essay about feudalism

Feudalism was the system in 10th-13th century European medieval societies where a social hierarchy was established based on local administrative control and the distribution of land into units (fiefs). A landowner (lord) gave a fief, along with a promise of military and legal protection, in return for a payment of some kind from the person who received it (vassal).

The payment of the vassal to the lord typically came in the form of feudal service which could mean military service or the regular payment of produce or money. Both lord and vassal were freemen and the term feudalism is not generally applied to the relationship between the unfree peasantry (serfs or villeins) and the person of higher social rank on whose land they laboured.

Problems of Defining Feudalism

Although the term 'feudalism' and 'feudal society' are commonly used in history texts, scholars have never agreed on precisely what those terms mean. The terms were applied to European medieval society from the 16th century onwards and subsequently to societies elsewhere, notably in the Zhou period of China (1046-256 BCE) and Edo period of Japan (1603-1868). The term feudalism was not used by the people who lived in the Middle Ages. Neither can the feudal system, once defined, be applied uniformly across different European states as there were variations in laws and customs in different geographical areas and in different centuries. As a consequence, many historians believe that the term feudalism is only of limited use in understanding medieval societies.

The Oxford English Dictionary has as concise a definition for feudalism as anywhere while still including its various levels of application:

The dominant social system in medieval Europe , in which the nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants (villeins or serfs) were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labour, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection.

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What were the origins of feudalism.

The word 'feudalism' derives from the medieval Latin terms feudalis , meaning fee, and feodum , meaning fief. The fee signified the land given (the fief) as a payment for regular military service. The system had its roots in the Roman manorial system (in which workers were compensated with protection while living on large estates) and in the 8th century kingdom of the Franks where a king gave out land for life ( benefice ) to reward loyal nobles and receive service in return. The feudal system proper became widespread in Western Europe from the 11th century onwards, largely thanks to the Normans as their rulers carved up and dished out lands wherever their armies conquered.

Lords & Vassals

Starting from the top of society's pyramid , the monarch – a good example is William the Conqueror (r. 1066-1087) who considered all the lands of England as his personal property – could give a parcel of land (of no fixed size) to a noble who, in return, would be that monarch's vassal, that is he would promise loyalty and service when required. Thus, a personal bond was created. The most common and needed service was military service. Military obligations included fighting in that monarch's army or protecting assets of the Crown such as castles. In some cases, a money payment (known as scutage), which the monarch then used to pay mercenary soldiers, might be offered instead of military service. The vassal received any income from the land, had authority over its inhabitants and could pass the same rights on to his heirs.

The nobles who had received land, often called suzerain vassals, could have much more than they either needed or could manage themselves and so they often sub-let parts of it to tenant vassals. Once again, the person was given the right to use and profit from this land and in return, in one form or another, then owed a service to the landowner. This service could again take the form of military service (typical in the case of a knight) or, as tenants might be of a lower social class (but still be freemen) and they might not have had the necessary military skills or equipment, more usually they offered a percentage of their revenue from the land they rented (either in money or produce) or, later in the Middle Ages, made a fixed payment of rent. There were also irregular special fees to be paid to the lord such as when his eldest daughter married or his son was knighted.

The arrangement which created a vassal was known as 'homage' as they often knelt before their particular feudal lord and swore an oath of loyalty, for which, in return, they not only received the land but also their lord's protection if and when required. The promise of protection was no small matter in times of war , when there were frequent raids from hostile neighbouring states, and when there was a perpetual danger of general banditry. Protection also came in the form of legal support and representation if a vassal found himself in a civil or church court. A tenant usually handed down their tenancy to their heir although it was sometimes possible to sell the right of tenancy to a third party, provided the lord who owned the land agreed.

Another type of relationship in feudal societies, especially in medieval Germany and France, involved the allod , an inalienable property, i.e. one that could not be taken back. Holders of an allod still owed some form of allegiance to a superior local lord but the relationship was not based on land ownership and so that allegiance was harder to enforce.

The feudal system perpetuated itself as a status quo because the control of land required the ability to perform military service and, because of the costs involved (of weapons, armour and horses), land was required to fund military service. Thus there was a perpetual divide between the landed aristocracy (monarchs, lords, and some tenants) and those who worked the land for them who could be free or unfree labourers. Unfree labourers were serfs, also known as villeins, who were at the bottom of the social pyramid and who made up the vast majority of the population. The peasantry worked, without pay, on the land owned or rented by others to produce food for themselves and, just as importantly, food and profit for their masters. They were often treated as little more than slaves and could not leave the estate on which they lived and worked. The term feudalism, however, is generally applied by modern historians only to the relationship between lords and vassals, and not the peasantry. Rather, the relationship between serf and landowner or tenant is referred to as the manorial system after the most common unit of land, the 'manor'.

Consequences & Effects of Feudalism

The consequence of the feudal system was the creation of very localised groups of communities which owed loyalty to a specific local lord who exercised absolute authority in his domain. As fiefs were often hereditary, a permanent class divide was established between those who had land and those who rented it. The system was often weighted in favour of the sovereign as when a noble died without an heir, his estate went back to the monarch to either keep for themselves or to redistribute to another noble. Monarchs could distribute land for political purposes, fragmenting a noble's holdings or distancing him from the court. It also became difficult to keep track of who owned what which led to such controls as Domesday Book of 1087.

Additional effects were the presence of vassals in the local courts which deliberated on cases involving the estates of their lords. Thus, there could be a clear conflict of interest and lack of impartiality, even if the more serious criminal cases were referred to the courts of the Crown.

In addition, the system of feudal relationships could create serious unrest. Sometimes a monarch might insist on active military service because of a war but nobles might also refuse, as happened to King John of England in 1215 and the Barons' Revolt which led to the signing of the Magna Carta . In 1215, and in subsequent revolts in the 13th century, the barons were acting collectively for their own interests which was a direct threat to the entire system of feudalism, based as it was upon single lords and vassals working out their own private arrangements. Military service was reduced to fixed terms, typically 40 days in England, in an effort to reduce the burden on nobles so that they did not leave their lands unattended for too long. However, 40 days was not usually enough to see out a campaign and so a monarch was obliged to pay mercenaries, dealing another blow to the tradition of feudalism and vassalage.

Why Did Feudalism Decline?

Medieval feudalism was essentially based on the relationship of reciprocal aid between lord and vassal but as that system became more complex over time, so this relationship weakened. Lords came to own multiple estates and vassals could be tenants of various parcels of land so that loyalties became confused and even conflicting with people choosing to honour the relationship that suited their own needs best.

Another blow to the system came from sudden population declines caused by wars and plagues, particularly the Black Death (which peaked between 1347-1352), and by peasant revolts (most famously in England in 1381). Such crises caused a chronic shortage of labour and the abandonment of estates because there was no one to work them. The growth of large towns and cities also saw labour leave the countryside to find a better future and the new jobs available there.

By the 13th century, the increase in commerce and the greater use of coinage changed the way the feudal system worked. Money allowed feudal lords to pay their sovereign instead of performing military service; the monarch's use of mercenaries then meant military service, and thus the barons themselves became less important to the defence of the realm. Conversely, a monarch could now distribute money instead of land in his system of rewards. A rich merchant class developed with no ties of loyalty to anyone except their sovereign, their suppliers and their customers. Even serfs could sometimes buy their freedom and escape the circumstances into which they were born. All of these factors conspired to weaken the feudal system based on land ownership and service even if feudalism would continue beyond the medieval period in some forms and in some places.

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Bibliography

• Anonymous. Chambers Dictionary of World History. Chambers Harrap, 2018.
• Blockmans, W. Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1500. Routledge, 2017.
• Davies, N. Europe. Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Gies, F. Life in a Medieval Village. Harper Perennial, 2016.
• Gies, J. Life in a Medieval Castle. Harper Perennial, 2015.
• Keen, M. The Penguin History of Medieval Europe. Penguin Books, 1991.
• McDowall, D. An Illustrated History of Britain. Pearson Education Ltd, 1989.
• OED - Feudalism , accessed 19 Mar 2020.
• Singman, J.L. The Middle Ages. Sterling, 2013.

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We explain what feudalism was, and how society was divided at the time. In addition, we explore the basis of feudal economy, and its characteristics.

What was feudalism?

Feudalism was a social system that emerged in the Frankish kingdom in the Early Middle Ages and spread throughout Western Europe during the High Middle Ages (between the 11th and 13th centuries). From an economic standpoint, it was a land tenure system that favored the rural nobility and encouraged serfdom. Politically, it entailed a dispersion of power in favor of feudal lords with local and regional authority.

Feudal relationships were contracts of mutual obligations between two freemen: a lord and a vassal. The lord granted protection and land (called "fiefs") to a vassal in exchange for allegiance and military assistance (or other services). Kings had their own vassals who, in turn, could be lords of other vassals , thereby forming a pyramid of land distribution and obligations that involved a significant part of society.

In the feudal system, peasants were particularly important , as the socioeconomic foundation of the system was rural. Serfs, in turn, were tied to land they did not own, and had to pay rents to a lord. Land granted as a fief always included the serfs who worked it. Free peasants were land-owners but could be obliged to pay fees or tribute to a lord with jurisdictional power.

The term "feudalism" is used by some historians to refer to other historical experiences , such as China during the Zhou dynasty, Japan in the shogunate periods, and parts of Eastern Europe at various periods in history.

• See also: Imperialism

Historical context of feudalism

An antecedent to feudalism was the colonate system in the Roman Empire . Under this system, large landowners installed coloni (freed slaves or peasants) on their lands , who had to work them for sustenance and to pay rents to their lord in exchange for protection.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Western Europe became divided into several smaller political units . This lasted until the formation of the short-lived Carolingian Empire, which implemented a reward system to loyal nobles, involving land grants in exchange for services (mostly military).

After the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century, several areas of Western Europe were attacked by Magyars, Muslims, and Vikings . Defense required swift action, which fell upon local lords, who had resources to build fortifications and gather fighting forces without having to wait for the arrival of royal troops.

This encouraged a system of political fragmentation that gave power to feudal lords , and shaped the High Middle Ages. Nevertheless, from the end of the 11th century onwards, some kings, dukes and counts began a process of concentration of political power that placed them in a position of greater authority in their territories, as was the case of King Louis VI of France, Count Ramon Berenguer I of Barcelona, and Duke William II of Normandy, who ascended to the English throne.

The feudal system began to lose prominence in the 14th century , when epidemics, peasant revolts, and the increasing growth of the urban bourgeoisie diminished the power of the nobility and paved the way for the emergence of centralized monarchies.

Feudal society

Social estates.

Feudal society was divided into three clearly distinct estates:

• Nobility . Nobles possessed large tracts of land, generally earned as payment for their military efforts or other services (though in practice they could also be inherited). They were organized in lineages and maintained bonds of vassalage with other feudal lords or with the king. According to their nobility titles and their position in the social hierarchy, they could belong to the higher nobility (dukes, counts, and marquises) or the lower nobility (viscounts, barons, knights, and hidalgos, among others).
• Clergy. Ecclesiastical members, whose supreme authority was the Pope based in Rome, handled religious matters, which shaped human behavior at the time. Clergymen could belong to the secular clergy, who resided in churches and cathedrals, or to the regular clergy, who observed the rule of a religious order and resided in convents or monasteries. They often enjoyed the privileges of feudal lords.
• Workers. While in the social hierarchy of the time this estate was composed of serfs, some historians encompass in it various types of workers who would later comprise the so-called "third estate". Serfs were the lowest stratum of feudal society, in charge of working and cultivating the land. Although they were not slaves, they were tied for life to their lord’s land, to whom they had to pay a rent in kind and sometimes other services. Their status was hereditary. Free peasants were land-owners but had to pay tribute or other obligations to the lord, who had jurisdiction over a territory (usually referred to as a "lordship"). Artisans and merchants lived in cities and, although they interacted with other social classes, they remained outside the feudal system.

The Church and the nobles justified this hierarchy by arguing that each estate had a role determined by God : to pray (clergy), to fight (nobility), and to work (serfs and peasants).

The highest authority in a kingdom was the king or emperor , but in practice he also depended on vassalage relationships with other nobles. Feudal lords usually had more real power than the king within the boundaries of their own lands.

One of the most important institutions of feudalism was vassalage. It consisted of a contract of mutual obligations between two free men: the "lord" and the "vassal" . Vassalage was a pledge of allegiance and service of the vassal (mainly concerning military matters, though it could also involve a payment) and in return, protection duties or sustenance obligations from the lord.

In this way, the lord granted his vassals "fiefs", i.e. lands (along with the serfs that occupied them) over which the vassals gained usufruct rights. In turn, vassals pledged to assist their lord whenever summoned . Knights were also vassals of a lord (noble or king), but did not always receive a fief in exchange for their service.

Vassalage permeated a large part of feudal society. A king could be lord of a noble vassal to whom he granted a fief, who in turn could be lord of other vassals with similar commitments. The vassalage contract between nobles was formalized with an oath ceremony that included "homage" and "investiture". A vassal who failed to fulfill his oath of fealty incurred a felony and could lose the fief . If a lord failed in his duties, the vassal could break the oath and demand reparation.

In this type of social structure, a feudal lord with numerous vassals could often wield more power than the king himself.

During feudal times, the figure of the knight emerged, becoming a literary motif in the medieval cantares de gesta and in the 16th-century chivalric novels (parodied in Miguel de Cervantes' famous novel "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha").

Knights were professional mounted warriors at the service of a king or feudal lord . Some received a fief in vassalage. In general, before being knighted they had to complete a series of stages, starting as pages and squires. In addition, they had to acquire their own military equipment (such as sword and armor).

Chivalry was an important military component that provided mobility and attack strength , but which also became an ideal of honor and religious devotion. Knights had to adhere to a strict code of conduct. Their participation in the Crusades was of major importance, and some Catholic religious-military orders, such as the Knights Templar and the Teutonic Knights, arose from these military campaigns.

The Catholic Church

One of the most significant events of the 11th century was the schism that broke the Western Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Church (1054) . Furthermore, in those years the Catholic Church underwent a series of reforms spurred by criticisms to corruption and practices such as the sale of ecclesiastical offices and the conferring of lay investiture (in accordance with the principles of vassalage but contrary to the doctrine of the Church).

Some of these reform movements originated in monasteries like in Cluny in France. The dispute over the appointment of clergymen (including the Pope himself) pitted the Church against the Holy Roman Empire during the so-called "Investiture Controversy" (between 1075 and 1122). Eventually, an agreement was reached by which the laity could neither invest clerics nor select the Supreme Pontiff , but rather he would be elected by a college of cardinals. This ensured papal supremacy in religious matters.

