Class 11 History Chapter 6 — The Three Orders (English Medium) | ASSEB
Welcome to HSLC Guru! This page provides complete English-medium question answers for Class 11 History Chapter 6 — The Three Orders, prepared in accordance with the ASSEB (Assam State Board of Secondary Education) syllabus, drawn from the NCERT textbook Themes in World History. The chapter explores the social, economic and religious organisation of medieval Western Europe between roughly the ninth and the sixteenth centuries — the age of feudalism — focusing principally on France, England and parts of Germany and Italy. This page contains an introduction to the chapter, an English summary, an Assamese summary (সাৰাংশ), all NCERT exercise questions with detailed answers, additional short-answer and long-answer questions, multiple-choice questions, a comparative table of the three orders, and a glossary of key terms — everything required for ASSEB Class 11 Higher Secondary History examination preparation.
About the Chapter
Chapter 6 of Themes in World History takes its title — “The Three Orders” — from a famous remark made by Bishop Adalbero of Laon in early-eleventh-century France: “the house of God which is thought to be one is therefore divided into three: some pray, others fight, still others work.” Western European society in the Middle Ages was thus theoretically divided into three social classes or “orders”: the clergy (those who prayed), the nobility (those who fought) and the peasantry (those who worked). Around these three orders grew the institution historians call feudalism — a system of economic, legal, political and social relationships built on the lord-vassal bond and the manorial estate. The chapter draws heavily on the work of the great French historian Marc Bloch (Feudal Society) and traces the rise of feudal society from the ninth century, its consolidation around the manor, the growing power of the Catholic Church, the agricultural revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the appearance of new towns and guilds, and finally the long fourteenth-century crisis — featuring famine, the Black Death of 1347-1350, and peasant revolts — which paved the way for the rise of the new centralised nation-states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Summary
Medieval European society between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries was organised around the system known as feudalism. Bishop Adalbero of Laon described its theoretical structure as a society of three orders — clergy, warriors and peasants. The clergy, headed by the Pope and organised through bishops, parish priests and monks, formed the first order; their duty was to pray, to teach Christian doctrine, to maintain churches, monasteries and convents, and to look after the poor and the sick. They received income from tithes (one-tenth of agricultural produce) and from extensive Church lands. The nobility — kings, dukes, counts, barons and knights — formed the second order. They were warriors who held land called fiefs in return for military service to a higher lord. A noble was bound to his vassal by an oath of fealty (loyalty), creating a chain of dependence often called the feudal pyramid. Below them lay the third order, the peasantry — the vast majority of the population — divided into free peasants, who paid rent and taxes, and serfs, who were bound to the soil, worked the lord’s demesne several days a week without payment, could not marry or move without permission, and had to use the lord’s mill, oven and winepress for a fee. The basic economic unit of feudal Europe was the manor — a self-sufficient estate consisting of the lord’s manor house, the peasants’ cottages, a church, fields, meadows, common pasture, woodlands and a mill. The Catholic Church was the dominant cultural and intellectual institution: it built great cathedrals, ran schools and universities, preserved classical learning in monastic libraries, conducted the calendar of festivals, and exercised both spiritual and political authority. From about 1000 CE Europe experienced a major agricultural revolution: a warmer climate extended the growing season; the heavy iron mouldboard plough, the horse-collar, the horseshoe and water- and wind-mills replaced wooden ploughs and human muscle; the three-field rotation system replaced the older two-field system, raising yields by roughly fifty per cent. Better food supplies caused population to rise from about 42 million in 1000 to nearly 73 million by 1300. New towns flourished as centres of trade and craft production, controlled by powerful merchant and craft guilds that fixed prices, regulated quality, trained apprentices and protected members. Knights, who first emerged in the ninth century to meet the demand for trained heavy cavalry, became a distinct social group with their own code of chivalry. The fourteenth century, however, brought a deep crisis. Climate cooled, harvests failed, the great famine of 1315-1317 struck Northern Europe, and silver mines were exhausted, disrupting trade and coinage. In 1347 the bubonic plague — the Black Death — entered Europe through Sicily aboard Genoese ships from the Black Sea; by 1350 it had killed roughly 20 per cent of Europe’s people, with some regions losing one in three. Acute labour shortages forced lords to commute labour services into money rents and to hire wage labour; peasants demanded freedom and higher wages. When lords tried to reverse these gains, massive peasant revolts broke out — the Jacquerie in France (1358), the English Peasants’ Revolt led by Wat Tyler (1381) and uprisings in Florence (Ciompi, 1378). Although these rebellions were crushed, serfdom in Western Europe collapsed. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, kings of France, England, Spain and Portugal — Louis XI, Henry VII, Ferdinand and Isabella — exploited the weakening of the nobility to build centralised nation-states with permanent royal armies, professional bureaucracies, regular taxation and unified national territories, replacing feudalism with the early modern state.
