What is the role of a seigneur in France?

Question

not New France, just France.its for my history class.

Answer 1

Seigneurialisticism is the organization of rural economy and society in medieval France, characterised by the vesting of legal and economic power in a lord supported economically from his own direct landholding and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under his jurisdiction.

These obligations could be payable in labor and produce "in kind" or, rarely, money. The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord. The lord held a manor court governed by public law and local custom.

Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigneurie

Answer 2

Same thing as in New France, except that this time, there is the king.

The kings is the seigneur of all the seigneurs.

The seigneur swears an oath to the King

The King gives him land (un fief) and the right to collect taxes (impots)

The Seigneur then promises to help the King whenever there is a war: the seigneur should come to help the king with his own horses and his own men.

The seigneur then allows people (serfs) to work on his land.

The serfs should then give the seigneur part of their harvest.