The idea of
feudalism was unknown and the system it describes was not conceived of as a formal political system by the people living in the medieval period. This section describes the history of the idea of feudalism, how the concept originated among scholars and thinkers, how it changed over time, and modern debates about its use.
Evolution of the concept The concept of a feudal state or period, in the sense of either a regime or a period dominated by lords who possess financial or social power and prestige, became widely held in the middle of the 18th century, as a result of works such as
Montesquieu's (1748; published in English as
The Spirit of Law), and
Henri de Boulainvilliers's (1737; published in English as
An Historical Account of the Ancient Parliaments of France or States-General of the Kingdom, 1739).
Adam Smith used the term "feudal system" to describe a social and economic system defined by inherited social ranks, each of which possessed inherent social and economic privileges and obligations. In such a system, wealth derived from agriculture, which was arranged not according to market forces but on the basis of customary labour services owed by
serfs to landowning nobles.
Heinrich Brunner Heinrich Brunner, in his
The Equestrian Service and the Beginnings of the Feudal System (1887), maintained that
Charles Martel laid the foundation for feudalism during the 8th century. Brunner believed Martel to be a brilliant warrior who secularized church lands for the purpose of providing
precarias (or leases) for his followers, in return for their military service. Martel's military ambitions were becoming more expensive as it changed into a cavalry force, thus the need to maintain his followers through the despoiling of church lands. Responding to Brunner's thesis,
Paul Fouracre theorizes that the church itself held power over the land with its own
precarias. The most commonly utilized
precarias was the gifting of land to the church, done for various spiritual and legal purposes. Although Charles Martel did indeed utilize
precaria for his own purposes, and even drove some of the bishops out of the church and placed his own laymen in their seats, Fouracre discounts Martel's role in creating political change, that it was simply a military move in order to have control in the region by hording land through tenancies, and expelling the bishops who he did not agree with, but it did not specifically create feudalism.
Karl Marx Karl Marx also uses the term in the 19th century in his analysis of society's economic and political development, describing feudalism (or more usually feudal society or the feudal
mode of production) as the order coming before
capitalism. For Marx, what defined feudalism was the power of the ruling class (the
aristocracy) in their control of arable land, leading to a
class society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farm these lands, typically under
serfdom and principally by means of labour, produce and money rents. He also took it as a paradigm for understanding the power-relationships between capitalists and wage-labourers in his own time: "in pre-capitalist systems it was obvious that most people did not control their own destiny—under feudalism, for instance, serfs had to work for their lords. Capitalism seems different because people are in theory free to work for themselves or for others as they choose. Yet most workers have as little control over their lives as feudal serfs." Some later Marxist theorists (e.g.
Eric Wolf) have applied this label to include non-European societies, grouping feudalism together with
imperial China and the
Inca Empire, in the
pre-Columbian era, as 'tributary' societies .
Later studies In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
J. Horace Round and
Frederic William Maitland, both historians of medieval Britain, arrived at different conclusions about the character of
Anglo-Saxon English society before the
Norman Conquest in 1066. Round argued that the Normans had brought feudalism with them to England, while Maitland contended that its fundamentals were already in place in Britain before 1066. The debate continues today, but a consensus viewpoint is that England before the Conquest had commendation (which embodied some of the personal elements in feudalism) while
William the Conqueror introduced a modified and stricter northern French feudalism to England incorporating (1086) oaths of loyalty to the king by all who held by feudal tenure, even the vassals of his principal vassals (holding by feudal tenure meant that vassals must provide the quota of
knights required by the king or a money payment in substitution). In the 20th century, two outstanding historians offered still more widely differing perspectives. The French historian Marc Bloch, arguably the most influential 20th-century medieval historian, though questioned both by those who view the concept in wider terms and by those who find insufficient uniformity in noble exchanges to support such a model. Although
Georges Duby was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch and
Lucien Febvre, that came to be known as the
Annales school, Duby was an exponent of the tradition. In a published version of his 1952 doctoral thesis entitled (
Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region), and working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian
monastery of Cluny, as well as the dioceses of
Mâcon and
Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region and charted a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000. He argued that in early 11th century, governing institutions—particularly comital courts established under the
Carolingian monarchy—that had represented public justice and order in
Burgundy during the 9th and 10th centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong-arm tactics and threats of violence. In 1939, the Austrian historian
Theodor Mayer subordinated the feudal state as secondary to his concept of a
Personenverbandsstaat (personal interdependency state), understanding it in contrast to the
territorial state. This form of statehood, identified with the
Holy Roman Empire, is described as the most complete form of medieval rule, completing conventional feudal structure of lordship and vassalage with the personal association among the nobility. But the applicability of this concept to cases outside of the Holy Roman Empire has been questioned, as by Susan Reynolds. The concept has also been questioned and superseded in German
historiography because of its bias and reductionism towards legitimating the .
Challenges to the feudal model In 1974, the American historian
Elizabeth A. R. Brown rejected the label
feudalism as an anachronism that imparts a false sense of uniformity to the concept. Having noted the current use of many, often contradictory, definitions of
feudalism, she argued that the word is only a construct with no basis in medieval reality, an invention of modern historians read back "tyrannically" into the historical record. Supporters of Brown have suggested that the term should be expunged from history textbooks and lectures on medieval history entirely. Ultimately, critics say, the many ways the term
feudalism has been used have deprived it of specific meaning, leading some historians and political theorists to reject it as a useful concept for understanding society. == See also ==