সাৰাংশ (Summary in Assamese)
মধ্যযুগীয় ইউৰোপৰ সমাজ ব্যৱস্থা — বিশেষকৈ ফ্ৰান্স, ইংলেণ্ড আৰু জাৰ্মানীত — নৱম শতিকাৰ পৰা চতুৰ্দশ শতিকালৈ “সামন্ততন্ত্ৰ” (Feudalism) নামেৰে চিনাকি এক ব্যৱস্থাত গঠিত হৈছিল। লাঁ-নগৰৰ বিশ্বপ পৰিচালক আদালবেৰোৰ মতে এই সমাজ তিনিটা শ্ৰেণী বা “অৰ্ডাৰ”ত বিভক্ত আছিল— প্ৰাৰ্থনাকাৰী যাজক শ্ৰেণী, যুদ্ধকাৰী সম্ভ্ৰান্ত শ্ৰেণী আৰু কাম-কাজ কৰা কৃষক শ্ৰেণী। যাজক শ্ৰেণীৰ মুৰব্বী আছিল পোপ; বিশ্বপ, পেৰিছ পুৰোহিত, সন্ন্যাসী আৰু সন্ন্যাসিনীসকলে গীৰ্জা পৰিচালনা কৰিছিল আৰু কৃষকৰ পৰা টাইথ (এক-দশমাংশ কৰ) আদায় কৰিছিল। সম্ভ্ৰান্ত শ্ৰেণীৰ অন্তৰ্গত আছিল ৰজা, ডিউক, কাউণ্ট, বেৰন আৰু নাইট। তেওঁলোকে ওপৰৰ অধিপতিৰ পৰা সামৰিক সেৱাৰ বিনিময়ত “ফিফ” নামৰ ভূমি লাভ কৰিছিল আৰু আনুগত্যৰ শপত (Oath of Fealty) লৈ এক সামন্তীয় পিৰামিড গঠন কৰিছিল। তৃতীয় শ্ৰেণীৰ কৃষকসকল দুই ভাগত বিভক্ত আছিল— মুক্ত কৃষক আৰু সাৰ্ফ। সাৰ্ফসকল ভূমিৰ লগত বান্ধি ৰখা আছিল, লৰ্ডৰ মাটিত বিনা পাৰিশ্ৰমিকে সপ্তাহত তিনি দিন কাম কৰিব লাগিছিল আৰু লৰ্ডৰ অনুমতি অবিহনে বিয়া বা স্থান পৰিৱৰ্তন কৰিব নোৱাৰিছিল। সামন্ততন্ত্ৰৰ অৰ্থনৈতিক একক আছিল “মেনৰ” — এটা স্বনিৰ্ভৰ সম্পত্তি য’ত মেনৰ ঘৰ, কৃষকৰ কুটীৰ, গীৰ্জা, পথাৰ আৰু জলকল আছিল। কেথলিক গীৰ্জা আছিল সকলোতকৈ শক্তিশালী সাংস্কৃতিক সংস্থা। ১০০০ চনৰ পাছৰে পৰা ইউৰোপত কৃষি বিপ্লৱ আৰম্ভ হ’ল— উষ্ণ জলবায়ু, লোহাৰ ফাল লগোৱা ভাৰী হাল, ঘোঁৰাৰ চাইজযুক্ত হাৰনেছ, পানী আৰু বতাহ চালিত কল আৰু তিনি-পথাৰৰ ফসল ঘূৰণিৱে কৃষি উৎপাদন বৃদ্ধি কৰিলে। জনসংখ্যা ১০০০ চনৰ ৪.২ কোটিৰ পৰা ১৩০০ চনত প্ৰায় ৭.৩ কোটিলৈ বাঢ়িল। নতুন নগৰ আৰু গিল্ড গঢ়ি উঠিল। কিন্তু চতুৰ্দশ শতিকাত মহা দুৰ্যোগ নামি আহিল— ১৩১৫-১৭ চনৰ মহা দুৰ্ভিক্ষ, ১৩৪৭-৫০ চনৰ “ব্লেক ডেথ” বা প্লেগে ইউৰোপৰ এক-পঞ্চমাংশ মানুহক হত্যা কৰিলে। শ্ৰমৰ অভাৱত লৰ্ডসকলে শ্ৰম-সেৱাৰ ঠাইত নগদ ভাড়া আৰম্ভ কৰিবলৈ বাধ্য হ’ল। ১৩৫৮ চনৰ ফ্ৰান্সৰ জেকেৰি আৰু ১৩৮১ চনৰ ইংলেণ্ডৰ ৱাট টাইলাৰৰ কৃষক বিদ্ৰোহে সাৰ্ফডমৰ অন্ত পেলালে। পঞ্চদশ-ষোড়শ শতিকাত ফ্ৰান্স, ইংলেণ্ড, স্পেইন আৰু পৰ্তুগালৰ ৰজাসকলে কেন্দ্ৰীভূত নেচন-ষ্টেট গঢ়ি তুলি সামন্ততন্ত্ৰৰ স্থান লৈছিল।
NCERT Textbook Exercise Questions and Answers
Q1. Describe two features of early feudal society in France.
Answer: Two main features of early feudal society in France between the ninth and eleventh centuries were:
- The lord-peasant relationship and the manor. French society was overwhelmingly agrarian and was organised around the manorial estate. A lord (seigneur) controlled a large estate that contained his manor house, the peasants’ cottages, a church, fields, pastures and woodlands. The peasants — most of them serfs — cultivated their own small holdings but were obliged to till the lord’s demesne (his personal land) for at least three days a week without wages. They surrendered a large part of their produce to the lord, paid him for the use of his mill, oven and winepress, and could not leave the estate, marry or hand over property to their children without his permission. The lord, in turn, gave them physical protection in his castle, dispensed justice in his manor court and provided basic religious life through the manor church.
- The hierarchy of vassalage and military obligation. Above the peasantry stood a chain of warrior lords. The king of France granted large estates to dukes and counts; these in turn sub-granted smaller estates called fiefs to lesser nobles and knights. In each case the recipient (the vassal) swore an Oath of Fealty in a ceremony of homage and undertook to serve his lord in war for forty days a year, to advise him in council and to pay aids on certain occasions. This created a tightly hierarchical society — a “feudal pyramid” — in which political authority was tied to land tenure rather than to a salaried bureaucracy.
Q2. How did long-term changes in population levels affect economy and society in Europe?
Answer: European population changed dramatically between 1000 and 1500, and these long-term shifts had profound economic and social consequences.
- Growth phase, 1000-1300: A milder climate, the agricultural revolution (heavy plough, horse-collar, three-field system, watermills) and a long period of internal peace pushed Europe’s population from about 42 million in 1000 to roughly 73 million in 1300. More mouths to feed and more hands to work meant greater demand for goods, more land was brought under cultivation, forests were cleared and marshes drained. New towns sprang up around cathedrals, river crossings and trade routes; markets and fairs flourished; merchant and craft guilds organised urban life; long-distance trade revived (the Champagne fairs, the Hanseatic League). A money economy began to replace pure barter, and lords began to accept money rents instead of labour services.
- Crisis phase, 1300-1400: From around 1300 the climate cooled, summers became shorter, harvests failed and famine struck (the great famine of 1315-1317 in Northern Europe). The Black Death of 1347-1350 then carried off about 20 per cent of Europe’s population, falling from 73 million to roughly 45-50 million by 1400. Acute labour shortages followed: wages rose, lords could no longer enforce serfdom, many estates were abandoned, marginal lands fell out of cultivation and food prices fluctuated wildly. Peasant revolts (Jacquerie 1358; Wat Tyler 1381) and urban uprisings (Florentine Ciompi 1378) shook the social order. In the long run, however, the survivors enjoyed higher real wages, better diets and greater social mobility, and feudalism gradually gave way to a wage-based agrarian and urban economy and to the rising centralised nation-state.
Q3. Why did knights become a distinct group, and when did they decline?
