Class 11 History Chapter 4 The Three Orders Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. From which word is the term ‘feudalism’ derived, and what does it mean?

Answer: It is derived from the German word ‘feud’, which means a piece of land.

Q. Name the book by Marc Bloch on medieval society, and the period it covers.

Answer: Feudal Society, which describes European, and particularly French, society between 900 and 1300.

Q. Name the three orders of medieval European society.

Answer: The clergy, the nobility and the peasantry.

Q. What was the tithe?

Answer: The tithe was the Church’s entitlement to a tenth share of whatever the peasants produced from their land during the year.

Q. What was the taille?

Answer: The taille was a direct tax that kings sometimes imposed on peasants alone, the clergy and the nobility being exempt from it.

Q. How large was a fief, and what did the knight give in return for it?

Answer: A fief was usually 1,000 to 2,000 acres or more, and in return the knight paid his lord a regular fee and promised to fight for him in war.

Q. Name the two famous monasteries mentioned in the chapter, with their dates.

Answer: St Benedict’s in Italy, founded in 529, and Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910.

Q. When did the Black Death strike western Europe, and how much of the population did it kill?

Answer: It struck between 1347 and 1350 and killed about 20 per cent of Europe’s population, with some places losing as much as 40 per cent.

Q. What did the saying ‘Town air makes free’ mean?

Answer: A serf who managed to hide undiscovered in a town for a year and a day became a free man.

Q. What was vassalage, and how was the bond sealed?

Answer: Vassalage was a mutual promise between a lord and a vassal: the lord would protect the vassal, and the vassal would stay loyal to him. The bond was sealed by an elaborate ceremony in which vows were taken on the Bible in 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.

Q. State any four privileges enjoyed by a medieval European noble.

Answer: He had absolute and perpetual control over his property. He could raise troops known as feudal levies. He held his own courts of justice. He could even coin his own money, and he was lord of everyone settled on his land.

Q. Why was a manorial estate never completely self-sufficient?

Answer: Salt, millstones and metalware always had to be brought in from outside. Lords who wanted a more luxurious life also had to obtain furnishings, musical instruments and ornaments from elsewhere.

Q. Who were the minstrels, and why were they popular?

Answer: 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 people could read and manuscripts were scarce, they were the most popular form of entertainment, and many manor halls had a minstrels’ gallery above them for their performances.

Q. Who was barred from becoming a priest in medieval western Europe?

Answer: Serfs, the physically challenged and women were all barred from the priesthood. A man who did become a priest could not marry.

Q. What was the two-field system, and why was it inefficient?

Answer: Half the land was sown with winter wheat while the other half was left fallow, the two halves changing places the following year, when rye was sown. Since half the land lay idle every year and was still being exhausted by repeated cropping, output stayed low, the soil deteriorated, and famines were not uncommon.

Q. How did peasants resist the lords’ demands without open revolt?

Answer: They spent more time cultivating their own fields and kept much of that produce for themselves. They avoided the extra unpaid services the lords demanded. They also came into conflict with the lords over pasture and forest land, which peasants regarded as a resource belonging to the whole community while lords treated it as private property.

Q. What was a guild, and what was the guild-hall used for?

Answer: A guild was the association into which each craft or industry in a town was organised, and it controlled the quality, the price and the sale of its products. The guild-hall was a building in every town used for ceremonial functions and for the formal meetings of the heads of all the guilds.

Q. Explain the shortage of metal money in the fourteenth century and what governments did about it.

Answer: The output of the silver mines in Austria and Serbia fell short of what the economy needed, so there was not enough metal to strike coins. Governments responded by debasing the currency, that is, by mixing the silver with cheaper metals.

Q. Explain what historians mean by feudalism, and show why it was not purely economic.

Answer: The background. After the Roman Empire fell, Germanic groups from eastern and central Europe occupied Italy, Spain and France. With no unifying political force left, military conflict was frequent and gathering the 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.
The term. Feudalism is the name historians give to the economic, legal, political and social relationships that existed in Europe in the medieval era. It comes from the German word ‘feud’, meaning a piece of land.
Where and when. It describes the society that developed first in medieval France and later in England and southern Italy. Its roots lie in practices of the Roman Empire and of the age of Charlemagne (742-814), but it became an established way of life over large parts of Europe only in the eleventh century.
The economic side. In its economic sense feudalism means agricultural production founded on the relationship between lords and peasants: peasants cultivated their own land as well as the lord’s, and performed labour services for him.
Why it was more than economic. What peasants received in exchange was military protection, which is a political relationship, and the lord also exercised extensive judicial control over them, which is a legal one. Land, arms and justice were held by the same people, so feudalism shaped the social and political sides of life just as deeply as the economic one.

