Feudalism
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Social system
also called feudal system or feudality , French féodalité
historiographic construct designating the social, economic, and
political conditions in western Europe during the early Middle Ages, the
long stretch of time between the 5th and 12th centuries. Feudalism and
the related term feudal system are labels invented long after the period
to which they were applied. They refer to what those who invented them
perceived as the most significant and distinctive characteristics of the
early and central Middle Ages. The expressions féodalité and feudal
system were coined by the beginning of the 17th century, and the English
words feudality and feudalism (as well as feudal pyramid) were in use by
the end of the 18th century. They were derived from the Latin words
feudum (“fief”) and feodalitas (services connected with the fief), both
of which were used during the Middle Ages and later to refer to a form
of property holding. Use of the terms associated with feudum to denote
the essential characteristics of the early Middle Ages has invested the
fief with exaggerated prominence and placed undue emphasis on the
importance of a special mode of land tenure to the detriment of other,
more significant aspects of social, economic, and political life.
Origins of the idea
The terms feudalism and feudal system were generally applied to the
early and central Middle Ages—the period from the 5th century, when
central political authority in the Western empire disappeared, to the
12th century, when kingdoms began to emerge as effective centralized
units of government. For a relatively brief period, from the mid-8th to
the early 9th century, the Carolingian rulers, especially Pippin
(reigned 751–768) and Charlemagne (reigned 768/771–814), had remarkable
success in creating and maintaining a relatively unified empire. Before
and afterward, however, political units were fragmented and political
authority diffused. The mightier of the later Carolingians attempted to
regulate local magnates and enlist them in their service, but the power
of local elites was never effaced. In the absence of forceful kings and
emperors, local lords expanded the territory subject to them and
intensified their control over the people living there. In many areas
the term feudum, as well as the terms beneficium and casamentum, came to
be used to describe a form of property holding. The holdings these terms
denoted have often been considered essentially dependent tenures, over
which their holders’ rights were notably limited. As the words were used
in documents of the period, however, the characteristics of the holdings
to which they were applied are difficult to distinguish from those of
tenures designated by such words as allodium, which has generally been
translated as “freehold property.”
Fiefs still existed in the 17th century, when the feudal model—or, as
contemporary historians term it, the feudal construct—was developed. At
that time, the fief was a piece of property, usually land, that was held
in return for service, which could include military duties. The fief
holder swore fidelity to the person from whom the fief was held (the
lord, dominus, or seigneur) and became his (or her) man. The ceremony in
which the oath was taken was called homage (from the Latin, homo;
“man”). These institutions survived in England until they were abolished
by Parliament in 1645 and, after the Restoration, by Charles II in 1660.
Until their eradication by the National Assembly between 1789 and 1793,
they had considerable importance in France, where they were employed to
create and reinforce familial and social bonds. Their pervasiveness made
students of the past eager to understand how they had come into being.
Similarities of terminology and practice found in documents surviving
from the Middle Ages—especially the Libri feudorum (“Book of Fiefs”), an
Italian compilation of customs relating to property holding, which was
made in the 12th century and incorporated into Roman law—led historians
and lawyers to search for the origins of contemporary feudal
institutions in the Middle Ages.
As defined by scholars in the 17th century, the medieval “feudal
system” was characterized by the absence of public authority and the
exercise by local lords of administrative and judicial functions
formerly (and later) performed by centralized governments; general
disorder and endemic conflict; and the prevalence of bonds between lords
and free dependents (vassals), which were forged by the lords’ bestowal
of property called “fiefs” and by their reception of homage from the
vassals. These bonds entailed the rendering of services by vassals to
their lords (military obligations, counsel, financial support) and the
lords’ obligation to protect and respect their vassals. These
characteristics were in part deduced from medieval documents and
chronicles, but they were interpreted in light of 17th-century practices
and semantics. Learned legal commentaries on the laws governing the
property called “fiefs” also affected interpretation of the sources.
These commentaries, produced since the 13th century, focused on legal
theory and on rules derived from actual disputes and hypothetical cases.
