Feudalism was a
society in which the status of an individual was fixed: he was
underman or overman in a rigid social scale according as he
considered his relation to his superiors or to his inferiors.
Whatever movement there was took place horizontally, in the same
class or on the same social level. The movement was not vertical,
as it so frequently is today, and men did not ordinarily rise
above the social level of their birth, never by design, and only
perhaps by rare accident or genius. It was a little world of
lords and serfs; of knights who graced court and castle, jousted
at tournaments, or fought upon the field of battle; and of serfs
who toiled in the fields, served in the castle, or, as the
retainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval
days. For their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed
and fed. Yet though there were feast days gay with the color of
pageantry and procession, the worker was always in a servile
state, an underman dependent upon his master, and sometimes
looking upon his condition as little better than slavery.
With the break-up of this rigid system came in England the
emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the
beginnings of peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation
which always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks
now began to work significant changes in the economic order. The
peasantry, more or less scattered in the country, found it
difficult to unite their powers for redressing their grievances,
although there were some peasant revolts of no mean proportions.
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