Answer: Knights emerged as a distinct social group in the ninth century. After the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire and during the violent age of Viking, Magyar and Saracen raids, central authority collapsed and warfare became local and constant. Foot-soldiers proved inadequate against fast-moving raiders, and a new kind of warrior was needed — a heavily armed horseman skilled in the use of lance, sword and shield from the saddle. Such cavalry required years of training, costly equipment (mail armour, war-horse, weapons) and a steady income, so lords began to grant knights a fief — usually 1,000-2,000 acres of land with a small manor house, a church, a mill and a body of peasants — in return for forty days of military service every year. The knight thus stood between the great nobles and the ordinary freeman; his social identity was reinforced by the code of chivalry and by elaborate ceremonies such as dubbing.
Knights began to decline from the fourteenth century and disappeared as a fighting class by the end of the fifteenth century. Several factors caused their fall: the introduction of the longbow at battles like Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), and especially the spread of gunpowder and firearms after about 1450, made the heavily armoured horseman vulnerable; new monarchs raised paid standing armies of professional infantry that no longer needed knightly service; and the long economic crisis of the fourteenth century, together with the collapse of feudalism and the rise of money rent, weakened the economic basis of the knightly fief. By the time of the Italian Wars (1494 onwards), knights survived only as a courtly nobility, not as the dominant military arm.
Q4. What was the function of medieval monasteries?
Answer: Medieval monasteries — communities of monks (and convents of nuns) living together under a religious rule such as the Rule of St. Benedict — played a central role in the religious, economic and cultural life of Western Europe.
- Religious function: Monks took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, abandoned worldly possessions and could not marry. Their primary duty was prayer, meditation and the regular round of services known as the Divine Office. They preached the Christian message, kept the sacraments and acted as a constant intercession for the souls of the laity.
- Charitable function: Monasteries cared for the sick, sheltered travellers and pilgrims, distributed alms to the poor, and maintained orphanages and rudimentary hospitals.
- Educational and cultural function: They ran schools, taught Latin, copied and preserved manuscripts in their scriptoria — including classical Greek and Roman works that would otherwise have been lost — and produced beautifully illuminated books such as the Book of Kells. Many of the earliest universities (Paris, Oxford, Bologna) grew out of cathedral and monastic schools.
- Economic function: Large monasteries such as Cluny and Cîteaux were major landowners. They cleared forests, drained marshes, introduced improved farming techniques, raised sheep, brewed beer and traded their surplus, contributing significantly to the agricultural revolution.
- Architectural and artistic function: Monasteries inspired the great Romanesque and Gothic styles of architecture, encouraged sculpture, fresco painting and music (Gregorian chant), and patronised craftsmen of every kind.
Q5. Imagine and describe a day in the life of a craftsman in a medieval French town.
Answer: Imagine the life of Pierre, a master weaver in the bustling cloth town of Troyes in northern France around the year 1300. Pierre rises before dawn at the sound of the church bell ringing for matins. He says a brief prayer, washes at the wooden basin, eats a breakfast of black bread and watered ale and walks down the narrow, muddy street to his workshop on the ground floor of his timber-framed house. Above the workshop he and his family — his wife, three children, two apprentices and one journeyman — sleep in a single upper room. The shutters of the workshop swing open as a counter onto the street, displaying bolts of finished woollen cloth.
The morning is filled with the rhythmic clack of the loom. Pierre supervises his apprentices, who card and spin the wool, while the journeyman dyes a fresh batch of cloth in vats of woad and madder. Pierre himself works the great horizontal loom, throwing the shuttle and pressing the pedals. At about ten o’clock he attends the meeting of the weavers’ guild at the guildhall. The guild lays down strict rules: only members may weave for sale within the town, the price of a length of cloth is fixed, the quality of dye and weave is inspected by sworn searchers, and apprenticeships must last seven years. Today the guild is settling a dispute between two journeymen and is collecting subscriptions for a candle that will burn before the altar of St. Severus, the weavers’ patron saint, in the parish church.
By midday Pierre returns home. The family eats a thick pottage of beans, leeks and bacon, with bread and cheese, sitting at a trestle table. After the meal he walks to the marketplace, where the weekly market fills the cathedral square with stalls — fish from the Channel, salt from the Loire, spices brought up the Champagne fairs from Genoa and Venice, leather, candles, ironware. He sells two bolts of cloth to a merchant from Bruges who has come for the great fair, and is paid partly in silver pennies and partly in pepper.
Back at the workshop the work continues until vespers. As the church bell rings at sunset, the apprentices put away the tools, sweep the workshop and lock the shutters. Pierre walks with his family to the parish church for the evening service. After supper — bread, herring and wine — he checks the household accounts by candlelight, prays with his wife and goes to bed. His day, like that of every medieval craftsman, is bounded by the church bell, the guild and the family workshop, but it is also a life of skilled labour, urban citizenship and rising prosperity.
Q6. Compare the conditions of life of a French serf and a Roman slave.
Answer: French serfs of the medieval period and slaves of ancient Rome shared deep deprivation, but their legal and social conditions differed in important ways.
- Legal status: A Roman slave was legally a piece of property — a “speaking tool” (instrumentum vocale) — without any rights of person, marriage or property. He could be bought, sold, branded, killed or freed at his master’s will. A French serf, by contrast, was a person in law, was a Christian baptised by the Church, could not be sold away from the land, possessed his own cottage and small plot, could marry, raise a family and pass property to his children — though only with his lord’s permission and on payment of a fine.
- Relationship to the land: Roman slaves were detached from the land and could be moved anywhere by their master, often working in chained gangs on plantations (latifundia), in mines or in town households. Serfs were tied to the manor and could not leave it, but the land itself could not be taken from them; if the manor was sold, the serfs went with it.
- Labour obligations: A Roman slave worked all day, every day, for the master and received only food and shelter. A serf worked his own holding most of the time and owed the lord three days of labour a week on the demesne, plus extra “boon days” at harvest, plus customary dues — but the rest of his time and produce was his own.
- Family life: Roman slaves had no legally recognised family; their unions were contubernia, not marriages. Children of a slave woman were the property of the master. A serf’s marriage, although requiring the lord’s consent and the payment of merchet, was a sacrament of the Church, and his family was recognised in law and could not be broken up.
- Religion and culture: Christianity gradually softened serfdom; the Church preached that all souls were equal before God, condemned the breaking of serf families and gave serfs feast days, festivals and the protection of the parish church. Roman slavery had no such religious cushion.