They did not include (nor were they intended to provide) dispassionate
analysis of historical development. Legal commentators in the 16th
century had prepared the way for the elaboration of the feudal construct
by formulating the idea, loosely derived from the Libri feudorum, of a
single feudal law, which they presented as being spread throughout
Europe during the early Middle Ages.
The terms feudalism and feudal system enabled historians to deal
summarily with a long span of European history whose complexities
were—and remain—confusing. The Roman Empire and the various emperors’
accomplishments provided a key to understanding Roman history, and the
reemergence of states and strong rulers in the 12th century again
furnished manageable focal points for historical narrative, particularly
since medieval states and governmental practices can be presented as
antecedents of modern nations and institutions. The feudal construct
neatly filled the gap between the 5th and the 12th century. Although
Charlemagne may seem an anomaly in this evolution, he was presented as
“sowing the seeds” from which feudalism emerged. A variety of Roman,
barbarian, and Carolingian institutions were considered antecedents of
feudal practices: Roman lordship and clientage, barbarian war chiefdoms
and bands, grants of lands to soldiers and to officeholders, and oaths
of loyalty and fidelity. In the 17th century, as later, the high point
of feudalism was located in the 11th century. Later rulers who adopted
and adapted feudal institutions to increase their power were labeled
“feudal” and their governments called “feudal monarchies.” Despite the
survival of institutions and practices associated with the medieval
feudal system in the 17th century, historians of that time presented
medieval feudalism and the feudal system as declining in importance in
the 14th and 15th centuries. This period was later dubbed an age of
“bastard feudalism” because of the use of salaries and written contracts
between lords and dependents.
Those who formulated the concept of feudalism were affected by the
search for simplicity and order in the universe associated with the work
of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and especially Isaac Newton
(1642–1727). Historians and philosophers were persuaded that if the
universe operated systematically, so too must societies. In the 16th
century some students of the law and customs of the fief declared that
feudal institutions were universal and maintained that feudal systems
had existed in Rome, Persia, and Judaea. The philosopher Giambattista
Vico (1668–1744) considered the fief one of humankind’s eternal
institutions. Adopting a similar position, Voltaire (1694–1778)
contested the judgment of Montesquieu (1689–1755) that the appearance of
feudal laws was a unique historical event. The philosophical historians
of 18th-century Scotland searched for feudalism outside western Europe,
and they expanded the construct’s field of significance to encompass
peasants as well as lords. Adam Smith (1723–90) presented feudal
government as a stage of social development characterized by the absence
of commerce and by the use of semi-free labour to cultivate land.
Smith’s student John Millar (1735–1801) found “the outlines of the
feudal policy” in Asia and Africa. The association popularly made
between the feudal construct and ignorance and barbarism fostered its
extension to regions which Europeans scarcely knew and which they
considered backward and primitive.
Following Millar’s precedent, some later historians continued to look
for feudal institutions in times and places outside medieval Europe,
most notably Japan. These efforts, predictably, resulted in
misconceptions and misunderstanding. Historians using the feudal model
for comparative purposes emphasized those characteristics which resemble
or seem to resemble Western feudal practices and neglected other,
dissimilar aspects, some of which were uniquely significant in shaping
the evolution of the areas in question. For Westerners, the use of the
feudal model necessarily created a deceptive sense of familiarity with
societies that are different from their own.
Development in the 19th and 20th centuries
In the 19th century, influenced by Adam Smith and other Scottish
thinkers, Karl Marx (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95) made “the
feudal mode of production” one stage in their visionary reading of
Western historical development; the feudal model followed “the ancient
mode of production” and preceded capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Marx and Engels rejected the traditional understanding of feudalism as
consisting of fiefs and relations among the elite and emphasized the
lords’ exploitation of the peasants as the essence of the feudal mode of
production. Marx and Engels did not try to establish that the feudal
period had existed universally; they formulated for Asia the idea of a
specific Asiatic mode of production. Still, by incorporating “the feudal
mode of production” into their design, they endowed it with seminal
significance. Their followers came to view the feudal stage as a
necessary prerequisite for the emergence of socialism, and socialist
scholars and activists sought traces of it throughout the world.
