're
working for yourself. This is not gonna work very well.
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You're gonna need extra money, and how does that extra
money come That extra money comes from, and that's not
your bosses. So let's talk about farming. What's sometimes called
the monorial system or the senorial system. This is the
way a medieval farm in this early period before about
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nine hundred is laid out all of this land and
you're only farming half of it at any one time.
That is really inefficient. Now, there's not a lot of
science here, but they did understand that if you keep
planting the same crop in the same place as the
years go by, you are yield is getting smaller, quantity
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going down and the quality of the crop is going down.
There's something wrong. So they simply rotated. One year, I'll
plant here, one year I lay fallow here. It's a
very very inefficient system. Within that system, you have some
left dovers, So you plow down one line and you
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turn your horse or your ox around, and as you
do that, because you're being very inefficient and you can't
do it line by line, a strip or a stripe
or a book as it's sometimes called, is created, and
that balk is now free. So every single surf, which
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would be a man, his wife, his family, would get
a couple of those books, but again you might get
two over there and seven over there and three over there.
Very inefficient for you to carry stuff all over the place.
And in addition to those strips or stripes, you'd have
your own little vegetable gardens. You have your house and
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your own little vegetable garden. What comes up in British
sources as you're toft and your croft, and so what
do you do in the winter, Because you've got two
growing seasons. Right spring you plant it rose, in the
summer you harvest, and then usually you have another little
quick harvest in the winter. You got something called winter wheat,
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whatever you can get out of it. And then the
winter comes. Can't do anything in the winter outside. So
what do you do in the winter. You repair your
tools and your instruments, and you work in your cottage.
If you have a computer at your home in a
study and you do a little work on the side
as a freelancer, we call that your cottage industry. Well,
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this is where the phrase comes from, what did you
do in your cottage in the winter. We can't say
what did you do in the spring or the summer
or the fall at night? Because you work all day.
You work from sun up to sundown. A great history
of the Middle Ages was called a world lit only
by fire, right, because when it's dark you have to
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go to bed. Candles will only give you so much light,
and so you really can't work after work in the spring,
the summer and the fall. What you have to do
is you have to take advantage of the winter. So
after you've repaired your tools and stuff, in other words,
you've done the material needs for somebody else's income, he
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did some for yourself. You might card wool, you might
create clothes, you might finish clothes, which is a little
bit of dying or putting buttons on things in some decoration,
and maybe you would make about a quarter of your income,
pretty small scale from that for your own usage and
to sell. We're going to take a quick break. But
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when we come back, life for women on the farm
and spoiler, it wasn't as depressing as you might think.
What was life like among us in that village. It
was very self regulating because, as I said before, you
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want to stay away from that steward or that bailiff.
Think again of the Sheriff of Nottingham, right, not a
good guy and so you want to regulate your own community.
This is going to become very important as government grows,
and when I talk about guilds in the next topic,
there's a tradition of self policing that's going to move
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from the feudal countryside to the gothic city. So one
example of self regulating is that all must heed the
Huan cry. The Huan cry, a famous phrase is when
somebody's stolen something and somebody else follow Tom, he's got
my sheep. Whatever you're doing, you have to drop what
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you're doing and start running. And if you don't, you're
an accomplice. You're complicit. Everybody thinks you're working with Tom.
And the reason you do that is because if something
is stolen from one, something is stolen from all, especially
if it's a piece of communal property like a plow,
like a knife, like a sheaf. And so you police
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yourself so the bailiff wouldn't get involved. You used common
areas together and you represented your concerns to the bayliff.
You organized yourselves and you said, hey, he's going to
be the spokesman for us. So there's a nice self
government tradition that's growing here now. Right away, you might
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be thinking, well, is this socialism? Is this communism? These
are all later words. It's more along the lines. If
you've ever been among an Amish or a Quaker community,
where people hold things in common and help each other
the famous Amish barn raising, this is the kind of
thing you should be thinking of now. One of the
really interesting things within the feudal system is that we
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look upon the system when we say, wow, it's so rigid,
it's so structured, and we've already seen that there were
lots of local customs, and we think, wow, this is
very misogynist, this is very patriarchal, this is very top down. Well, yes,
we don't have examples of women pledging odes of fealty,
even though a nun basically pledges an oath of fealty
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to her abbess. But women had relative rights in this system,
and we have the documents to tell us that, for instance,
women worked in the fields among the men. And the
interesting thing is when they received compensation, sometime in the
form of wages, but more often in the form of kind. Right,
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we're talking about goods in kind. They received equal compensation.
Now that blows your mind, right, you think of equal
compensation men and women. You think of the nineteen sixties
sexual revolution, although all studies show nowadays that women are
still making only seventy five cents or eighty cents on
the dollar for the same job that a man makes.
And here we have in the Middle Ages women working
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side by side with the men as their partners, as
equal partners. If a woman's husband died and she owned
the land, she actually got to take control of the land.
