Life in a central Europe Manorial village

Introduction

Over the course of the early Middle Ages, and especially by the 10th century, villages or estates owned by nobles evolved into manors (mansi) with certain reciprocal obligations on the laboring peasantry and on the lord. Both sides had to meet the terms of tenure and protection. These manors had a lord, who held it as a vassal and as a tenant of his own lord. The system can be theoretically viewed as a pyramid with the king or prince at the top. These relations were distinct from those of feudalism but mirrored some of its terms and conditions. A lord exercised legal jurisdiction over petty vassals and peasants, who were compelled to yield labor and meet obligations to him (Watson, 11 - 33).

A manor in English law is an estate in land to which is incident the right to hold a court termed court baron, that is to say a manorial court. The proper unit of tenure under the feudal system is the fee, on which the manor became established through the process of time, akin to the modern establishment of a "business" upon a freehold site. The manor is nevertheless often described as the basic feudal unit of tenure and is historically connected with the territorial divisions of the mark, parish and township (Spielvogel, 100 - 189).

Discussion and Analysis

The greatest weakness of communal life in the middle Ages is the lack of domestic tranquility, the inevitable consequence of competition between the social partners for the conquest of power. In the thirteenth century we see in fact the major Italian cities, though flourishing business and wealth, troubled by constant quarrels between nobles and bourgeois, one family, including fat people and the common people, so that the normal city life is constantly disturbed by upheavals. Each vague alarm bells sounding the tocsin; people come from all over, it comes to weapons in the streets and squares, you run to the houses of their enemies, they attacked, they ravage, burn. Everyone feels the lack of a strong government that above the competition class, will give to the city a lasting peace with the laws and by force of arms (Spielvogel, 100 - 189).

Early medieval manorial villages were often small, mobile, and short lived in most of Europe, but less so in the lands of Byzantium in Anatolia and the Near East. From the 11th century such European villages were characterized more by the existence of a settled rural community having legal recognition and an organized agrarian territory with known boundaries. In them a number of functions were carried out such as activities in a religious center or church, funerary rituals and burials in a cemetery, courts for communal and manorial administrative regulation, facilities for the storage of foodstuffs and seeds, centers for artisan production for trade and local use, some defensive capabilities, and locations for economic markets for exchange and for peasant labor. Between 1000 and 1500 they became more elaborate, organized, and settled, in the ...