WHAT ARE THE MAIN FEATURES OF FEUDAL KINGSHIP?.
In order to successfully discuss the features of feudal kingship, it is necessary to define the concept of feudalism. It can be explained as a societal development which involved personal dependence within society, where a specialized military class occupied the higher levels of the social spectrum. There was usually an intense subdivision of the rights of real property and this subdivision created a graded system of rights over land corresponding to the grades of personal dependence. This resulted in a hierarchy of persons with political authority, who exercised in their own interests powers normally attributed to the state. .
In the seventh and eighth centuries, the king started to detach himself from those to whom he originally owed his position as leader, and began adopting the title of "a King by the grace of God", claiming that his title-deed lay not in the will of his people, but in divinity. The paramount feature of this theocratic kingship was to turn divine grace into a divine right whereby the monarch ruled by the grace of God. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, England was already a single kingdom, which was very rare within Europe. However, there was still no clear code of kingship in England; there was no determined rule of succession. The monarchy abided by customs and religious beliefs. It was the time of the Norman Conquest that a feudal system developed, because the Normans acquired all new territory and had to distribute it in order for it to be maintained, similar to the situation in Jerusalem. By the thirteenth century, royal theocracy was combined with the king functioning as a feudal overlord: the king was still supreme in the eyes of Roman law, but now the monarch embodied both functions of a theocratic ruler and country's "protector".
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By the thirteenth century a legal hierarchy of titles was created, based on a relationship between lords and vassals.
