The University of Delhi,

Department of history,
Hindu college,
M.A.History.

Saumin Bisht
Exam.roll.no: 20026716024
___________________________________________________________________

Medieval Western Europe

Q 1. Examine the "Transition debate" along with the departures set in by the idea of
"other transition "?

ABSTRACT

My aim in this article is to discuss and examine the

discourse put forward by various historians on the matters
of Feudalism and why ,when and how it originated and what
were it characteristic features , we see the explanations of
Marc Bloch , Perry Anderson , Lynn white jr and various
other historians who try to examine the conditions that led to
the emergence of feudal society .

How, why, where and when 'feudal' society came into being has long been a
concern of medieval historians. the arguments on feudalism range widely in topic,
from defining feudalism precisely to its origins, character, and effects. To trace the
emergence and to understand the characteristics of the feudal society we observe
various reasons by many historians that show how its development started after the
fall of the Roman empire .

According to Jacques Le Goff there started a ruralization of the roman urban

society . With the loss of workshops, warehouses, and irrigation systems, as
well as local roads, agriculture began to suffer. When stone was used as a
primary building material, it was at one time a technical breakthrough;
nevertheless, the usage of stone began to decline as wood began to reappear in
construction. Despite population decrease, the influx of town-dwellers to the
countryside did not completely compensate for the loss. Instead of a town, a
country estate was now the economic and social hub, with manors being the
fundamental economic and social entities where people lived and cultivated.
The resources available to these manors were limited, but on average only one
family could be supported at a time .Bartering replaced the monetary system
when money became worthless.With the exception of essentials, trade across
long distances virtually vanished. For him “historians have tended somewhat to
discount the decline of the towns”. In reality, however, cities only where
bishops and barbarian chieftains lived, such as Toulouse, Lyon, Reims, Seville,
Milan, and Ravenna, were the only ones that continued to grow substantially.
Two further changes he notices is that , To begin with, the country now led by
monarchs (to whom Roman citizens were hostile) stood in the forefront of the new
political forms. They were tribal leaders, or monarchs, who were of modest size.
Despite claiming the trappings of the Roman Empire, the authority held by the
Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, and Burgundian kings; the Lombard, Visigoths, and
Gothic kings; and the Ostrogoths , and Burgundian kings was very low.
Furthermore, Though many of these monarchs issued laws, they were much less
civilized than in prior centuries and were labeled barbaric . They were made up of
lists of tariff, fine, and compensation requirements that applied to criminal activity
and incidents. Guilty parties had their crimes punished according to their ethnicity
and social status.
The ninth century saw the union of a Europe of warriors and a Europe of peasants
under the rule of a hierarchy of bishops and secular clergy and under the monks'
pursuits. The Frankish model was used and all subjects of Charlemagne's realm
became subjects of the Emperor, who were also all soldiers. It was all of their
obligation to serve in the military. Every free man was a warrior-in-training who,
either by directly serving in the overlord's contingent or serving in one offered by
his overlord, had to participate in the yearly military campaigns in the spring,
summer, and fall. Every free man, whether as a personal obligation or as a personal
request, was required to provide his own horse, shield, and weapon when called up.
(Le Goff,200.20-34)

For Marx and Engels, The original Germanic and Roman components have
been believed to have eventually became feudalism when the two were mixed.
There was a time during the Roman Empire when slavery had completely
faded away. After 400 years, serfdom, a "milder" type of slavery, would make
its appearance in the system of benefices and protection which the Franks had
created. (Engels, 1986, ch. 8).

Perry Anderson advocates the assertion that feudal social formations in

Western Europe are heavily influenced by the difference in population mixing
of the Roman and Germanic traits centuries ago, indicating that these
structures sprang from pre-existing social movements .Anderson argues that
the economic base of classical antiquity was the slave mode of production, and
that its nature and expansion determined the social formations of both the
Eastern and the Western half of the Roman Empire. The Western Empire
crumbled away in the early fifth century A.D. because there the slave mode on
the model of the Roman latifundia' had found its native habitat' , No
"homeland civilization" existed in Spain or Gaul to oppose or adapt to the new
economic order. In the mode of production slave, this caused the slave mode of
production to go through a series of phases and multiplies the existing
contradictions until it leads to the feudal mode of production.

