Feudalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Feudalism was never a word anyone in the Middle Ages spoke aloud. The adjective feudal first surfaced by at least 1406, the noun feudalism only near the end of the 18th century. The people supposedly living inside the system had no name for it. They simply held land and owed each other service. Yet the term has since been stretched to cover medieval Europe from the 9th to the 15th centuries, and then far beyond, onto shoguns in Japan, kings in Ethiopia, and even the cotton fields of the American South. So what is this thing that no one who lived through it ever knew they were part of? Why do two of its most respected scholars, François Louis Ganshof and Marc Bloch, define it in ways that barely overlap? And why, in 1974, did one historian argue the word should be torn out of the history books entirely?

• 2. Lords, Vassals, Fiefs

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  Before a lord could grant land, he first had to make a man his vassal. The ceremony was called commendation, and it joined two acts: homage and an oath of fealty. During homage the vassal promised to fight at the lord's command, and the lord promised protection from outside threats. The word fealty comes from the Latin fidelitas, the fidelity a vassal owed his lord, and the oath followed homage to reinforce those commitments. The vassal's chief duty was aid, meaning military service. He answered the lord's call using whatever arms and horses the revenues of his fief could buy. That guarantee of armed help was the main reason a lord entered the relationship at all. Service did not stop at the battlefield. A vassal might owe attendance at his lord's court, whether manorial, baronial, or the king's. He might owe counsel, summoned with the other vassals when the lord faced a major decision. At the manor that could mean dull questions of agricultural policy, but it could also mean passing sentence for crimes, including capital punishment. At the king's court, the deliberation could reach as far as a declaration of war.

• 3. The Fragmentation Of Powers

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  In 11th-century France, historians describe a feudal revolution, a fracturing of authority unlike anything happening in England, Italy, or Germany. As fiefs hardened into hereditary holdings, the personal bond between lord and vassal gave way to what Marc Bloch called a politics of land. Counties and duchies broke apart. Castellans and lesser seigneurs seized control of local territory, and lesser lords privatized the rights of the state itself: travel dues, market dues, fees for woodlands, obligations to use the lord's mill, and above all the highly profitable rights of justice. Georges Duby grouped these usurped powers under one phrase, the seigneurie banale. The breakdown was not uniform. In Flanders, Normandy, Anjou, and Toulouse, counts held their lands into the 12th century or later, and there the vassal system became a tool of control rather than confusion. Elsewhere it bred chaos, made worse because a single vassal could and often did pledge himself to two or more lords at once. The 12th century answered with a new idea, the liege lord, whose claim outranked all the others.

• 4. The Long Abolition

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  On the night of the 4th of August 1789, France abolished the feudal system entirely. The National Assembly, in the words of historian Georges Lefebvre, adopted without debate the equality of taxation and the redemption of manorial rights, sparing only personal servitude, which was to vanish without indemnity. Equality of punishment, admission of all to public office, freedom of worship, and an end to plural holding of church benefices followed in the same rush. Provinces and towns offered up their privileges as a last sacrifice. The peasants were originally meant to buy back their seigneurial dues, which weighed on more than a quarter of France's farmland and funded most of the great landowners. Most simply refused, and in 1793 the obligation was cancelled outright, so the peasants kept their land free and stopped paying the tithe. The decree of the 11th of August 1789 was only the beginning of a long unwinding across Europe. Joachim Murat ended feudalism in the Kingdom of Naples by a law of the 2nd of August 1806. The Sicilian Parliament acted on the 10th of August 1812. On the island of Sardinia it survived until an edict of the 5th of August 1848, and in Lombardy-Venetia until a law of the 5th of December 1861. Russia abolished serfdom in 1861, Romania ended slavery in 1856, and the very last remnants outlived them all.

• 5. Roots Of A Word

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  The Latin feudum first appears in a charter of Charles the Fat in 884, the seed of feudal and every word grown from it. Its origin is genuinely unclear. In 1870, Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern traced it to a Frankish term meaning cattle joined with goods, a movable object of value, a reading later backed by William Stubbs and Marc Bloch. Bloch explained that by the early 10th century land was valued in money but paid for in kind, with arms, clothing, horses, or food. That substitute payment was called feos, and the word, once meaning movable property, eventually flipped into feus, landed property, its exact opposite. Competing theories abound. Archibald Ross Lewis pointed instead to foderum, military fodder, citing the Vita Hludovici of 840. Alauddin Samarrai proposed an Arabic root, fuyu, the plural of fay, land conquered from enemies who did not fight. He noted the earliest forms appeared in Languedoc, bordering Muslim Spain, and that feuum first replaced beneficium in 899, the same year a Muslim base was established at Fraxinetum in Provence. Samarrai himself warned the theory should be handled with care.

• 6. Inventing The System

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  The notion of a feudal age took hold in the middle of the 18th century, built on works like Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois of 1748 and Henri de Boulainvilliers's history of the ancient parliaments of France. Enlightenment writers reached for feudalism as a weapon. They mocked the Dark Ages and projected their contempt onto the Ancien Regime, where feudalism meant seigneurial privileges and prerogatives. In 1771, in The History of Manchester, John Whitaker first coined the word feudalism and the image of the feudal pyramid. Adam Smith gave it economic weight. In The Wealth of Nations of 1776 he described a feudal system of inherited social ranks, where wealth came from agriculture arranged not by markets but by the customary labour serfs owed their landowning nobles. Karl Marx later cast feudalism as the order preceding capitalism, defined by an aristocracy controlling arable land and exploiting peasants through serfdom and rents. He called it a democracy of unfreedom, and used it to expose his own age, arguing that most wage workers had as little control over their lives as feudal serfs.

• 7. The Tyranny Of A Construct

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  In 1974, the American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown rejected feudalism as an anachronism that imposed a false uniformity on the past. Surveying the many contradictory definitions in use, she called the word a construct with no basis in medieval reality, an invention read back tyrannically into the record. Some of her supporters went further and urged that the term be expunged from textbooks and lectures entirely. Susan Reynolds expanded the case in Fiefs and Vassals of 1994. She argued that the feudo-vassalic institutions historians treat as a coherent bundle may never have been structurally separate from the other institutions of their time. The doubt runs through the discipline. Earlier debates already showed how unstable the ground was. J. Horace Round held that the Normans brought feudalism to England, while Frederic William Maitland argued its fundamentals were present before the Conquest of 1066. The consensus settled on a middle path: England had commendation before 1066, and William the Conqueror introduced a stricter northern French feudalism, including the 1086 oaths of loyalty sworn to the king even by the vassals of his own vassals. Karl Friday observes that in the 21st century, historians of Japan rarely invoke feudalism at all, and Richard Abels notes that world civilization textbooks now shy away from the word.