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 almost doubled food output.

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, 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 in the famine years before the plague, then France in 1358 and England in 1381 after it. Every one of them was put down, yet serfdom itself never came back: 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 songs were the most popular entertainment there was, 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.