In feudal society, ecclesiastics (mainly bishops and abbots) enjoyed the privileges that their position afforded them in the feudal hierarchy: they owned lands and exploited serfs. But they also provided an ideological justification for the system. According to the Catholic Church, kings ruled by the grace of God , and the prevailing rigid social order, which caused all sorts of suffering to those who did not belong to the privileged estates, emanated from God and should not be questioned.

One of the most important enterprises of the Catholic Church in feudal times was the launch of the Crusades . The first of these military expeditions to the Holy Land arose from a call made by Pope Urban II to all of Christendom (which included the realms and nobles of Western Christianity in agreement with the Byzantine Empire ) to expel the Seljuk Turkish Empire from the "Holy Land".

Only the first of these Crusades was successful for Christendom , but it nonetheless had major consequences, such as the creation of religious-military orders, the strengthening of religious fervor, and the opening of trade routes across the Mediterranean. The defeats in the subsequent Crusades had adverse effects on the Church and other privileged classes.

Rural economy

In feudal times, the generation of wealth essentially stemmed from agriculture and cattle raising, carried out by serfs and free peasants.

This rural economy experienced growth between the 11th and 13th centuries due to the expansion of arable lands as a result of plowing and triennial rotation, particularly in France, England, Germany, and the Low Countries. Also important were improvements in the plow and the use of mills.

Rents and tributes

The feudal economy was grounded in rents and tribute. Serfs had to pay "in kind" (grains, livestock, or other agricultural products) for the right to live on the lord's land . In some cases, they were also required to fulfill labor duties, such as providing hand labor (for example, in the lord's demesne).

Free peasants also had to pay rents or tribute, generally in kind. The “banal lordship” granted some lords jurisdictional power over a territory where they could administer justice and levy taxes for the use of bridges, ovens, mills, or other facilities under their charge. Another form of tribute was tithing, originally a 10% contribution of the produce destined to the maintenance of the clergy.

Cities and trade

In the early years of feudal society trade was very limited, and the characteristic urbanism of the Roman Empire had been replaced by a nearly absolute ruralization of the economy (with the exception of a few Italian cities). However, cities and trade experienced a resurgence beginning in the late 11th century .

Agricultural innovations facilitated the generation of larger surplus, which was used for the purchase of handcrafted products, such as fabrics or new tools. These, in turn, improved production and increased agricultural surplus , thus allowing the cycle to expand.

These transactions were usually conducted in "burgs" or towns inhabited by artisans and merchants (known as "burghers"). They were often located near castles or at crossroads and were typically fortified. These cities housed markets that were often under the protection of lords . The commercial trade stimulus made it possible to hold seasonal trade fairs involving exchanges on a larger scale. Currency increasingly began to circulate in these fairs and, in time, some merchants and artisans began to offer loans, becoming the earliest bankers and financiers.

City dwellers organized themselves in merchant and craft guilds by trade and enjoyed growing autonomy from feudal lords. They obtained privileges and other liberties guaranteed by the king, and in some cities they even came to establish autonomous governments with their own municipal ordinances. The wealthier sectors formed urban patriciates, but sometimes had to face conflicts with feudal lords, which partly explains the use of defensive walls and the subsequent formation of leagues or confederations of cities.

Many cities played a major role in long-distance trade routes. The most prominent cities were those situated in Northern Italy , where merchants competed for the control of Mediterranean trade. Pilgrimage routes and the Crusades also became important trade routes.

Military system

The feudal order emerged following the fragmentation of the Carolingian Empire and the onslaughts from Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims. The lords who offered military protection, provided by the service of vassals and the construction of castles, accumulated great power. This military system played a significant role during the frequent wars between kingdoms or lords , which were raids and sieges rather than pitched battles.

This type of warfare emphasized the significance of siege engines and cavalry mobility. Knights were important in the Crusades that pitted Christian combatants against Muslim armies for the control of the Holy Land.

In feudal times, warfare served as a means to settle dynastic or territorial disputes , enabling the victors to reap economic benefits by seizing the lands of the vanquished, thereby increasing their pool of serfs (who were tied to the land), and thus enhancing their capacity to produce food and acquire new vassals.

However, warfare could also be a source of discontent among peasants, who saw their lands frequently plundered or were subjected to increased tributes to fund the wars of nobles or kings. This might have explained some of the peasant revolts in the 14th century.

One of the most notable features of the Middle Ages were castles. Throughout the feudal era, numerous fortified structures were erected across Europe, usually situated in strategic locations , such as on high ground. Commissioned by kings or feudal lords, these structures primarily had defensive functions and served as bases for military operations.

In the event of enemy assault, their towering stone walls provided protection for the lord (known as "castellan") and his family, and refuge to the peasants within his manor. In addition, they ensured supplies during sieges.

Some of these structures were begun amidst the intermittent attacks from Vikings, Magyars, and Muslims during the 9th and 10th centuries. Over time, construction techniques evolved and refined.

Castles were often concentric, that is, they had a double wall (outer and inner), and had one or more towers , interior courtyards and, sometimes, a peripheral moat. In addition to their defensive function, castles served as the permanent or temporary residence of the lord, who often received his vassals there. Castles were also inhabited by men-at-arms and servants.

During the Crusades, castles were built in Asian territory, such as the imposing Krak Des Chevaliers in present-day Syria.

End of feudalism

The decline of feudalism in Western Europe during the 14th century was brought about by various factors. Wars, epidemics, and urban migrations reduced the rural population . The subsequent labor shortage accelerated the end of serfdom. Nobles, who had to face important peasant revolts, gradually started to lose political power.

In wars (notably within the context of the Hundred Years' War), kings began to rely more on mercenaries than on their vassals , with the latter paying their obligations with currency. Lords progressively abandoned their manors, and leased their lands to peasants instead.

The urban bourgeoisie accumulated wealth, becoming moneylenders to kings and princes . This consolidated great commercial houses that served the increasingly centralized monarchies in a growing monetized economy.

Finally, while certain aspects of feudal society lingered for centuries, the power of lords inevitably declined.

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• Bloch, M. (1986). La sociedad feudal . Akal.
• Brown, E. A. R. (2021). feudalism. Encyclopedia Britannica .
• Duby, G. (1992). Los tres órdenes o lo imaginario del feudalismo . Taurus.
• García de Cortázar, J. A. & Sesma Muñoz, J. A. (2008). Manual de Historia Medieval . Alianza.
• Le Goff, J. (1999). La civilización del occidente medieval . Paidós.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Feudalism and knights in medieval europe.

Viking Sword

Aquamanile in the Form of a Mounted Knight

A Knight of the d'Aluye Family

Michael Norris Department of Education, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2001

From the ninth to the early eleventh centuries, invasions of the Magyars from the east, Muslims from the south, and Vikings from the north struck western Europe. This unrest ultimately spurred greater unity in England and Germany, but in northern France centralized authority broke down and the region split into smaller and smaller political units. By the ninth century, many knights and nobles held estates (fiefs) granted by greater lords in return for military and other service. This feudal system (from the medieval Latin feodum or feudum , fee or fief) enabled a cash-poor but land-rich lord to support a military force. But this was not the only way that land was held, knights maintained, and loyalty to a lord retained. Lands could be held unconditionally, landless knights could be sheltered in noble households, and loyalties could be maintained through kinship, friendship, or wages.

Mounted armored warriors , or knights (from the Old English cniht , boy or servant), were the dominant forces of medieval armies. The twelfth-century Byzantine princess Anna Komnena wrote that the impact of a group of charging French knights “might rupture the walls of Babylon .” At first, most knights were of humble origins, some of them not even possessing land, but by the later twelfth century knights were considered members of the nobility and followed a system of courteous knightly behavior called chivalry (from cheval , the French word for horse). During and after the fourteenth century , weapons that were particularly effective against horsemen appeared on the battlefield, such as the longbow, pike, halberd, and cannon. Yet despite the knights’ gradual loss of military importance, the system by which noble families were identified, called heraldry, continued to flourish and became more complex. The magnificence of their war games—called tournaments—also increased, as did the number of new knightly orders, such as the Order of the Garter.

Norris, Michael. “Feudalism and Knights in Medieval Europe.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/feud/hd_feud.htm (October 2001)

Further Reading

Bennett, Judith M., and C. Warren Hollister. Medieval Europe: A Short History . 10th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2005.

Gies, Joseph and Frances Gies. Life in a Medieval Castle . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Michael Norris

• Norris, Michael. “ The Papacy during the Renaissance .” (August 2007)
• Norris, Michael. “ Arms and Armor in Medieval Europe .” (October 2001)
• Norris, Michael. “ Life of Jesus of Nazareth .” (originally published June 2008, last revised September 2008)

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• The Age of Saint Louis (1226–1270)
• Arms and Armor in Renaissance Europe
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Feudalism Facts & Worksheets

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Origins and development of the feudal system, features of the feudal system, decline of feudalism, key facts and information, let’s know more about feudalism.

• Feudalism was a political, economic and social system that flourished in Western Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. It had its roots in Germanic and Roman traditions. It was characterised by a king’s ownership of vast land and the distribution of it to people in exchange for services. Its two principal institutions were vassalage and the fief. With the rise of towns and commerce and the decline of local organisation, feudalism gradually broke down in the continent. However, many of its remnants persist and still influence Western European institutions.
• Feudalism was a socio-political and economic system utilised in Western Europe during the medieval period. It developed as early as the 8th century and flourished between the 9th and 15th centuries.
• The bond of mutual loyalty between lord and vassal, which formed such an essential part of medieval feudalism, appears to have derived from the German comitatus described by Tacitus in 98 CE, the band of free fighting men associated with a prominent leader in an equal and honourable status.
• The companions followed their chieftain into battle, having sworn to fight to the death in support of him. In return, the chieftain looked after their welfare, gave them leadership, provided food, shelter and entertainment in times of peace.
• The Romans had long known a somewhat similar arrangement, in which clients commended themselves to a powerful patron, giving personal devotion in return for subsistence and protection.
• But this involved a definitely inferior status on the part of the client, and it was thus unlike the honourable relationship of vassalage which became a part of feudalism.
• During the economic and political decay of the later Roman Empire, clientage was often linked with landholding.
• Small farmers found it impossible to compete with the great estates, and many commended themselves to powerful landlords, giving up their lands and receiving back the right of their use under the lords’ protection.
• These relationships probably continued after the use of the Germanic kingdoms on the ruins of the Roman Empire in the West.
• In a predominantly agrarian economy, rights to land became the basis of wealth and power.
• The relations of personal dependency between lord and vassal, known as vassalage, was more and more associated with rights of land, termed the fief.
• An important step towards feudalism was taken by the Frankish king Charles Martel in the 8th century, in creating numerous military fiefs from lands which he took from the Church.
• Their holders became his vassals and were thus enabled to support themselves as mounted and heavily armed fighting men during wars.
• Private jurisdictions developed as the early Frankish rulers gave grants of immunity to various monasteries and laymen, by which the king’s officials were excluded from their lands.
• Collecting taxes
• Holding court for his tenants and vassals
• Calling out the fighting men
• The processes were accelerated during the break-up of the Carolingian empire in the 9th century, when men looked in vain to weak central governments for protection and leadership, and turned instead to powerful local magnates, becoming their vassals and holding their lands as fiefs for them.
• The idea of kingship never entirely vanished, but the government and the administration of justice came to be exercised by various local authorities who had connections with the king.
• The counts and other royal officials took for their own use the lands and authority attached to their offices, and the great landlords everywhere seized the privileges of immunity.
• The kings acquiesced in this, finding it necessary, in the absence of money to pay salaries, to give fiefs of lands and revenues, and to try to bind their holders to themselves by homage.
• In turn, the royal vassals and churches with immunities gave part of their lands and functions to vassals of their own.
• Thus, a process of decentralisation went on by, in which the various powers of the state were divided among the feudal lords and churches.
• As the central authority became even weaker, the local authorities became practically independent princes, ruling and dispensing justice, and waging wars with their feudal armies.
• This system extended from France to Spain, Italy, Germany and England. Whilst the important features of feudalism were similar throughout, there existed definite national differences.
• Feudalism was characterised by a king’s ownership of vast land and the distribution of it to people in exchange for services. It was intricately connected with the manorial system but it proved distinct from the latter. The feudal hierarchy encompassed all social class levels.
• The two principal institutions of feudalism were vassalage and the fief.
• Vassalage was a contractual arrangement between lord and vassal, established by a ceremony of homage in which the vassal kneeled and placed his hands between the hands of his lord, and swore to serve him faithfully.
• What did the vassal owe to his lord?
• The vassal owed to his lord loyalty, obedience, aid, counsel and court service.
• The pecuniary aids were due on special occasions, later restricted to the knighting of the lord’s eldest son, the marriage of his eldest daughter, and the payment of his ransom if he were taken prisoner.
• The vassal owed military service to his lord, eventually fixed at forty days in the year. He might have to supply several knights beside himself, according to the amount of land he held.
• This relationship lasted only during the lifetime of both parties.
• When one of them died, the acts of homage and investiture and the oaths of fealty had to be renewed.
• When the hereditary principle was supplemented, the son normally succeeded his father as a vassal of the lord, and received the fief on the same terms, although he was required to pay a sum of money called relief, in recognition of the fact that the fief belonged to the lord.
• If the new vassal was minor, he became a ward of his lord, who administrated the fief in his own interests until the boy came of age.
• Heiresses were also wards of the lord until they married, and the lords asserted the right to choose the husband, who would become their vassals.
• When a vassal died without heirs, the fief reverted to the lord as owner.
• Forfeiture to the lord resulted when the vassal failed to live up to his obligations if the lord were powerful enough to enforce it.
• Subinfeudation came about as vassals regranted part of their fiefs to men who then owed allegiance to them rather than to the original lord of the land.
• The consent of the overlord was theoretically required, but in practice, it was difficult to withhold it.
• This process might go on several times, as the sub-vassals granted fiefs to their men.
• Thus, a chain of landed dependency grew, from the king, who was theoretically lord of all the land, through the nobles, who were both overlords and vassals at the same time, down to the simple knight who had a fief and overlord but no vassals of his own.
• However, this development complicated the chain of personal dependence.
• As fiefs became alienable and heritable, it was not long before several were held by one vassal, who might thus have obligations to several lords.
• In France, an attempt was made to overcome this difficulty by the principle of liege homage to one lord, which was more binding than homage given to others.
• Even this became confused as vassals came to owe more than one liege homage through the process of inheritance or otherwise.
• Since there was no real definition of what constituted a breach of the sacred bond between lord and vassal, it was easy for either to find an excuse to declare it broken.
• Appeal to force was the only remedy, and private war was regarded as a privilege of the feudal nobles.
• Vassals began to regard their fiefs as hereditary possessions burdened with services and dues that they continually tried to restrict or evade altogether.
• As a result, the personal bond of vassalage was weakened. Feudalism, which had served to hold society together when the central authority almost disappeared, tended to be a system of organised anarchy.
• Despite efforts of the Church to restrict feudal warfare, little was accomplished until the royal power had grown strong and the king had become a national sovereign able to enforce justice, rather than the apex of a contractual system to whom only the great tenants-in-chief who held their lands for him owed direct allegiance.
• The feudal system became the basis of the medieval class system.
• Localised groups of communities which owed loyalty to a local lord were created.
• The feudal system enabled medieval kings to become more powerful with an army to raise in case of war.
• Feudalism declined with the rise of towns and a money economy when land ceased to be the only important form of wealth. Money enabled feudal lords to pay their sovereign instead of performing military service. At the same time, with the development of new weaponries and methods of fighting, the nobles began to lose their position as an exclusive and privileged military class.
• Battles such as Courtrai, Crécy and Agincourt showed that the day of heavily armed knights fighting on horseback had passed.
• The feudal system became an anachronism in an age of gunpowder and capitalism.
• The weaknesses of European feudalism became evident by the 13th century, however, the system of interconnecting feudal obligations remained to be dominant in the continent until at least the 15th century.
• In England, France and Spain, the royal power advanced at the expense of the nobility.
• England was saved from the absolutism of the other two countries by the cooperation of the nobles and the other classes, and the development of Parliament for the limitation of the monarchy.
• But it was first necessary for the Crown to break down local powers and become strong, by the extension of its law and its machinery of administration, before a limited but efficient monarchy could evolve.
• Feudalism was abolished in England in 1662.
• Feudal customs and rights continued to be enshrined in the land laws of many nations including France, Germany, Austria and Italy until eliminated following the French Revolution. However, many remnants of feudalism still persist and influence Western European institutions.

