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World history
Course: World history > Unit 3
Lesson 2: European Middle Ages: feudalism and serfdom- Overview of the Middle Ages
- Feudal system during the Middle Ages
- Serfs and manorialism
- Serfdom in Europe
- Key Concepts: Serfdom
- Focus on economics: serfdom
- Peasant revolts
- Key concepts: Peasant revolts
- Focus on rebellion: Peasant revolts
- An overview of the Crusades (part 2)
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Serfs and manorialism
An overview of how a manor was organized in Medieval Europe. Discussion of serfs and serfdom.
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- What were the main differences between free peasants and serfs? If serfs were bound to their manor, does that mean that free peasants could choose to move to a different manor and work there instead?(7 votes)
- Serfs were essentially "property" of manors. Their freedom was restricted, and they were given and taken from one manor to another. Free serfs had an option to work for manors, but they also had an alternative to work for themselves in the fields of their own.(7 votes)
- In my school we learned that barons were right under the king, the knight was below the baron, and the villein was below the knight. Why are they different?(5 votes)
- Under the Feudal system, people had different ranks and based on where you were with your life (wealth, stature, etc..) that’s where you would be in the government.(2 votes)
- Was the feudal system better than the social (economic) system used during the roman empire in Europe, and why did it occur during the middle ages?(2 votes)
- No, not really , It wasn't that well economically. But better than Roman slavery. Feudalism itself was made because of a loss of central authority aka Roman Empire and when that all fell everything became unsafe what with robbers and barons. So the people wanted protection. The nobles gave them that under a series of rules. Leading into feudalism.(7 votes)
- How were free peasants or serfs able to have a family? If so, how were they able to meet their partner? How was somebody even chosen to be a peasant?(3 votes)
- There were multiple peasants that worked on the Lord’s land, so they met each other because they lived near one another. If you owed the Lord a debt, then he could legally make you a peasant. If the Lord went to war and captured somebody, they could become the lord’s peasant. Or if you were just so poor you would go to a lord voluntarily and volunteer yourself to be a peasant in exchange for food and stuffs like that. If you were in danger and you were really poor then you could go become a peasant and the lord would protect you. They would protect you because lord’s actually needed peasants to plow their land so they could make money, if you went and tried to kill their peasant, they would probably kill you because you killing their peasant (or serf) would endanger their wealth.(1 vote)
- Since serfs weren’t really slaves, because they can cultivate their own land, wouldn’t that mean that free peasants were the slaves?🤔(2 votes)
- Note that you used the word "free", which is usually a disqualifier for being "enslaved." Just as being "enslaved" is a disqualifier for being "free".(1 vote)
- Why was it so beneficial to avoid turning around medieval plows?(2 votes)
- Why was it so beneficial to avoid turning around medieval plows?(1 vote)
- It takes up a lot of land to turn around a team of draught animals pulling a plow, land that could be used for growing crops. Avoiding the need to turn the team around created more land for production of crops to feed the animals and the people who used them.(2 votes)
- Why was it so beneficial to avoid turning around medieval plows?(2 votes)
- 1) Turning around at the end of a row and getting the oxen lined up wasted time. One also had to get the plow down to the depth for the desired furrow all over again.
2) Turn around space was subtracted from crop space, so the productive land was wasted for "utility" rather than for growing stuff.(0 votes)
- What are the rights of Manorialism?(1 vote)
- is that a dragon in the background? 1:54(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] In a previous video, we already talked about the feudal system, how you can have a king and then you might have
some vassals of the king who give an oath of fealty to the king in the homage or homage ceremony, might be a duke. And you could keep going down this. Maybe you have a count, maybe you have a baron, and could keep going down
this chain of nobility where one noble is pledging fealty to the king as a king's vassal, but then they are a
lord of another vassal. And you keep going all the way down until you get to a plot of land where the actual work might occur. And that term is often
referred to as a manor. A manor just doesn't happen at the bottom of this pyramid. A duke can have a manor and they can split up
the rest of their duchy and give sections of it to form counties that could be led by counts. But what we're going
to focus in this video is the manor itself, because that's where life
in a medieval community actually takes place. And the work on a manor
is done essentially by the lowest rung of the ladder and that is both free peasants and also by serfs. To get a sense of what a medieval manor could have looked like, here's a picture and this would've been a particularly fancy
manor right over here. This is a ducal manor, so this would have been
the manor of a duke, so it could be something
like that right over there. And in this picture,
you see the manor house which in this case is the duke's castle, in many medieval communities
were the highest ranking of the nobility right beneath the king. And so we see these people
actually working the field. We don't know from looking up at them, some of them might be free peasants, maybe this gentleman right
over here is a free peasant. And this person right over here is a serf. The word of serf comes
from the Latin for service, the same word that eventually
gives us words like servant and they're someplace in between
a free peasant and a slave. They are bonded to the lord of the manor. In this case it would be a duke, but you can go down this hierarchy, you could have a manor
where the lord is a baron or the lord is a knight, or the lord is just
someone who is very wealthy and somehow got access to a fiefdom. So the serfs are bonded to the land. They can't leave without their permission. They are allowed to cultivate certain tracts of land themselves, but they also have to work for their lord. So they might help plant
crops and harvest crops in the lord's land as well and they also give a
percentage of everything that they grow or everything that they do to the actual lord. And if the lord needs to go into war, they might have to be
soldiers in that war. You might be wondering,
well that sounds pretty bad, it sounds similar to being a slave. One of the key differences is that a serf actually can accumulate
things on their own. They can actually own property. Now another term or sometimes a subcategorization of
serf in the Middle Ages is the term villain. I know what you're thinking, you have heard that term before. The villain today means a bad guy. But the term originally
comes from the Roman Empire when Diocletian, the famous emperor who persecuted Christians, he also, because they were having trouble getting labor in rural villas, he began to decree that certain people had to work in the villas. And so someone who was
compelled to work at a villa was called a villain, and so they were bonded to the land. They were a type of serf. Now the fact that villain in English, it means someone who is bad, it gives you an idea how
in a lot of languages in a lot of cultures, the notion of being
captive or bonded and poor gets associated with being bad which seems very contrary to
our modern view of the world. Get a top-level view of what
a manor might look like. We don't know what type of
manor this is in particular, but the manor house here
seems a little bit more humble than this ducal manor right over here. This could be a, maybe a baron's manor house. Now the manner often had a village. This is where the serfs
or the free peasants might live, keep their homes. And then you see the land that is cultivated collectively by this community, not just the actors that
we've just talked about, you might also have a church or monastery on that manor right over here. And these strips of land, they might have different crops. And the output of those
crops go to different people. The one common factor
is the lord of the manor might get all of the crops
from some of these strips, while on the other strips, they get the taxation. So they'll get a certain
percentage from the crops there. But all of the work is done by the serfs and the free peasants and
possibly if there some, if this is a monastery, and there's some monks at the monastery. Now one interesting thing is why you often see in these manor maps, these long strips of land, and our resident agricultural expert at Khan Academy, David Rheinstrom, says it's because the medieval
plows once you got going, you didn't want to turn them around, you got some momentum. And so people liked the plant
crops in these long strips so the plows could just
keep going in one direction and only at the end, they just have to turn it around. So you're minimizing the number of times that you actually have
to turn around to plow.