feudalism

feudalism. An abstract term derived from the adjective ‘feudal’, and commonly used to highlight those features believed to be characteristic of western European society during the Middle Ages. The word was coined in the 19th cent. and is analogous to the earlier French term feodalité. It is based on the Latin noun feudum (or feodum) which is now usually translated as ‘fief’ and understood to mean property held by a tenant in return for service. This notion of feudal tenure was used by 16th-cent. French legal historians as a key to understanding the origins and development of aristocratic rights and powers in France in the centuries after the fall of Rome. In the 17th cent. Sir Henry Spelman argued that it was imported into England by the Normans. Hence Maitland's crack that it was Spelman who introduced the feudal system into England. In the 18th cent. historically minded intellectuals such as Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and David Hume believed that societies went through a ‘feudal’ stage—an idea subsequently taken over by Marxist historians who have, however, emphasized the labour services owed by peasants to manorial lords rather than the military or governmental service owed by high-status tenants, which was central to the older tradition. Particularly influential was Montesquieu's hypothesis that when aristocratic fiefs became hereditary in France (which he dated to the 9th cent.), royal government collapsed and ‘feudal anarchy’ resulted.

Most British historians have remained within the old tradition of thought, partly because if all that is required for a society to be labelled ‘feudal’ is that tenants of any kind owe service in return for their lands, the term is thought to embrace too wide a range of social structures to be useful, and partly because the whole notion of feudalism originating in France and spreading out from there has become thoroughly entrenched. The view that the Normans brought ‘feudalism’ to England, and that during the next two centuries French and English invaders and settlers took it to Scotland, Wales, and Ireland remains widely held—and also widely disputed. Since it is clear that, throughout the British Isles, rulers before 1066 expected political and military service from their landed élites, those historians who believe that William the Conqueror feudalized England have had to define feudalism in terms of precisely those features which they believe he introduced: castles, the ‘feudal quota’ (that is, the obligation of the king's tenants to provide a quota of knights to serve, usually without pay, for 40 days), and the ‘feudal incidents’ (that is, the king's right to exploit the deaths, marriages, and wardships of his tenants both for profit and as an instrument of political control).

One problem with feudalism is that the ‘facts’ on which it is said to be based—e.g. that fiefs became hereditary in 9th-cent. France, or that William I introduced ‘feudal incidents’ and the quota—are themselves highly contentious. So many different definitions of feudalism have been offered—or, worse, simply assumed—that a degree of confusion has been the inevitable result. The adjective ‘feudal’ is commonly used to denote almost any social system regarded as being oppressive or backward. In these circumstances it is not surprising that some American and British medieval historians believe that both word and concept are past their sell-by date and should be abolished. French historians, more at ease with abstractions than their Anglo-Saxon colleagues, continue to use the term freely and much as Montesquieu did, though now with—thanks to the work of Georges Duby—a new orthodoxy dating the breakdown of public power and hence the ‘feudal revolution’ to c. ad 1000.

John Gillingham