Image sources:

• https://cdn.britannica.com/02/115002-050-C91498DA/Peasants-work-gates-town-painting-Breviarium-Grimani.jpg
• https://cdn.britannica.com/52/130352-050-8B473B8D/Charles-Martel-armour.jpg
• https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/Hommage_au_Moyen_Age_-_miniature.jpg/800px-Hommage_au_Moyen_Age_-_miniature.jpg

82 Feudalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best feudalism topic ideas & essay examples, 👍 good essay topics on feudalism, ✅ simple & easy feudalism essay titles, ❓ questions about feudalism.

• Feudalism System of Western Europe in the Middle Ages Although there was the presence of the king, the position was irrelevant in the country. The vassals, as mentioned in the introduction, were the persons who paid homage and pledged allegiance to the lords in […]
• Digital Feudalism: Capitalists Exploit Laborers The examination of the life cycle of a single Amazon Echo speaker reveals deep interconnections between the literal hollowing out of the earth’s materials and the data capture and monetization of human communication practices in […]
• From the Fall of the Holy Roman Empire to Feudalism This remnant from the past reflects the time when the Franks took over the Burgundians and influenced both the language and culture of the Burgundians.
• Susan Reynolds’s Attack on the Concepts of Feudalism Supported by F.L. Ganshof and Marc Bloch However, in her book Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, Susan Reynolds states that it is inappropriate to follow the narrow discussion of feudalism with references to the concepts of vassalage and fiefs, and […]
• Major Historiographic Views on Feudalism The history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance continues to attract the attention of many contemporary historians. This is one of the points that should be considered.
• The Fall of Roman Empire and the Rise of Feudalism Therefore, to German, the fall of the Roman Empire is significant for some of the aspects of feudalism are still present in German societies.
• The Role of Women on Feudalism: Nobility, Peasantry, and the Church
• The Cultural Significance of Feudalism: Literature, Music, and Dance
• Capitalism and Feudalism: The Lowell System
• Key Differences Between Feudalism and Capitalism
• Feudalism and Powerful Warrior Landlords
• Comparing and Contrasting Haritan and Japanese Feudalism
• The Impact of Feudalism on Medieval Art and Architecture
• Feudalism and Court Services Vassals
• The Feudalism and Manorialism Unraveled
• Political and Economic Characteristics of Feudalism
• The Role of the Black Death in the Decline of Feudalism
• Feudalism and Feudal States From Europe After the Breakup
• Similarities Between European Feudalism in the Middle Ages and the Caste System of India
• The Feudal System in Central Asia: Comparative Analysis With European Feudalism
• Lives Sold Dear: Chivalry and Feudalism in the “Song of Roland”
• The Dark Ages and the Feudalism
• The Role of Feudalism in the Crusades and the Reconquista
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of Capitalism
• The Role of Feudalism in Medieval Medicine and Health Care
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of Modern International Relations
• Literature and the Transition From Middle Ages Feudalism to the Industrial Era
• Main Reasons for the Fall of Feudalism
• The Role of Feudalism in the Formation of Medieval Cities
• Feudalism and New Social Order
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of Nationalism in Europe
• The Military System of Feudalism: Knights and Chivalry
• The Historical Context of Feudalism: Origins and Evolution
• The Rise and Fall of Feudalism
• Feudalism: The Rights and Responsibilities of Lords and Vassals
• The Rise of Feudalism in Eastern Europe
• The Differences Between Feudalism Before and After the Norman Conquest
• Feudalism and Its Effects on Society
• Comparing and Contrasting Japanese Feudalism to Western European Feudalism During the Middle Ages
• The Transition From Feudalism to the Renaissance
• The Military Government: The Oldest Form of Governance Since the Feudalism
• The Influence of Feudalism on the Development of Democracy in Europe
• How Revolutionaries Change System Government-Based Monarchy Feudalism?
• Feudalism: Social Class and National Government
• The Impact of Feudalism on Trade and Commerce in Medieval Europe
• The Economic System of Feudalism: Manorialism and Serfdom
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of International Law
• Feudal System: Medieval Life and Feudalism
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of Modern Science
• The Feudal System in America: Comparative Analysis With European Feudalism
• The Social and Economic Changes in Feudalism in the 14th Century
• The Role of Feudalism in the Formation of Modern Nation-States
• The Impact of Feudalism on the Development of Human Rights
• The History and Impact of Feudalism in Europe Between the 8th and 9th Century
• The Social Hierarchy of Feudalism: Nobility, Clergy, and Peasantry
• Pensions and Lifetime Jobs: The New Industrial Feudalism Revisited
• Are There More Similarities Between Feudalism and Capitalism Than We’d Like to Admit?
• Was Feudalism an Effective Form of Government?
• What Events Led to the Decline of Feudalism?
• Did Feudalism Create Capitalism?
• How Did Centralized Feudalism Under the Tokugawa Shoguns Unite Japan?
• What Made Feudalism So Unfair?
• How Long Did Feudalism Last?
• What Economic System Started to Replace Feudalism During the Time of the Renaissance?
• Why Did Russian Feudalism Last So Much Longer Than Its Western European Counterparts?
• How Is Feudalism and Manorialism Connected?
• Did Karl Marx Believe in Feudalism?
• What Was the Main Problem With Feudalism?
• How Did Feudalism Begin and End?
• Why Did Europe Shift From Feudalism to Capitalism?
• How Did Feudalism and the Manor Economy Emerge and Shape Medieval Life?
• What Are the Theories of Feudalism?
• How Did the Tokugawas Set Up Centralized Feudalism?
• What Was the Basic Structure of Feudalism in Western Europe in the 8th and 9th Centuries?
• Is Capitalism Better Than Feudalism?
• Which Country Abolished Feudalism First?
• How Did Society Change From Feudalism to Renaissance Times?
• What Was the Social and Economic Impact of Feudalism?
• How Did Feudalism Change History?
• What Is the Structure of Feudalism?
• How Did Feudalism Impact Life in the Middle Ages?
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The Problem With Feudalism

Later historians say the concept doesn't match reality

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Medieval historians generally aren't bothered by words. The intrepid medievalist is always ready to leap into the rough-and-tumble milieu of Old English word origins, medieval French literature, and Latin Church documents. Icelandic sagas hold no terror for the medieval scholar. Next to these challenges, the esoteric terminology of medieval studies is mundane, no threat to the historian of the Middle Ages.

But one word has become the bane of medievalists everywhere. Use it in discussing medieval life and society, and the average medieval historian's face will screw up in revulsion.

What word has this power to annoy, disgust, and even upset the ordinarily cool, collected medievalist?

What Is Feudalism?

Every student of the Middle Ages is at least somewhat familiar with the term, usually defined as follows:

Feudalism was the dominant form of political organization in medieval Europe. It was a hierarchical system of social relationships wherein a noble lord granted land known as a fief to a free man, who in turn swore fealty to the lord as his vassal and agreed to provide military and other services. A vassal could also be a lord, granting portions of the land he held to other free vassals; this was known as "subinfeudation" and often led all the way up to the king. The land granted to each vassal was inhabited by serfs who worked the land for him, providing him with income to support his military endeavors; in turn, the vassal would protect the serfs from attack and invasion.

This is a simplified definition, and many exceptions and caveats go along with this model of medieval society. It is fair to say that this is the explanation for feudalism you'll find in most history textbooks of the 20th century, and it is very close to every dictionary definition available.

The problem? Virtually none of it is accurate.

Description Inaccurate

Feudalism  was not the "dominant" form of political organization in medieval Europe. There was no "hierarchical system" of lords and vassals engaged in a structured agreement to provide military defense. There was no "subinfeudation" leading up to the king. The arrangement whereby serfs worked the land for a lord in return for protection, known as manorialism or seignorialism, was not part of a "feudal system." Monarchies of the early Middle Ages had their challenges and their weaknesses, but kings didn't use feudalism to exert control over their subjects, and the feudal relationship wasn't the "glue that held medieval society together," as had been said.

In short, feudalism as described above never existed in Medieval Europe.

For decades, even centuries, feudalism has characterized our view of medieval society. If it never existed, then why did so many historians say it did? Weren't entire books written on the subject? Who has the authority to say that all those historians were wrong? If the current consensus among "experts" in medieval history is to reject feudalism, why is it still presented as reality in nearly every medieval history textbook?

Concept Questioned

The word feudalism was never used during the Middle Ages. The term was invented by 16th- and 17th-century scholars to describe a political system of several hundred years earlier. This makes feudalism a post-medieval construct.

Constructs help us understand alien ideas in terms more familiar to our modern thought processes. Middle Ages and medieval are constructs. (Medieval people didn't think of themselves as living in a "middle" age—they thought they were living in the now, just like we do.) Medievalists might not like the way the term medieval is used as an insult or how absurd myths of past customs and behavior are commonly attributed to the Middle Ages, but most are confident that using Middle Ages and medieval to describe the era as between the ancient and early modern eras is satisfactory, however fluid the definition of all three timeframes might be.

But medieval has a fairly clear meaning based on a specific, easily defined viewpoint. Feudalism cannot be said to have the same.

In 16th-century France, Humanist scholars grappled with the history of Roman law and its authority in their own land. They examined a substantial collection of Roman law books. Among these books was the  Libri Feudorum —the Book of Fiefs.

'Libri Feudorum'

The  Libri Feudorum  was a compilation of legal texts concerning the proper disposition of fiefs, which were defined in these documents as lands held by people referred to as vassals. The work had been put together in Lombardy, northern Italy, in the 1100s, and over the intervening centuries, lawyers and scholars had commented on it and added definitions and interpretations, or  glosses.  The  Libri Feudorum  is an extraordinarily significant work that has been barely studied since 16th-century French lawyers gave it a good look.

In their evaluation of the Book of Fiefs, the scholars made some reasonable assumptions:

• The fiefs under discussion in the texts were pretty much the same as the fiefs of 16th-century France—that is, lands belonging to nobles.
• Te  Libri Feudorum  was addressing actual legal practices of the 11th century, not simply expounding on an academic concept.
• The explanation of fiefs' origins in the  Libri Feudorum —that grants were initially made for as long as the lord chose but were later extended to the grantee's lifetime and afterward made hereditary—was a reliable history and not mere conjecture.

The assumptions might have been reasonable, but were they correct? French scholars had every reason to believe they were and no real reason to dig any deeper. They weren't so much interested in the historical  facts of the time period as they were in the legal questions addressed in the ​ Libri Feudorum.  Their foremost consideration was whether the laws had any authority in France. Ultimately, French lawyers rejected the authority of the Lombard Book of Fiefs.

Examining Assumptions

However, during their investigations, based in part on the assumptions outlined above, scholars who studied the  Libri Feudorum  formulated a view of the Middle Ages. This general picture included the idea that feudal relationships, wherein noblemen granted fiefs to free vassals in return for services, were important in medieval society because they provided social and military security at a time when the central government was weak or nonexistent. The idea was discussed in editions of the  Libri Feudorum  made by legal scholars Jacques Cujas and François Hotman, who both used the term  feudum  to indicate an arrangement involving a fief .

Other scholars soon saw value in the works of Cujas and Hotman and applied the ideas to their own studies. Before the 16th century ended, two Scottish lawyers—Thomas Craig and Thomas Smith—were using feudum in their classifications of Scottish lands and their tenure. Craig apparently first expressed the idea of feudal arrangements as a hierarchical system imposed on nobles and their subordinates by their monarch as a matter of policy. In the 17th century, Henry Spelman, a noted English antiquarian, adopted this viewpoint for English legal history.

Although Spelman never used the word feudalism , his work went a long way toward creating an "-ism" from the ideas over which Cujas and Hotman had theorized. Not only did Spelman maintain, as Craig had done, that feudal arrangements were part of a system, but he related the English feudal heritage with that of Europe, indicating that feudal arrangements were characteristic of medieval society as a whole. Spelman's hypothesis was accepted as fact by scholars who saw it as a sensible explanation of medieval social and property relations.

Fundamentals Unchallenged

Over the next several decades, scholars explored and debated feudal ideas. They expanded the meaning of the term from legal matters to other aspects of medieval society . They argued over the origins of feudal arrangements and expounded on the various levels of subinfeudation. They incorporated manorialism and applied it to the agricultural economy. They envisioned a complete system of feudal agreements running throughout Britain and Europe.

