Although most of you, at one time or another, have probably come across this word either in its purely descriptive sense and/or in its pejorative sense, it will come as a big surprise to you to learn that despite its continued ubiquitous usage today there has been considerable disagreement among modern historians as to whether or not such a socio-economic and political system ever existed in Europe and in fact many have simply dismissed the term as nothing more than a historiographical construct (similar to the concept of the “Dark Ages, ” that is, a period invented by historians for their own purposes). The fundamental definitional problem has been the concept’s historiographically portmanteau, hence meaningless, character, encompassing a socio-economic and political order spanning some one thousand years—roughly from the time of the disintegration and decay of the Roman Empire around the fifth century CE, to the twelfth century when urbanization was beginning to move apace against the backdrop of the dissolution of slavery in Europe together with the loosening of peasant ties to land—across a wide geographic terrain stretching from England to Russia that never exhibited, in reality, uniformity of the type that is commonly associated with the concept: of contractual reciprocity, embedded in both tradition and law, across three primary levels of a relatively unified socio-economic and political hierarchy comprising the monarch at the apex and the serf at the base and vassals in between (sometimes referred to as the “feudal pyramid”) involving provision of security in terms of law and order by those at the top in exchange for, on one hand, land-use rights and a portion of its proceeds, and on the other, a labor levy for the maintenance of the vassals’ demesne for those at the bottom; in other words, a form of a protection racket run by the monarch and the nobility and in which the Church was fully complicit. The truth is this: what is commonly understood as feudalism (or feudal system) simply never existed in Europe. Yet, these terms continue to remain in vogue in books and in classrooms. As Elizabeth A. R. Brown, who was among the first to challenge the continued usage by historians of a term that described a mythological European past in an aptly titled article “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe” observed: “Since the middle of the nineteenth century the concepts of feudalism and the feudal system have dominated the study of the medieval past. The appeal of these words, which provide a short, easy means of referring to the European social and political situation over an enormous stretch of time, has proved virtually impossible to resist, for they pander to the human desire to grasp-or to think one is grasping-a subject known or suspected to be complex by applying to it a simple label simplistically defined.”[1] The variation in the kinds of societies that emerged on the heels of the disappearance of the Roman Empire was such that it escapes the imposition of a single concept to describe it; however much one would wish otherwise for the sake of historiographical order and clarity. The question you may ask is why, then, am I still using the term in this course? The reason is that the term has some utility when used in a very specific sense for our purposes, which is to comprehend the radical transition that took place, beginning first in England and then spreading to the rest of Europe, in the mode of production—the reverberations of which, for good or ill, we are living with to this day—that is, the transition from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode of production: a process that was accompanied by much violence and brutality aimed, initially, at the European peasantry as it was forcibly transformed, by design and/or circumstance, into the modern proletariat of today (and of whom most of you are descendants).[2] Used in this sense, my concern is with the class relations between the nobility and the peasantry that defined the pre-capitalist agrarian economic system.
[1]. From page 1065 of her article that was published in the American Historical Review, 79, No. 4 (1974), pp. 1063-1088. More recently, another historian, Susan Reynolds, helped to complete the project started by Brown with the publication of her monumental work: Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford University Press, 1994)—she, in fact, not only indicates that her book was inspired by Brown’s article, but she dedicates it to Brown. In this painstakingly researched work she lays to rest the inaccurate model of medieval European society that the term feudalism has traditionally been used to describe. Note that she makes a clear distinction between feudalism as used by traditional historians, which is her primary concern, and that used to describe a particular mode of production; as she points out: “I have deliberately omitted almost all of the vast and important subject of relations between lords and peasants—in other words the whole subject of feudalism in its Marxist sense. Such relations seem to be of only indirect relevance to the concepts of fiefs and vassalage [meaning feudalism traditionally defined] as they have been understood since the sixteenth century.” (p. 15)
[2]. I cannot resist repeating here, for the umpteenth time, that strange as it may appear to many of you, capitalism, as the dominant mode of production in which the pursuit of profit-driven limitless accumulation of wealth for its own sake by a tiny minority, on the basis of its monopolistic ownership and/or control of the means of production, as well as the coercive means to enforce it, entails for the majority the complete surrender of their time and labor to the capitalist class against the backdrop of pauperization as a permanent feature of capitalism, is a relatively new human invention (and not a dispensation from God).