The heart of your dictionary definition is feudum. Which means “faith,” meaning trust.
Even today, land held in “fee simple” is held in fief, in feudum. “Fee” comes from feudum.
It’s the idea that you don’t own your land outright and absolutely. That’s actually still true today (eminent domain).
You have only a dictionary defintion that employs words you don’t understand. Then you read into it all the negative stereotypes you have from the movies and the Black Legend view of the “feudal dark ages.”
What I described is what historians know about how it actually functioned.
A peasant was not personally free but he could not be thrown off his land. The land belonged to his lord but not absolutely. The peasant had a right to sit on that land and farm it. He paid rent from the produce to the lord. The lord could not arbitrarily abuse the peasant—the peasant had legal recourse against it. The lord was obligated by feudum, honor, faith to defend the peasant against outside powerful lords.
Did this work perfectly? No. Plenty of lords abused their peasants. But both lord and peasant had rights enshrined in law, customary law, not whim-law created by nobles.
They had far more legal protection than Soviet citizens or German citizens had under modern bureaucratic totalitarianism. We have not yet reached that stage in this country but we no longer are governed by honorable, virtuous elites either. And the prevailing theory of law is a 100 times worse than what governed peasant-lord relations in the “feudal age” because they believed in ancient custom rooted in a God who would damn to hell those who abused trust/feudum, who abused power.
We don’t.
That is, our elites don’t
believe in such a God. And they have no sense of honor, only “what can I get away with.”
Feudum/fee in your dictionary definition is the key to all this.
But you have it in your head that the feudal system was totally arbitrary sheer naked power by nobles.
That’s garbage, historically. But you don’t know it because you only know what the MSM and the movies have to say about “feudal Dark Ages.”
Am I advocating a return to the Middle Ages? Of course not.
The American system as originally established is about as good as it gets but it depended on virtuous elites running it. It was not rule by the mob or the commmoners. It was rule by noblesse oblige gentry like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. The problem is not rule by elites. The problem is rule by power-abusing, dishonorable elites.
And that’s always been the problem, no matter what degree of kingship, nobility, market, mercantile, barter system of politics and economics prevailed. All such systems can be reasonably fair and just or horribly unjust.
And we lost our system a generation or two ago when we shifted from noblesse oblige FDR’s technocrats. Read Amity Schlaes, The Forgotten Man. If I had a choice, I’d choose medieval feudalism over what we’ve had since FDR. But I don’t have a choice, so I hope to recover the Nobles envisioned by Adams, Washington, Lincoln, men who lived by virtue and honor.
I have very little optimism that this will happen but I will continue, in faith, to hope.