The Three Orders — Class 11 History

This theme studies feudal society in western Europe, mainly France and England, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, organised around the "three orders" — the clergy who prayed, the nobility who fought, and the peasantry who worked. After the fall of Rome, Germanic tribes set up kingdoms, military conflict was frequent, and society centred on control of land, blending Roman traditions with German customs. The chapter, drawing on the work of Marc Bloch, explains feudalism (from a word meaning "a piece of land") as a web of lords, vassals and peasants bound by vassalage: nobles held manors and could raise feudal levies, hold courts and coin money, while knights received a fief in return for military service. The Catholic Church, headed by the Pope, was a great landholder that levied the tithe; monks and nuns lived in monasteries by the Benedictine rule. Free peasants and unfree serfs sustained the system, and growing towns formed a "fourth order" with guilds and cathedral-towns. New farm technology (heavy plough, three-field rotation, water and wind mills) raised output and population, but the fourteenth-century crisis — colder climate, famine, a silver shortage and the Black Death (which killed perhaps 20% of Europeans) — triggered peasant revolts and the rise of centralising "new monarchs".