When Rollo took Normandy from the French King Charles the Simple in 911 the ownership of Normandy was given quasi fundum et allodium — in absolute ownership, allowing Duke Rollo as seigneur to give everyday use of portions of land to his followers, in exchange for recognition of the lords' rights and agreeing to foi et homage - providing services and paying homage.
[1] This continued until 1204 when Normandy once again became part of France, except for the Channel Islands where fiefs would in future be held for the English Crown in right of the ducal title.
However, it could be structurally complex, which is illustrated by the example of the feudal barony of Stafford as described in a survey of knight's fees made in 1166 and recorded in The Black Book of the Exchequer.
Hugh describes a convoluted intermingling of loyalties that was characteristic of the period and instrumental in developing strain between nobles that resulted in competition for each other's land.
Hugh: My lord, I beg you through God and this blessed crucifix which is made in the figure of Christ that you do not make me do this if you and your son were intending to threaten me with trickery.
Upon seeing the weakness of feudal society due to the Muslim invasion, Portugal became independent from the Kingdom of León as Castile had done a century earlier.
However, some have taken the feudalism analogy further, seeing it in places as diverse as Ancient Egypt, the Parthian Empire, India, and the American South of the nineteenth century.
Pronoia, the 11th-century system of land grants in the Byzantine Empire, makes a useful contrast to feudal tenure in the European West.
Lacking a feudal system of vassal loyalty made it impossible for any prince, early on, to gain enough influence and power to project a strong force against any invaders.
In modern times historians have become very reluctant to classify other societies into European models and today it is rare for Zamindari to be described as feudal by academics; it is still done in popular usage, however, but only for pejorative reasons to express disfavor, typically by critics of the system.
Feudalism is the model that modern Chinese Marxists[8] and Tokyo school historians use to identify China's recent past, neologized from the Chinese concept of fengjian[9] (which means to allocate a region or piece of land to an individual, establishing him as the ruler of that region),[10] a term used to designate the multi-state system which existed in China under the Zhou dynasty,[9] eradicated following Qin's wars of unification in favour of the commandery–county system.
Broadly, while fengjian shared several similarities with later Western feudalism, the local chiefs were afforded greater autonomy in their own territories, but the king owed them no mutual defense.
[13] Early Chinese titles were a mixture of political and kinship terms,[14] and did not attain systematization until the late Spring and Autumn period.
The notion of "prime minister" 太宰 in early China came from the aristocratic meaning of "chief housekeeper" or "butler" of a noble household, in a similar way to the development of such European titles as "constable".
[16] The collapse of central authority led to a geopolitical situation marked by considerable infighting by the landed aristocracy and their successors, often ministerial lineages.
[19] Han dynasty scholarship would decry the First Emperor as a tyrant whose crimes included deconstructing the fengjian system, which was misunderstood in anachronistic overly systematized form as an integral component of the idealized society of the Western Zhou.
[20] Studied districts of Tibet between the 17th and 20th-century show evidence of a striated society with land ownership laws and tax responsibility that resemble European feudal systems.
[21] Scholar Geoff Samuel further argued that Tibet even in the early 20th century did not constitute a single state but rather a collection of districts and a legal system of Lhasa with particular land and tax laws did not extend over the entire country.
[22] However, according to Melvyn Goldstein, for the 20th century, the Tibetan political system can not be categorized as feudal since Tibet possessed a centralized state.
[24] Karl Friday notes that in the 21st century, historians of Japan rarely invoke feudalism; instead of looking at similarities, specialists attempting comparative analysis concentrate on fundamental differences.
Those making grants – the "superiors" – retained a legal interest in the land ("dominium directum"), and so a hierarchical structure was created with each property having several owners, co-existing simultaneously.
Sark's ruling body voted on 4 October 2006 to replace the remaining tenement seats in Chief Pleas with a fully-elected democratic government, which was implemented on April 9, 2008.
Regular citizens can be seen as peasants, soldiers as knights, higher members at the Workers' Party of Korea as nobles and the Kim dynasty as monarchs.