But they didn't challenge Craig's or Spelman's interpretation of the works of Cujas and Hotman, nor did they question the conclusions that Cujas and Hotman drew from the  Libri Feudorum.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, it's easy to ask why the facts were overlooked in favor of the theory. Present-day historians engage in a rigorous examination of the evidence and clearly identify a theory as such. Why didn't 16th- and 17th-century scholars do the same? The simple answer is that history as a scholarly field has evolved over time; in the 17th century, the academic discipline of historical evaluation was in its infancy. Historians didn't have the tools, both physical and figurative, taken for granted today, nor did they have the example of scientific methods from other fields to incorporate into their learning processes.

Besides, having a straightforward model by which to view the Middle Ages gave scholars the sense that they understood the time period. Medieval society becomes so much easier to evaluate and comprehend if it can be labeled and fit into a simple organizational structure.

By the end of the 18th century, the term feudal system was used among historians, and by the middle of the 19th century, feudalism had become a fairly well-fleshed-out model, or construct, of medieval government and society. As the idea spread beyond academia, feudalism became a buzzword for any oppressive, backward, hidebound system of government. In the  French Revolution , the "feudal regime" was abolished by the  National Assembly , and in Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto ,"   feudalism was the oppressive, agrarian-based economic system that preceded the industrialized, capitalist economy.

With such far-ranging appearances in academic and mainstream usage, breaking free of what was, essentially, a wrong impression would be an extraordinary challenge.

Questions Arise

In the late 19th century, the field of medieval studies began to evolve into a serious discipline. No longer did the average historian accept as fact everything that had been written by his or her predecessors and repeat it as a matter of course. Scholars of the medieval era began to question interpretations of the evidence and the evidence itself.

This wasn't a swift process. The medieval era was still the bastard child of historical study; a "dark age" of ignorance, superstition, and brutality, "a thousand years without a bath." Medieval historians had much prejudice, fanciful invention, and misinformation to overcome, and there was no concerted effort to shake things up and re-examine every theory ever floated about the Middle Ages. Feudalism had become so entrenched that it wasn't an obvious choice to overturn.

Even once historians began to recognize the "system" as a post-medieval construct, its validity wasn't questioned. As early as 1887, F.W. Maitland observed in a lecture on English constitutional history that "we do not hear of a feudal system until feudalism ceased to exist." He examined in detail what feudalism supposedly was and discussed how it could be applied to English medieval law, but he didn't question its existence.

Maitland was a well-respected scholar; much of his work is still enlightening and useful today. If such an esteemed historian treated feudalism as a legitimate system of law and government, why should anyone question him?

For a long time, nobody did. Most medievalists continued in Maitland's vein, acknowledging that the word was a construct—an imperfect one, at that—yet going forward with articles, lectures, treatises, and books on what feudalism had been or, at the very least, incorporating it into related topics as an accepted fact of the medieval era. Each historian presented his or her own interpretation of the model; even those claiming to adhere to a previous interpretation deviated from it in some significant way. The result was an unfortunate number of varying, sometimes conflicting, definitions of feudalism.

As the 20th century progressed, the discipline of history grew more rigorous. Scholars uncovered new evidence, examined it closely, and used it to modify or explain their view of feudalism. Their methods were sound, but their premise was problematic: They were trying to adapt a deeply flawed theory to a wide variety of facts.

Construct Denounced

Although several historians expressed concerns over the indefinite nature of the model and the term's imprecise meanings, it wasn't until 1974 that anyone thought to point out the most fundamental problems with feudalism. In a groundbreaking article titled "The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe," Elizabeth A.R. Brown leveled a finger at the academic community, denouncing the term feudalism and its continued use.

Brown maintained that the feudalism construct, developed after the Middle Ages, bore little resemblance to actual medieval society. Its many differing, even contradictory, definitions had so muddied the waters that it had lost any useful meaning and was interfering with the proper examination of evidence concerning medieval law and society. Scholars viewed land agreements and social relationships through the warped lens of the feudalism construct and either disregarded or dismissed anything that didn't fit into their version of the model. Brown asserted that, even considering how difficult it is to unlearn something, continuing to include feudalism in introductory texts would do readers a grave injustice.

Brown's article was well received in academic circles. Virtually no American or British medievalists objected to any part of it, and almost everyone agreed: Feudalism wasn't a useful term and really should go.

Yet, it stuck around.

Hasn't Disappeared

Some new publications in medieval studies avoided the term altogether; others used it sparingly, focusing on actual laws, land tenures, and legal agreements instead of on the model. Some books on medieval society refrained from characterizing that society as "feudal." Others, while acknowledging that the term was in dispute, continued to use it as a "useful shorthand" for lack of a better term, but only as far as it was necessary.

But some authors still included descriptions of feudalism as a valid model of medieval society, with little or no caveat. Not every medievalist had read Brown's article or had a chance to consider its implications or discuss it with colleagues. Additionally, revising work conducted on the premise that feudalism was a valid construct would require the kind of reassessment that few historians were prepared to engage in.

Perhaps most significantly, no one had presented a reasonable model or explanation to use in place of feudalism. Some historians and authors felt they had to provide their readers with a handle by which to grasp the general ideas of medieval government and society. If not feudalism, then what?

Yes, the emperor had no clothes, but for now, he would just have to run around naked.

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Feudalism: Reflections on a Tyrannical Construct’s Fate

• First Online: 24 January 2022

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• Elizabeth A. R. Brown 4  

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In this article I reflect on feudalism and the attack I launched in 1974 against it and such similar constructs as feudal system, feudal society, and feudal monarchy. I first review the reasons for my campaign and its timing. Re-evaluating the extent and gravity of the disapproval the term had long elicited, I reconsider the relationship between my uncompromising assault and earlier opposition to feudalism. Before examining the reactions to the article, positive and negative, I treat the feudal constructs’ appeal and powers of endurance, and the cognitive roots of their advocates’ attachment to them. In appraising the article’s reception, I discuss Susan Reynolds’s book, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted , published in 1994, and the similarities and differences between our approaches to the feudal constructs and to medieval society and politics. In a final section I assess the diminished fidelity that feudalism has commanded since 2000, and the progressive waning of the feudal constructs’ influence on studies of medieval Europe, which focus increasingly on the complexities of its evolution. The conclusion reiterates the call I issued in 1974 to renounce the constructs and cautiously forecasts their imminent demise, except as evidence of the styles of conceptualization that led their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fabricators to invent them.

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American Historical Review , 79:4 (1974), 1063–88. I am grateful for encouragement, suggestions, and corrections to Allan Appel, Suzanne Boorsch, Rowan Dorin, Theodore Evergates, Geoffrey Koziol, Susanne Roberts, M. Alison Stones, Thomas N. Tentler, and, particularly, Richard C. Famiglietti and Emily Zack Tabuteau. I am indebted as well for exchanges I have had over the years with Theodore Evergates, the late Susan Reynolds, and Stephen D. White, as well as Walter Goffart, the late Howard Kaminsky, and, particularly, the late Fredric L. Cheyette. Lucy L. Brown and Herbert H. Schaumberg have discussed and debated with me my ideas about the development of the physical and social sciences, and the relevance of experimental studies of human cognition to attitudes toward the feudal constructs. Jackson Armstrong, Peter Crooks, and Andrea Ruddick have been models of editorial patience and efficiency.

Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

At Swarthmore College, Professor Mary Albertson introduced me to Eileen Powers’ masterpiece, Medieval People (London: Methuen & Co., 1924), a seventh edition of which was published in 1939, and a tenth in 1963. In 1957, four years after its publication, when I was in my third year of graduate school, I acquired a now ragged copy of Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox , which was based on an essay that appeared in 1951. See below, n. 37 and the accompanying text.

M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien , ed. Étienne Bloch (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993). I treasure the copy I bought in 1957 of The Historian’s Craft , trans. Peter Putnam with an introduction by Joseph R. Strayer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954).

M. Bloch, La société féodale. La formation des liens de dépendance (L’Évolution de l’humanité, synthèse collective, 34:1; Paris: Albin Michel, 1939), and La société féodale. Les classes et le gouvernement des hommes (Paris: Albin Michel, 1940) (the second part of the volume in Henri Berr’s series). In the English translation that appeared twenty years later the two divisions were rendered as ‘The growth of ties of dependence’, and ‘Social classes and political organization’: Feudal Society , trans. L.A. Manyon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). I discussed Bloch’s mixed attitude toward the constructs in ‘Tyranny’, 1069–1070, and also in ‘Reflections on Feudalism: Thomas Madox and the Origins of the Feudal System in England’, in Belle S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado (eds), Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 135–55, at 136, 138–41.

Richard W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953; cf. Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1080–1; Georges Duby, La société aux XI e et XII e siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Bibliothèque générale de l’École pratique des Hautes Études, 6 e section; Paris: Armand Colin, 1953; reprinted, with different pagination, as Bibliothèque générale de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1971); see Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1073–4, 1081–4. Fredric L. Cheyette commented on Southern and Duby, in ‘George Duby’s Mâconnais after Fifty Years: Reading It Then and Now’, Journal of Medieval History , 28 (2002), 291–317, at 293.

Notable among them are Jacques Flach (1846–1919), Les origines de l’ancienne France , 4 vols (Paris: L. Larose et al., 1886–1917), on whom see Alain Guerreau, Le féodalisme: un horizon théorique (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1980), 51–5; and Alain Guerreau ‘Fief, féodalité, féodalisme. Enjeux sociaux et réflexion historienne’, Annales : Économies – Sociétés – Civilisations , 45:1 (1990), 137–66; Émile Lesne, ‘Les diverses acceptations du terme “beneficium” du VIII e au IX e siècle (Contribution à l’étude des origines du bénéfice ecclésiastique)’, Revue historique du droit français et étranger , 4th ser., 3 (1924), 5–56; Charles Edwin Odegaard, Vassi and Fideles in the Carolingian Empire (Harvard Historical Monographs, 19; Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1945); Léo Verriest, Institutions médiévales. Introduction au Corpus des records de coutumes et des lois de chefs-lieux de l’ancien comté de Hainaut, 2 vols (Société des bibliophiles belges séant à Mons, Publications, 41–42; Mons-Frameries: Union des imprimeries, 1946); Léo Verriest, Questions d’histoire des institutions médiévales. Noblesse. Chevalerie. Lignages. Condition des biens et des personnes. Seigneurie. Ministérialité. Bourgeoisie. Échevinages (Brussels: Chez l’Auteur, 1959/1960); Jan Dhondt, Études sur la naissance des principautés territoriales en France (IX e – X e siècle) (Werken Uitgegeven door de Faculteit van de Wijsbegeerte en Letteren, Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, 102; Bruges: ‘De Tempel’, 1948); Yvonne Bongert, Recherches sur les cours laiques du X e au XII e siècle (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1949); Jean-François Le-marignier, ‘Les fidèles du roi de France’, in Recueil de travaux offert à M. Clovis Brunel …, 2 vols (Mémoires et documents publiés par la Société de l’École des chartes, 12; Paris: Société de l’École des chartes, 1955), II, 138–62. In his study A Rural Society in Medieval France: The Gâtine of Poitou in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Johns Hopkins University Press Studies in Historical and Political Science, ser. 82, 1; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), 72, 94, 96, George Beech invoked ‘feudalism’ in studying the nobility and drew on Marc Bloch’s La société féodale to flesh out ‘the few scraps of information’ that he had found, while cautioning that ‘the lacunae of the documents … cast a shadow of uncertainty on any assertion’, and making clear ‘that birth was a more important criterion for nobility than the ability to fight’.

William Huse Dunham, Jr., review of Bryce D. Lyon, From Fief to Indenture: The Transition from Feudal to Non-Feudal Contract in Western Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), in Speculum 33:2 (1958), 300–4, at 304. Citing the Oxford English Dictionary , Dunham dated to 1776 the appearance of the term ‘feudal System’ and to 1839 the first use of ‘feudalism’, although in fact Thomas Madox (1666–1727) used the first expression, and in 1771 John Whitaker (1735–1808) employed the word ‘feudalism’ and introduced the notion of the feudal pyramid; see my article, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, esp. 145n. 35, and 147–49, for the dates.

F.W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England: A Course of Lectures , ed. H A. L. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1st edn., 1908), 142–3; see also my essay, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 138–41.

Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I , 2nd edn., 2 vols (first pub. 1898; ed. S. F. C. Milson; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), I, 66, and see the following pages for Maitland’s continued use of the term and his suggestion that the term ‘feodo-vassalism’ might be preferable to ‘feudalism’. See also Maitland’s Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (first pub. 1897; London: Collins, 1960), esp. part 8 of Essay I (‘Domesday Book’), 189–212 (‘The Feudal Superstructure’), at 211 (writing of ‘feudalism’ and ‘vassalism’).

F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism 1066–1166. Being the Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932; 2nd edn. 1961), 214–15 (216–17 in the 2nd edn.). For the terms I mention, see ibid., (2nd edn., 1961), vii, ix, 8–9, 12–14, 16–17, 27, 33, 35–6, 145, and 223.

V.H. Galbraith, 1066 and All That: Norman Conquest Commemoration Lecture Delivered to the Society on 14th October, 1966 (Leicester: The Leicestershire Archæological and Historical Society, 1967), 3, who remarked that in 1870 Freeman questioned ‘Did the Feudal System ever exist anywhere?’ (without, however, pursuing the implications of the question, I should note) and pointed out that Richard Southern avoided ‘Feudalism, yet without affecting [his book’s] popularity’. Like the others, Galbraith himself did not repudiate the feudal terms, declaring (ibid., 5) that in Domesday Book we find ‘the introduction of the’Feudal System’ into England’. See Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results , 6 vols, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1870), I, 90–92; the preface is dated 4 January 1867 (ibid., xii).

Henry Alfred Cronne, The Reign of Stephen 1135–54. Anarchy in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 4–8, where Cronne provided useful historiographical background and commentary. Cronne advised (ibid., 8), ‘Let us rather study the characteristics of society as we find it revealed in the available sources of information, without bothering too much about the exact shade of meaning to be attached to the term “feudal” in relation to it’.

Fredric L. Cheyette, ‘Some Notations on Mr. Hollister’s “Irony”’, Journal of British Studies , 5 (1965), 1–14 (at 2 and 4); and ibid., 2 (1963), 1–26, for Hollister’s article. Cheyette commented on Hollister’s other publications and the debates they stimulated in ‘Some Notations’, 1–2, esp. notes 1–4.

Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 5. For Susan Reynolds’s attention to the relationship among word, concept, and phenomenon, see below, n. 77.

Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 2.

Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 12.

Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 13 (‘in a sense, there was not one feudalism; there were a great many’, suggesting in n. 33 that in 1962 Strayer perhaps ‘[did] not go far enough’ in positing ‘two feudalisms’); see below following n. 40, for the similar proposition that Thomas N. Bisson later made.

Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 14.

F. L. Cheyette, Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968). In Susan Reynold’s ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, in Sverre Bagge, Michael H. Gelting and Thomas Lindkvist (eds), Feudalism, New Landscapes of Debate (The Medieval Countryside, 5; Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 15–26, at 15, she wrongly wrote that Cheyette’s book was published a year after my article (and thus in 1975), rather than six years before my essay, which both Cheyette and his anthology greatly influenced. Reynolds’s essay and others in the volume were based on papers delivered at a conference on feudalism in Bergen in 2006, on which see below, at n. 108 and following.

Cheyette, Lordship and Community , vii, 1–5.

Exceptions are the essays by Édouard Perroy and William Huse Dunham, Jr., and one of the two essays contributed by Duby and one of Joshua Prawer’s, whose authors use such terms as ‘feudal régime’, ‘feudalism’, and ‘feudality’: Cheyette, Lordship and Community, 137–79, 217–39.

Cheyette, Lordship and Community , 10.

Cheyette, ‘“Feudalism”: A Memoir and an Assessment’, in Tuten and Billado (eds), Feud, Violence and Practice , 119–33, at 120, where Cheyette singled out Stephen White as his ‘welcome and learned companion’, even though in my view White’s commitment to the crusade against the constructs has been sporadic: Brown, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 135–8, and n. 121 below.

Published in the 1 February 1969 issue of The New Yorker (on 26), the cartoon appeared on the cover of the issue of The American Historical Review in which my article was published. Cf. the cartoon that Jacob Adam Katzenstein contributed to The New Yorker , the issue dated 5 and 12 August 2019 (19), which shows a crowned princess and a jongleur companion walking hand-in-hand toward an imposing castle as she beseeches him, ‘Try not to bring up feudalism with my dad tonight’.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); 2nd edn. (International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Foundations of the Unity of Science, 2, part 2; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), translated with a special foreword as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1063–4.

Cf. the comments of Richard Abels, in ‘The Historiography of a Construct: “Feudalism” and the Medieval Historian’, History Compass , 73 (2009), 1008–31, at 1022–23.

Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1066–80.

See n. 6 above.

E.A.R. Brown, ‘Customary Aids and Royal Fiscal Policy under Philip VI of Valois’, Traditio, 30 (1974),191–258, at 191n. 1, reprinted in my book, Politics and Institutions in Capetian France (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 350; Aldershot: Variorum, 1991), no. IX. I treated the issue at greater length in Customary Aids and Royal Finances in Capetian France: The Marriage Aid of Philip the Fair (Medieval Academy Books, 100; Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1992), 2–7. In a paper published four years earlier, I did not confront the issue directly but simply referred to ‘aids’ and, once, to ‘customary aids’; I twice employed the adjective ‘feudal’, to describe the ties between the kings of France and England and issues arising from those bonds: ‘Philip the Fair, Plena Potestas , and the Aide pur fille marier’ , in Representative Institutions in Theory and Practice: Historical Papers Read at Bryn Mawr College, April 1968 (Studies Presented to the International Commission for Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, 39; Brussels: Éditions de la Librairie encyclopédique, 1970), 1–27, esp. 5.

F.L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). I prize my copy, in which, at my request, Fred wrote: ‘OK, Peggy, this is what it was really like’. For Cheyette’s preliminary research and findings, see his essay ‘The Castles of the Trencavels: A Preliminary Aerial Survey’, in William C. Jordan, Bruce McNab and Teofilo F. Ruiz (eds), Order and Innovation in the Medieval West: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 255–72, 498–99, for which Cheyette had not only acquired aerial photographs of the area but also visited the sites (ibid., 498n. 1). See also his articles ‘The “Sale” of Carcassonne to the Counts of Barcelona (1067–1073) and the Rise of the Trencavels’, Speculum , 63 (1988), 826–64; and ‘Women, Poets, and Politics in Occitania’, in Theodore Evergates (ed.), Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (The Middle Ages Series; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 138–233; as well as his review of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , in Speculum , 71:4 (1996), 998–1006. Cheyette usefully discussed topics that still need study, in ‘George Duby’s Mâconnais ’, 317.

In ‘De feodale maatschappij der mideleeuwn’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden , 89 (1974), 193–211, which appeared in the same year as my article, Co Van de Kieft surveyed the many definitions of feudalism found in the work of Bloch, Duby, and others, without directly attacking the feudal constructs. In the article he emphasized as powerful determinants of medieval society the medieval economy’s agrarian character, and the Church and Christian faith. In 1968, in contrast, Van de Kieft had written, ‘La rencontre des structures économiques, sociales et politiques s’exprime avec tellement d’évidence dans les pouvoirs de l’aristocratie féodo-vassalique que l’on peut concevoir, à bon droit, une société féodale, une époque féodale dont l’histoire se déroulerait approximativement de 900 à 1200’, in ‘La périodisation de l’histoire au Moyen Âge’, in Chaïm Perelman (ed.), Les catégories en histoire (Travaux du Centre national de recherches de logique; Brussels: Éditions de l’Institut de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1969), 39–56, at 54–55. However, on the offprint of this piece that Van de Kieft sent me in 1982 he wrote beside this statement, ‘I do not hold this opinion now’. In Fiefs and Vassals , 1, Susan Reynolds noted that Van de Kieft and I ‘pointed out independently in 1974 [that] feudalism can mean a lot of different things’. I am grateful to Mayke de Jong, a student of Van de Kieft, for her counsel concerning his views. See n. 77 below.

Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1065.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), esp. 19–70, 415; and, for ‘cognitive ease’ and ‘cognitive strain’, ibid., 59–70, 212. See also Gary Marcus and Annie Duke, ‘The Problem with Believing What We’re Told’, Wall Street Journal (31 August–1 September 2019), C5. I explored remarks on this subject by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Playfair (1748–1819) in ‘ Veritas à la cour de Philippe le Bel de France: Pierre Dubois, Guillaume de Nogaret et Marguerite Porete’, in Jean-Philippe Genet (ed.), La vérité. Vérité et crédibilité: construire la vérité dans le système de communication de l’Occident (XIII e –XVII e siècle). Actes de la conférence organisée à Rome en 2012 par SAS en collaboration avec l’École française de Rome (Collection de l’École française de Rome, 485/2; Histoire ancienne et médiévale, 128/2; Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300–1640), 2; Paris/Rome; Publications de la Sorbonne/ École Française de Rome, 2015), 425–45, at 442–43; see also ibid., 433.

Cf. Kahneman’s comments on hedgehogs and foxes, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 218–20, with reference to the findings of Philip E. Tetlock.

Isaiah Berlin’s book The Hedgehog and the Fox, has critically affected my thinking about concepts and theories, and a host of other topics. See my articles, ‘Jürgen Habermas, Philippe le Bel, et l’espace public’, in Patrick Boucheron and Nicolas Offenstadt (eds), L’espace public au Moyen Âge. Débats autour de Jürgen Habermas (Le Nœud Gordien; Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011),193–203, at 193–94; and ‘The French Royal Funeral Ceremony and the King’s Two Bodies: Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Ralph E. Giesey, and the Construction of a Paradigm’, Micrologus, 22 (Le Corps du Prince) (2014), 105–37, at 108–9.

See, e.g., Guerreau, ‘Fief, féodalité, féodalisme’, 152–53; and Peter Coss, ‘From Feudalism to Bastard Feudalism’, in Natalie Fryde, Pierre Monnet, and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus; Présence du féodalisme et présent de la féodalité; The Presence of Feudalism (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, 173; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 79–108, at 79.

T. Bisson, ‘The Problem of Feudal Monarchy: Aragon, Catalonia, and France’, Speculum , 533 (1978), 460–78, at 461.

T. Bisson, ‘ Pro feodalitatibus’ , a paper presented at the Fourteenth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University on 4 May 1979.

Bisson, ‘ Pro feodalitatibus ’; for a variety of feudalisms, see above at n. 18.

Bisson, ‘ Pro feodalitatibus’ .

In Brown, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 137n. 7, I quoted excerpts from Bisson’s description of the National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, ‘Medieval European Feudalism’, given at the University of California at Berkeley, June 23–August 15, 1986; I am grateful to him for sending me a copy of the description, in which he proposed that the concept filled ‘a need particularly associated with explanatory generalizing and teaching’—while not being ‘a requirement for research’. In a letter dated 24 March 1986 he commented, ‘I no longer believe the conceptual problem worth discussing until people like you and me work directly with the sources for vassalage and laws of fiefs’.

Cf. Stenton’s comment ( First Century, 2nd ed., 216), ‘But unless the term [feudalism] is to lose all significance, it should at least be reserved for some definite form of social order’.

Remarks made by Philippe Contamine at the inauguration of the Journée d’étude ‘Kings like semi-gods: Autour des travaux d’Elizabeth A.R. Brown’, at Université de Paris—La Sorbonne, Centre Roland-Mousnier, 15 June 2013.

The papers were published in Structures féodales et féodalisme dans l’Occident méditerranéen (X e –XIII e siècles). Bilan et perspectives de recherches. Colloque international organisé par le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et l’École française de Rome (Rome, 10–13 octobre 1978) (Collection de l’École française de Rome, 44; Rome: École française de Rome, 1980), a volume of 800 pages.

Long after the article was published it was sometimes mentioned in connection with Reynolds’s book Fiefs and Vassals; see Élisabeth Magnou-Nortier, ‘La féodalité en crise. Propos sur “Fiefs and Vassals” de Susan Reynolds’, Revue historique, 2962 (600) (1996), 253–348, at 254–55; and also Eric Bournazel and Jean-Pierre Poly, ‘Introduction générale’, in Eric Bournazel and Jean-Pierre Poly (eds), Les féodalités (Histoire générale des systèmes politiques; Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), 3–12, at 6. A translation of my article by Réjean Girard, ‘La tyrannie d’un construct: la féodalité et les historiens de l’Europe médiévale’, will appear in a collection of essays edited by Richard M. Pollard. In the introduction to his translation, which he prepared in consultation with Professor Pollard at the Université de Québec à Montréal, M. Girard noted the absence of references to the article in popular French manuals on medieval history, ‘bien que les problèmes reliés à la définition et à la généralisation du concept y soient évoqués’.

G. Bois, Crise du féodalisme : économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du 14 e siècle au milieu du 16 e siècle (Cahiers de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 202; Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques/Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1976), with a 2nd edn. in 1981; translated into English in 1984 as The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550 (Past and Present Publications; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; and Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1984).

G. Duby, Les trois ordres ou l’imaginaire du féodalisme (Bibliothèque des histoires; Paris: Gallimard, 1978); translated by Arthur Goldhammer as The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. 183–205 (section III, ‘La révolution féodale’); see the translation, The Three Orders, 147–66. In this section, Duby declared of the new mode of production whose appearance he hypothesized (ibid., 189; trans. 153), ‘Mieux vaut ne pas l’appeler féodal—le fief n’a rien a voir ici—mais seigneurial’, thus indicating the preferability of ‘lordship’ to ‘feudalism’ to characterize the essence of eleventh-century society.

Georges Duby, ‘Vers la féodalité en Aquitaine au onzième siècle’, a lecture presented at Columbia University on 15 April 1986, and a seminar on Andreas Capellanus given at New York University on 18 April 1986. See Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘Georges Duby and the Three Orders’, Viator , 17 (1986), 51–62, esp. n. 3; and Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1073–74.

Published by Gallimard in Paris in 1996 in the series Quarto, with an introduction by Jacques Delarun; Gallimard republished the volume in 1999, in the series Le Grand Livre du Mois. In 2002 another compendium of Duby’s writings entitled Qu’est-ce que la société féodale? was published by Flammarion in Paris, in the series Mille & Une Pages, with introductions by Dominique Iogna-Prat and Mirna Velcic-Canivez. See Theodore Evergates, ‘The Feudal Imaginary of Georges Duby’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 641–60, at 653.

J.-P. Poly and É. Bournazel, La mutation féodale. X e –XII e siècle (Nouvelle Clio, 16; Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 1980, and 2nd ed., 1991). On Poly’s work on Provence, see n. 57 below. Duby wrote the preface to Guy Bois’s book, La mutation de l’an mil : Lournand, village mâconnais, de l’Antiquité au féodalisme (Nouvelles études historiques; Paris: Fayard, 1989).

In R. Fossier (ed.), Le Moyen Age , 3 vols (Paris: Armand Colin, 1982–3), II ( L’éveil de l’Europe, 950–1250 , 1982), 19–78, esp. 30, 38, 54–57, 60.

R. Fossier (ed.), Histoire de la Picardie (Toulouse: Privat, 1974), esp. R. Fossier, ‘La société picarde au Moyen Age’, ibid., 135–76, at 159–67. See R. Fossier, La terre et les hommes en Picardie jusqu’à la fin du XIII e siècle , 2 vols (Publications de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Paris, série Recherches, 48–49; Paris and Louvain: B. Nauwelaerts, 1968); a new edition was published in 1987 in Amiens (Centre régional de documentation pédagogique).

D. Barthélemy, Les deux âges de la seigneurie banale. Pouvoir et société dans la terre des Sires de Coucy (milieu XI e –milieu XIII e siècle) (Publications de la Sorbonne, Université de Paris IV, Série Histoire ancienne et médiévale, 12; Paris, 1984), 13–16, 34–42 (sources), 108–9, 117 (‘hiérarchie féodale’), 157 (courts), 158 (esp. n. 63) (allod, fief, and manse); cf. ibid., 374–75 (on arbitration), and 492 (the dangers of projecting onto the past ‘l’image d’une féodalité “classique”’).

T. Venckeleer’s article appeared in Quirinus Ignatius Maria Mok, Ina Spiele, Paul E.R. Verhuyck (eds), Mélanges de linguistique, de littérature et de philologie médiévales , offerts à J. R. Smeets (Leiden: Comité de rédaction, 1982), 303–16; Susan Reynolds referred to it in ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 20n. 8, and later publications. Felice Lifshitz proposed that in Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Gesta Normannorum , the word vassalus , used once, means ‘fighter’ and has no other, more technical, connotations: ‘Translating “Feudal” Vocabulary: Dudo of St. Quentin’, first published in The Haskins Society Journal: Studies in Medieval History, 9 (2001), 39–56, reprinted in her Writing Normandy: Stories of Saints and Rulers (Variorum Collected Studies, 1095; London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 206–24, at 213; on Dudo (fl. late tenth century), see ibid., 188 (a notice Lifshitz first published in 1998).

