Daily Living

        Mowing grass, ranking leaves, shoveling snow, and pulling weeds are some of the seasonal activities expected living in my part of the world. The garbage goes out Wednesday night for Thursday pick-up, the water bill is due by the tenth of each month and, taxes from the city and county are paid at the beginning of the year. On and on it goes with school tax, property tax, sales tax, car tax, and any other taxes that folks in charge can contemplate. What in the world one would think. Well, just imagine what day to day living would have been in 1300 A.D.

       Those in charge were considered "overlords". The supreme overlord sat upon what was conceptualized as "The Throne" and under accepted theory owned all the land that folks of the day lived [or survived upon]. You had to mow his grass, plant and harvest his fields, milk his cows, and every other task he so desired. The system that was brought over to the neighborhood by the French speaking Normans and, their Marcher Lords, came to be called "feudalism". Of course, you had to go along to get along. 

       The best text describing the origin and introduction of this concept to the hallways of history is by two French folks, Jean-Pierre Poly and Eric Bournazel. First published in French (1980), an English translation was published in 1991. The cover of my copy is shown.

      "Seigneuries" was the new word on my vocabulary list. It meant the territory under the government of a feudal lord. Let's see now, the Norman folks who dug-in all sorts of places among my ancestors family's land, claimed all the territory they had come to occupy by force of arms. This land become their new governmental territory. They were the feudal lord, with no buts and or otherwise! 

       Daily life would certainly change from the common law of the kindred, to this new law of the feudal lord. 

The above text was translated by Caroline Higgitt and published by Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc. N.Y., 1991.