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Updated: May 3, 2025
Elements of sound political life fostered by the Russian village. Traces of the mark in England. Feudalization of Europe, and partial metamorphosis of the mark or township into the manor. Parallel transformation of the township, in some of its features, into the parish. The court leet and the vestry-meeting. The New England town-meeting a revival of the ancient mark-mote.
It has been maintained that a formal and definitive act, forming the initial point of the feudalization of England, is to be found in a clause of the laws, as they are called, of the Conqueror; which directs that every freeman shall affirm, by covenant and oath, that "he will be faithful to King William within England and without, will join him in preserving his lands and honor with all fidelity, and defend him against his enemies."
In England the effects of feudalization were different from what they were in France, but the process was still carried very far, especially under the Norman kings. The theory grew up that all the public land in the kingdom was the king's waste, and that all landholders were the king's tenants.
Most of his descendants would thus be landless, or, if they held land, would do so by what soon amounted to servile tenure. Thus the majority of the tribe had little or nothing to lose by the feudalization that was approaching. The changes of Malcolm's reign are concerned with the Church, not with land-tenure.
Taken together, the introduction of the feudal system was as momentous a change as any which followed the Norman Conquest, as decisive in its influence upon the future as the enrichment of race or of language; more decisive in one respect, since without the consequences in government and constitution, which were destined to follow from the feudalization of the English state, neither race nor language could have done the work in the world which they have already accomplished and are yet destined to perform in still larger measure.
This may not seem true of the sheriff; but that he had escaped transformation, after the feudalization of England, into something more than an administrative officer makes the Norman state somewhat exceptional at that time, and the history of this office, even under the most powerful of kings, shows the strength of the tendency toward development in the direction of a private possession.
Since the paper was read, I have met with the following passage in Stubbs's "Constitutional History of England," vol. i., p. 265: "It has been maintained that a formal and definitive act, forming the initial point of the feudalization of England, is to be found in a clause of the laws, as they are called, of the Conqueror, which directs that every FREEMAN shall affirm, by covenant and oath, that 'he will be faithful to King William within England and without, will join him in preserving his land with all fidelity, and defend him against his enemies. But this injunction is little more than the demand of the oath of allegiance taken to the Anglo-Saxon kings, and is here required not of every feudal dependant of the king, but of every FREEMAN or freeholder whatsoever.
The process of feudalization, throughout western Europe in general, was no doubt begun by the institution of Benefices, or "grants of Roman provincial land by the chieftains of the" Teutonic "tribes which overran the Roman Empire; such grants being conferred on their associates upon certain conditions, of which the commonest was military service."
The mark or township, transformed by the process of feudalization, becomes the manor.
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