the.com/feudal system

means A hierarchical medieval arrangement in which kings granted land to nobles in exchange for military service and loyalty, nobles sub-let portions to lesser lords, and peasants worked the land at the bottom, owing labor and produce up the chain.

from The word 'feudal' comes from medieval Latin 'feudum' or 'feodum,' meaning a fief — a grant of land held in exchange for service. That Latin term is probably borrowed from a Germanic word related to 'fee' and 'cattle' (livestock once being a basic measure of wealth and payment), though the exact path is debated among scholars. Oddly, the people living inside the system never called it a 'feudal system' — that label was coined much later, by historians and lawyers (notably from the 1600s onward) trying to describe and systematize a tangle of overlapping medieval land obligations that was messier and far less tidy in practice than the word suggests.