Introduction
Augustulus was the last Roman emperor of Rome and the western empire, and he abdicated in 476, marking end of the Roman Empire in the west, with non-Roman (“barbarian”) kings and chieftains occupying and ruling most of Italy at that time and going forward. The emperors in the East, seated in Constantinople still claimed authority over Italy and the West, but their actual rule was distant and weak.
In the absence of strong civil rulers in Rome, the Lead Pastors (“bishops”) of Rome gave much of the stability to the land, such as Leo the Great (~A.D. 400-461) and Gregory the Great (A.D. 540-604), including negotiation civil peace at times. While these ministers were forced to make many civil decisions for the inhabitants of Rome and Italy, the Fall of the Roman Empire meant that most civil authority became fragmented and decentralized throughout Europe.
The Middle Ages
The phrase “the dark ages” has sometimes been used to refer to the millennium between the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance and Reformation (~500-1500), which is really a travesty of a misnomer. More sober assessments of the era occasionally assign a century or two that title, but the phrase is often loaded with anti-Christian sentiment. Is an “empire” the only sign of civilization? In reality, there was much learning and cultural growth happening over those centuries, if slower and in a far more decentralized way.
Without large cities, there were rarely large sums of money to fund large buildings, works of art, and so on, but there were still many small cities and villages that flourished around Christian worship and learning. Many cities in Europe began as monasteries. While some monasteries were entirely escapist retreats and ascetic hideaways, many, like those that followed the Rule of Benedict, became fruitful communities of worship, learning, and industry.
This is why by the time of the Reformation many monasteries had become incredibly wealthy and massively corrupt. It’s also why many families would dedicate their sons or daughters to monasteries/convents and lives of celibacy – they were often steps up in terms of basic living standards, learning, and vocational skills, especially for families in extreme poverty.
Feudalism
The word “feudal” comes from the Latin word “feodum” which meant gift or fief of land and “feodalis” which is the word for vassal. This name was something invented later by historians to describe a broad system of various legal, economic, military, and cultural customs and laws that developed throughout the Middle Ages based on personal loyalties, contracts, and exchanges of “gifts” between individuals, working within a broadly Christian worldview.
This Christian worldview recognized a multiplicity of jurisdictions, and therefore the legitimacy of many different authorities and loyalties. “Lords” were generally those who owned land, and they made agreements with individuals (“vassals”), allowing them to live and work on their land (a “fief”), in exchange for some service or product or food and allegiance in case of outside threats. In return, the lord also provided protection with his trained warriors. This often worked its way up a hierarchy of lords to a king: a vassal to one lord might also be the lord over other vassals.
But there would often be many overlapping contracts and oaths between different people for different needs and services, including customary law, village laws, fief laws, church/canon law. Many of the contracts were common law sorts of agreements, but disputes were heard by courts, often with multiple judges or juries. In this way, over time, feudalism established the basic structure of society as local and centered on the ownership of local land and Christian worship and morals. Local laws and customs and contracts came to be viewed as just as important (if not more so) than regional/national laws.
Conclusion
In 1215, a number of English nobles held King John accountable for his oaths of loyalty regarding taxation in England. The Magna Carta which resulted, was a reassertion of the old feudal covenants, and it continues as a standing testimony of the old feudal and covenantal nature of civil covenants.
Arguably, the same basic assumptions were at work when the American colonies protested the failure of King George to uphold their colonial charters (contracts/covenants). The famous insistence of “no taxation without representation” was not primarily a protest against not having representation in the British parliament, since the King was supposed to be their representative. Rather, it was a protest that the King was breaking his covenants with the colonies by refusing to defend the local colonial governments’ right to levy taxes themselves. They already had local representatives authorized to levy taxes. But parliament was usurping those authorities and that local jurisdiction.
In broad terms, feudalism was a broad sort of covenantalism, with oaths of loyalty, often explicitly before God, asking for His blessing on faithfulness and His cursing on disloyalty. Covenantalism insisted that God was Lord over all, and no human authority was absolute. It insisted on loyalty and faithfulness, but it also reserved the right to require redress for failure, up to and including abolishing certain ties and forming new ones. This broadly Christian and covenantal worldview inherited from Medieval England was at work in the American Declaration of Independence.