Marx and Engels’s model of Western historical development indicates
how popular the feudal construct had become by the middle of the 19th
century. Their modification of the construct to serve their own purposes
demonstrates its pliancy. However, they were not unique in having shaped
the feudal construct to suit their particular perspective. The
Australian medieval historian John O. Ward isolated 10 different sets of
phenomena that historians had associated with feudalism. Some employed
narrow legalistic definitions like those elaborated by 16th-century
lawyers. Others, following the English historian Thomas Madox
(1666–1726/27) and the French historian Marc Bloch (1886–1944), equated
feudalism with feudal society. They saw feudalism as encompassing many
if not most aspects of medieval society: peasants, whether free, unfree,
or semi-free; a ruling warrior class with subordinates compensated for
military service by grants of land rather than money; fragmentation of
power; and disorder—yet with the family and the state retaining their
importance. The American historian Joseph R. Strayer (1904–87) laid
special emphasis on the splintering of political and public power and
authority, and he believed that systematized feudal institutions and
customs were compatible with the formation of large political units,
which he viewed as recognizable precursors of contemporary
nation-states. Although Bloch and Strayer employed the feudal construct
throughout their careers, both admitted the idiosyncrasy of the various
definitions of the feudal labels that have been proposed, and both
acknowledged that focusing on the construct inevitably obscures the
human beings, both individuals and groups, whose actions historians are
dedicated to comprehending.
Modern critiques
From the time of the French historian Louis Chantereau Le Febvre
(1588–1658), questions were raised concerning the extent to which the
feudal construct oversimplified and distorted the historical realities
it was intended to capture. Chantereau Le Febvre denounced as futile the
attempts of his contemporaries to deduce general rules from uncertain
principles. He stressed the necessity of studying authentic acts and
working “historically,” implying thereby that his contemporaries were
not working in this fashion. He cautioned against reducing the great
variety of fiefs to a single type, because each fief was different from
the others. Despite Chantereau Le Febvre’s reservations, in the end he
succumbed to current fashion and endorsed a simplified picture of feudal
institutions. He did, however, edit and publish medieval documents
demonstrating the difficulty of attaching precise meanings to such words
as feudum and allodium.
Many modern historians have attempted to follow Chantereau Le
Febvre’s admonitions and have studied these words and others, such as
vassus (“vassal”), homo (“man”), and fidelis (“the faithful”), which
figured centrally in the classic definitions of the feudal construct. By
examining the contexts in which key words appear in a host of medieval
acts and chronicles, they have demonstrated the wide range of meanings
these words possessed and the difficulty of formulating simple and
precise definitions of any of them. It is clear that in the Middle Ages
those who fought (like those who farmed) were rewarded in different ways
and were sometimes paid in money. Land was owned, controlled, and held
in a variety of ways. Similarly, enterprising individuals used a range
of tactics to augment their lands and wealth and increase their power.
Standardization and regularization of tenurial and territorial bonds and
of ceremonies such as homage accompanied the development of centralized
government, as lords and kings utilized these devices (and many others)
to buttress and extend their authority.
The extent to which surrender of property to a lord as a fief limited
control and rights over the property has been investigated, as has the
importance of such acts in creating ties between family groups that
could be repeatedly renewed. The difficulty and danger of drawing sharp
distinctions between the ceremonial practices of the nobility and the
peasantry have been recognized, so too the importance of urban and
parochial communities and the significance of spiritual and economic
links between religious establishments and the laity. In studying the
settlement of disputes, historians have emphasized the continuing
importance of mediation and of judgments given by free men, especially
members of the secular and ecclesiastical elite. Lordship has emerged as
a more centrally important topic than the feudum. The quality of lords’
relationships with their dependents, free and unfree, has been debated,
with some historians stressing the predatory, exploitative aspects of
lordship and others emphasizing its protective, beneficial features.
Increased knowledge of the Middle Ages and greater sophistication
regarding the constructs (and periods) that scholars have created in
attempting to comprehend the past have sparked the search for
appropriate terms to describe human institutions and societies. Although
the feudal labels have lost their validity as terms to designate the
realities of medieval society, they provide insight into the thought
processes and assumptions of the lawyers and historians who formulated
and utilized them between the 16th and the 20th century.
Elizabeth A.R. Brown
