Was the english king/royal family also “not as important as we usually think there were” or is that more of french thing?

It’s really complicated, and depends what period you’re talking about. So here’s how I’d explain the relative power of English and French monarchs:

Under Charlesmagne, there was a relatively powerful bureaucratic state left over from the days when his ancestors who served as “mayors of the palace” (i.e, majordomo) to the Merovingian kings gradually usurped authority from their erstwhile monarchs (not unlike the Tyrells and the Gardeners). The counts (the main direct vassals of the king) were supervised by palace inspectors, whose job it was to keep an eye on the counts and in extreme cases recommend they be removed from fiefdoms for disloyalty or incompetence – as fiefdoms were considered a gift from the Emperor for the lifetime of the count.

At this time, the kings of the Franks were substantially more powerful than any of the warring heptarchs of the Anglo-Saxons.

After Charlesmagne’s death, this system gradually broke down, partially because his empire was divided between his three grandsons and then a lot of infighting took place between and within each of the three sections, but more significantly because the weakening of central authority empowered the regional nobility. The assembly of nobles got the right to decide who got appointed as inspectors, inspectors were now chosen from within districts, all of which meant that they became weak and corrupt. At the same time, fiefdoms became seen as property of the landholder to be inherited by their sons, and taking away a fiefdom was seen as a violation of the social contract. Over time, this meant that the king could only maintain power by giving away land, but then didn’t have land to give away in the future to keep their followers loyal, and it meant that the king’s own land diminished:

At the same time, in England, the Kingdom of Wessex was one of the few Saxon kingdoms to survive the Vikings, and under Alfred the Great reformed its military, its taxation system, military and civilian infrastructure, and legal system, which allowed the West Saxons to annex London, Kent, and west Mercia, then eastern Mercia and East Anglia, then Northumbria, at which point they controlled virtually all of England.

When William, Duke of Normandy, defeated Harold Godwinson in 1066, this entire kingdom fell into his personal possession, an enormous windfall in feudal terms. And the Norman Kings of England managed the hell out of their new acquisition, what with the Domesday Book, the invention of the Exchequer, etc.

For a while, this gave the Kings of England (who were still Dukes of Normandy, remember) more clout than the King of France, especially when the Kings of England managed to get their hands on the western half of France (note the dark blue on the map below represents the lands of the King of France):

However, French Kings from Phillip Augustus onwards were able to capitalize on disunity within the Angevin Empire, the growing wariness of French noblemen in eastern France about the expansion of said Empire, and the troubled reigns of Richard I and John I, to expand his holdings at the expense of the English. Normandy, Anjou, Vermandois, Touraine, and Auvergne were retaken by Phillip Augustus, then Louis the Lion seized control over Toulouse through the Albigensian Crusade, giving the French king a far more contiguous realm.

The English bounced back in the early phase of the Hundred Years War, allowing them to reconquer much of what they’d lost in southwestern France as well as adding the Pale of Calais into their territory, but even at their height they never got back their former north/northwestern provinces.

Eventually, however, the French recovered, and the mobilization against the English allowed the French monarchy to further their consolidation over their own territory.

Why did soldier get paid in land rather than gold?

As I discuss here and here and here, paying soldiers in gold requires substantial state capacity – you need a large bureaucracy that can collect taxes in cash (which requires significant record-keeping, valuation, and enforcement capacities), you need the logistical ability to mint the necessary amount of coins and ship them to the army in time for pay day, you need both the authority/legitimacy and economic development to ensure that coin can exchanged with civilians for food and other supplies, and so forth.

Thus, even in the late Roman Empire, you see this system begin to break down – the commercial economy is weakening and urban centers are declining, which means the state is having a harder time extracting the necessary amounts of gold to pay the army (especitally when the army has gotten a sense of its political power and starts demanding more and more gold), the currency is becoming less valuable as a result, which means fewer people are willing to take coins (they’re not trading as much and now you see how all of these factors are mutually-reinforcing)

So the late Roman Empire begins to shift to a proto-feudal system. First they shift to a system of direct requisition of supplies from provinces by the army (which means the army is collecting the taxes itself so you don’t need a bureaucracy to do it for them) and taxes being paid in kind (which means that you don’t need to worry about currency as much). Second, from there it’s not much of a jump to just hand over land to armies in return for military service – whether you’re talking about the limitanei under Diocletian and Constantine or the stratiotika ktemata of the Byzantines, etc.

