As the Roman Empire grew to its most overstretched extent, Roman military governors began employing “barbarian” foederati more and more as primary troops to police border regions, and thus chainmail more or less wholly eclipsed plate armor in the Late Roman Empire. Unlike Roman plate armor, which required the large-scale division of labor in slave-manned Imperial workshops, chainmail could be made on a relatively small scale by an armorer and a handful of apprentices. It was used mainly as armor for auxiliary troops, non-Roman levies called foederati, as well as for cavalry. The “Roman” (or, really, Celtic) pattern of chainmail became widespread across Europe: it consisted of alternating rows of round wire rings and stamped flat rings to save on labor. Early chainmail was likely made from bronze, and later iron –- and when the Republican Romans encountered chainmail-wearing Celts in the 3rd century BCE, like every good empire, they shamelessly stole the idea. That way, the previous large and unified empire of Charlemagne became fragmented, and feudalism became stronger and stronger.Medieval Armor: The Age of Chainmail Roman reenactor wearing mail, via Wikimedia CommonsĬhainmail emerged in Iron Age Central Europe in the first millennium BCE, the invention of cunning Celtic metalsmiths. The kings once again had to ask for help to different nobles, rewarding them with more and more land. Also, from the ninth century onwards, there were heavy invasions in Europe, mainly by the vikings, the muslims and the slavic peoples of the east. These grandsons of Charlemagne needed to ask for the help of different nobles to advance their objectives, and after the wars, rewarded them with lands of their own kingdoms because of their loyalty. The grandsons of Charlemagne fought one another to be the most powerful lord in Europe, ending in the division of the Carolingian empire by the treaty of Verdun in 843 a.d. However, once he died, his son had many problems that helped the feudal system to spread through Europe. Charlemagne managed to create a large and unified empire, somewhat opposed to the feudal system. In a feudal state, the territory is heavily fractured, the power being dispersed among several lords of different weight in political and militar matters. The baron or king might give commands, but these were not laws and if he exacted more than custom sanctioned he would be frustrated by universal resistance." As Will Durant writes in The Story of Civilization, "the community itself was therefore the chief source of law. When the shared values of the community were broken, the peasants rejected the system and revolted. There were, for example, biblical prohibitions against charging interest that were enforced during this period. Prices were established by a sense of what was just. This system ensured that the lord had the right to rule and that the poor farmers were entitled to his protection. A moral economy-where cultural or political intervention limits market prices or freedom of contract-was enforced by the teachings of the church. The lord of the manor-who set the terms of the rent agreement-was also usually the local legal authority. There was no standard rent in the Middle Ages, and tenant farmers had few ways to contest the rent demanded of them. The amount and type of payment was not influenced by market forces it was coercive, or forced. This could be a portion of the harvest, days of labor in the lord's own fields-called the demesne-or money. Tenant farmers-that is, people who didn't own the land they worked-owed some kind of payment to their landlords. For our purposes, the important thing is that those lands were cultivated with a combination of free and unfree labor-let's talk about how that came to be. Rather than diving into the arguments of how to organize this history, let's discuss some common threads about those estates. Modern historians dispute whether or not it's useful to lump together the management of these estates in that way. Medieval economies were largely based around the operations of those landed estates. Though these arrangements could range widely in style, they were lumped together under the label of feudalism, from the Medieval Latin term feudum referring to a landed estate. Seventeenth-century historians and lawyers who studied the Middle Ages decided to give a common name to the diverse landowner-tenant arrangements that existed in northwest Europe during the Middle Ages, starting with the collapse of Charlemagne's empire in the late ninth century and declining after the Black Plague and the Peasant Revolt in the fourteenth century. The term feudal is a tricky one, because few scholars can quite agree on what it means these days.
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