- Long-term destiny: Roman slavery declined slowly because, as the Empire collapsed, the supply of war-captives dried up. Serfdom in Western Europe collapsed quickly after the Black Death of 1347-1350, when the survivors won money rents and personal freedom.
In short, the Roman slave was a thing without rights, while the French serf was a partly free person bound by custom and the manor. Both were exploited, but the serf retained family, religion and limited property, and his bondage proved easier to dismantle.
Additional Short-Answer Questions
Q1. Who was Marc Bloch and what is his contribution to the study of feudalism?
Answer: Marc Bloch (1886-1944) was a great French historian and a founder of the Annales school of history, which sought to study not just kings and battles but the whole structure of past society — its economy, climate, geography and mentalities. His most famous work, La Société féodale (Feudal Society, 1939-40), is the classic study of European feudal society between roughly 900 and 1300 CE. Bloch showed that feudalism was not just a legal-political system of lords and vassals but a complete social order resting on the manor, the Church and the warrior class. He died in 1944, executed by the Nazis as a member of the French Resistance.
Q2. What was a fief?
Answer: A fief was a piece of land — usually 1,000 to 2,000 acres including a manor house, fields, peasants, a church, a mill and sometimes a small castle — granted by a lord to his vassal in return for an oath of loyalty (homage and fealty) and for stipulated services, especially forty days of military service a year. The fief was inheritable on payment of a relief fee, and the holder enjoyed wide judicial and administrative powers within it. The whole feudal pyramid of Europe was built up from king to duke to count to baron to knight by means of overlapping grants of fiefs.
Q3. What was the manor?
Answer: The manor was the basic economic and social unit of feudal Europe — a self-sufficient estate centred on the lord’s manor house and surrounded by the dwellings of peasants, a church, the lord’s demesne (his personal cultivated land), the peasants’ open-field strips, common pasture, woodland, a mill, an oven and often a fish-pond. The lord exercised judicial authority through the manor court, collected rents and dues, and provided protection. Manors varied greatly in size — from a few hundred acres to several thousand — but everywhere they were largely self-sufficient, producing most of their own food, clothing, tools and timber.
Q4. What was the role of the Catholic Church in medieval society?
Answer: The Catholic Church, headed by the Pope in Rome, was the single most powerful institution in medieval Europe. It baptised, married and buried every Christian, regulated festivals, controlled the calendar (the year of “our Lord”), administered the sacraments, ran schools, monasteries, universities, hospitals and orphanages, and collected the tithe (one-tenth of agricultural produce). It owned about one-third of the cultivated land of France. Politically, the Pope crowned emperors and kings, settled disputes between rulers, organised the Crusades and could excommunicate disobedient princes. Culturally, the Church preserved classical learning, inspired Romanesque and Gothic art and shaped the moral and intellectual outlook of all Europeans.
Q5. What was the tithe?
Answer: The tithe was a religious tax of one-tenth (decimus) of all agricultural produce — grain, wine, oil, livestock — that every peasant household had to pay annually to the parish church. It was meant to support the parish priest, maintain the church building and provide for the poor of the parish. In practice it was often collected by bailiffs of the bishop or of a great monastery and was deeply resented by the peasants, who thus had to support both their lord (in labour and dues) and the Church (in the tithe).
Q6. What was labour rent?
Answer: Labour rent was the obligation of a serf to work without wages on his lord’s demesne (the lord’s personal land) for at least three days a week, with extra “boon days” during ploughing and harvest. Whatever the serf produced on the demesne belonged entirely to the lord. This unpaid labour was the primary source of the lord’s income before the rise of the money economy in the later Middle Ages, when labour rent was gradually commuted into money rent.
Q7. What were the main technological improvements of the medieval agricultural revolution?
Answer: Between roughly 1000 and 1200 CE Western Europe experienced a major agricultural revolution based on five key innovations: (i) the heavy iron mouldboard plough that could turn the heavy clay soils of Northern Europe; (ii) the rigid horse-collar (instead of the throat-strap that throttled the animal), which let horses pull twice as much; (iii) the iron horseshoe, which gave horses traction on muddy fields; (iv) the water-mill and the wind-mill, which freed human labour from grinding grain by hand; and (v) the three-field system of crop rotation, which left only one-third of the land fallow each year (instead of one-half) and so increased usable land by about fifty per cent. Together these innovations doubled food production and made possible the great population rise of 1000-1300.
Q8. What was a guild?
Answer: A guild was an association of merchants or of master craftsmen of the same trade in a medieval town. Merchant guilds controlled long-distance trade and the right to sell in the town. Craft guilds — of bakers, weavers, dyers, goldsmiths, butchers, masons and so on — regulated the price and quality of the goods produced, fixed wages, set the length of apprenticeships (often seven years), restricted entry into the trade, looked after the welfare of members, gave funeral expenses and pensions to widows, maintained chapels and patron-saint feasts, and in many cities elected representatives to the town council. Guilds gave urban craftsmen security and dignity but also discouraged competition and innovation.
Q9. Why did towns grow rapidly between 1000 and 1300?
Answer: The agricultural revolution produced a food surplus that could feed people who did not farm. Population growth, longer-distance peace, the revival of trade with the Mediterranean (Genoa, Venice) and the Baltic (Hanseatic League), and the demand for craft goods all encouraged the rise of towns. Many grew up around cathedrals (Chartres, Reims), at river crossings or fortifications (Paris, London), at the foot of castles (Bruges) or along trade routes (the Champagne fairs). Towns offered freedom — “town air makes one free” was the saying, because a serf who lived for a year and a day in a chartered town became free. Merchants, craftsmen, lawyers, clerks and clergy crowded inside the walls, organised themselves into guilds and obtained royal charters of self-government.
Q10. What was the Black Death?
Answer: The Black Death was the great epidemic of bubonic and pneumonic plague — caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis carried by fleas on black rats — that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1350. It entered Europe in October 1347 through the Sicilian port of Messina aboard Genoese galleys returning from the Black Sea and within three years had spread north to the Baltic. It killed roughly 20 per cent of Europe’s population — about 25 million people out of 73 million — with mortality reaching one in three in many cities. Europe took nearly 250 years to recover its 1300 population. The plague broke the manorial economy, raised wages, freed surviving serfs and provoked widespread peasant revolts, marking the great turning point between medieval and early modern Europe.
Q11. What were the main peasant revolts of the fourteenth century?
