Class 11 History Chapter 4 The Three Orders NCERT Solutions in English

Q. Describe two features of early feudal society in France.

Answer: After the Roman Empire fell, Germanic groups occupied Italy, Spain and France. With no unifying political force left, military conflict was frequent and the need to gather resources to protect one’s land became urgent, so social organisation came to be centred on the control of land, drawing on both imperial Roman traditions and German custom. Out of that came the two features below.

1. Land was held through vassalage, not owned outright by one authority. The kings of France were linked to their people by the practice of vassalage, which the Franks shared with other Germanic peoples. The big landowners, that is the nobles, were vassals of the king, and the peasants were vassals of those landowners. In the ceremony a nobleman accepted the king as his seigneur, the senior or lord, and the two exchanged a mutual promise: the lord would protect the vassal, and the vassal would stay loyal to him. Vows were taken on the Bible in a church, and the vassal was handed a written charter, or a staff, or a clod of earth as the symbol of the land granted to him. Out of this the noble drew a privileged position: absolute and perpetual control of his property, the right to raise troops called feudal levies, his own courts of justice, and even the right to coin his own money.

2. Society was divided into three orders by the work people did. French priests taught that every person belonged to one of three orders. A bishop put it in one sentence: “Here below, some pray, others fight, still others work.” The clergy prayed, the nobility fought and held land, and the peasantry, free peasants and serfs together, grew the food that fed the other two. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen defended the arrangement in the twelfth century as natural and God-given, writing that all are loved by God “yet there is no equality among them”.

Two more features you may use instead. The lord’s estate, the manor, was almost self-sufficient, with its own fields, blacksmiths, carpenters, stonemasons, woodlands, pastures, a church and a castle, though salt, millstones and metalware always had to be bought outside. Its tenant-peasants worked the fields and doubled as foot-soldiers in battle whenever the lord required it. And from the ninth century, when localised warfare became frequent, the knights emerged as a distinct group, each holding a fief of 1,000 to 2,000 acres or more in exchange for a fee and a promise to fight for his lord.

Q. How did long-term changes in population levels affect economy and society in Europe?

Answer: Europe’s population rose steeply for three centuries and then collapsed in one. Each movement reshaped the economy and society, and in opposite directions.

1. The rise, 1000 to 1300. The population grew from about 42 million in 1000, to 62 million around 1200, to 73 million in 1300. The cause was the new agricultural technology of the eleventh century: the heavy iron-tipped plough with a mould-board, the shoulder-harness, iron horseshoes, more wind and water mills, and above all the switch from the two-field to the three-field system, which doubled food availability.

2. Longer lives and better diets. Peas, beans and lentils grown in the spring field added vegetable protein for people and oats and barley for horses. Better food meant longer lives: an average European of the thirteenth century could expect about ten more years of life than one of the eighth. Women and girls, however, lived shorter lives than men, because men were given better food.

3. Towns and a possible fourth order. A larger and better-fed population revived town life, which had almost vanished with the Roman Empire. Peasants with a surplus needed somewhere to sell it, so fairs and marketing centres grew into towns with a square, a church, merchants’ roads and shops, and an office for the town’s governors. Townspeople paid the lord a tax instead of performing services, and a serf who hid undiscovered in a town for a year and a day became free: “Town air makes free”. Some towns grew instead around large castles, around the estates of bishops, or around large churches. Crafts were organised into guilds, new trade routes opened with West Asia, and the richest merchants came to rival the nobility. Bigger towns held around 30,000 people, and townspeople have been described as a possible fourth order.

4. The loosening of feudal bonds. As the economy became money-based, lords began to prefer rent in cash to labour services, and peasants sold their crops to traders instead of exchanging goods. English agricultural prices doubled between the 1270s and the 1320s. Peasant holdings shrank from about 100 acres to 20 or 30 acres, which could be worked more efficiently and left the household time for other work.

5. The fall, 1300 to 1400. A colder climate brought the Great Famine of 1315-17 and mass cattle deaths in the 1320s, a shortfall in the Austrian and Serbian silver mines forced governments to debase the coinage, and the Black Death of 1347-50 killed about a fifth of Europe. Population fell from 73 million in 1300 to 45 million in 1400.