Now I shouldn't say owned the land and the sense
of her name as on a contract, but she's the
one who's making the decisions on her balk or stripe
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for her family. What will we plant and when will
we plant it? And what kind of cottage industry will
we have. You have as many female brewers as you
have male brewers, because brewing is essentially cooking. And this
is something interesting because when you see brewing move from
the countryside to the city in cities, you have as
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many female brewers as male brewers. Even in guilds. And
a woman had the right to speak for herself in
a court of a manner. So if a steward or
a bailiff made a charge against a woman, she had
the legal right to stand up and defend herself in
her own voice. Not something we expect to find in
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the Middle Ages, but it's right there in the records. Now,
how do we go from this feudal system to this
gothic city landscape? When you are so inefficient in producing food,
you've got to somehow go from a subsistence economy to
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a surplus economy. A subsistence economy what I make, I eat,
and I only have enough to leftover to get me
through the winter. A surplus economy, I have leftovers not
only for myself for the winter, but that I can sell. Well.
I've got to increase my production in order to do that.
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And if I don't do that, if there is no
surplus food, you can never have a city. Because nowadays
you're thinking about breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and you're gonna
go out and you're either gonna buy prepared food or
you're gonna cook food. But the food that you're gonna
cook has been slaughtered by something else. Nobody says I
want to gla a milk and takes a pail and
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goes out back anymore. And so people in cities have
to have a surplus agriculture somewhere nearby that gets brought
into the city. And this was replicated in history as well.
The city of Rome in the ancient world had a
million people that bought food, mostly prepared food. They basically
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had diners in ancient Rome. How does that happen? This
agricultural revolution again, how can you have a revolution in
a dark age? Because it wasn't a dark age. That's
why around nine hundred people begin tinkering. They say, hey,
we're not making enough money, so we need to tinker
with what we're doing. And they go from a two
field system to a three field system. They take that
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field where they were allowing fifty percent of the land
to go fallow useless, and they say, let's cut this up.
Let's cut this pie, not in two but in three.
And so we're going to use sixty six percent of
our land, not fifty percent of our land. And lo
and behold, that produces a lot more food, twenty five
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percent more food. So what do they start to do.
They start to move their fields around. They plant this
and that in these two fields and let the third
go fallow. And then they swap, and then they swap.
This was all experimentation by the way, that was done
in monasteries and convents by people who had to be subsistent.
And as the monasteries grew, they needed to make more food,
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and so they tinkered and they figured out how to
do it while they worked, and for them, working was prayer, spirituality.
It's tied into this. It's an interesting connection. Now think
about it. Think about your own life. If you skip lunch,
you start to get a little bit lagging around four o'clock,
you start to get a headache if you don't have
that cup of coffee in the morning. With more food
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and better food, when you eat better, let's face it,
you feel better. If you have better nutrition, you have
a longer life. Women, particularly if their health is better,
they will survive childbirth at a higher rate. Childbirth is
greeted with utter fear in this period because in some places,
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if the records are true, a woman might have a
one in three chance of surviving childbirth, let alone the
child's chances. But if a woman is in better nutrition
even today, the chances of her surviving childbirth and having
a healthy baby that survives what they called infancy, which
was ten years, then you're going to have a bigger population,
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so better nutrition, longer life. We find people getting married earlier.
If women are getting married earlier, they have a few
more years of sorry to put it in the terms fertility,
because they're healthier. They're having more children and healthier children.
So the death rate declines, the infant mortality rate declines,
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your population grows, and because you're getting more efficient on
the farm, all of those people don't have to work
to produce food anymore. How are you getting more efficient
on the farm? Better farming technology. Nailed horse shoes. Can
you imagine that there weren't nailed horseshoes by before eight
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or nine hundred? Absolutely true. Better harnessing. We used to
put a harness on a horse or an ox that
went across the neck or the chest. Now think about that,
if somebody puts a harness across your neck or your chests.
To take your backpack and put it across your neck
or your chest, you're not going to be breathing all
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that well, you're gonna get tired, you're not going to
be able to pull as heavy of a load. But
if you take your backpack and you put the straps
over your shoulders, and in fact, if you strap it
cross your waist as well. You can distribute the weight better,
you can go farther. And so what we did with
our ox and our horses is we put a shoulder yoke.
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That picture you've all seen of a shoulder yoke, and
that takes the pressure off of where you're breathing and
puts it on your shoulders. Your shoulders are stronger than
your chest, and so these animals can be controlled better.
They can turn in a tighter way at the end
of a line. So you're plowing your field much more efficiently.
Not only are you using two thirds as opposed to half,
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but your lines, your furrows are closer together, and your
yield just starts going through the roof. We have a
better use of more efficient water wheels, wind mills, saw mills.
This all has to be seen as technology. You know,
we live our lives with iPhones and iPads and all
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of this other stuff, and we see that as technology,
and it is. But the wheel whenever somebody invented the
wheel back in caveman times, was a huge innovation. These
small innovations nailed horseshoes, shoulder yokes, water wheels, windmills, and sawmills.
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Move us from a subsistence economy to a surplus economy.
So this larger, healthier population can now move to the cities.
It's in the cities where you have larger populations where
you can buy food that folks can now take place
in a different sort of revolution, a commercial revolution. But
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without a commercial revolution, you couldn't have an agricultural revolution.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Half Hour History
Secrets of the Medieval World. Next time, we're taking a
field trip into the medieval cities fun make sure your
permission slips are signed. Half Hour History Secrets of the
(26:07):
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