The phrase "a fief from" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts discussing feudal systems, land ownership, or metaphorically to describe a grant of power or privilege.
Example: "The lord granted him a fief from his vast estate, allowing him to govern the land and its people."
Alternatives: "a grant from" or "a domain from".
After receiving a generous pension and a fief from the Queen, he lived under court protection until 1806.
Finally, in 1569, two years before his death, he received the duchy of Prussia as a fief from King Sigismund II Augustus of Poland.
It was the capital of a fief from the 12th to the 17th century, and its counts rivaled the viceroys of Sicily in power and wealth.
When Charlemagne destroyed the Avar empire about 796, he rewarded the Moravians for their help by giving them a part of it, which they held as a fief from him.
By the 1070s, Gregory VII could seriously attempt to bully the Danish king into holding his realm as a fief from himself; in 1164, Alexander III confirmed the Norwegian warlord Olaf Haraldsson, who had died in battle against Cnut's forces and been the half- brother of Harald Hardrada, as a saint of the Roman Church.
However, the pope condemned him for having accepted his kingdom "as a fief from the king of the Germans" and claimed suzerainty over Hungary.
It has been calculated that a fief needed from 15 to 30 peasant families to maintain one knightly household.
His Sandinista Front is a personal fief from which he has expelled those who challenge his leadership.
Urban was faced with three tasks: freeing the Kingdom of Sicily, a papal fief, from domination by the Hohenstaufen dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire; reasserting papal influence in Italy, where it had diminished because of Alexander's vacillation on the Sicilian problem; and restoring order in Rome, which suffered such civil unrest that Urban never resided there as pope.
King Philip II Augustus gradually united Amiénois and Vermandois to his domain (from 1185), but Ponthieu was held by the English as a fief almost continuously from 1279 to 1360 and then as an outright possession until 1369.
The ministry is indeed a fief, a holdover from the era when the state controlled all.