And in the West, once the Roman Empire falls completely, it was similarly an easy shift for ring-giving kings to start giving out land, now that the Roman bureaucracy and economy that let them get their hands on gold to turn into rings to hand out went away.

What was wage labor like in feudalism? I know it wasn’t hourly before clocks were around and stuff like that, but how was it thought of? Did they have the concept of employer and employee of a company (or the concept of a company outside of whatever the mercenaries count as). Did taking wages for work affect your class, maybe making you more than a serf but less than a skilled craftsman?

In terms of when you got paid, it depended. Most wage laborers were paid daily, but in some cases you could be paid weekly, monthly, or even yearly.

Companies were very rare, and required special licenses and legislation to set up (think things like the East India Trading Company or the Muscovy Company) because they were monopolies. So in most cases, wage labor took place between an owner-operator and their worker.

In terms of how it was thought of in class terms, it’s a bit complicated.

On the one hand, you had a significant body of journeymen who were paid wages, and they were significantly above serfs although below master craftsmen. Journeymen were legally free and no longer bound as apprentices were, they had property in their tools, they had certain rights (and responsibilities) as guild members, etc. And below the journeymen, you had a population of (unskilled) free laborers who worked for wages as well.

On the other hand, a significant percent of the population (about 4-5% in rural areas and 11-17% in urban areas) were servants. And servants had a different status than other wage workers. To quote Steinfeld:

“Servants were different from other wage workers – laborers and artificers – who occupied separate social and legal niches. Servants ordinarily were single and had not yet established households of their own. Hence, they lived with their masters and served them full time for a term. Laborers generally were married and maintained their own households. In most instances, they did not serve for a term, but worked on a casual basis by the day, week, or task…

Servants were “in the service of another.” But laborers and artificers [i.e, artisans], who did not live with their employers, might be employed by one person today and someone else tomorrow or next week, or they might…simultaneously undertake a number of different tasks for different persons.”

This distinction had important legal consequences: because they were part of someone’s household, servants were under the legal control of the master of the household; servants weren’t free to leave their employer until their term of service was up; etc.

Hello Steven! Are there any historical examples of nobility “investing” in their peasants? such as buying them flocks of sheep or ox and plows to jump start productivity, like a medieval stimulus package? Whats a way that a lord could “spend money to make money” w/o including banking?

Interesting question!

Most of the examples that I can remember of nobles investing in their estates are things like draining fenland to create more arable land, building mills to turn grain into flour (thus, climbing the value-added ladder), or building weirs and the like to shape trade. These improvements are more akin to investments to fixed plant or capital goods than investments in the productivity of the labor force.

That’s not to say that lords wouldn’t buy livestock or plows or the like, but they’d usually buy them for their own lands, as those kinds of moveable goods were considered individual property. Indeed, in many cases peasants were required to bring their own plows on those days when they had to perform labor on the lord’s land as part of their feudal service.

Was it common for medieval kings to actively hold the noble classes in disdain? Something that I’ve seen somewhat regularly in medieval fantasy is a monarch that wants beneficial progress, but is blocked by the nobility, and hates them for it. Stannis is an example with his “if all the lords had but one neck” remark. Are these sorts of characters a bit of an overoptimistic take on absolutism, or did they turn up in real life?

Given the long history in many different countries of monarchs struggling with the aristocracy over centralization vs. decentralization of power, it’s not an inaccurate portrayal, but how common that attitude was did change over time.

I’m not sure I would always go as far as to say the class as a whole or as a concept was disdained – a lot of the centralizers would still defend at least the social prerogatives of the nobility against the peasantry or the urban burghers and none of them attempted to abolish or eliminate the nobility. Rather, the aim was usually to try to make the nobility a compliant and dependent part of the monarchical system.

