Feudalism and Medieval Europe

Origins of Feudalism
A question of relationship between the land and the people
• The word feudal come form an old adjective used to describe a certain kind of
property i.e. the fief. Despite its later meanings and the
vigorous academic debates pertaining to come to a set of objective axioms of
feudalism the accepted version is that it was an alternative
of the slave social formation contained elements of Roman villa as well as
Germanic village community.

• The downfall of the Roman Empire in the west led to the formation of the
Frankish state in the late fifth century AD. Marked by the
growth of large landed estates and the control over the peasants was secured by
providing protection to them in return for their services.

• The authority of the king who symbolised the state was hierarchically
distributed among a large number of feudal lords in a graded
order. Feudalism’s basis were the personal kinship ties and impersonal
bureaucratic politics.

• The four important groups in the feudal structure forming a chain of kinship
ties were; king, overlord, lord, and client in which the king
was the supreme authority. The peasants constituted the lowest segment of the
society and were divided mainly in three categories - the
free holders, villeins, and serfs.

• The free holder received lands from the lords which they used and managed on
their own.They did not work for the lord and paid taxes.
The villeins gave part of their produce from their allowed land and gave their
labour for a fixed number of days to the their lords.
Otherwise, they were free,. The bulk of the peasants constituted of the serfs
who were allowed to use the lord’s land for cultivation on a
set of conditions imposed on them by the feudal lords. This relationship of
duties and obligations of the serfs for their master lord
constituted the most important aspect of feudalism.

• The land was divided into three tenures; 1. Church Tenure 2. Military Tenure 3.
General Tenure.In the church tenure the Christians
would way the tithe( one tenth of their income) . Military tenure obliged that
the clients had to give forty days work in. a year to
overlord’s army, home and in some cases they worked as guard to overlord’s
home. In General tenure the vassals gave (equipments,
military horses etc. to the overlords.
Features of Feudalism
• Manor: Came as a method to improve the production. Divided into ; demesne and
dependent peasant tenements.
• Corvee: Free mandatory labour for the lords.
• Demesne : This is where the corvee was performed, it means the personal farm of
the feudal lord that contained
arable lands, meadowlands, vineyards or le clos and sometimes water mills,
breweries and inns. The size of demesne
varied from one lord to another. Labour services rendered in the demesne land are
considered as an essential part of
feudal rent , a method, by which the ruling class appropriated surplus labour.

• Scholars have noted that the development of rent in kind and in money was a sure
sign of the breakdown of the feudal
mode of production in western Europe, while the continuation of large demesnes
and senile labour rent in eastern Europe
from sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries suggests the continuation and
strengthening of feudalism there.

• The produce of the demsne farming was consumed to some extent within the
aristocratic household but part of it went to
the market. The disposable surplus varied depending on factors such as war,
natural calamities etc.

• The feudal ruling class created the market demand for luxury goods such as silk,
spices, wines and ornaments- small in
bulk but high in cost, such cost was met with rent and jurisdictional profits.

Debates on Feudalism
• Montesquieu claimed that there was never a period when the Frankish nobility was
without a feudal
nobility, for feudal system was implicit in the custom of conquering
Germans.Montesquieu the essence
of feudalism lay in the custom of vassalage, which can be traced back to the
comitatus described by
Tacitus. To vassalage the fief was entirely subordinate, being a form of pay for
loyal service. The
earliest fiefs were horses, arms, and food; for it was the Frankish conquest of
Gaul that first provided
lands wherewith chieftains could reward their followers.

• From the beginning these land grants were not merely economic control over the
peasant population
what was to become known as the seigniorial system. but also what was to become
the seigniorial
justice. Scholars have emphasised the aspect of military organisation along with
the legal and
customary principles on which the feudal relationships were based.

• Heinrich Brunner supports the view of feudalism as a ‘military system’ which

developed as a reaction
to a looming sense of insecurity generated by constant Germanic, Arabs, Slav and
Magyar invasions. In
absence of regular army the King depended on the vassals to Marshall together
troops to ward off
invaders. Especially the Battle of Poitiers in 732 CE, and the initiation of
reforms by Charles Martel to
reorganise the Frankish army from an infantry base to cavalry.
• Rushton Coulborn suggests that feudalism was basically a method of government
rather than a type of
economic or social system. Its essential feature being the relationship between
the lord and the vassals in
which political authority was treated as a private possession- personal in nature
rather than institutional.

• In political terms Feudalism as a system was marked by extreme political

decentralisation where the
authority was parked among the feudal l lords. Though the King cannot be ignored
however weak his
position might be.

• March Bloch, another important scholar of feudal societies, considers feudalism

as a system of human
relations and studies it form the point of view of social order. For him the
fundamental features of
feudalism consisted of a subject pedantry; widespread use of service ‘tenement’
(I.e fief) instead of salary
, supremacy of a class of specialised warriors, ties of obedience and protection
and fragmentation of
authority due to decentralised power structure.

• Bloch sees feudalism as the weakening of the state, particularly in its

protective capacity and a vigorous
economic subjection of “a host of humble folk to a few powerful men.” Instead of
providing a definition,
Bloch attempted a description of what feudalism was.

• Bloch further argued that despite the self sufficiency of the feudal economy
coexisted with a tiny
monetised sector, and there was shift later from labour services to dues payable
in money facilitated by the
growth of urban centres and trade by the twelfth century.

• Marx and Engels did not describe feudalism in terms of class organisation but
their theory
implied that class provided the fundamental foundation of feudal society. In
their works they
see feudalism as a estate organisation with little or no division of labour, with
primitive
conditions of production. It is a mode of production based in appropriation of
feudal rent by
feudal lords from the peasant tenants in a primarily agrarian society.

• Feudal rent is distinguished from the capitalist ground rent as the level of
feudal rent was
determined by the ability of the feudal class to impose non-economic forms of
compulsion.
Such non economic compulsions were exercised through the institutionalisation of
serfdom,
superior force exercised by the landowners.

• In Marx’s view the surplus labor extracted “by other than economic pressure”-
that is, by
juridical-political means ultimately sanctioned by manifest force. Feudal
property invested
lords with private powers of coercion: the lord’s estate was simultaneously a
state,
empowering him to command the services of those inferior to him and make binding
decisions
regarding the dispositions o their persons and possessions.

• This relationship specified the main form of labor power I’m the feudal economy :
serfdom.
Defined by Marx as “a condition of personal dependence… a lack of personal
freedom, no
matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as eats accessory, bondage in
the true sense of
the word.”
• Paul Sweezy has maintained that feudalism lacked an internal prime mover capable
of
explaining its historical evolution. Positing the growth of production of
exchange, to the
development of long distance trade and rise of towns, as the external stimulus
that
fostered feudal growth and its eventual suppression by capitalism.

• In the high middle ages, the real antagonism between the classes was not focused
on etc
feudal class vs the merchant class but the feudal nobility and the serfs. As
Perry
Anderson pointed out that feudalism was neither an economic system nor a
political
system, it was ‘parcellized sovereignty.’ For him feudalism is product of two
modes of
production, the primitive Germanic tribal system and the ancient Roman slave mode
of
production.

• In its original system the grants could be revocable at the will, the
introduction of tenure
for a term of years also did not change the situation radically but it was the
hereditary
passing of the estate which resulted in the resolution of the authority of the
monarch. As
freemen attached themselves to the land and the powerful nobles thus removing
them
from the royal authority and creating a process of subinfeudation. So goes the
saying of
the time “the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.”