- [Instructor] In a previous video,
we already talked about the feudal system,
how you can have a king
and then you might have some vassals of the king
who give an oath of fealty to the king
in the homage or homage ceremony,
might be a duke.
And you could keep going down this.
Maybe you have a count,
maybe you have a baron,
and could keep going down this chain of nobility
where one noble is pledging fealty
to the king as a king's vassal,
but then they are a lord of another vassal.
And you keep going all the way down
until you get to a plot of land
where the actual work might occur.
And that term is often referred to as a manor.
A manor just doesn't happen
at the bottom of this pyramid.
A duke can have a manor
and they can split up the rest of their duchy
and give sections of it to form counties
that could be led by counts.
But what we're going to focus in this video
is the manor itself,
because that's where life in a medieval community
actually takes place.
And the work on a manor is done essentially
by the lowest rung of the ladder
and that is both free peasants
and also by serfs.
To get a sense of what a medieval manor
could have looked like,
here's a picture and this would've been
a particularly fancy manor right over here.
This is a ducal manor,
so this would have been the manor of a duke,
so it could be something like that right over there.
And in this picture, you see the manor house
which in this case is the duke's castle,
in many medieval communities were the highest ranking
of the nobility right beneath the king.
And so we see these people actually working the field.
We don't know from looking up at them,
some of them might be free peasants,
maybe this gentleman right over here is a free peasant.
And this person right over here is a serf.
The word of serf comes from the Latin for service,
the same word that eventually gives us words like servant
and they're someplace in between a free peasant and a slave.
They are bonded to the lord of the manor.
In this case it would be a duke,
but you can go down this hierarchy,
you could have a manor where the lord is a baron
or the lord is a knight,
or the lord is just someone who is very wealthy
and somehow got access to a fiefdom.
So the serfs are bonded to the land.
They can't leave without their permission.
They are allowed to cultivate
certain tracts of land themselves,
but they also have to work for their lord.
So they might help plant crops and harvest crops
in the lord's land as well
and they also give a percentage of everything
that they grow or everything that they do
to the actual lord.
And if the lord needs to go into war,
they might have to be soldiers in that war.
You might be wondering, well that sounds pretty bad,
it sounds similar to being a slave.
One of the key differences is that a serf
actually can accumulate things on their own.
They can actually own property.
Now another term or sometimes
a subcategorization of serf in the Middle Ages
is the term villain.
I know what you're thinking,
you have heard that term before.
The villain today means a bad guy.
But the term originally comes from the Roman Empire
when Diocletian, the famous emperor
who persecuted Christians, he also,
because they were having trouble
getting labor in rural villas,
he began to decree that certain people
had to work in the villas.
And so someone who was compelled to work at a villa
was called a villain,
and so they were bonded to the land.
They were a type of serf.
Now the fact that villain in English,
it means someone who is bad,
it gives you an idea how in a lot of languages
in a lot of cultures,
the notion of being captive or bonded and poor
gets associated with being bad
which seems very contrary to our modern view of the world.
Get a top-level view of what a manor might look like.
We don't know what type of manor this is in particular,
but the manor house here seems a little bit more humble
than this ducal manor right over here.
This could be a,
maybe a baron's manor house.
Now the manner often had a village.
This is where the serfs or the free peasants
might live, keep their homes.
And then you see the land that is
cultivated collectively by this community,
not just the actors that we've just talked about,
you might also have a church or monastery
on that manor right over here.
And these strips of land,
they might have different crops.
And the output of those crops go to different people.
The one common factor is the lord of the manor
might get all of the crops from some of these strips,
while on the other strips,
they get the taxation.
So they'll get a certain percentage from the crops there.
But all of the work is done by the serfs
and the free peasants and possibly if there some,
if this is a monastery,
and there's some monks at the monastery.
Now one interesting thing is why
you often see in these manor maps,
these long strips of land,
and our resident agricultural expert
at Khan Academy, David Rheinstrom,
says it's because the medieval plows once you got going,
you didn't want to turn them around,
you got some momentum.
And so people liked the plant crops in these long strips
so the plows could just keep going in one direction
and only at the end,
they just have to turn it around.
So you're minimizing the number of times
that you actually have to turn around to plow.