6. What the fall did. Labour became scarce and therefore expensive, and serious imbalances appeared between agriculture and manufacture, because there were no longer enough people to engage in both equally. Agricultural prices fell for want of buyers, while wages rose sharply, because the demand for labour rose by as much as 250 per cent in England, and surviving labourers could demand double their earlier pay. Lords, squeezed from both sides, tried to give up their money contracts and bring back labour services, and peasants opposed this violently. The chapter names three revolts: Flanders in 1323, which falls before the plague, in the decade of cattle deaths that followed the great famine of 1315-17, then France in 1358 and England in 1381 after it. Every one of them was put down, yet the old feudal relations could not be reimposed: a money economy this far advanced could no longer be turned into a labour economy.

Q. Why did knights become a distinct group, and when did they decline?

Answer:

1. Why they arose. From the ninth century, localised wars in Europe became frequent. The amateur peasant-soldier, who left his fields when the lord called him out, was no longer good enough for this kind of fighting: what was needed was skilled cavalry, available at short notice and trained all year round. That need is what gave the knights their importance and made them a group apart.

2. How they were tied into feudal society. Knights were linked to the lords exactly as the lords were linked to the king. A lord granted a knight a piece of land called a fief and promised to protect him. The fief could be inherited and ran to 1,000 or 2,000 acres or more, including a house for the knight’s family, a church, a watermill and a wine-press, and its land was cultivated by peasants just as on a feudal manor.

3. What the knight owed. In return he paid his lord a regular fee and promised to fight for him in war. He kept his skills sharp by spending part of every day fencing and practising tactics against dummies. He might serve more than one lord, but his foremost loyalty was always to his own lord, a bond celebrated in the thirteenth-century French poem Doon de Mayence: “If my dear lord is slain, his fate I’ll share.”

4. Their culture. From the twelfth century, minstrels travelled from manor to manor in France singing partly historical, partly invented songs about brave kings and knights. In an age when few could read, these travelling bards were very popular, and many manor halls had a minstrels’ gallery above them.

5. When they declined. The chapter gives no single year, so the answer has to be read off its account of the new monarchs. Their decline came with those rulers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As the feudal system of lordship and vassalage dissolved, kings dispensed with feudal levies altogether and introduced professionally trained infantry equipped with guns and siege artillery, directly under royal control. Mounted, armoured knights fighting for a fief had no answer to that firepower, and the chapter records that “the resistance of the aristocracies crumbled” before it. The knight who had been indispensable in the ninth century was, by the sixteenth, an expensive irrelevance.

Q. What was the function of medieval monasteries?

Answer:

1. A place of withdrawal. Alongside the parish clergy, who lived among ordinary people in towns and villages, there were deeply religious Christians who chose to live apart in religious communities called abbeys or monasteries, usually far from human habitation. Two of the most famous were founded by St Benedict in Italy in 529 and at Cluny in Burgundy in 910.

2. A life of prayer, study and work. Monks took vows to remain in the abbey for life, and divided their time between prayer, study and manual labour such as farming. The Benedictine Rule, a manuscript of 73 chapters followed for centuries, set out the discipline: permission to speak was rarely granted, humility meant obedience, no monk could own private property, idleness was the enemy of the soul so hours were fixed for manual labour and for sacred reading, and the monastery was to be laid out so that everything needed lay within its own bounds, water, mill, garden and workshops.

3. A life open to women. Unlike the priesthood, which barred women altogether, monastic life was open to both men and women, as monks and nuns. Except in a few cases abbeys were single-sex, with separate houses for men and for women, and neither monks nor nuns married.

4. Centres of learning and care. Communities that began with ten or twenty members grew into several hundred, with large buildings and landed estates, and with schools, colleges and hospitals attached to them.

5. Centres of art and music. Monasteries contributed a great deal to the arts. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen, besides her writings, was a gifted musician who did much to develop the community singing of prayers in church.

6. Preaching in the world. From the thirteenth century some monks, called friars, chose not to stay in one monastery at all, but moved from place to place preaching and living on charity.

7. And how they came to be criticised. By the fourteenth century there was growing uncertainty about the value and purpose of monasticism. Langland’s poem Piers Plowman contrasted the ease and luxury of some monks’ lives with the “pure faith” of simple ploughmen, shepherds and poor common labourers, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales gave comic portraits of a nun, a monk and a friar.

Q. Imagine and describe a day in the life of a craftsman in a medieval French town.

Answer: This question asks for imagination, but the imagination has to be built out of what the chapter actually says about towns, guilds and cathedrals. Here is a twelfth-century day, told in the first person.

Who I am. I am a stonemason in a French town that has grown up around a cathedral still being built. My grandfather went from manor to manor looking for work, but by my father’s time commerce and crafts had grown enough in France that craftsmen found it easier to settle in one place, so we did.

