e the marks and to which many relics
of tenure and of class and governmental responsibility may be traced.
Feudalism was a society in which the status of an individual was fixed:
he was underman or overman in a rigid social scale according as he
considered his relation to his superiors or to his inferiors. Whatever
movement there was took place horizontally, in the same class or on the
same social level. The movement was not vertical, as it so frequently is
today, and men did not ordinarily rise above the social level of their
birth, never by design, and only perhaps by rare accident or genius. It
was a little world of lords and serfs; of knights who graced court and
castle, jousted at tournaments, or fought upon the field of battle;
and of serfs who toiled in the fields, served in the castle, or, as the
retainers of the knight, formed the crude soldiery of medieval days.
For their labor and allegiance they were clothed and housed and fed.
Yet though there were feast days gay with the color of pageantry and
procession, the worker was always in a servile state, an underman
dependent upon his master, and sometimes looking upon his condition as
little better than slavery.

With the break-up of this rigid system came in England the emancipation
of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the beginnings of
peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation which always draws
together men of similar ambitions and tasks now began to work
significant changes in the economic order. The peasantry, more or less
scattered in the country, found it difficult to unite their powers for
redressing their grievances, although there were some peasant revolts
of no mean proportions. But the artisans of the towns were soon grouped
into powerful organizations, called guilds, so carefully managed and so
well disciplined that they dominated every craft and controlled
every detail in every trade. The relation of master to journeyman and
apprentice, the wages, hours, quantity, and quality of the output, were
all minutely regulated. Merchant guilds, similarly constituted, also
prospered. The magnificent guild halls that remain in our day are
monuments of the power and splendor of these organizations that made
the towns of the later Middle Ages flourishing centers of trade, of
handicrafts, and of art. As towns developed, they dealt the final blow
to an agricultural system based on feudalism; they became cities of
refuge for the runaway serfs, and t