Q. Describe the manorial estate of a medieval European lord.

Answer: What it was. The manor was the lord’s own dwellings, his private fields and pastures, and the homes and fields of his tenant-peasants, all taken together. Every lord had his manor-house, and a great lord could control anywhere from a dozen villages to several hundred.
Its size. A small manorial estate might hold about a dozen families, a larger one fifty or sixty.
Its self-sufficiency. Almost everything needed for daily life was produced on the spot: grain from the fields, blacksmiths and carpenters to maintain tools and weapons, stonemasons to look after the buildings, women spinning and weaving cloth, and children working in the lord’s wine-presses. There were woodlands for hunting, pastures for cattle and horses, a church, and a castle for defence.
Its limits. Even so it was never fully self-sufficient. Salt, millstones and metalware came from outside, and luxuries such as furnishings, instruments and ornaments had to be bought elsewhere.
Castles. From the thirteenth century some castles were enlarged into residences for a knight’s family. In England castles were practically unknown before the Norman Conquest, and developed as centres of political and military power only with feudalism.

Q. Why did knights become a distinct group, and what was their relationship with the lords?

Answer: The need for cavalry. From the ninth century localised wars became frequent in Europe. Amateur peasant-soldiers were no longer good enough, and skilled cavalry was needed, which is what gave the knights their importance.
The bond. Knights were linked to the lords exactly as the lords were linked to the king. The lord gave a knight a piece of land, called a fief, and promised to protect him.
The fief. It could be inherited, ran to 1,000 or 2,000 acres or more, and included a house for the knight and his family, a church, a watermill and a wine-press. Peasants cultivated its land, just as they did on a feudal manor.
What the knight owed. He paid his lord a regular fee and promised to fight for him in war. To keep his skills sharp he spent part of every day fencing and practising tactics against dummies.
Loyalty. A knight could serve more than one lord, but his foremost loyalty was always to his own lord, a bond celebrated in poems such as the thirteenth-century Doon de Mayence.

Q. Distinguish between free peasants and serfs.

Answer: Free peasants. They held their farms as tenants of the lord. The men of the household had to give military service for at least forty days every year. Usually three days a week, and often more, had to be set aside for labour-rent on the lord’s land, and the produce of that work went to him. Beyond this they owed unpaid labour such as digging ditches, gathering firewood, building fences and repairing roads. They also paid the taille, the direct royal tax from which the clergy and nobles were exempt.
Serfs. They cultivated plots that belonged to the lord, not to them, and most of that produce went straight to him. They received no wages. They could not leave the estate without the lord’s permission. They had to use the lord’s mill for their flour, his oven for their bread and his wine-press for their wine, paying for each, and they needed the lord’s consent and a fee even to marry.
The point of the difference. A free peasant owed the lord defined services out of a holding that was his to work; a serf owed the lord his labour, his produce and his freedom of movement.

Q. What was the function of medieval monasteries?

Answer: A separate way of life. Some deeply religious Christians chose not to live among ordinary people as parish clergy did, but withdrew into religious communities called abbeys or monasteries, usually far from human habitation.
The vows. Monks took vows to remain in the abbey for life, and spent their time in prayer, study and manual labour such as farming. Unlike the priesthood the life was open to women too, as nuns, though except in a few cases abbeys were single-sex and neither monks nor nuns married. The Benedictine Rule, in 73 chapters, governed daily life: speech was rarely permitted, humility meant obedience, no monk could own private property, idleness was the enemy of the soul, and the monastery was to hold everything it needed within its bounds.
Institutions. Communities of ten or twenty grew into several hundred, with large buildings and landed estates, and with schools, colleges and hospitals attached to them.
Culture. Monasteries contributed a great deal to the arts. Abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a gifted musician who did much to develop the community singing of prayers in church.
Preaching. From the thirteenth century some monks, called friars, chose to move from place to place preaching and living on charity rather than stay in one house.

Q. Describe the power, the organisation and the social role of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe.

Answer: An independent power. The Catholic Church had its own laws, owned lands granted to it by rulers, and could levy taxes. It was therefore a powerful institution that did not depend on the king at all.
Its organisation. The Pope, who lived in Rome, was the head of the western Church. Bishops and clerics guided the Christians of Europe and formed the first order. Bishops were the religious nobility: like lords, they had the use of vast estates and lived in grand palaces.
The parish. Most villages had their own church, where people assembled every Sunday to listen to the sermon of the priest and to pray together. Villagers came to call the village itself the parish, meaning the area under the supervision of one priest.
Who could serve. Serfs were barred from the priesthood, as were the physically challenged, and women could not become priests at all. A man who became a priest could not marry.
Its income. The Church was entitled to the tithe, a tenth share of everything peasants produced from their land in a year. It also received money as endowments from the rich, given for their own welfare and for that of their deceased relatives in the afterlife.
Old customs inside the new faith. Though Europeans became Christian, they still held on to some of their older beliefs in magic and folk tradition. Christmas, celebrated on 25 December, replaced an old pre-Roman festival whose date was calculated by the solar calendar, and Easter, dated by the lunar calendar, replaced an older festival for the coming of spring. Overworked peasants welcomed holy days as days off, meant for prayer but usually spent in fun and feasting, and pilgrimage to the shrines of martyrs or to great churches was an important part of a Christian’s life.
Feudal manners in Church ritual. Kneeling in prayer with hands clasped and head bowed copied exactly what a knight did while swearing loyalty to his lord, and the very word lord, used for God, came from feudal culture.