Answer: The three most famous popular revolts of the fourteenth century were: (i) the Jacquerie in northern France (May-June 1358), in which French peasants, exhausted by the Hundred Years’ War, the plague and noble extortions, rose against their lords, burned manor houses and were crushed within a few weeks; (ii) the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 led by Wat Tyler and the priest John Ball, sparked by the poll tax, which brought tens of thousands of rebels into London demanding the abolition of serfdom — Tyler was killed by the mayor of London in front of the boy-king Richard II; and (iii) the Ciompi revolt of the wool-carders of Florence in 1378. All three rebellions were defeated, but they marked the end of serfdom in Western Europe.
Q12. What was the chief difference between a free peasant and a serf?
Answer: A free peasant rented his holding from the lord for a fixed money or grain rent, was personally free, could leave the manor, marry, sell his property and take his case to the king’s courts. A serf, by contrast, was bound to the soil — he could not leave the manor, marry or pass on property without his lord’s consent and the payment of a fine; he owed the lord at least three days a week of unpaid labour on the demesne; he was tried in the lord’s manor court; and he had to use the lord’s mill, oven and winepress. Free peasants made up perhaps one-third of the medieval rural population in France; serfs made up the rest.
Q13. What was chivalry?
Answer: Chivalry was the code of conduct of the medieval knight. It combined martial values — bravery, loyalty to one’s lord, prowess with arms — with Christian and courtly virtues such as protection of the Church, defence of widows and orphans, mercy to a defeated enemy, courteous service to ladies and the keeping of one’s word. Chivalry was taught through the long apprenticeship of page and squire, was glorified in the romances of King Arthur and Roland, and was solemnly conferred at the dubbing ceremony when a young man was struck on the shoulder with a sword and made a knight.
Q14. What was the position of women in feudal society?
Answer: Women in feudal society lived under the rule of their fathers and husbands and had limited legal rights, but their position varied widely with class. Noble women managed great households, ran estates while their husbands were on crusade or war, and a few — Eleanor of Aquitaine, Blanche of Castile — even ruled kingdoms. Peasant women laboured in the fields, brewed beer, made cheese and butter, raised the children and worked in the household, and serf wives owed labour services to the lord just as their husbands did. Some women became nuns and rose to be abbesses with great authority over land and people. In the towns, widows of master craftsmen often inherited the workshop and ran it, and many women worked as spinners, brewers (the “ale-wife”), midwives, market-traders and silk-workers; certain crafts (silk, brewing) were female monopolies in Paris and London. The Church, however, restricted women from priestly office, and married women legally lost most property rights to their husbands.
Q15. What was the Crusades’ contribution to medieval society?
Answer: The Crusades (1095-1291) were a series of religious wars launched by the Latin Church to recover the Holy Land from Muslim rule. They contributed to medieval society in several ways: they reopened the Mediterranean to Italian shipping (Venice, Genoa, Pisa) and stimulated long-distance trade in spices, silk and sugar; they brought Western Europeans into contact with the more advanced Arab world, Persia and Byzantium, from which they learned algebra, medicine, papermaking, the windmill and Aristotle; they encouraged the rise of banking and credit; they weakened the lesser nobility (many of whom died or sold their estates to go on Crusade) and so strengthened both the kings and the towns; and they reinforced the prestige of the papacy.
Long-Answer Questions
Q1. Describe the structure of the three orders of medieval European society.
Answer: Around the year 1020 Bishop Adalbero of Laon described French society as divided by God into three orders, each with its own task. The First Order was the clergy — those who pray. It was headed by the Pope at Rome, beneath whom stood archbishops, bishops, abbots, parish priests, monks and nuns. The clergy were not allowed to marry, were exempt from military service and from most taxes, but received the tithe and large endowments of land. They were the educated minority — Latinists, lawyers, doctors, scholars. The clergy were thus the spiritual and intellectual aristocracy of the age, and the Catholic Church owned about one-third of all land in France.
The Second Order was the nobility — those who fight. It included the king at the top and below him a descending ladder of dukes, counts, barons and finally knights. Each held land from a lord above him by an oath of fealty, the technical name for which was vassalage. In return for the fief he received he gave forty days of military service, advice in council and aids on great occasions (the marriage of the lord’s eldest daughter, the knighting of the lord’s eldest son, the ransom of the lord). The nobility lived in stone castles, lived chiefly off rents and labour services from peasants, and amused themselves with hunting, tournaments and warfare. Their boys learned to ride, hunt and fight; their girls were married very young to seal alliances. The code of chivalry — bravery, loyalty, defence of the Church and of women — gave them their identity.
The Third Order was the peasantry — those who work — together with the small but growing population of urban craftsmen and merchants. Some 90 per cent of medieval Europeans were peasants, divided between free peasants who paid rent and serfs who were tied to the soil and owed unpaid labour services. They lived in small wooden cottages clustered around the manor, ate a diet of bread, pottage, cheese and beer, and supported the other two orders out of their toil. Townspeople — bakers, weavers, masons, smiths, merchants — also belonged to the third order but enjoyed greater freedom and, after about 1100, growing wealth and political voice through their guilds.
The three orders were imagined as a cooperative body in which each helped the others. In practice, however, the first two orders — together less than ten per cent of the population — lived off the labour of the third. The neat scheme also left out groups that did not fit easily — Jews, lepers, heretics, beggars and, after 1100, the rising urban bourgeoisie. The model nevertheless dominated European thought for almost a thousand years; in France it survived until the Revolution of 1789, which abolished the privileges of the First and Second Estates.
Q2. Discuss the agricultural revolution of medieval Europe and its consequences.
Answer: Between roughly 1000 and 1200 Western Europe experienced an agricultural transformation so profound that historians call it a revolution. Several factors made it possible. First, the climate of Northern Europe slowly warmed by about 1 °C in what is called the “medieval warm period,” extending the growing season by perhaps three weeks and allowing vines to be grown as far north as England and grain in Norway. Second, the long peace that followed the end of the Viking, Magyar and Saracen raids (around 1000) made permanent settlement and land clearance safe. Third, a series of inventions — some borrowed from Asia — was widely adopted.