In contrast, since a long-established Hellenistic culture of coastal commercial

towns already existed in the Eastern Empire, Rome's slave system could never
succeed in merely superimposing itself on the economic foundation, or
achieving a monopolistic control over it. However, the smaller the territory
was that remained after the decline of the Roman Empire, the more the
heritage of Greek history was able to withstand the Dark Ages. However, the
price was steep. Finally, the Byzantine Empire found itself stuck between the
feudal and slave modes of production, unable to return to the former and
unable to go forward into the latter, which ultimately resulted in its downfall.
(Anderson,1996.266- 70).
When Anderson recognizes the significance of super structural sanctions in
drawing labour from the working class , he comes to see social formations that
emphasized historical and cultural particularities as well as functional
interconnections .only in western Europe did Feudalism, a mix of vassalage ,
benefice and immunity,achieve its true complex form .(Anderson.1979,409-13)

Bloch argued that, during the fifth and sixth centuries, an enormous rise in the
number of slaves occurred during the great wars, but in this case they were not
part of the customary plantations owned by Roman aristocracy; instead, they
became tenant farmers. Slaves were first let loose on small parcels of land called
tenant plots; eventually, the number of free tenants diminished, which
subsequently led to serfdom by way of the union of these two social groupings.
And this further developed into feudalism . (Wickham,1984,5)
When developing “the Fundamental Features of European Feudalism”, Bloch
finds himself laying the foundation for feudalism in other areas of the world. He
believes that even with many changes in the kind of vassalage necessitated by the
soil from the kind of land and therefore differing types of dependency, the
broader concept of vassalage may exist outside of Europe. After that, he studies
commonalities and deep-seated contrasts with Japan. Marc Bloch saw feudal
society as both universal and particular, depending on whether one looked at it
throughout the broader continent of Europe or in more localized areas. Drawn out
into two distinct “feudal ages” about 1050; one which was vastly different from
the other in its fundamental nature.
The first feudal age , saw low density of population in towns, the speed of travel
was sluggish as they went to ruin waiting for maintenance ,the most advanced
agricultural technique was to leave 1 third of the land fallow every 6 months ,
trade was restricted to very few routes and was extremely small in volume. “Trade,
therefore, was not non existent,but it was irregular in the extreme. The society of this age was
certainly not unacquainted with either buying or selling. But it did not, like our own, live by
buying and selling.”(Bloch, 1962.67)
Bloch takes pride in referring to a “second feudal age” as a “economic
revolution” and calls it a “fundamental shift.
“from approximately 1050 to 1250, transformed the face of Europe: on the confines of the
Western world.”(Bloch, 1962.68)
When we talk about the the period of 10 th to 12th century we need to mention the
feudal revolution thesis that Georges Duby gave in 1953, he published a scholarly
examination of the political, economic, and social lives of the Maconnais settlers
in France from the tenth to the twelfth centuries and exerted considerable
influence on the historical research community in bringing to light the fact that
this class of settlers was marked by an economic, social, and political upheaval
known as the "feudal revolution" that took place at the turn of the eleventh
century. In his argument, Duby points out that after the demise of royal authority
in the tenth and eleventh centuries, castellans pushed the lesser landlords into
vassalage and established a new type of lordship for all peasants, called
seigneurie banale. This form of lordship is based on taxation, rather than land
tenure.(Bisson,1994.6-42)

While doing my research what intrigued me the most was the argument of
Lynn white jr who took the concept of feudalism from a different perspective
In order to discover the roots of the feudal system, White first investigates the
origins of technical advancements in the field.Similarly, while the Romans and
the Germans of the Early Middle Ages fought on foot, by the 8th century,
Medieval knights had displaced foot troops as the main fighting force. This
shift was attributable to modern military technology, and in particular the
introduction of stirrup to the west , which made mounted shock warfare
successful.
He further goes as Charles Martel, the Frankish mayor of the palace in 711-41,
was the first to use and effectively employ armoured cavalry in battle. This
judgement had a substantial societal effect. the high cost of the mounted
fighter was balanced by its effectiveness in battle In order to achieve its
political and military objectives, the Frankish nobility had a select few of their
countrymen who could buy horses and armor and had the time to learn the
skills of mounted warfare. And these very few became the nobility of the
feudal society .Additionally, Charles Martel and his successors were required
to give royal and church estates to the mounted troops in order to sustain these
units. We find here the origins of feudal land tenure, or more specifically, the
beginnings of the character property relationship.(White,1962,ch-1)

What for David Herlihy is not convincing is in particular, that White dismisses
the concept that the adoption of mounted warfare could have occurred
gradually; rather, it was brought with the modern stirrup and by Charles Martel
explicitly. Unfortunately, there is no proof to back his statement. Additionally,
Carolingian capitularies include commands on the equipment that troops should
carry. Mounting stirrups are not listed. It seems unlikely that an entire army
could have been reeducated, or a large part of their combat customs altered. But
this does seem to be the case because of a lack of records found from the
Carolingian era in which we may have expected to see this. The fact that we
have credible evidence to believe that the mounted warrior was growing in
importance at the end of the early empirical period with the Romans and
Germanic tribes is very different than the idea that the mounted warrior was "all
the rage" among the Romans and some of the Germanic
tribes."(Herlihy,1963,44)