J.-P. Poly, La société féodale en Provence du X e au XII e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1973). Three years later Poly brought out La Provence et la société féodale (879–1155). Contribution à l’étude des structures dites féodales dans le Midi (Collection ‘Études’; Paris: Bordas, 1976), but his approach was fundamentally similar despite his introduction of the modifier ‘dites’ into the phrase ‘structures féodales’.

G. Giordanengo, Le droit féodal dans les pays de droit écrit : l’exemple de la Provence et du Dauphiné , XII e -début XIV e siècle (Bibliothèques des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1 ère sér., 266; Rome: École française de Rome, 1988).

Hélène Débax received her doctorate in 1997 for a thesis entitled Structures féodales dans le Languedoc des Trencavel (XI e -XII e s.) , for which see H. Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (Espagne , Italie et sud de la France, X e -XIII e s.). Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie (Collection “Méridiennes”; Toulouse: CNRS, Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1999), 441.

Theodore Evergates, Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes under the Counts of Champagne, 1152–1284 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), esp. 136–53.

Evergates, Feudal Society , 153, 251 n.49.

T. Evergates, review of John Critchley, Feudalism (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1978), in American Historical Review , 84:2 (1979), 418. Ending his review, Evergates declared ‘It is not clear what is achieved by cramming bits and pieces of information on hundreds of societies widely scattered in time and place into the worn mold of feudalism’.

E.Z. Tabuteau, ‘Ownership and Tenure in Eleventh-Century Normandy’, American Journal of Legal History , 21:2 (1977), 97–124; E.Z. Tabuteau, ‘Definitions of Feudal Military Obligations in Eleventh-Century Normandy’, in Morris S. Arnold, Sally A. Scully, and Stephen D. White (eds), On the Laws and Customs of England: Essays in Honor of Samuel E. Thorne (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in Association with the American Society for Legal History, 1981), 18–59, at 19; E.Z. Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 3; see also the review of the volume by R.C. van Caenegem, in American Journal of Legal History , 26 (1982), 391–93, at 392.

Tabuteau, Transfers of Property , 2–3 and passim; Tabuteau, ‘Definitions of Feudal Military Obligations’, 59.

Tabuteau, Transfers of Property , 4–6; Tabuteau, ‘Definitions of Feudal Military Obligations’, 41, 59; see also van Caenegem’s review, 392, and above, at n. 11, for Frank Murray Stenton’s work.

T. Bisson, review of Tabuteau, Transfers of Property , Speculum , 66:3 (1991), 698–700, at 699.

S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London: Butterworths, 1969); S.F.C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism. The Maitland Lectures Given in 1972 (Cambridge Studies in English Legal History; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See Robert C. Palmer’s review of Milsom’s Legal Framework , ‘The Feudal Framework of English Law’, Michigan Law Review , 79:5 (1981), 1130–64. For additional bibliography, see Stephen D. White, ‘Inheritances and Legal Arguments in Western France, 1050–1150’, Traditio , 43 (1987), 55–103, at 57n. 8.

White, ‘Inheritances’, 96.

White, ‘Inheritances’, 96–103, esp. 96.

White, ‘Inheritances’, passim, esp. 64–70. In another study of the same region White showed the importance of ecclesiastical mediation in resolving feuds and demonstrated that the absence of established governmental institutions did not result in unbridled violence, although warfare made peasants ‘more and more vulnerable to pressure exerted by lords’: Stephen D. White, ‘Feuding and Peace-Making in the Touraine around the Year 1100’, Traditio , 42 (1986), 195–263, esp. 261 and n. 256.

The volume edited by Cantor was published by Viking in New York in 1999. Although an earlier article on ‘feudalism’ in Wikipedia gave the classic definitions of the term while referring readers for further information to the articles I wrote for these reference works, the version posted on 26 December 2020 featured my article and Susan Reynolds’s book and cited my entry in the Encyclopædia Britannica Online .

D. Corner, review in American Journal of Legal History, 34 (1990), 98–99.

From the endorsement that Donahue wrote, which appeared on the cover of Tabuteau’s book.

S. Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, with a corrected edn., 1982); S. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, with a 2nd edn. in 1997).

In precisely what sense(s) I was Reynolds’s ‘forerunner’ is an involved question. See Philippe Buc, ‘What Is Order? In the Aftermath of the “Feudal Transformation” Debates’, Francia, 46 (2019), 281–300, at 282. In ‘Historiography of a Construct’, 1021, Abels described Reynolds as ‘further developing’ my criticisms of the feudal constructs. In ‘Feudalism’, International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences , 2nd edn., ed. James D. Wright, vol. 9 (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 111–16, at 114, Levi Roach described me as opposing all models of feudalism (and particularly its use ‘as a socioeconomic model’) and Reynolds as combatting the ‘legal-tenurial’ model. He distinguished Reynolds’s attack as ‘more fundamental’ than mine, and he credited her with presenting ‘feudalism tout court [as] an Early Modern invention’; cf. Brown, ‘Tyranny’, 1063–65, and also Brown, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 138–47.

In ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 15, Reynolds wrote that we planned a book ‘about the problem of feudalism’ and that I was interested in taking ‘a wide look at the ideas behind the word feudalism’ , whereas I recollect wanting to collaborate on a series of essays featuring sources related to the development of property-holding and their proper interpretation, and the ways in which different regions evolved from the tenth century onwards. Thus, I did not favour placing particular emphasis on ‘fiefs’ and ‘vassals’ but thought that words like feodum and vassus should be examined with other similar terms in the specific documentary contexts in which they appeared.

Like Cheyette, Reynolds has insisted that words, concepts, and phenomena must be meticulously distinguished: see Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 5, and Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 12–14, esp. n. 33, where she confessed to ‘painstakingly reinvent[ing] the wheel’, citing John Lyons, Semantics , 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). In 2009 she presented and analyzed the diagram of Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards illustrating the relationship of word to concept (or notion), and phenomenon, which Lyons treated in Semantics, I, 96–98: Reynolds, ‘The Use of Feudalism in Comparative History’, first published in Benjamin Z. Kedar (ed.), Explorations in Comparative History (Publication of the Institute for Advanced Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2009), 191–207, at 194–97, reprinted in S. Reynolds, The Middle Ages without Feudalism. Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 1019; Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), no. VI. In 2011 she also focussed on this issue, in ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 17–18 (first delivered in 2006). In ‘Use of Feudalism’, 192, she again compared my work to that of Co Van de Kieft (see n. 33 above).

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 14, but cf. 17–47, esp. 47 (‘having concluded that vassalage is too vacuous a concept to be useful, I shall concentrate my attention primarily on fiefs, which raise much more substantial issues’). Geoffrey Koziol emphasized to me on 28 December 2020 the abundant references to oaths and acts of commendation and alliance in early acts, which merit study and analysis.

In his introduction to Lordship and Community , 5, Cheyette noted that fiefs and vassalage had ‘been associated with the term “feudalism”’ since the construct’s invention, and he warned that ‘if a historian approaches medieval society primarily in terms of fief and vassalage … [he] must assume, explicitly or implicitly, that fief-holding and vassalage were in fact of primary importance in medieval society, indeed, that they determined its nature’. Cheyette himself compellingly questioned whether ‘lordship and vassalage did form the primary social tie among the class of rulers of late eleventh-century England’ (cf. ibid., 9). In contrast, as has been seen, in ‘Problem of Feudal Monarchy’, 461, Bisson argued the central importance for medieval historians of lordship, vassalage, and the fief. Reynolds, in ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 15, expressed her debt to Cheyette for ‘the idea of approaching the subject [of feudalism] … through an investigation of the medieval evidence about fiefs and vassalage, which medievalists have long taken as key institutions of what most of them characterize as feudalism’. She herself indeed believed that ‘[n]either the great extension of knowledge nor the elaboration of interpretations in the past two centuries seem to have led to serious questioning of the fundamental importance of fief-holding and vassalage’ (ibid., 16). More recently, in 2018, Reynolds herself wrote that the ‘focus on relations between lords and those whom historians call their vassals has distracted attention from so much else in medieval societies’: S. Reynolds, ‘Still Fussing about Feudalism’, in Ross Balzaretti, Julia Barrow, and Patricia Skinner (eds), Italy and Early Medieval Europe: Papers for Chris Wickham (The Past & Present Book Series; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 87–94, at 94.

See, e.g., Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 322. The ‘feudal’ perspective vitiated her attempts to establish the precise nature and function of the so-called fiefs de reprise recorded in the French Midi by leading her to assume that they were equivalent to what Italian historians term feudi oblati (in German Lehnsauftragung ), all of which she presented as allodial lands definitively ‘converted’ into fiefs, as later legal scholars described them: ibid., the various pages referred to in her index, s.v., fiefs de reprise, feudi oblati , Lehnsauftragung , and especially 50, 230, 233, 390. In 1687, at the University of Leipzig, Johann Friedrich Egger defined the feudum oblatum as ‘feudum, quo dominus de re antea ipsi a vasallo sub conditione investiendi tradita, vasallum investit’: De feudis oblatis, Von Aufgetragenen Lehen … (Leipzig: Andr. Mart. Schedius, 1715), nos. 46–47. Charles-Edmond Perrin gave examples of twelfth-century acts that distinguished German from Italian and French customs governing such fiefs: 111 ( mos theutonicus , Karlenses custume , ius et consuetudo teutonice [ romanie ] terre ): La société féodale allemande et ses institutions du X e au XII e siècles , 4 parts (Les cours de Sorbonne, Histoire du Moyen Âge; Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1956–7), II, 111. Cheyette commented on fiefs de reprise in his review of Reynolds’s book, in Speculum, 71:4, 1003–4 (‘she does not herself escape the analytical categories of rights and obligations associated with property’ in considering ‘documents from Montpellier’ which reveal ‘that scribal words do not always correspond one-to-one with social processes’). Cheyette elaborated on these land transfers and their ceremonial function in twelfth-century Occitania, first (in 1999) in ‘On the fief de reprise’ , in Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal , 319–24 (at 324, ‘a ritual of succession … fix[ing] in the landscape the paired and inseparable values of fidelity and good lordship’), and then (in 2001) in Ermengard , 220–32.

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 75–180, 258–322 (France, 168 pp.), 181–257 (Italy, 76 pp.), 323–95 (England, 72 pp.), 396–474 (Germany, 78 pp.). As to Spain, the Spanish Jesuit Luís de Molina (1535–1600) declared ‘quamuis frequens sit vsus feudorum in Germania, in Gallia, & in Italia, nullus, aut ferè nullus, est vsus eorum in Hispaniis’, although he believed ‘Apud Iaponenses nil videri esse frequentiùs, quàm feuda’: De iustitia , Tomus secundus, De contractibus (Mainz: Balthasar Lippius, sumptibus Arnoldi Mylii, 1602), 1055 (disp. 485). See, however, Bisson, ‘The Problem of Feudal Monarchy’, 463–70. In ‘Feudalism in Twelfth-Century Catalonia’, in the special issue on ‘Structures féodales et féodalisme’, Publications de l'École Française de Rome, 44 (1980), 173–92, Bisson concluded that Catalonia ‘could be called a “feudal monarchy” … only in a severely qualified sense’, involving ‘diffusion and diversity’, and that it was characterized ‘by a feudalism distinctively her own’. The paper was reprinted in Bisson, Medieval France and her Pyrenean Neighbors: Studies in Early Institutional History (Studies Presented to the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, 70; London: Hambledon Press, 1989), 153–78, no. 7. For Spain, see below, at and following n. 110; see also the comments of Steffen Patzold, Das Lehnswesen (Beck’sche Reihe, Wissen; Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012), 58–63. Fuller consideration of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus might have affected Reynolds’s conclusions: Abels, ‘Historiography of a Construct’, 1023–4, 1028n. 52, giving bibliography. Peter W. Edbury has cautioned that ‘the absence of evidence … is not evidence that … features did not exist’ although he has also emphasized that ‘Frankish society in the twelfth century was not tidy; nor was it schematized’, and, citing Joshua Prawer, has stressed that ‘the Frankish conquest of the Holy Land at the start of the twelfth century did not entail the importation of a fully-fledged “feudal system” from the West’. See Peter W. Edbury, ‘Fiefs, vassaux et service militaire dans le royaume latin de Jérusalem’, in Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (eds), Le partage du monde. Échanges et colonisation dans la Méditerranée médiévale (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998), 141–50, at 142–5, reprinted in Edbury, Law and History in the Latin East (Variorum Collected Studies Series, 1048; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), no. I; and ‘Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, from the Twelfth Century to the Thirteenth’, Crusades, 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, 2002), 49–62, at 50, 52–53, reprinted in his Law and History in the Latin East , no. II.

In Fiefs and Vassals , 115–23, Reynolds enumerated problems she confronted in developing her hypotheses: the hazard of ‘generalization about property rights’ when there was ‘probably … a great deal of local variation’; the ‘danger of teleology’; the difficulty of establishing the meaning(s) of words used to designate property holdings, including the ‘uncertain’ relationship between words and phenomena. For her ideas and methodology, see particularly ibid., 166, 179–80, 259.

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 256–59, 270–8, 288, 320. In her conclusion, as earlier in her book, Reynolds privileged governmental over legal activity to explain systematization of property holding: Fiefs and Vassals , 74, 478–79 (‘increasingly bureaucratic government and expert law’), 482 (‘the development of the new sort of government and law’); see, however, 180, 257, 278, and also 235–40 and 257 (Frederick Barbarossa’s ‘rather patchy’ development of feudal administrative and governmental devices). In 2012 she laid greater emphasis on the role of ‘academic lawyers’: see the ‘Introduction’ to The Middle Ages without Feudalism , ix–xv, at xiii. See too her earlier discussion of professional law and lawyers in ‘Afterthoughts on Fiefs and Vassals’ , first published in Haskins Society Journal , 9 (2001, for 1997), 1–15, at 13–14, reprinted in The Middle Ages without Feudalism , no. I.