The most important inventions were: the heavy iron mouldboard plough with wheels, drawn by eight oxen, that could turn the heavy wet clay soils of Northern Europe (the older scratch-plough was useless on such soil); the padded horse-collar, which rested on the animal’s shoulders instead of choking its windpipe and so let one horse pull as much as four oxen; the iron horseshoe, which gave traction in mud; the rapid spread of watermills for grinding grain, fulling cloth, sawing wood and forging iron, joined after 1180 by the windmill; and, above all, the change from the two-field to the three-field crop rotation. Under the older two-field system, half the arable land was left fallow each year. Under the three-field system, the arable was divided into three parts: one was sown with winter cereals (wheat or rye), one with spring cereals or legumes (oats, barley, peas, beans) and only one was left fallow. This raised usable arable land by 50 per cent, gave a second harvest, and — through the legumes — added nitrogen to the soil and protein (peas, beans) to the diet.
The consequences were enormous. Yields per acre roughly doubled, food supply per head rose, life-expectancy improved and population grew from about 42 million in 1000 to 73 million in 1300. Forests were cleared, marshes drained and new villages founded. The food surplus fed a growing non-farming population — craftsmen, merchants, clergy — and made possible the rise of towns, the building of cathedrals and the spread of universities. The greater value of land encouraged lords to commute labour services into money rents, weakening serfdom. New crops (sugar, citrus, rice) were brought from the Arab world. The agricultural revolution was thus the foundation of the great medieval flowering of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Q3. Explain the causes and consequences of the fourteenth-century crisis in Europe.
Answer: After three centuries of expansion, Europe entered a long period of crisis between roughly 1300 and 1450. Several causes combined.
Climatic deterioration: Around 1300 the medieval warm period ended and the “Little Ice Age” began. Summers became shorter and wetter, harvests failed and grain rotted in the fields. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 killed about 10 per cent of Northern Europe’s population.
Soil exhaustion and overpopulation: The expansion of farmland over the previous three centuries had brought poor, marginal soils under the plough. Without modern fertiliser these soils now gave declining yields, while population had outrun food supply.
The Black Death (1347-1350): Bubonic plague carried by fleas on black rats reached Sicily on Genoese ships from the Crimea in October 1347 and within three years swept through Europe. About 20 per cent — roughly 25 million people — died. Many villages were abandoned. Trade collapsed.
Monetary disorder: The silver mines of Central Europe were nearing exhaustion, the supply of new coin dried up and merchants and tax-payers complained of “shortage of money.”
War: The Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337-1453) ravaged the French countryside. In Italy, the great cities fought endless wars among themselves. The Church split during the Great Schism (1378-1417), with rival popes at Rome and Avignon, weakening its moral authority.
The consequences of the crisis were profound. The acute shortage of labour after the plague pushed up wages and forced lords to abandon serfdom and substitute money rents. When kings and lords tried to hold wages down by laws (the Statute of Labourers in England, 1351), the peasants revolted: the Jacquerie (1358), the Ciompi (1378) and the Wat Tyler rising (1381). Although crushed militarily, the rebels won their economic demands. Serfdom disappeared in most of Western Europe. The Church lost prestige; new spiritual movements such as the Lollards and Hussites prepared the way for the Reformation. The collapse of small noble incomes led many minor knights to seek service with the king, accelerating the rise of centralised monarchies. The economic depression also pushed merchants and bankers — the Medici of Florence, the Fuggers of Augsburg — into ever larger international operations. By 1450 Europe began to recover, but the feudal world had gone forever; the road lay open to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the early modern nation-state.
Q4. How did feudalism decline and how did the new nation-states arise?
Answer: Feudalism declined gradually between about 1300 and 1500 under the combined pressure of economic, military, political and religious change.
Economic causes: The Black Death of 1347-1350 carried off a third of the labour force, drove up wages and shattered the manorial economy. Lords could no longer enforce labour services and were forced to commute them into money rents. The rise of the money economy, of long-distance trade and of urban guilds created a new class of bourgeois merchants, lawyers and bankers — the bourgeoisie — who paid taxes directly to the king and so weakened the noble’s hold on the third estate.
Military causes: The longbow at Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), and gunpowder cannon at Constantinople (1453), made the armoured knight obsolete. Kings began to raise paid standing armies of professional pikemen and musketeers — the Companies of Ordnance of Charles VII of France in 1445 — that no longer needed feudal service. Castles fell quickly to artillery.
Political causes: The Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) and the Wars of the Roses in England (1455-1485) ruined many great noble families. New monarchs — Louis XI of France (1461-1483), Henry VII of England (1485-1509), Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain (1474-1516) — exploited this weakness to centralise power. They built professional bureaucracies of trained jurists and clerks, raised regular taxes (the taille in France, customs duties in England), unified law codes and reduced the great nobles to courtiers. Provincial parliaments, free towns and feudal courts were absorbed into the royal administration.
Religious and cultural causes: The Great Schism and the Protestant Reformation (after 1517) broke the unity of the Western Church and weakened the papacy as a rival to royal authority; many Protestant rulers seized monastic lands and used them to reward loyal officials. The Renaissance ideal of the powerful prince — Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1513) — supplied the new monarchies with a justifying philosophy.
The result, by 1550, was the early modern nation-state: a defined territory with a single sovereign, a single language of administration, a permanent royal army, a salaried bureaucracy, a unified law and a regular system of national taxation. Feudal vassalage and the manorial economy survived in remote regions and in much of Eastern Europe, but in France, England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands the medieval order had been replaced by the modern state — the political form within which the great voyages of discovery, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution would unfold.
Q5. Discuss the role of the Catholic Church in shaping medieval European society.
Answer: The Catholic Church was the dominant institution of medieval Europe — spiritually, intellectually, politically and economically. Its head was the Pope at Rome, regarded as the successor of St. Peter and the Vicar of Christ on earth. Beneath him stood a hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots and parish priests that paralleled — and sometimes rivalled — the lay feudal hierarchy.
Spiritually, the Church baptised, married and buried every Christian, administered the seven sacraments, said mass in every parish church, ran the cycle of festivals (Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, the saints’ days), defined the moral code (the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins) and held out the certainty of heaven through penance and good works. Excommunication — exclusion from the sacraments — was a fearful weapon that could be used even against kings, as Pope Gregory VII used it against the Emperor Henry IV in 1077.
Intellectually, the Church was the educator of Europe. Its monasteries preserved and copied the manuscripts of classical antiquity; its cathedral schools and the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna and Salamanca produced the great philosophers and theologians of the age — St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard. Its language, Latin, remained the language of learning across Europe.