White looks into the history of farming in the second chapter. He believes the
European agricultural revolution that occurred between the 6th and 9th
centuries was as influential as the English agrarian revolution of the 18th
century. Numerous technical breakthroughs were made in Northern Europe
throughout the Middle Ages. The first of these agricultural tools was the heavy
plough.which was more mobile and also helped regulate the depth of the furrow
, it also eliminated the need of cross ploughing .(White,1962,ch-2)
The second was the horse collar , in the 9th century , new harness were created,
and with that draught animal's labour capacity had been increased , The horse
was for the first time harnessed, allowing him to be used as a draught animal
and his superior speed and endurance ensuring that agriculture in Northern
Europe was very fruitful. Then came the three field crop rotation system that
revolutionized the agriculture and with these three innovations , it was made
possible for them to harness the maximum of all the agricultural resources . and
then the rise of the northern Europe to a position of leadership in the western
civilization, eventually these development all aided in the formation of a hybrid
manorial system that eventually also took to modification . (Herlihy,1963,44)

Henri Pirenne used the collapse of the ancient world and the Middle Ages as a
result of the spread of the Islamic civilization into the Mediterranean basin in
his renowned argument. In spite of the waves of invasions from the Germanic
tribes, cities in Rome persisted, and significant commercial and economic
connections remained between the East and West. The Arab invasions that
occurred in the early Middle Ages, however, were enough to completely sever
the link between the two regions. From the 8th century, the whole economic
movement in the region was steered toward Baghdad, which became a very
significant economic centre in the following centuries. Countries like Africa
and Spain, previously significant members of the Mediterranean community,
became active participants in this new orbit. the Mediterranean served as an
economic and intellectual bridge between the east and the west, but rather as a
barrier between two civilizations that were distinct and, if not outright hostile,
at least very different For Pirenne, feudalism originated at this point in Europe.
The West had to survive on its own resources since it had been ‘bottled up' by
the Arabs. When the trading era came to an end in the ninth century, money was
no longer used, contracts and credits were unknown, significance of writing
waned, and gold currency was replaced by silver monometallism In short, it
was an economy of regression, in which the proprietors concentrated on
farming the land and using the agricultural products, with payments typically in
kind and each estate endeavouring to provide all of its own requirements.

Considering all the arguments presented above we see alot of similarity in the
fact that there developed a new system , the roman decline led to chain reaction
of long term events that led in the 9 th century towards the end of the slave
mode and the formation of a new social structure which came to be known as
feudalism .but the perspective is change in an article published in 1974,
Elizabeth Brown castigates the nonthinking usage of the word “feudalism” and
insists that we pay attention to changing meanings and disparate social realities
associated with important vocabulary like “fief” and “vassal. Building on
Browns work Reynolds has challenged the legitimacy of both the word
“feudalism” and the society it supposedly describes. she claims that the
previous historians have been too eager to have the eleventh and twelfth
century language that was popular in the legal community of the ninth and
tenth centuries applied to earlier time periods. The 'feudal' society they had
created did not even exist, or was limited to just tiny regions of France for brief
periods of time. historical accounts of feudalism are being reevaluated due to
the magnitude of the assertion.(Brown,1974)(Reynolds,2012)
END NOTES

 Engels, Friedrich.1986(1884), The Origins of the Family, Private

Property and the State.London: penguin.
 Anderson, Perry.1996 (1974). Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism.
London: Verso
 Bloch, Marc. 1962. Feudal society. London: Routledge & K. Paul.
 Anderson ,Perry. 1979. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London:
Verso
 Herlihy, David, and Lynn White. 1963,Agricultural History, vol. 37, no.
1, pp. 43–45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3740099.
 White Jr., Lynn. 1962, Medieval technology and social change.
London : Oxford University Press, c .
 Chris Wickham,1984,THE OTHER TRANSITION: FROM THE
ANCIENT WORLD TO FEUDALISM, Past & Present, Volume 103,
Issue 1, Pages 3–36
 Wickham ,Chris. 2005. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and
the Mediterranean, 400–800.Oxford, England: Oxford University
press
 Jacques Le Goff. 2005. The Birth of Europe .Boston : Blackwell
publication ,
 Elizabeth A. R. Brown.(1974) "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism
and Historians of Medieval Europe." The American Historical
Review 79, no. 4
 Reynolds, S. (2012). The Middle Ages without Feudalism: Essays in
Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West (1st ed.). Routledge.
 Bisson, T. N. 1994,“The ‘Feudal Revolution.’” Past & Present, no. 142, pp.
6–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/651195.