Morning. The cathedral bell wakes the town. It was made to be heard at a distance and to call people to prayer, and it does the work of a clock for us. On a working morning I go straight to the site, past the town square, the merchants’ road with its shops, and the office of the men who govern the town.

The morning’s work. The cathedral belongs to the monastery, but it is built of stone and will take years to finish, so the whole town has a share in it: some give labour, some give materials, some give money, and rich merchants who have grown wealthy on trade put their money into donations to the church as well. When it is done it will be a place of pilgrimage, and our town will grow again around it, as Reims and Chartres have. My own task today is to dress the stone for a window opening, because the master glaziers are coming with coloured glass. Those windows will be radiant in the sunlight by day, and lit from inside by candlelight at night, and their pictures will tell Bible stories to people who cannot read.

Midday, and the guild. I eat bread from the town oven, not the lord’s, for we in the town pay him a tax and no longer owe him services. In the afternoon I go to the guild-hall. My craft, like every other craft and industry, is organised into a guild, which controls the quality of what we make, the price we may charge and how we may sell it. The heads of all the guilds meet formally in this hall and hold their ceremonies here. A new apprentice is presented today, and an argument is settled about a mason who was underselling the agreed price.

The people I meet. Our town of some thousands, though not one of the great ones of thirty thousand, holds free peasants who have come to sell grain, escaped serfs working as unskilled labour, shopkeepers, merchants, and now even a banker and a lawyer. One of the labourers on our site is a serf from a manor two days’ ride away. He has been here eleven months. If he stays undiscovered for a year and a day he becomes a free man, for town air makes free, and we say nothing to anyone.

Evening. The day ends when the light goes. On a holy day there would be no work at all: those days are meant for prayer, though most people spend them in feasting and fun. Tonight a party of pilgrims is passing through on its way to a martyr’s shrine, and they will sleep in the square. Tomorrow I go back to the stone, and to a cathedral that will not be finished in my lifetime.

Q. Compare the conditions of life for a French serf and a Roman slave.

Answer: This question reaches back to Theme 2, “An Empire Across Three Continents”, for the Roman slave, and uses this chapter for the French serf. The two were both unfree, but unfree in different ways.

The comparison in one line. The Roman slave was owned; the French serf was tied. That is the real difference, and it is why the serf’s unfreedom could be escaped by moving to a town while the slave’s could be ended only by his master.

What they had in common. Neither received wages, neither could move or marry freely, both were subject to a private authority rather than a public court, and in both societies the labour of the unfree supported the comfort of an upper class that also wrote the law.

Q. You may have noticed that the column on Australia/Pacific Islands has very few recorded dates. This is because the peoples in these areas often used other forms of recording, including paintings such as the one shown above. List at least one event/process from each of the preceding five columns which an Australian painter may have found worth recording. List another five which may have seemed irrelevant to her/him.

Answer: Events an Australian painter might have found worth recording, because they brought distant peoples, ships and trade closer to the Pacific world:
Africa: the Portuguese begin slave trading (1442), or Portuguese expeditions and settlements along the west coast of Africa (1471 onwards).
Europe: Coffee from South America is drunk in Europe for the first time, and tobacco, chocolate, tomatoes and turkey are introduced (1517).
Asia: growing demand in Europe for Chinese tea and silk (1625-50), or the Portuguese driven out to Macao (1522).
South Asia: Vasco da Gama reaches India (1498), or the establishment of the British East India Company (1600).
Americas: Columbus reaches the West Indies (1492), or the first sugar plantations in the West Indies (1654).
These were all part of the European sea voyages and trade that soon reached the Pacific itself: Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean (1519), Dutch sailors reached Australia by accident, and Abel Tasman sailed around Australia and landed on Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania).
Five events that may have seemed irrelevant to an Australian painter, because they had no effect on life there: the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453); Geoffrey Chaucer writing The Canterbury Tales (1388); the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in England (1485); the construction of the Taj Mahal (1632-53); the first Kabuki play staged in Japan (1586). Other examples: Copernicus’s theory about the solar system (1543), Akbar consolidating Mughal rule, William Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of blood (1628).

Q. Discuss social hierarchies based on different criteria: occupation, language, wealth, education. Compare medieval France with Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire.

