towers of a feudal lord did not look much further beyond, to the king in his palace or in his courts of justice, for protection.  He found it closer at home.  The vassal, moreover, began to think of his own rights and privileges, to value them and to ask that they be enforced.  The idea of right and law, one of the most deeply engraved in the Christian conscience in the Middle Ages, grew and developed.  The barons were the first to claim these rights; gradually the whole nation imitated them.  Even when they claimed them, primarily for themselves, the whole nation participated sooner or later in their blessings.  The Barons of Runnymede were fighting the battles of every ploughboy in England when they wrenched Magna Charta from King John.

Although many a feudal lord was a proud and hard-driving master, yet the vassal and the serf knew that there were limits which his lord dared not transgress; that the very spirit of his “caste”, for such to a certain extent was the social rank to which the feudal lord belonged, would not tolerate any too flagrant a violation of his privileges.  A bond of united interests was found between feudal noble and his vassal.  They were found side by side in war; their larger interests were the same in peace.  Loyalty, honor, fidelity took deep root in the society which they represented.

As the aristocracy of feudalism was founded, not on wealth or money, but on land tenure, one of the most stable titles to prestige and authority found in history, there was in the underlying concept of society in those days a feeling of stability and permanency, which for a time made feudalism, in spite of its flaws, a bulwark of order.  It fostered even a strong family spirit.  Baron, count or earl, behind the thick ramparts of his castle, lived a patriarchal life.  He was, with his retainers and men-at-arms, his chaplains, to watch over his spiritual needs, his wife and children and vassals, dependent upon him for protection and safety, impelled by every sense of honor, duty and chivalry to make them feel that he was their sword and buckler.  They were closely knit to him.  There was a patriarchal bond between them.  Family spirit grew strong and, under the teaching of the Church, it became pure.

Feudalism had its flaws.  It was strictly an aristocratic institution.  It fostered the spirit of pride and bore harshly at times upon the serf and the man of low degree.  But its harsher features were softened by the teachings of the Church.  When it was at its height, voices of Popes like Alexander III and of Doctors like St. Thomas Aquinas, were lifted to proclaim the equality of all men in the sight of God.  At the altar, serf and master, count or cottier, knelt side by side.  In the monasteries and convents, the poor man’s son might wear the Abbot’s ring and in the assemblies and councils of the realm, the poor clerk of former days, might speak with all the authority of a Bishop to sway the destinies of both Church and State.