Politically, the Pope crowned emperors, judged kings, organised the Crusades, mediated disputes among rulers and could lay whole kingdoms under interdict. The Church controlled its own courts (the canon law) and could try clergy in them. Bishops and abbots, as great landowners, sat in feudal councils and parliaments.
Economically, the Church was the largest single landowner in Europe — perhaps a third of all cultivated land. It collected the tithe, ran the great monastic estates, owned mills and fishponds, and was a major patron of art, architecture and music — building the cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, Cologne and Salisbury, the abbey churches of Cluny and Cîteaux and the great Romanesque and Gothic sculptures.
Charitably, the Church ran hospitals, leper-houses, orphanages, schools and hostels for pilgrims, distributed alms and protected widows and orphans. It provided social welfare in an age that had no other.
Yet the Church was not without faults. It accumulated wealth, sold offices (simony), tolerated luxurious bishops, and from the late Middle Ages was widely criticised for corruption. The Great Schism of 1378-1417, when there were two and at one point three rival popes, badly damaged its prestige. Heretical movements (the Albigensians, the Lollards, the Hussites) attacked its abuses. By the time of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses of 1517, demands for reform had become irresistible, and the Reformation broke the religious unity of Western Europe forever. Even so, for almost a thousand years the Catholic Church had been the chief shaper of European civilisation.
Q6. Describe the rise of medieval towns and the role of guilds.
Answer: The Roman cities of Western Europe had largely decayed by the eighth century. From about 1000, however, towns revived and multiplied. The agricultural revolution had produced a food surplus that could feed non-farmers; the long peace, the revival of long-distance trade with Byzantium and the Muslim world, and the demand for craft goods all encouraged urban growth.
Towns grew up in several kinds of place. Some grew around bishop’s seats and cathedrals (Chartres, Reims, Cologne); some at the foot of castles (Bruges, “the bridge”); some at river crossings (Paris, London); some along major trade routes (the four Champagne fair towns of Provins, Troyes, Lagny and Bar-sur-Aube); some — especially in Northern Italy — were old Roman cities that revived (Milan, Florence, Venice). The walls were stone, the streets narrow and crooked, the houses timber-framed and crowded, the cathedral the dominant building.
Townsmen — merchants, master craftsmen, lawyers, clerks — sought freedom from the feudal lord on whose land their town stood. By paying the lord or king a heavy fee they obtained a charter that gave the town the right to govern itself, to elect its own mayor and council, to keep its own court, to collect its own tolls and — crucially — to free any serf who lived in the town for a year and a day (“town air makes one free”). By 1300 there were perhaps 5,000 chartered towns in France, Germany and Italy. The largest — Paris (200,000), Venice (110,000), Florence (95,000), London (50,000) — were among the great cities of the world.
Within the towns, economic life was organised around the guild. The merchant guild controlled wholesale trade and the right to sell in the town. The craft guilds — bakers, weavers, fullers, dyers, shoemakers, masons, goldsmiths, butchers, candle-makers and many others — regulated every aspect of their trade. The guild fixed prices, controlled the quality of goods (a baker selling underweight loaves was pilloried), set wages, restricted entry, defined the apprenticeship (typically seven years), promoted the welfare of members, paid funeral expenses and pensions to widows, kept its own chapel and saint’s-day procession and elected representatives to the town council. A young boy entered as an apprentice (no wage but lodging and board), rose to journeyman (a wage-earner) and finally to master (an independent owner of a workshop) after producing a “masterpiece.”
The guilds gave urban craftsmen security, dignity and political voice. They were also conservative — they restricted competition and innovation, and from the fifteenth century they became more closed and oligarchic. But for three or four centuries they were the framework within which urban Europe produced its great wealth, its cathedrals and its civic culture, and out of which the modern bourgeoisie was born.
Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ)
Q1. The phrase “those who pray, those who fight, those who work” is associated with —
(a) Pope Urban II
(b) Bishop Adalbero of Laon
(c) Marc Bloch
(d) Charlemagne
Answer: (b) Bishop Adalbero of Laon
Q2. The classic study of medieval feudal society titled Feudal Society was written by —
(a) Edward Gibbon
(b) Henri Pirenne
(c) Marc Bloch
(d) Fernand Braudel
Answer: (c) Marc Bloch
Q3. The basic economic unit of feudal Europe was the —
(a) Polis
(b) Latifundium
(c) Manor
(d) Diocese
Answer: (c) Manor
Q4. A piece of land granted by a lord to a vassal in return for services was called a —
(a) Tithe
(b) Fief
(c) Demesne
(d) Allod
Answer: (b) Fief
Q5. The Black Death struck Europe in —
(a) 1066-1070
(b) 1215-1220
(c) 1347-1350
(d) 1453-1456
Answer: (c) 1347-1350
Q6. The tax of one-tenth of agricultural produce paid to the Church was called —
(a) Taille
(b) Tallage
(c) Tithe
(d) Gabelle
Answer: (c) Tithe
Q7. The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was led by —
(a) Robin Hood
(b) Wat Tyler
(c) John of Gaunt
(d) Simon de Montfort
Answer: (b) Wat Tyler
Q8. Knights emerged as a distinct class in the —
(a) 5th century
(b) 9th century
(c) 13th century
(d) 15th century
Answer: (b) 9th century
Q9. The three-field crop rotation system replaced the older —
(a) Slash-and-burn cultivation
(b) Two-field system
(c) Four-field system
(d) Mediterranean dry-farming
Answer: (b) Two-field system
Q10. The 1358 peasant revolt in northern France was called the —
(a) Ciompi
(b) Jacquerie
(c) Vendée
(d) Fronde
Answer: (b) Jacquerie
Q11. Which of the following was NOT a part of the medieval agricultural revolution?