Were twentieth-century aristocrats lazier than medieval aristocrats? I’m really only going by the fictional versions, but the medievals seem to always be doing something productive, while their 1900s counterparts spend all their time hunting and drinking. Some of it is because Downton Abbey doesn’t have to worry about being invaded by Bertie Wooster, but the medievals work hard at non-military projects too.

The medieval/early modern ones were plenty damn lazy, given that “not working for a living” was pretty much the definition of their social identity and actually doing a day’s work would be acting like a serf.

However, I would say the main difference is that the medieval/early modern nobility had two things that occupied a good deal of their time:

estate management: even though most of the “shop floor” work was done by stewards and bailiffs and the like, the lords did spend a lot of time on the management side of land management.
a monopoly on political power: in the premodern era, pretty much all jobs in politics were held by nobles or nobles who had joined the clergy; there were seats in Parliaments or Diets or Estates, there were places at court or in royal government/administration, there were judicial positions, there was the aristocratic domination of the army, etc.

After the economic/social/cultural/political transformations of the 17th-20th centuries that could collectively be described as “modernity,” the nobility lost those “places” in society. On the land side, they either lost a lot of their land or shifted their money into more liquid capital (which meant they could move to the city) or gave into the need for fully professional management (ditto, with a side of absentee landlordism). On the politics side, the rise of mass democracies, professionalized civil services, and militaries, abetted in no small part by the fact that the aristocracy had enthusiastically blundered their way into tons of increasingly bloody wars meant that noble titles shifted from a necessity to a liability.

What was left was their traditional pursuit of the “gentle life.”

I’m a bit confused about Knights as a social class. Were they all younger noble sons trying to make a living? How did they pay for their equipment? Could they own land or were they dependant on a master for their finances?

No. Knights were a particular section of the nobility, below the level of lord but above that of esquire. Indeed, one could argue that they were the foundational element of the nobility, since fiefdoms were made up of knight’s fees.

They paid for their armor usually in cash from the feudal taxes and rents that they extracted from their knight’s fee.

And knights usually did “own” land – the aforesaid knight’s fee – although there were household knights or tourney knights or the like.

How are feudal contracts negotiated and what would they cover and what would the terms be like generally? What about renegotiations of the contract?

See here and here for previous writings about the feudal contract.

Feudal contracts weren’t frequently negotiated, because tradition was considered incredibly important and breaking the traditional terms of the contract was frowned upon in the extreme, and innovations like scutage weren’t always thought well of either. Generally, if they had to be changed, it was usually done by trying to find some sort of ancient precedent, or if that couldn’t be done, by inventing one out of whole cloth and doctoring the records.

They varied tremendously, but usually they involved a bilateral exchange: the liege lord offers rights over a certain piece of land (not an absolute right to the land itself, but that’s a bit tricky given the difference between pre- and post-enlightenment conceptions of property rights) in exchange for stuff. It usually included military service (hence the practice of dividing fiefdoms into knight’s fees), although if a fiefdom was given to the church this was usually commuted, but it could also include various traditional forms of taxes (so many pheasants or so many butts of wine, etc.) or personal service (holding someone’s stirrup when they came to town, being their cupbearer, etc.).

i have a feudalism question. Youve said before that some lands belong to kings directly whereas others are owned by other nobles who pay tribute in taxes/military service to the king. But doesnt technically the whole realm belong to the king? Isn’t that the whole “sovereign ruler” schtick ?

It’s kind of complicated. The thing is that, in feudalism, almost no one actually owns anything outright in the sense that we think about it; rather property is distributed in various leases and use-rights and tenancies, all the way up and all the way down

And while in our 21st century capitalist mindset leases, use-rights, and tenancies sound like precarious second-class statuses that fall fall short of true ownership, that wasn’t the case in medieval societies. These statuses were backed up by tradition, law, and the willingness of very touchy mounted soldiers to go to war to uphold them against infringement from on high. Thus, even if something was de jure “owned” by the king, once noblemen felt that they had a right to inherit the fiefdom, de facto it became owned by those noblemen (save in the case of felony).