The name long given to the political and social order of medieval Europe — a world without a strong central state, held together by personal bonds of land and loyalty, with lords granting fiefs to vassals in return for service and peasants tied to the manor below. It is also a contested category: the tidy pyramid was assembled by later centuries, and many historians now argue the 'feudal system' obscures the messy, local reality more than it reveals it.
The word 'feudalism' was not coined in the Middle Ages. Lawyers and scholars invented it in the 1600s and 1700s, centuries after the knights were gone, to name a system the medieval people themselves never described. The picture they built is familiar: a neat pyramid of kings, lords, knights, and serfs, all bound by land and loyalty. It is the standard map of the Middle Ages. It is also a map drawn long after the territory had vanished — and many historians now think it shows a country that never quite existed.