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Essay On Feudalism

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Politics , Military , Security , Economics , Money , Europe , Society , Agriculture

Published: 01/19/2020

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Feudalism refers to the spread of political influence between noble figures. This political system reached the height of its power during Europe’s middle Ages. Europe’s feudal society incorporated the king, lords, and vassals as the predominate figure heads. By exploring concepts of feudalism throughout Europe one can gain a better understanding of political systems during the middle Ages.

The Rise of Feudalism

At the onset of the middle Ages, Europe was facing severe economic and population depletion. This was largely due to the threat of invasion and war with other world populations. In order to resolve this need for protection, Europe implemented a feudal system to ensure that areas could receive proper protection, support, and supervision. The job was simply to over whelming for a single king to maintain these vast areas of land alone. The land was known as the “fief” (“feudalism”). Each fief was overseen by a lord who owned that land and a vassal that was granted access to that land. The vassal was expected to provide military protection for that area of land in return for its use. Peasants typically work for the vassal and provide labor and military forces under the command of the vassal.

Characteristics of Feudalism in Europe

Feudalism in Europe has a few key characteristics. The first is that the economy is primarily supported by agricultural endeavors (“feudalism”). Usually there is not much in the way of actual money, instead relying on agricultural trade. Most land areas are self-sustaining. The second characteristic is the use of the Church to assist in societal and military structure. The Church is in turn entitled to a part of the land and a share in any economic profits.

Decline of feudalism

As available land began to diminish, so did feudalism. The cost of providing land to vassals and the lack of available property meant that lords were eventually unable to keep up with demands. A new money based economy was also beginning to slowly creep into Europe’s consciousness. Instead of relying solely on agricultural trade, the value of currency was beginning to be recognized. The circulation of currency made feudalism less important to society. This also allowed people to become independent of lords and vassals by earning their own place amongst society. The Black Death in Europe also contributed to the end of feudalism. Great masses were essential wiped out by disease leading to a labor shortage (“feudalism”). Those who were fortunate to survive the Black Death moved to towns to fill these positions. Peasants no longer wished to work under their superiors when new opportunities were presented to them. In conclusion, feudalism began in Europe to ensure protection against other populations and create a self-sustaining agricultural economy. The system allowed land, called fief, to be controlled by lords and vassals. In return they provided protection for the area. The lords, vassals, and the Church all held political influence in the area. Feudalism eventually died out as the result of the new currency system and lack of land availability. The Black Death provided survivors the opportunity to break out the role of peasants and create a new system of government.

Works Cited:

"European Feudalism." Middle Ages. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Dec. 2012. . "European Feudalism." For Students. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Dec. 2012.

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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

Feudalism was a way of life in the Middle Ages, from around the 9th to the 15th century. It was a system where a king gave land to lords, who were powerful people. In return, these lords promised to be loyal to the king and give him soldiers when needed.

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.

At the top of the feudal pyramid was the king. He owned all the land but couldn’t take care of it alone. So, he gave pieces of land to important nobles called lords in exchange for their loyalty and help in battles. These lords were like the king’s team, promising to support him.

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

A manor was like a big farm that was the heart of feudal life. It was where the lord lived and where the peasants worked. The manor had houses, a church, and sometimes a mill for grinding grain. Everyone had their job, and the work never stopped. The peasants worked long days in the fields, growing crops and raising animals.

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

Even though feudalism is long gone, it shaped the world in many ways. It influenced how governments and societies were organized. Some of the ideas from feudalism, like giving loyalty to a leader, can still be seen today in how people work and live together.

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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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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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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82 Feudalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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• 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 […]
• The Development of Feudalism and Manorialism in the Middle Ages Manorialism on the other hand refers to an important component of feudal community which entailed the principles used in organizing economy in the rural that was born in the medieval villa system. We will write a custom essay specifically for you by our professional experts 808 writers online Learn More
• 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
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• 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?
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• How Did Feudalism and the Manor Economy Emerge and Shape Medieval Life?
• What Are the Theories of Feudalism?
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• What Was the Basic Structure of Feudalism in Western Europe in the 8th and 9th Centuries?
• Is Capitalism Better Than Feudalism?
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• 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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What is Feudalism debate in Medieval Indian History, its perspective and understanding in larger discussion

2021, isara solutions

The feudalism debate once play a major role in any medieval researchers, but now it's long gone, still then it relevant for any medieval scholars to understand, as it is the essence of every aspect as it related to urbanisation, trade, land grant and so on. The notion of an 'Indian feudalism' has predominated in the recent historiography of pre-colonial India. Early medieval India has been described by historian, largely as a dark phase of Indian history characterised only by political fragmentation and culture. Such a characterisation being assigned to it, this period remained by and large a neglected one in terms of historical research. We owe it completely in new research in the recent decades to have brought to light the many important and interesting aspects of this period. Fresh studies have contributed to the removal of the notion of 'dark age' attached to this period by offering fresh perspectives. Indeed the every absence of political unity that was considered a negative attribute by earlier scholars in now seen as a factor that had made possible the emergence of rich cultures of the medieval period.

