The three orders

 ( Theme 6 )

• Church was a powerful institution. The Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, lived in Rome. Bishops were religious nobility.
• The church played a major role in influencing the Medieval European society.
• They collected the tithe, a tax from the peasants.
• Church ceremonies copied several formal feudal customs.
• Some Christians chose to live in isolation in abbeys. (‘Abbey’ is derived from the Syriac abba, meaning father. An abbey was governed by an abbot or an abbess)

• The word ‘Feudalism’ is derived from the German word ‘feud’ which means ‘a piece of land’. Feudalism was a division of society that initially developed in medieval France, then in England and southern Italy.
• It was a kind of agricultural production relationship between lords and peasants.
• The nobility had a privileged role in the social process with absolute control over his land. They raised troops that were called ‘Feudal Levies’. The King of France was linked to his people through the system of ‘vassalage’. The King was accepted as Seigneur, i.e. lord. The nobility lived in manor houses.
• The cavalry and peasant soldiers were called knights. Minstrels and bards toured France, singing tales of brave kings and knights.

• Peasants and Serfs were two kinds of cultivators in medieval Europe.
• Free peasants laboured for cultivating the lord’s fields to provide labour rent. They paid a direct tax, called taille, to the king. European monarchs were called New Monarchs.

1. In Northern Europe, by the end of the thirteenth century the warm summers of the previous 300 years had given way to bitterly cold summers. Seasons for growing crops were reduced by a month.
2. Trade was hit by a severe shortage of metal money because of a shortfall in the output of silver mines in Austria and Serbia. This forced government to reduce the silver content of the currency and to mix it with cheaper metals.
3. Ships carrying goods from distant countries had started arriving in European ports. The ships came with rats carrying deadly bubonic plague infection (the Black Death).

• In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European kings strengthened their military and financial power. The new monarchs, Louis XI in France, Maximilian in Austria, Henry VII in England and Isabelle and Ferdinand in Spain were absolutist rulers, who started the process of organising standing armies.
• Decline of feudalism and lordship in the sixteenth century paved the way for the rise of nation-state in Europe.
• French, German and Russian Revolutions took place in 1789, 1848 and 1917 CE respectively. These revolutions inspired the people across the world and gave a rich legacy of liberty and equality to reconstruct the society in a new way.

• Expansion in agriculture was accompanied by growth in three related areas: population, trade and towns.
• The towns of the Roman Empire had become deserted and ruined after its fall. But from the eleventh century, as agriculture increased and became able to sustain higher levels of population, towns began to grow again
• Towns offered the prospect of paid work and freedom from the lord’s control, for young people from peasant families.
• The bigger towns had populations of about 30,000. They could be said to have formed a ‘fourth’ order.