(a) Heavy iron mouldboard plough
(b) Padded horse-collar
(c) Steam engine
(d) Three-field rotation
Answer: (c) Steam engine
Q12. The personal land of the lord cultivated by serfs without wages was called the —
(a) Tenant land
(b) Demesne
(c) Fief
(d) Glebe
Answer: (b) Demesne
Q13. The oath by which a vassal promised loyalty and service to his lord was the Oath of —
(a) Allegiance
(b) Fealty
(c) Investiture
(d) Compurgation
Answer: (b) Fealty
Q14. Europe’s population in 1300 was approximately —
(a) 25 million
(b) 42 million
(c) 73 million
(d) 150 million
Answer: (c) 73 million
Q15. The 1378 revolt of the wool-carders of Florence was called the —
(a) Jacquerie
(b) Wat Tyler revolt
(c) Ciompi
(d) Lollard rising
Answer: (c) Ciompi
Q16. The new monarchies of the late fifteenth century included —
(a) Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain
(b) Charlemagne, Otto III, Henry IV
(c) Frederick Barbarossa and Richard I
(d) William the Conqueror and Philip II Augustus
Answer: (a) Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain
Q17. The Black Death entered Europe through the port of —
(a) Marseille
(b) Messina (Sicily)
(c) Lisbon
(d) Bruges
Answer: (b) Messina (Sicily)
Q18. The “First Estate” in medieval France referred to the —
(a) Nobility
(b) Clergy
(c) Commons
(d) Royal household
Answer: (b) Clergy
Q19. A serf who lived in a chartered town for a year and a day —
(a) Was sent back to his lord
(b) Became free
(c) Was made a knight
(d) Joined the Church
Answer: (b) Became free
Q20. The leading historian of the Annales school cited in this chapter is —
(a) Henri Pirenne
(b) Marc Bloch
(c) Lucien Febvre
(d) Fernand Braudel
Answer: (b) Marc Bloch
The Three Orders — Comparative Table
| Feature | First Order — Clergy | Second Order — Nobility | Third Order — Peasants & Townsmen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Function | Those who pray | Those who fight | Those who work |
| Head | The Pope at Rome | The King | No formal head; village headmen, town mayors |
| Composition | Pope, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, abbots, parish priests, monks, nuns | King, dukes, counts, barons, knights | Free peasants, serfs, craftsmen, merchants, labourers |
| Approx. share of population | About 1% | About 5-7% | About 90% |
| Source of income | Tithe (10% of all produce), Church estates, gifts and endowments | Rents and labour services from peasants, war booty, plunder | Own labour on land or in workshop; wages |
| Land tenure | Owned about 1/3 of cultivated land in France | Held land as fiefs in return for military service | Held small plots from the lord; serfs were tied to the soil |
| Privileges | Exempt from royal taxation; tried only in Church courts; cannot marry | Exempt from most taxes; tried only by peers; right to bear arms; hunting rights | No privileges; bore the tax burden of the kingdom |
| Obligations | Pray, preach, run sacraments, charity, education | Forty days of military service per year, advice in council, aid in cash | Labour rent, taxes, tithe, rent in money or kind |
| Symbol/Dress | Cassock, mitre, crozier; the cross | Sword, spurs, coat of arms; the castle | Plain woollen tunic, hood; the plough or hammer |
| Education | Highly educated in Latin; ran schools and universities | Trained in arms, hunting, courtly manners | Mostly illiterate |
| Justice | Canon (Church) law in ecclesiastical courts | Tried by peers in feudal courts | Tried in the lord’s manor court |
| Centre of life | Cathedral, monastery | Castle, manor | Village, town, workshop |
Key Terms / Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Feudalism | The economic, legal, political and social system of medieval Western Europe based on land granted by lords to vassals in return for military service and on serf labour on the manor. |
| Three Orders | The medieval division of society into clergy (those who pray), nobility (those who fight) and peasants (those who work), described by Bishop Adalbero of Laon (c. 1020). |
| Clergy | Religious specialists ordained by the Church — Pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns. The First Order. |
| Nobility | The hereditary warrior aristocracy — kings, dukes, counts, barons, knights. The Second Order. |
| Peasantry | The agricultural labourers, free or serf, who formed about 90% of the population. The Third Order. |
| Manor | The basic economic unit of feudal Europe — a self-sufficient estate of lord’s house, peasants’ cottages, fields, mill, church and woodland. |
| Demesne | The lord’s personal land within the manor, cultivated for him by serfs without wages. |
| Fief | A piece of land (1,000-2,000 acres) granted by a lord to a vassal in return for an oath of fealty and military service. |
| Vassal | A man who held land (a fief) from a lord and owed him service in return. |
| Oath of Fealty | The ceremonial oath of loyalty by which a vassal bound himself to his lord. |
| Serf | A peasant tied to the manor who could not leave it, marry or transfer property without his lord’s permission and who owed unpaid labour services. |
| Free peasant | A peasant who paid rent in money or kind to a lord but was personally free. |
| Tithe | One-tenth of all agricultural produce, paid annually by every household to the parish church. |
| Labour rent | Unpaid labour (typically three days a week) owed by a serf to his lord on the demesne. |
| Knight | A heavily armed mounted warrior of the 9th-15th centuries, holder of a fief, follower of the chivalric code. |
| Chivalry | The moral code of the medieval knight — bravery, loyalty, defence of the Church, courtesy to ladies. |
| Monastery | A community of monks living together under a religious rule (e.g. that of St. Benedict). |
| Convent | A community of nuns. |
| Pope | The bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church. |
| Excommunication | Exclusion from the sacraments of the Church, the Pope’s most fearful weapon. |
| Three-field system | A method of crop rotation in which arable land is divided into three parts — winter cereal, spring legume, fallow — instead of the older two-field half-and-half system. |
| Mouldboard plough | A heavy iron plough with a wheel and a curved board that turned over the soil; suited to the heavy clays of Northern Europe. |
| Horse-collar | A padded collar resting on the horse’s shoulders that allowed it to pull twice as much without choking. |
| Watermill / Windmill | Mills powered by flowing water or by the wind, used for grinding grain, fulling cloth, sawing wood and forging iron. |
| Guild | An association of merchants or craftsmen of the same trade in a medieval town that regulated quality, price, apprenticeship and welfare. |
| Apprentice | A young learner of a craft, usually bound to a master for seven years for board and lodging only. |
| Journeyman | A trained craftsman who had finished his apprenticeship and worked for a daily wage. |
| Master | An independent owner of a workshop in a craft guild. |
| Charter | A royal or seigneurial document granting a town or community its rights of self-government. |
| Black Death | The bubonic plague pandemic of 1347-1350 that killed about 20% of Europe’s population. |
| Jacquerie | The 1358 peasant revolt in northern France. |
| Wat Tyler’s Revolt | The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. |
| Ciompi | The 1378 uprising of the Florentine wool-carders. |
| Crusades | A series of religious wars (1095-1291) launched by the Latin Church to recover the Holy Land. |
| Marc Bloch | French historian (1886-1944), author of Feudal Society, founder of the Annales school. |
| Nation-state | The early modern state, with defined territory, single sovereign, standing army, salaried bureaucracy and regular taxation, that replaced feudalism after 1450. |