Q. Describe the technological changes in European agriculture from the eleventh century, and their effects.

Answer: The plough. Heavy iron-tipped ploughs with mould-boards replaced the basic wooden plough. They dug much deeper and turned the topsoil properly, so the nutrients of the soil were better used.
Animal power. The shoulder-harness replaced the neck-harness, letting animals exert greater power, and horses were shod with iron horseshoes, which prevented foot decay.
Wind and water. More water-powered and wind-powered mills were built all over Europe, for milling corn and pressing grapes.
Land use. The most revolutionary change was the switch from the two-field to the three-field system, in which each field could be cropped two years out of three.
Effects. Food output almost doubled. The new spring crop of peas, beans and lentils gave people more vegetable protein and gave horses oats and barley. The average peasant holding fell from about 100 acres to 20 or 30 acres, which could be worked more efficiently and left time for other activities. Peasants themselves led the way in extending arable land, adopting the rotation and setting up village smithies, while the costly mills were funded by the lords.

Q. How and why did towns grow again in Europe from the eleventh century?

Answer: The agricultural base. Roman towns had been deserted and ruined after the fall of the empire. From the eleventh century, as the new technology allowed agriculture to support a much larger population, town life became possible again.
The market. Peasants with a surplus needed somewhere to sell grain and to buy tools and cloth, so periodic fairs and small marketing centres grew up and slowly took on the features of a town: a town square, a church, roads and shops for merchants, and an office for the town’s governors.
A different kind of obligation. In a town people paid the landowning lord a tax rather than performing services for him.
Other seeds of a town. Some towns grew instead around large castles, around the estates of bishops, or around large churches.
Freedom. ‘Town air makes free’ was a popular saying: a serf who hid undiscovered in a town for a year and a day became free. Towns held free peasants, escaped serfs working as unskilled labour, shopkeepers and merchants, and later specialists such as bankers and lawyers.
Organisation and scale. Each craft was organised into a guild that controlled quality, price and sale, and met in the guild-hall. Bigger towns held around 30,000 people, and as trade expanded town merchants grew rich enough to rival the nobility, which is why townspeople have been described as a possible fourth order.

Q. Explain the three causes of the crisis of the fourteenth century in Europe, and its consequences.

Answer: 1. The change of climate. After three centuries of warm summers Europe turned bitterly cold by the end of the thirteenth century. Growing seasons shortened, it became difficult to farm on higher ground, and storms and oceanic flooding destroyed farmsteads. The soil, over-ploughed for generations, was exhausted despite the three-field system, and there was less pasture, so fewer cattle could be kept. Population had outstripped resources, and the result was the Great Famine of 1315-17 and mass deaths of cattle in the 1320s.
2. The shortage of metal money. The output of the silver mines in Austria and Serbia fell short of what the economy needed. Governments were forced to debase the currency by mixing the silver with cheaper metals.
3. The Black Death. Between 1347 and 1350 bubonic plague, carried by rats on trading ships, swept western Europe. Modern estimates put the mortality at about 20 per cent of the whole population, and as high as 40 per cent in the worst-hit places.
How the plague spread. Cities, as centres of trade, suffered worst. In enclosed communities such as monasteries and convents, once one person was infected almost everyone was. Infants, the young and the elderly died in the greatest numbers, and further, milder outbreaks followed in the 1360s and 1370s.
The demographic result. Europe’s population, which had reached 73 million in 1300, was down to 45 million by 1400.
The economic result. Depopulation caused a major shortage of labour and serious imbalances 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: English agricultural wages went up by as much as 250 per cent, and surviving labourers could demand double their earlier pay.
The revolts. Lords’ incomes were badly hit, and in desperation many tried to give up their money contracts and revive labour services. Peasants opposed this violently, and the chapter names three revolts: Flanders in 1323, France in 1358 and England in 1381. The first of these came in the famine years before the plague and the other two after it, so the pressure on the peasantry ran right through the century of crisis. The rebellions were ruthlessly crushed, yet they were most violent in the areas that had known the prosperity of the earlier expansion, and their sheer intensity ensured that the old feudal relations could not be reimposed: the money economy was too far advanced to be reversed.