Answer: Medieval France: society was divided by occupation into three orders: the clergy who prayed, the nobility who fought and the peasants who worked. Wealth was land: the nobles controlled land through vassalage, held courts and coined money, while serfs owned nothing and could not leave the estate. Education was limited mostly to the clergy and monasteries; few people could read, which is why minstrels and stained-glass windows were used to tell stories. Women could not become priests, and serfs and the physically challenged were also barred.
Mesopotamia: a small ruling elite of kings and temple officials held a major share of the wealth, as the riches buried with kings and queens at Ur show. Specialists such as scribes, seal cutters, metal workers and merchants depended on one another. Education gave status: very few people could read and write cuneiform, and kings boasted when they could. Languages changed over time (Sumerian, Akkadian, Aramaic), and newcomers such as the Amorites could rise to become rulers.
The Roman Empire: Tacitus describes senators, leading equestrians, the respectable people attached to the great houses, the “unkempt lower class” and slaves; in the late empire senators and equites merged into an aristocracy above a middle class and the humiliores. Language marked the elite: the upper classes wrote Greek in the east and Latin in the west. Literacy varied by group: soldiers, army officers and estate managers were more literate than others.
Comparison: in all three, wealth and control of land or resources placed a small elite at the top and unfree or poor labourers at the bottom. Medieval France fixed rank most rigidly by occupation and birth into an order, sanctioned by the Church; Mesopotamia and Rome allowed more movement through specialised skills, trade, government service and, in Rome, wealth from business.

Q. Discuss examples of expected patterns of behaviour between people of different social levels, in a medieval manor, a palace and in a place of worship.

Answer: In a manor: peasants worked on the lord’s land on fixed days, gave labour-rent and unpaid services, and fought as foot-soldiers when required; serfs could not leave the estate without the lord’s permission, had to use only the lord’s mill, oven and wine-press, and needed his consent, on payment of a fee, to marry. The lord in turn was expected to protect them and held courts of justice over them. Nobles feasted in the great hall while minstrels entertained them from the gallery.
In a palace or a lord’s court: a vassal knelt and took vows of loyalty to his lord on the Bible, received a charter, a staff or a clod of earth as a symbol of his land, and remained loyal while the lord protected him; a knight’s foremost loyalty was to his own lord. Later, under the new monarchs, nobles became courtiers, loyal to the king within a network of patron-client relationships.
In a place of worship: people assembled every Sunday to listen to the priest’s sermon and to pray together; they knelt while praying, with hands clasped and head bowed, exactly as a knight did while taking vows to his lord, and called God “lord”. The clergy, the first order, were respected as religious guides, and peasants paid the Church a tithe, a tenth of their produce.

Q. Look carefully at this map and the drawing of a town. What would you notice as special features of medieval European towns? How were they different from towns in other places and other periods of time?

Answer: The seventeenth-century map of Reims, a French cathedral-town, shows: a town enclosed by a defensive wall, built beside a river crossed by bridges; houses packed tightly together along narrow, winding streets; many churches and the great cathedral standing out above the houses; and an open square. The chapter adds other features: a town square, a church, roads where merchants built shops and homes, an office where the town’s governors met, a guild-hall in every town, guards patrolling the walls, and inns for travellers. Many towns grew around castles, bishops’ estates, large churches or cathedrals, which became centres of pilgrimage.
Differences: medieval towns grew slowly out of fairs and markets, around churches and castles, without planning, so their streets were irregular, unlike the planned grid of Harappan cities. They were centres of freedom for runaway serfs (“Town air makes free”), and their economy was organised through guilds. Compared with the great Roman cities such as Carthage, Alexandria and Antioch, which were centres of imperial administration with public baths and huge populations, medieval towns were small, the bigger ones having about 30,000 people. And unlike modern towns, they were enclosed by walls for defence and dominated by the cathedral rather than by government or commercial buildings.

Q. Read through the events and processes listed with dates, and connect them into a narrative account.

Answer: In 1066 the Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxons and conquered England, and William I distributed the land among 180 Norman nobles, so feudalism developed in England. From 1100 onwards, as agriculture and trade expanded and towns grew, cathedrals were built in France, often with the money of rich merchants, and small towns grew around them. By the early fourteenth century this expansion slowed: colder summers, exhausted soil and too many people for the land’s resources led to the Great Famine of 1315-17. At the same time England and France fought the Hundred Years War (1338-1461), a long struggle over territory and trade. Then, between 1347 and 1350, the Black Death, brought by rats on trading ships, killed about a fifth of Europe’s people. The labour shortage raised wages and lowered agricultural prices, so lords tried to revive labour services, and peasants revolted, as in England in 1381. The revolts were crushed, but the old feudal relations could not be fully reimposed, and the way was opened for the new monarchs of the following centuries.