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The Book Review

TULIIP BISWAS

THIS IS MY ARTICLE CUM ASSIGNMENT ON THE DEBATE OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIAN FEUDALISM.

ZOYA SIDDIQUI, LADY SHRI RAM COLLEGE FOR WOMEN, UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

zoya siddiqui

The concept of feudalism comes from the European historiography. Feudalism is a kind of social and economic system which is characterized by the close relationship of the peasants with the land.Various historians have tried to implement this concept in early medieval India, which is further questioned by other historians; it has led to the feudalism debatein India. This debate is one of the richest historical debates in Indian historiography. We shall be pointing out the various approaches of different historians on this debate in North India specifically.

Siddhant Sarang

Use of the term feudalism to describe India applies a concept of medieval European origin, according to which the landed nobility held lands from the Crown in exchange for military service, and vassals were in turn tenants of the nobles, while the peasants were obliged to live on their lord's land and give him homage, labor, and a share of the produce, notionally in exchange for military protection. Feudalism is most likely introduced to India when the Kushan Dynasty from Central Asia invaded India and introduced new policies of their own. The term Indian feudalism is used to describe taluqdar, zamindar, jagirdar, ghatwals, mulraiyats, sardar, mankari, deshmukh, chaudhary and samanta. Most of these systems were abolished after the independence of India and the rest of the subcontinent. D. D. Kosambi and R. S. Sharma, together with Daniel Thorner, brought peasants into the study of Indian history for the first time. In this paper, we will try to find out how far it is correct to term Early India as Feudal.

Ramita Udayashankar

R.S. Sharma, in his response, wrote an essay entitled ‘How Feudal Was Indian Feudalism?’ (1985)

Huberttu Siby

The recent approaches to the study of early medieval Indian history and how it challenged the hypothesis of Indian Feudalism. This essay will be looking at the different approaches to the study of early medieval Indian history from the 1950s to the latest by looking at the ideas and concepts put forward by historians like D.D. Kosambi, R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadava, D.C. Sircar, Harbans Mukhia, D.N. Jha, Burton Stein, B.D. Chattopadhyaya, and Irfan Habib and how it changed over time.

gian chauhan

Pavan Tiwari

Presently, varied schemes of periodization of history are prevalent in historical studies, the most common being the tripartite scheme of ancient-medieval-modern periods. In European history, ancient, medieval and modern eras have remained the dominant standard epochal frontiers since the eighteenth century. In the wake of colonial rule, this scheme was applied by the European historians and orientalists to the colonized regions in Africa and Asia, including India, for historiographical purposes. The concept of medieval period in Indian history is not without problems and limitations. First, not only there are conceptual intricacies involved in it, the whole process of periodization has been politicized. Moreover, the chronological frontiers of medieval India have become conceptual barriers, which restrict historical imagination. Secondly, the medieval period in Indian history, as in European history, is often referred to as the 'Middle Ages'. It is understood as a post-classical age denoting a radical shift from ancient or classical period. Moreover, there seems to be an inherent bias in it, as it implies decline and degeneration in medieval times as opposed to the splendor and glory of the ancient era. Thirdly, despite its common usage, there is no consensus among historians as to what constitute medieval India, though the construction of ancient and modern India is also controversial. As for the ancient India, almost all historians begin it with an account of the prehistoric times followed by the Aryan invasion and the Vedic age, but the problem arises where to bring ancient India to a close and

AKHILESH KUMAR

Indian Historical Review

Vijaya Laxmi Singh

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Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe History Essay Sample

In this essay, we will discuss the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe. This change happened over a period of time and was not smooth; there were many difficulties along the way. These difficulties arose largely because people had different ideas about what should happen after feudalism ended. In this essay, we will explore the factors that led to this change and how it impacted European society.