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

Answer: The rise, 1000 to 1300. Europe’s population grew from about 42 million in 1000 to 62 million around 1200 and 73 million in 1300. The cause was the new agricultural technology from the eleventh century, which almost doubled food output.
Longer lives. Better food meant longer lives: an average European of the thirteenth century could expect to live about ten years longer than one of the eighth. Women and girls, however, lived shorter lives than men, because men were given better food.
Towns and trade. A larger, better-fed population revived town life, which had almost vanished with the Roman Empire. Fairs and marketing centres grew into towns with squares, churches, shops and their own governing offices. Crafts were organised into guilds, new trade routes opened with West Asia, and merchants grew rich enough to rival the nobility. Townspeople have even been called a fourth order.
Weakening of feudal bonds. As the economy became money-based, lords preferred rent in cash to labour services and peasants sold their crops to traders, so the personal bonds at the heart of feudalism loosened. English agricultural prices doubled between the 1270s and the 1320s.
The fall, 1300 to 1400. Famine, currency shortage and the Black Death reversed all of this. Population fell from 73 million in 1300 to 45 million in 1400.
What the fall did. Labour became scarce and therefore expensive, and serious imbalances appeared between agriculture and manufacture because there were not enough people for both. Agricultural prices fell because there were fewer buyers, while wages rose by as much as 250 per cent in England. Lords, squeezed from both sides, tried to bring back labour services, and peasants answered with the revolts the chapter names: Flanders in 1323, France in 1358 and England in 1381. The lasting effect was that serfdom could not be restored: population change had shifted bargaining power towards the labourer.

Q. Who were the ‘new monarchs’, and how did they change the political system of Europe?

Answer: Who they were. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries European kings strengthened their military and financial power and built states as significant for Europe as the economic changes had been. Historians call them the new monarchs. They were Louis XI in France, Maximilian in Austria, Henry VII in England, and Isabelle and Ferdinand in Spain. The New Monarchy is dated 1461-1559 in France, 1474-1556 in Spain and 1485-1547 in England.
What they built. These absolutist rulers began organising standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy and national taxation, and in Spain and Portugal they started Europe’s overseas expansion.
Why they succeeded. The dissolution of the feudal system of lordship and vassalage, together with the slow rate of economic growth, gave kings their first real opportunity to increase control over their subjects.
The military change. Feudal levies were dispensed with and replaced by professionally trained infantry equipped with guns and siege artillery, directly under the king’s control. Aristocratic resistance crumbled before this firepower.
What taxation bought. Increased taxation provided the revenue for larger armies, with which rulers defended and expanded their frontiers and overcame internal resistance to royal authority.
Resistance. Centralisation was resisted, and taxation was the common thread in every kind of opposition. England saw rebellions in 1497, 1536, 1547, 1549 and 1553. In France, Louis XI (1461-83) had to wage a long struggle against dukes and princes, lesser nobles resisted through local assemblies, and the sixteenth-century religious wars were in part a contest between royal privilege and regional liberties.
The nobility’s tactical shift. Nobles turned from opponents into loyalists and were given permanent positions in the administrative service. This is why royal absolutism has been called a modified form of feudalism: the same class went on dominating politics.
A new kind of court. The king was no longer at the apex of a pyramid of personal loyalty but at the centre of a courtier society and a network of patron-client relationships, in which patronage was obtained through money. Merchants and bankers who lent kings the money to pay their soldiers thus gained access to the court, and non-feudal elements found a place in the state system.

Q. Why did France become a republic and England remain a monarchy? Trace the divergence from the seventeenth century.

Answer: The common starting point. Both kingdoms emerged from feudalism with an assembly representing the orders of society, and in both the quarrel that decided their futures was about taxation and the sharing of power.
France: the Estates-General. In 1614, in the reign of the child-king Louis XIII, the French consultative assembly known as the Estates-General met. It had three houses, representing the clergy, the nobility and the rest. After that meeting it was not summoned again for nearly two centuries, until 1789, because the kings did not want to share power with the three orders. Absolutism therefore grew unchecked in France, and when the reckoning came it came as revolution.
England: the Great Council and Parliament. Even before the Norman Conquest the Anglo-Saxons had a Great Council which the king had to consult before imposing any tax. This developed into Parliament, consisting of the House of Lords, whose members were the lords and the clergy, and the House of Commons, representing towns and rural areas.
Charles I. King Charles I ruled for eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, without calling Parliament. When he was forced to call it because he needed money, a section of Parliament went to war against him, and he was later executed and a republic established.
The restoration. The English republic did not last long. Monarchy was restored, but on the condition that Parliament would be called regularly, so the crown survived by accepting a limit on its power.
The outcome. France today has a republican form of government and England a monarchy. The difference comes from the different directions the histories of the two countries took after the seventeenth century: in England the assembly tamed the king, in France the king silenced the assembly.