Feudalism in europe?

Question

How did the breakdown of central authority in Europe lead to the development of feudalism? please help me with this, i need to write a paper on it and it would really help if someone helped explain it

Answer 1

The source of feudalism rises from an intermingling of barbarian usage and Roman law. To explain this reference must be made to a change that passed over the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fourth century. About that date Diocletian reorganized the Empire by the establishment of a huge bureaucracy, at the same time disabling it by his crushing taxation. The obvious result was the depression of free classes into unfree, and the barbarization of the Empire.

Before A.D. 300 the absentee landlord farmed his land by means of a familia rustica or gang of slaves, owned by him as his own transferable property, though others might till their fields by hired labor. Two causes extended and intensified this organized slave system:

(1) Imperial legislation that two thirds of a man's wealth must be in land, so as to set free hoarded specie, and prevent attempts to hide wealth and so escape taxation. Hence land became the medium of exchange instead of money, i.e. land was held not by rent but by service.

(2) The pressure of taxation falling on land (tributum soli) forced smaller proprietors to put themselves under their rich neighbors, who paid the tax for them, but for whom they were accordingly obliged to perform service (obsequium) in work and kind. Thus they became tied to the soil (ascripti glebae), not transferable dependents. Over them the lord had powers of correction, not apparently, of jurisdiction.

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