Feudalism in Germany

For this project I have chosen to cover the topic of feudalism in Germany. Feudalism was the dominant social system in medieval Europe. Feudalism came about due to Roman client ship and Germanic social hierarchy of lords and retainers. It started in the eighth century and ended in the twelfth century. It is really just a mutual agreement between a lord and the people under him. It was an agreement that helped each person usually get a benefit out of the process. For example in exchange for some land and protection, vassals had to give a certain amount of military service. This gave security to the vassals and a good amount of financial benefits to the lord. In the line of superiority it went the lords, vassals, and then serfs. The serfs were peasants who worked on the land and gave them goods and taxes to the lords and vassals.

They had to do this in exchange for being able to live on the land provided by the lords. There were many different feudalist run communities and sometimes the lords would be corrupt and wouldn’t give the serfs what they had previously agreed to do because the serfs had no say at all in the government and the way that it was ran. A good thing about feudalism is that it brought good stability. A bad thing is that the serfs had no rights or independence and the church and the lords ran all of the legal stuff in the countries. Feudalism ended because of a bunch of social changes that took place. Beginning with increased trade which allowed the peasants to leave the lords land and earn their own income. There was a huge reliance on land that was used to determine how the economy ran and when that all changed to let the lower class citizens are able to provide for themselves the feudalism faded away. The national leader during this time was the Holy Roman Emperor and the Catholic Church basically ran the whole country.

The nation’s leader did help encourage feudalism because they also took part in it. They helped set the lords up with high positions in the government so that way they could control how the country was being run and what laws were out into place to protect themselves. This kind of helped set them up to do what I mentioned previously about the lords being able to do what they wanted because really there was no one that could stop them.

In conclusion, feudalism was a very specific type of government that is only able to operate under certain circumstances. Due to those circumstances changing the style of government slowly died away leading to the more modern approaches to government. Although there isn’t a government currently calling itself a feudalist type of style many styles of governments used today are based off of common views that are seen within the feudalistic style of government.

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