C.-E. Petit-Dutaillis, La monarchie féodale en France et en Angleterre , X e –XIII e siècle (L’Évolution de l’Humanité, Synthèse collective, 41; 2 ème Section [ La reconstitution du pouvoir monarchique ]; Paris, La renaissance du livre, 1933), where, at 2–3, he underscored the role of ‘the jurists’, whom he presented as ‘co-ordinat[ing] and systematis[ing] the practices of the administration’; see also ibid., 223, 246–47, 336–47 (‘Le roi seigneur supérieur’), and the conclusion, 424–27, which stressed the importance of Roman law in promoting the growth of monarchical power without insisting on ‘feudal’ elements; tr. as The Feudal Monarchy in France and England from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Century , trans. E. D. Hunt (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1936), 2, 200, 220, 301–10, and 376–9. In relation to Philip Augustus, and royal and comital administrative record-keeping, see: Josette Metman, ‘Les inféodations royales d’après le “Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste”’, in Robert-Henri Bautier (ed.), La France de Philippe Auguste: le temps des mutations. Actes du Colloque international organisé par le C.N.R.S. (Paris, 29 septembre–4 octobre 1980) (Colloques internationaux du CNRS, 602; Paris, Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1982), 503–17, at 517; John F. Benton, ‘Written Records and the Development of Systematic Feudal Relations’, in John F. Benton, Culture, Power and Personality in Medieval France , ed. Thomas N. Bisson (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 275–90 (a paper presented at a conference at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Toronto, 6–7 November 1981); Bisson, ‘Problem of Feudal Monarchy’, 474, and also 461; John W. Baldwin and C. Warren Hollister, ‘The Rise of Administrative Kingship: Henry I and Philip Augustus’, American Historical Review, 83:4 (October 1978), 867–905, at 881, 895–96, 901, 903–4; John W. Baldwin, Knights, Lords, and Ladies: In Search of Aristocrats in the Paris Region, 1180–1220 (The Middle Ages Series: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2019), 121, the conclusion of a chapter examining royal registers and surveys (ibid., 101–21).

Bisson, ‘Problem of Feudal Monarchy’, 477, who also wrote of the ‘feudalizing’ of rural settlements, the ‘de-feudalizing of royal administration’, and the ‘very retarded [feudalizing]’ in Picardy (commenting on the work of Robert Fossier) (ibid., 466, 474). Bisson offered useful comments on the historiography of the notion and the phrase, ibid., 461–62.

In ‘The Chancery Archives of the Counts of Champagne: Codicology and History of the Cartulary-Registers’, Viator, 16 (1985), 159–79, Theodore Evergates argued (ibid., 178) that the volumes ‘were primarily memorial books produced during moments of institutional insecurity’, rather than volumes compiled for administrative purposes. See also Evergates’s introduction to his edition, Littere Baronum: The Earliest Cartulary of the Counts of Champagne (Medieval Academy Books, 107; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 3–22. See also Constance Brittain Bouchard, Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1198 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 37–43; and the introduction and conclusion by Patrick Geary and Michel Parisse to Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse (eds), Les cartulaires. Actes de la Table ronde organisée par l’École nationale des chartes et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S. (Paris, 5–7 décembre 1991) (Mémoires et documents de l’École des chartes, 39; Paris: École des chartes, 1993), 13–24 (Geary, ‘Entre gestion et gesta ’), 503–11 (Parisse, ‘Conclusion’). Also important are essays in Jean-François Nieus (ed.), Le vassal, le fief et l'écrit : pratiques d'écriture et enjeux documentaires dans le champ de la féodalité (XI e –XV e s.). Actes de la journée d'étude organisée à Louvain-la-Neuve le 15 avril 2005 (Textes, Études, Congrès, 23; Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique de Louvain, 2007), especially those by Nieus, Dirk Heirbaut (esp. at 98), and Karl-Heinz Spiess (esp. at 160 and 167).

Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 215–31, where she presented a number of hypotheses; see particularly 225. The work of Gérard Giordanengo on the feudists of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries casts considerable doubt on the general (and practical) importance of their writings and debates, and on the influence they may have exercised (directly or indirectly) on rulers and their officials: Gérard Giordanengo, ‘La littérature juridique féodale’, in Nieus (ed.), Le vassal, le fief et l’écrit , 11–34. See as well the chapter ‘Les féodalités italiennes’, which Giordanengo contributed to Bournazel and Poly (eds), Les féodalites , 211–62, where, adopting a feudal perspective in deference to the book’s orientation, he demonstrated the diversity of institutions in Italy and the differences among Italian feudists.

Reynolds, ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 25–26.

Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, The Middle Ages Without Feudalism , ix–xv, at xiv.

Reynolds, ‘Still Fussing about Feudalism’, 94.

In ‘Fiefs and Vassals after Twelve Years’, 15–16, Reynolds acknowledged that the book ‘had a relatively narrow scope’ and ‘became increasingly negative, as, to my increasing surprise, I gradually found how scarce was the medieval evidence, especially before the thirteenth century, for the concepts or phenomena that modern medievalists characterize as noble fief-holding and vassalage’.

In her review of Reynolds’s book, almost a hundred pages long, Magnou-Nortier, ‘La féodalité en crise. Propos sur “Fiefs and Vassals” de Susan Reynolds’, focussed on the meanings of specific Latin and vernacular terms. In 1998, Jim Bradbury cited Reynolds’s book in concluding that ‘at about the time of Philip Augustus something akin to feudalism was becoming visible’ and that ‘Philip and his government [probably] contributed to this development’: Philip Augustus, King of France 1180–1223 (London: Longman, 1998), 227–30 (esp. 228 and 229n. 30, referring to Reynolds’ book), 234. Reynolds’ arguments persuaded Dirk Heirbaut of the necessity of continuing to study ‘feudalism’ in order to produce different and better constructs to replace those she attacked: Heirbaut, ‘Dispute Resolution. Feudalism’, available on Heirbaut’s website, with a translation into German forthcoming (in D. von Mayenburg et al. (eds), Geschichte der Konfliktlösung in Europa. Ein Handbuch ); and Dirk Heirbaut, ‘The Quest for the Sources of a Non-Bureaucratic Feudalism: Flemish Feudalism during the High Middle Ages (1000–1300)’, in Nieus (ed.), Le vassal, le fief et l'écrit, 97–122, at 122. In his own work Heirbaut distinguishes between ‘real’ and ‘personal’ feudalism; see Heirbaut, ‘Flanders: A Pioneer of State-Oriented Feudalism? Feudalism as an Instrument of Comital Power in Flanders during the High Middle Ages (1000–1300)’, in Anthony Musson (ed.), Expectations of the Law in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge and Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 23–34, at 24.

C.M. Bouchard, “Strong of Body, Brave and Noble”: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 35–46, esp. 35, 37.

Benton, ‘Written Records and the Development of Systematic Feudal Relations’, 275n. 1.

F.L. Cheyette, ‘Some Reflections on Violence, Reconciliation, and the Feudal Revolution’, in Warren Brown and Piotr Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe. Changing Perspectives on Society and Culture (Aldershot, Hants., and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2003), 243–64, at 245–46 and 258. Cheyette noted that proponents of the mutational, transformational approaches had difficulty ‘accommodat[ing] the discoveries of detailed research in the sources’ (ibid., 247). In Cheyette, ‘George Duby’s Mâconnais ’, 303, he declared himself unable to discern traces of a ‘crisis of the year 1000’ or a ‘feudal revolution’ in documents from the Midi. Warren Brown and Piotr Górecki provide a useful survey of the debates over feudal revolution and mutation, in their essay, ‘What Conflict Means: The Making of Medieval Conflict Studies in the United States, 1970–2000’, in Brown and Górecki (eds), Conflict in Medieval Europe , 1–35, at 27–33; see also Stephen D. White, ‘Tenth-Century Courts at Mâcon and the Perils of Structuralist History: Re-reading Burgundian Judicial Institutions’, in ibid., 37–68, at 37–38nn. 2 and 3; Patrick Boucheron, ‘An mil et féodalisme’, in Christian Delacroix, François Dosse, Patrick Garcia, and Nicolas Offenstadt (eds), Historiographies. Concepts et débats , 2 vols (Folio Histoire; Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 952–66, on which see Buc, ‘What is Order? In the Aftermath of the “Feudal Transformation” Debates’, 289–94.

See, e.g., Miriam Pawel, ‘California Calls It “Feudalism”’, New York Times (14 September 2019), A27; and David Brooks, ‘The Case for New Optimism’, New York Times (22 January 2021), A23.

J.B. Collins, From Tribes to Nation: The Making of France 500–1799 (Toronto: Wadsworth: 2002), iii.

From Tribes to Nation , v; see also J.B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (New Approaches to European History; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–6.

Collins, From Tribes to Nation, 35–85, esp. 35, 52–53 (‘The Birth of Feudalism’); the next chapter ‘The Origins of France and of Western Civilization, 1095–1270’, ibid., 87–135, features the Church, towns, and culture (ibid., 35).

Collins, From Tribes to Nation , 56–57. Collins wrestled elsewhere with the problems associated with the construct: ibid., 36, 40–43, 57. In his introduction (ibid., vi) he stressed his desire ‘to inquire about lived life’, and ‘to offer readers a small taste of human life in France’.

Collins, From Tribes to Nation , 53–59.

Ina Caro, The Road from the Past: Traveling through History in France (A Harvest Book; Harcourt Brace, 1994); in an endorsement on the cover Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., praised the book as ‘[t]horoughly delightful, the essential traveling companion’.

Caro, Road from the Past , 5.

Caro, Road from the Past , 117.

Ina Caro, Paris to the Past. Traveling through French History by Train (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 30, 34.

William W. Kibler and Grover A. Zinn (eds), Medieval France: An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Garland, 1995). I contributed articles on Philip IV the Fair and his sons Louis X and Philip V. See also Steffen Patzold, Das Lehnswesen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2012), comments at 121, and notably the succinct definition of the feudal ‘model’ he gives at 9–12, and the simplified graphic representation he presented on the book’s final page at 129. With Reynolds, Patzold figures prominently in the nine essays, all focussed on the concept of feudalism rather than medieval society and politics, in Simon Growth (ed.), Der geschichtliche Ort der historischen Forschung. Das 20. Jahrhundert, das Lehnswesen und der Feudalismus (Normative Orders, 28; Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2020).

Poly and Bournazel, ‘Conclusion générale’, in Poly and Bournazel (eds), Les féodalités, 751–74, at 753–54.

See n. 20 above. Sverre Bagge, Michael H. Gelting, and Thomas Lindkvist, the editors of the conference volume, analyzed the standpoints of the different contributors, in their ‘Introduction’, Feudalism, New Landscapes of Debate , 1–13; see also my review of the book, available online in The Medieval Review ‘12.06.10, Bagge, Feudalism’. For the essay that Fredric Cheyette wrote for the conference but published apart, in 2010, see n. 24 above.

‘Introduction’ to Bagge, Gelting, and Lindkvist (eds), Feudalism, New Landscapes of Debate , 5, 13.

A.J. Kosto, ‘What about Spain? Iberia in the Historiography of Medieval European Feudalism’, in Bagge, Gelting, and Lindkvist (eds), Feudalism, New Landscapes of Debate , 135–58, at 157.

Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Peninsula Ibérica (Crítica /Historia, 4; Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1978).

I am grateful to Charles West for sharing his paper with me in advance of publication.

B. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 4th edn., 2014), 131. In 1998, Barbara Rosenwein and Lester K. Little edited Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings (Malden: Blackwell, 1998). In a section entitled “Feudalism and its Alternatives” (ibid., 105–210), they included my article together with selections from descriptive and analytical works by a number of authors including Dominique Barthélemy and Fredric Cheyette.

Christoph Bramann, Das ‘Lehnswesen’ im Geschichtsschulbuch. Bindungsadministrative und fachwissenschaftliche Einflussfaktoren auf die Darstellungen zum Lehnswesen in hessischen Geschichtsschubüchern für das Gymnasium zwischen 1945 und 2014 (Georg Eckert Institute: Beiträge 2017, urn:nbn:de.0220-2017-0228), https://repository.gei.de/handle/11428/271 [1 February 2021], demonstrates how little effect scholarly debate about and research on feudalism has had on medieval history textbooks in Hesse. I thank Dr. Bramann for sharing with me his ideas about his research.

See the work surveyed by Buc, ‘What is Order? In the Aftermath of the “Feudal Transformation” Debates’, esp., 281–82, 286–88, 291–92, 296.

See my essay, ‘On 1500’, in Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (eds), The Medieval World (London: Routledge, 2001), 691–710, at 694–98; in the 2nd edn., ed. Peter Linehan, Janet L. Nelson, and Marios Costambeys (London: Routledge, 2018), 811–30, at 814–18. For evidence supporting my hypotheses, see Giordanengo, ‘La littérature juridique féodale’, 26–27; and also Antheun Janse, ‘Feudal Registration and the Study of Nobility: The Burgundian Registers of 1475’, in Nieus (ed.), Le vassal, le fief et l’écrit, 173–87; Henri Sée, ‘La portée du régime seigneurial au XVIII e siècle’, Revue d’histoire médiévale et contemporaine , 103 (1908), 173–91; Albert Soboul, ‘La Révolution française et la “féodalité”. Notes sur le prélèvement féodal’, Revue historique, 2401 (1968), 33–56; and James Lowth Goldsmith, Les Salers et les d’Escorailles, seigneurs de Haute Auvergne, 1500–1789, trans. Jacques Buttin (Publications de l’Institut d’Études du Massif Central, 25; Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, Université de Clermont-Ferrand II; Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’Études du Massif Central, 1984), esp. 218.

Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours . See above, notes 32 and 80.

H. Débax, ‘L’aristocratie languedocienne et la société féodale: le témoignage des sources (Midi de la France: XI e et XII e siècles)’, in Bagge, Gelting, and Lindkvist (eds), Feudalism, New Landscapes of Debate , 77–100, at 78 (‘une société qui n’est conforme ni au modèle de Ganshof, ni au modèle des feudistes’).

H. Débax, La féodalité languedocienne. XI e –XII e siècles. Serments , hommages et fiefs dans le Languedoc des Trencavel (Tempus; Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail 2003), in which the last chapter demonstrates in detail the striking assortment of mechanisms the Trencavel lords used to secure their power (ibid., 269–325).

H. Débax, La seigneurie collective. Pairs, pariers , paratge: les coseigneurs du XI e au XIII e siècle (Collection ‘Histoire’: Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2012), esp. 343–429; see the review by Theodore Evergates, in American Historical Review 118:5 (2013), 1581.

