Class 11 History Chapter 4 The Three Orders Short Notes in English

The essence of this chapter for last-minute revision: definitions, key facts, dates and tables. The full notes, with the complete explanation, are available separately.

1 The chapter in one frame

The chapter covers western Europe between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries, mostly France and England. A bishop of the time summed the scheme up in one line: “Here below, some pray, others fight, still others work.”

How this world came about. Rome’s collapse left Italy, Spain and France to Germanic groups out of eastern and central Europe, and no single authority above them. War was constant, so whoever held land held everything, and the social order built on it borrowed from Roman practice and German custom alike. Christianity, the Roman Empire’s official religion from the fourth century, survived Rome’s collapse, spread into central and northern Europe, and made the Church a major landholder and political power. Across a narrow channel lay the island of England and Scotland, conquered in the eleventh century by a duke from the French province of Normandy. The Roman province of Gaul, with its two long coastlines, mountains, rivers, forests and farming plains, took the name of the Germanic tribe that settled it, the Franks, and so became France.

How historians know. The medieval centuries left a great deal behind: documents, records of landownership, prices and legal cases. Churches kept registers of births, marriages and deaths, inscriptions in them describe traders’ associations, and songs and stories preserve a sense of festivals and community life. Marc Bloch (1886-1944) built Feudal Society out of exactly this material.

2 Definitions to learn by heart

3 Numbers worth remembering

4 Dates at a glance

5 The two lower orders in one table

Women and children of both groups also spun thread, wove cloth, made candles and pressed grapes for the lord’s wine.

6 Land, climate and technology

Who paid for what. Peasants took the lead in extending arable land, adopting the three-field rotation and setting up village smithies for ploughs and horseshoes. Lords, who had the money, funded the expensive watermills and windmills.

7 The fourteenth-century crisis

Two points examiners like. The plague hit cities hardest because they were centres of trade, and enclosed communities such as monasteries lost almost everybody once one person was infected. And the revolts were most intense in the regions that had prospered most, because peasants were defending gains they had already made.

The Church and folk belief. Though Europeans became Christian, they still held on to older beliefs in magic and folk tradition. Christmas, on 25 December, replaced an older pre-Roman festival whose date was fixed by the solar calendar, and Easter, dated by the lunar calendar, replaced a festival for the coming of spring. The village came to be called the parish, and overworked peasants welcomed holy days as days off.

Cathedral-towns. From the twelfth century large churches called cathedrals were built in France. They belonged to the monasteries, but were paid for with the labour, materials and money of many people, and rich merchants often spent money on donations to churches. Built of stone, they took years, and once finished they became centres of pilgrimage with small towns growing around them. They were designed so the priest’s voice and the monks’ singing carried and the bells could be heard at a distance, and their stained glass told Bible stories to people who could not read. The chapter’s own examples are Reims, Chartres and Salisbury, and Chaucer’s pilgrims are on their way to Canterbury. Abbot Suger (1081-1151) described the new windows made for the Abbey of St Denis near Paris.

8 The new monarchs, and why France and England diverged

What they built: standing armies, a permanent bureaucracy, national taxation, and in Spain and Portugal the beginning of overseas expansion. Why they succeeded: the dissolution of lordship and vassalage plus slow economic growth gave kings their first real opening. How they fought: feudal levies were replaced by professionally trained infantry with guns and siege artillery, directly under royal control, and the increased taxation paid for larger armies with which they defended and expanded their frontiers and put down internal resistance. Why absolutism is called a modified form of feudalism: the same lordly class went on dominating politics, now as loyal officeholders instead of rivals, in a courtier society where patronage was bought with money, which is how merchants and bankers found their way into the court.

9 Five-minute recap