Essay Example on Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe

• Introduction – Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe
• Factors affecting the state
• Perks of capitalism
• Results of capitalism

Introduction – Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe In this essay, the topic covers the journey from the transformation of feudalism to capitalism in Europe and it is observed that feudalism prevailed from about 300 to 1400 AD and then after the concept of capitalism start taking shape in the nation. It is noteworthy from various studies and researchers that the era of feudalism ended with the renaissance period in Europe and is known as the enlightenment period. In this period it is observed that it was encountered the rebirth of art, science, literature, liberty, and human freedom. However, the renaissance period is known for its development and plays an indispensable role in the evolution of capitalism from the ideology of feudalism. Both the theories had their perks as well as loopholes but due to certain disadvantages of feudalism, the approach of capitalism evolved. Get Non-Plagiarized Custom Essay on Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe in USA Order Now Main Essay Body – Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe Factors affecting the state Several other factors play a key role in evolving one theory from the other. And some of the factors are external that laid down special emphasis on the medieval society and there are loopholes of feudalism that play a central role in the rebirth of capitalism. One of the major external factors that led to the transition is the extension of trade. Traders started to thrive as Europe became more stationary. the new retailers offer significant money for kings, who want to gain encouraging their trade don’t suffer in essay writing! hire experts now Moreover, certain internal factors also played a key role in the decline of feudalism such as revolt, the Impact of the Hundred Years war’, ineffective system, administration, etc. The system positioned different departments of groups among the monarch and the inhabitants. This ultimately led to uncertainty in the state and create tension between different groups and the monarch. However, all such tension resulted in rebellion across the state in the fourteenth century and abolishing the old system of theory along with the commencement of the modern social economy known as capitalism. The rebellion led to reformation that further led to the evolution of entrepreneurs and the capitalist state which resulted in the growth of the state. This ideology led to several new options for trade and travel during the era of the middle ages. Such transaction and dealing resulted in the development of more towns and entrepreneurs. Some disruptive forces strengthen the communication and emergence of the middle class. Such forces provide support in the growth of the towns and stimulated the origin of the middle-class. Buy Customized Essay on Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe At Cheapest Price Order Now Perks of capitalism The mechanism gains momentum in the fourteenth century and put a lot of effort into destroying the feudalism theory. The emergence of capitalism facilitates new opportunities in towns and societies that provide thousands of people with employment, livelihood, etc. The motive of such reformation is for the development of the state and its economy. This also resulted in stimulating the migration of people from rural to urban areas in search of employment and a better standard of life. The demise of feudalism changes certain church systems and it was allowed for the fiefs to perform their function on weekends as well. However, the ideology of feudalism provides certain elements to be focussed such as survival and salvation. Such elements played a crucial role in the branch of psychology and as the state becomes more secure, the entrepreneur gives a new shape by occupying the rural towns and cities to wealth and capital. One of the indispensable contributions of Karl Marx pointed out the decline of feudalism that should be mainly via internal forces. Due to the shortfall of feudalism and the demand for commodities with the emergence of a new market, the rigid feudal structure proves to be ineffective. As the feudal structure was unable to meet the demand of growing opportunities and state but with the new methods of production mechanism, it increases the division of labour that ultimately increased productivity. buy pre written sample on Transition From Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe Results of capitalism The introduction of the ideology of capitalism aimed to improve the production level, and landlords, entrepreneurs started pertaining themselves as entrepreneurs. It strives for higher economic growth and the development of the state. With the advancement of technology, there are new modes, techniques, and other mechanisms that prove benefitted for higher for the growth of the state. It is encountered that fiefs were kicked off from their land and increase migration towards rural towns and cities. With the evolution of capitalism in the state, it is now possible for the merchants to allow the monarch to raise money and create armies that were devoted to the king. One of the external factors that affect the abolishing of feudalism structure in the state was the demographic crisis and the great famine that occurred during the thirteenth century also led to weakening the agriculture production. Hire USA Experts for Feudalism To Capitalism In Europe Essay Order Now Conclusion The feudal system was eventually replaced by the capitalist economic system in Europe. This change happened over time with many factors contributing to its success including increased international trade, new technologies, and inventions. Feudalism is no longer an acceptable form of government for any country that wants to be successful economically or politically, but it remains fascinating as a way of looking at how people used to live their lives hundreds of years ago.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Feudalism — Compare And Contrast: Japanese and European Feudalism

Compare and Contrast: Japanese and European Feudalism

• Categories: Feudalism Japan

About this sample

Words: 1041 |

Published: Mar 1, 2019

Words: 1041 | Pages: 2 | 6 min read

Works Cited

• Adams, R. (2018). Feudal Japan. History Today, 68(4), 34-40. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feudal-japan
• Bowman, J. (2017). The History of Feudalism. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
• Hall, J. A. (2015). Feudal Japan. Routledge.
• Kitagawa, J. M. (2018). Japan before Tokyo: Power and place in the premodern Japanese world. University of Hawai'i Press.
• Koen, L. (2015). The era of the warrior: Japan, 1600-1868. Routledge.
• Lacey, R. J. (2017). Feudalism in Europe. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
• Smith, T. C. (2015). Feudalism: Its Frankish Birth and English Development. Clarendon Press.
• Turnbull, S. (2014). Samurai: The Story of Japan’s Great Warriors. Routledge.
• Webb, M. (2017). The Evolution of Medieval Japan. The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.
• White, W. M. (2019). The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in Sixteenth Century Japan. Routledge.

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