F. Lifshitz, ‘Translating “Feudal” Vocabulary’, in Lifshitz, Writing Normandy , 206–24, esp. 206–7, 210–11, 213, 217 (‘feudo-vassalic relations, as traditionally conceived, fail to help us understand Dudo’s sociopolitical vocabulary’); see also F. Lifshitz, ‘Viking Normandy: Dudo of St. Quentin’s Gesta Normannorum ’ (her introduction to her online translation of the Gesta Normannorum , written in 1996 and revised in 2008), in Lifshitz, Writing Normandy , 181–87, at 186–87; and F. Lifshitz, ‘Still Useless After All These Years: The Concept of “Hagiography” in the Twenty-First Century’, in Lifshitz, Writing Normandy , 26–45, at 29n. 10. On 19 July 2019, Stephen D. White promised in an email to tell me when next ‘we have a chance to talk about it face to face’ his reasons for featuring the ‘fief’ in the title of a paper on Raoul de Cambrai despite the fact that the word does not appear in the poem itself, where ‘terre’ is often found. See White, ‘The Discourse of Inheritance in Twelfth-Century France: Alternative Models of the Fief in “Raoul de Cambrai”’, in George Garnett and John G. Hudson (eds), Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy: Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173–97, reprinted in White, Re-Thinking Kinship and Feudalism in Early Medieval Europe (Variorum Collected Studies, 823; Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate Variorum, 2005), no. V; Buc discussed White’s ideas in ‘What is Order? In the Aftermath of the “Feudal Transformation” Debates’, 293–94. Patrick Wormald described the poem as ‘the most eloquent testimonial to the passions aroused by lords and their patronage’, as he called on historians to focus on ‘lordship’—rather than the ‘fief’—in investigating eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe. See Wormald’s review of Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , in Times Literary Supplement (10 March 1995), 12.

Lifshitz, ‘Translating “Feudal” Vocabulary’, in Lifshitz, Writing Normandy , 207, 211, 217, 222; see also her references to ‘sociopolitical discourse’, ibid., 207, 209–10, 212–13.

Brown, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 140–54. Cf. the thumbnail sketches given by Reynolds and Cheyette, with both of whom I shared my findings about the creation of the constructs. See Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals , 3–14 (referring to my work on 3n. 4); Reynolds, ‘Still Fussing about Feudalism’, 87, 91–94; and Reynolds, ‘The Historiography of Feudalism in France’, Osamu Kano and Jean-Loup Lemaître (eds), with Takashi Adachi, Yoshiya Nishimura, and Michel Sot, Entre texte et histoire. Études d’histoire médiévale offertes au professeur Shoichi Sato (De l’archéologie à l’histoire; Paris: Éditions de Boccard, 2015), 293–308, at 293 (esp. n. 1), 295, 303–4. See Cheyette, ‘Some Notations’, 6–7; Cheyette, Lordship and Community , 5; Cheyette, ‘Some Reflections on Violence’, 244–45; and Cheyette, ‘“Feudalism”: A Memoir’, 119–30. In 2005 Cheyette prepared a short article on ‘Feudalism’ for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas that was never published but that can be consulted (as ‘Feudalism. Preprint for the Dictionary of the History of Ideas ’) on the site devoted to Cheyette’s publications at Amherst College https://amherst.academia.edu/FredricCheyette/Papers [1 February 2021].

Brown, ‘Reflections on Feudalism’, 140–54, and see n. 8 above.

See particularly Louis Chantereau Le Febvre, Traité des fiefs, et de leur origine. Avec les preuves tirées de divers autheurs anciens et modernes … (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1662), esp. 2 and 4. Following the Traité are two hundred pages of texts (including much of Henry Spelman’s Archæologus … [London: John Beale, 1626]) and three hundred pages of collected documents (separately paginated), which range in date from 1091 to 1279.

I have been particularly heartened by a paper David Snyder presented in January 2014, ‘The Construct of Feudalism: A War with the “Tyrant”’, (available on https://www.academia.edu ), and his subsequent description to me (on 15 December 2020) of the resistance he has subsequently mounted to charges that his view of history is ‘parochial’ because it does not ‘give primacy to theoretical debates’.

In a paper entitled ‘The Feudal Prism’, delivered in October 1989 at the Seventh Colloquium of Soviet and American Historians in Moscow, I argued that the feudal constructs had vitiated understanding of medieval ‘lordships, communities, and kingdoms’, the topic of the session.

In order to expose the feudal constructs’ absurdity (and also, I admit, test the limits of scholarly credulity), in 2004 I wrote a paper concerning my discovery of a protocollum feodale that I claimed to have found among the muniments of Saint-Denis. The protocollum , which I attributed to Charlemagne’s brother Carloman, features the noun feodalitas , the phrases pyramis feodalis and systema feodalis , and ends ‘Vivat feodalitas, vivantque vassalli admirabiles, operatores sui’. The inspiration for the lark was an invitation to present a short paper at Giles Constable’s 75th birthday party, where it was taken by some to be a serious report, as it was ten years later at a seminar at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. To prevent further misunderstanding, I refrain from publishing it here but will gladly make it available to anyone who is interested—on condition that its fictional nature and the circumstances of its creation be fully recognized in any reference to it.

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Brown, E.A.R. (2022). Feudalism: Reflections on a Tyrannical Construct’s Fate. In: Armstrong, J.W., Crooks, P., Ruddick, A. (eds) Using Concepts in Medieval History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77280-2_2

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Essay on Feudalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Feudalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Feudalism

What is feudalism.

Feudalism was like a team game where everyone had a role. Kings gave land to nobles, who were like team captains. Nobles then picked knights to protect the land. In return, the knights got small pieces of land to live on. Farmers, called serfs, worked the land for the knights but didn’t own any of it.

The Feudal Pyramid

Imagine a pyramid with the king at the top. Below him were the nobles, then the knights, and at the bottom were the serfs. This pyramid shows who had power and who worked for whom. The higher you were, the more power you had.

Life of Serfs

Serfs were like the workers of the team. They farmed, fixed buildings, and did whatever the knights asked. They couldn’t leave their land without permission and had a tough life. But they had a home and protection, which was important back then.

End of Feudalism

Over time, things changed. Money became more important than land. People could buy and sell goods instead of just working the land. Soldiers were paid to fight, so knights weren’t as needed. Slowly, the team game of feudalism came to an end.

250 Words Essay on Feudalism

The feudal system.

In this system, the king was at the top. Next came the lords and nobles, who got big pieces of land called fiefs. Below the lords were knights, who were given smaller pieces of land for their service. At the bottom were peasants or serfs. These were farmers who worked the land for the lords and knights. They were not free to leave and had a hard life.

Life of the People

Lords lived in large houses or castles and had a comfortable life. Knights trained for battle and fought for their lords. Peasants worked hard, growing food and raising animals. They gave part of what they grew to the lords. The rest was for their families.

Over time, trade grew, and money became more important than land. Wars and diseases also made it hard for lords to control their lands. Slowly, the feudal system came to an end. Instead, countries started to have kings with more power and governments to make laws.

Feudalism was an important part of history that shows how people and societies can organize themselves in different ways. It teaches us about the past and helps us understand how things change over time.

500 Words Essay on Feudalism

Feudalism was a way of life in the Middle Ages, especially in Europe, from around the 9th to the 15th century. It was like a set of rules for how people lived and worked together. Imagine a big game where everyone has a role. Some people are leaders, some are workers, and everyone must follow the rules to make sure things run smoothly.

Under the lords were the knights. Knights were like the protectors of the land. They had to fight for the lords and the king when there was a war. In return, they got small pieces of land to live on and food to eat.

At the bottom were the peasants or serfs. These were the everyday workers who farmed the land. They didn’t own the land but lived on it and worked hard to grow food. They had to give some of their food to the lord as rent. Life was tough for peasants, but this was the way things worked back then.

Life on the Manor

The role of the church.

The church was very powerful during feudal times. It was involved in almost every part of life. The church taught people how to live and what to believe. It also owned a lot of land and could be like a lord, with peasants working on its lands. The church helped the poor and sick, but it also expected people to pay it a part of what they earned.

The Decline of Feudalism

Over time, things changed, and feudalism began to fade away. Wars, diseases like the Black Plague, and the growth of towns and trade meant that people didn’t rely on the feudal system as much. Peasants started to pay rent with money instead of food and could even leave the land to find work in towns. Eventually, kings became stronger and didn’t need lords as much.

Feudalism’s Impact

In conclusion, feudalism was a unique system that controlled how people lived for many centuries. It had clear roles for everyone, from the king to the peasants. While it might seem strange to us now, it was just the way of life back then. As time passed, new ideas and changes in society led to the end of feudalism, but its memory still affects us today.

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The Origins of Feudalism: a Historical Overview

This essay about the rise of feudalism explores its emergence following the fall of the Roman Empire. It examines how feudalism developed as a system of mutual obligations and land ownership, influenced by Germanic customs and Roman traditions. The essay also discusses the role of the Catholic Church and economic factors in shaping feudal society, as well as the eventual decline of feudalism and its lasting impact on modern institutions and power dynamics.

How it works

In the grand narrative of human history, few phenomena command as much fascination as the enigmatic rise of feudalism. Like a phoenix soaring from the remnants of the once-mighty Roman Empire, feudalism unfurled its intricate structures across medieval Europe, crafting a complex web of social, economic, and political relationships that profoundly influenced the trajectory of civilization. Within this elaborate tapestry lie distinctive threads, each contributing to the rich and diverse origins of feudalism.

At the heart of feudalism’s birth lies a story of upheaval and transformation.

Following the collapse of centralized authority after the Western Roman Empire’s disintegration, Europe found itself at a crossroads, teetering on the brink of chaos. Barbarian invasions swept across the continent, leaving a path of destruction. In response to such turmoil, communities sought refuge under the protection of local strongmen who emerged as guardians of order in an increasingly volatile world.

Amidst this chaos, a new order began to take shape. Drawing from a blend of Germanic customs and Roman traditions, feudalism emerged as a system of mutual obligations and hierarchical relationships. Central to this system was the concept of land ownership, a symbol of wealth and power in a world disrupted by strife. Kings and nobles granted parcels of land, known as fiefs, to their loyal vassals in exchange for military service and allegiance. Thus, the feudal pyramid was established, with each level interconnected by a delicate balance of duty and privilege.

However, feudalism was not merely a system of land tenure; it was a complex tapestry woven from various strands of social, economic, and religious influences. The Catholic Church, with its vast wealth and spiritual authority, played a pivotal role in shaping the feudal order. Through its doctrines of divine right and hierarchical structure, the Church legitimized the authority of secular rulers while also serving as a beacon of stability and guidance in an uncertain world.

Economic factors further fueled the development of feudalism. As trade routes faltered and urban centers diminished, the countryside became the focal point of medieval life. Manor estates, overseen by local lords, became self-sufficient entities where peasants worked the land in exchange for protection and sustenance. This agrarian economy formed the backbone of feudal society, supporting its intricate web of obligations and dependencies.

Yet, for all its resilience, feudalism was not immune to change. The winds of transformation blew strongly across medieval Europe, reshaping the landscape of power and authority. The rise of centralized states and professional armies marked the decline of feudalism’s dominance, while the Black Death and other calamities weakened its foundations. By the dawn of the Renaissance, feudalism stood at the brink of obsolescence, its once-formidable structure crumbling under the weight of history.

Despite its decline, the legacy of feudalism endures, woven into the fabric of modern society. Its influence can be seen in the institutions of governance, the distribution of wealth, and the dynamics of power that shape our world today. Though the era of feudal lords and vassals may have faded into history, the spirit of feudalism persists, a testament to the enduring resilience of human civilization in the face of adversity.

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The Middle Ages

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The period of European history extending from about 500 to 1400–1500 ce is traditionally known as the Middle Ages. The term was first used by 15th-century scholars to designate the period between their own time and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The period is often considered to have its own internal divisions: either early and late or early, central or high, and late.

Although once regarded as a time of uninterrupted ignorance, superstition, and social oppression, the Middle Ages are now understood as a dynamic period during which the idea of Europe as a distinct cultural unit emerged. During late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, political, social, economic, and cultural structures were profoundly reorganized, as Roman imperial traditions gave way to those of the Germanic peoples who established kingdoms in the former Western Empire. New forms of political leadership were introduced, the population of Europe was gradually Christianized, and monasticism was established as the ideal form of religious life. These developments reached their mature form in the 9th century during the reign of Charlemagne and other rulers of the Carolingian dynasty , who oversaw a broad cultural revival known as the Carolingian renaissance.

In the central, or high, Middle Ages, even more dramatic growth occurred. The period was marked by economic and territorial expansion, demographic and urban growth, the emergence of national identity, and the restructuring of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. It was the era of the Crusades , Gothic art and architecture, the papal monarchy , the birth of the university , the recovery of ancient Greek thought, and the soaring intellectual achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas ( c. 1224–74).

It has been traditionally held that by the 14th century the dynamic force of medieval civilization had been spent and that the late Middle Ages were characterized by decline and decay. Europe did indeed suffer disasters of war, famine, and pestilence in the 14th century, but many of the underlying social, intellectual, and political structures remained intact. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe experienced an intellectual and economic revival, conventionally called the Renaissance , that laid the foundation for the subsequent expansion of European culture throughout the world.

Many historians have questioned the conventional dating of the beginning and end of the Middle Ages, which were never precise in any case and cannot be located in any year or even century. Some scholars have advocated extending the period defined as late antiquity ( c. 250– c. 750 ce ) into the 10th century or later, and some have proposed a Middle Ages lasting from about 1000 to 1800. Still others argue for the inclusion of the old periods Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation into a single period beginning in late antiquity and ending in the second half of the 16th century.

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Feudalism Definition

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Published: Mar 5, 2024

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Feudalism, Essay Example

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Feudalism was a structured society in which lords owned large pieces of land and allowed servants to live on it in exchange for cultivating the land and providing the lord with a part of the profit. History has demonstrated that feudalism typically arises when an empire loses its power, which causes wealthy land owners to rule their territory with absolute power. Because this land is divided and ruled by many different families, there were no laws that unified the land and lords were generally free to make laws as they pleased. As such, feudalism would cease to exist if one family were able to gain power over the others and unite the land.

The land grant that lords provided their servants were called fiefs, and this land was provided in exchange for service. After the agreement was made between the lord and the servant for land, the servant is called a vassal. At this point, the vassal would agree to pay the lord homage and to engage in battle on the lord’s behalf if this is deemed necessary. Many instances of feudalism have existed throughout history, although during different time periods. Feudalism in Western Europe ceased to exist towards the end of the Middle Ages in the 1500s, while feudal Japan ended in the 1600s. Both of these events were marked by widespread unification that led to the predecessors of the territories that we are familiar with today.

Interestingly, it does not appear that feudalism exists in the world today. While there are some smaller ruling provinces in the world, these rulers are often elected in some manner. In countries in which rulers are not democratically elected, the land is unified. Therefore, it is unlikely that feudalism will come again but this system of government was certainly an important mark in the history of the world.

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