By Richard Abels

Between 1974 and 1994, two influential critiques of feudalism were published, an article in 1974 by Elizabeth A. R. Brown and a book by Susan Reynolds in 1994, that crystallized doubts about the construct of feudalism harbored by many historians of the Middle Ages. Over the last few years textbooks have begun to reflect the new consensus. Medieval historians responsible for chapters on the Middle Ages in Western Civilization and World Civilization textbooks now shy away from the term ‘feudalism’. This reticence is less evident in civilization textbooks lacking a medievalist among the collaborators. In several of these we still find the ‘feudal Middle Ages’ presented without apology, as well as comparisons drawn between Japanese, Chinese, and medieval Western feudalisms. Whether or not the assigned textbook mentions ‘feudalism’, most Western civilization instructors probably continue to use the term because it is familiar to them and to their students.

This article presents an overview of the historiography of one of the key concepts for the study of the Middle Ages, and an assessment of where the state of the question now stands. The author concludes that, although the critique of feudalism is powerful and necessary, the pendulum is threatening to swing too far in the other direction, away from the vertical ties and power relations that once dominated discussions of medieval politics and society, and toward a new paradigm of horizontal bonds, consensus making, and community.

As a teacher of undergraduates, I am confronted every semester by the problem of the textbook. Most of my students read survey textbooks as if they were authoritative statements of historical fact. To disabuse them of that notion, I sometimes have them compare the treatment accorded a controversial historical topic in different editions of the same textbook. One such pedagogical exercise focuses on the term ‘feudalism’ as treated in different editions of the late C. Warren Hollister’s popular survey, Medieval Europe: A Brief History. In the third edition (1974), Hollister introduced the term ‘feudalism’ in a subsection of the book he entitled, ‘Response to the Invasions: French Feudalism’.1 As a judicious scholar and a veteran of the historiographical battles over the introduction of feudalism into England, Hollister began by carefully explaining what feudalism was not.

It was not, he stated, a universal or symmetrical system. Even in northern France where it was born it appeared in a variety of forms. It did not, even in its heyday, encompass all the land. It was riddled with ambiguities due to vassals holding lands from multiple lords. It was not associated with chivalry. And it was not exclusively a military institution. But given these caveats, Hollister had no doubt that feudalism existed as ‘both a military and political system’. For specialists in medieval history, Hollister explained, feudalism referred to ‘the network of rights and obligations existing among members of the knightly aristocracy – the holders’.2 And this is how the term is used throughout the rest of the book.

In the posthumously published eighth edition of Medieval Europe (1998), the subsection ‘Response to the Invasions: French Feudalism’ has become ‘France: Fragmentation’, an indication of the less prominent role that feudalism plays in this edition. Hollister’s discussion of feudalism survives but in much truncated form. Gone is his list of those things that feudalism was not. In its place is an acknowledgement, phrased almost as a cri de coeur, that the term feudalism had grown even more problematic over the intervening fourteen years. ‘Even today’, Hollister writes,

feudalism is heartbreakingly difficult to define. Some scholars reject the word altogether; others prefer the terms ‘feudalisms’ to ‘feudalism’. I continue to find feudalism a useful word if employed with caution – no more misleading then humanism, democracy, communism, capitalism, classicism, or renaissance (all of which some scholars would like to abolish).3

The change in content and tone reflects a historiographical shift with which Warren Hollister was not completely comfortable. Between 1974 and 1998, two influential critiques of feudalism were published, an article in 1974 by Elizabeth A. R. Brown and a book by Susan Reynolds in 1994, that crystallized doubts about the construct harbored by many historians of the Middle Ages.4 Hollister himself had begun his career as a critic of the received tradition about English feudalism. In his second book and a series of articles, he demonstrated what he called the ‘irony of feudalism’, that knight service owed in consequence of holding land from a lord had never been the main mechanism whereby Anglo-Norman kings raised their armies, and that strong centralized government flourished in Anglo-Norman England, during what was supposed to be the heyday of feudalism.5

His treatment of feudalism in the third edition of Medieval Europe was far more nuanced than the extended, uncritical treatment it received in other popular medieval history textbooks of the day.6 Hollister, the young radical, ended his career as a conservative in terms of the historiography of feudalism, reluctant to abandon a construct that he found to be useful in writing about medieval politics and society, especially in surveys, despite a growing consensus among medieval historians that ‘feudalism’ should be banned not only from scholarly monographs, but from textbooks and classrooms as well.

Over the last few years textbooks have begun to reflect the new consensus. Medieval historians responsible for chapters on the Middle Ages in Western Civilization and World Civilization textbooks now shy away from the term ‘feudalism’.7 This reticence is less evident in civilization textbooks lacking a medievalist among the collaborators. In several of these we still find the ‘feudal Middle Ages’ presented without apology, as well as comparisons drawn between Japanese, Chinese, and medieval Western feudalisms.8

Whether or not the assigned textbook mentions ‘feudalism’, most Western civilization instructors probably continue to use the term because it is familiar to them and to their students. As one of my colleagues, an American historian commented, ‘I’m going to keep on teaching feudalism until you guys come up with some other generalization I can use’. Given this seismic shift in the treatment of one of the key concepts for the study of the Middle Ages, a brief overview of how we got to this point is in order.

Definitions of Feudalism

The problem of ‘feudalism’ begins with the term’s origin and its multiple usages. ‘Feudalism’ is not a medieval term; nor does it have a single, agreed upon definition. In recent decades, many medieval historians have gone so far as to question whether the term has any historical or heuristic value. Lordship, dependent tenures, and manors were real institutions in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, even if the words used to connote them also bore other meanings and differed from region to region. ‘Feudalism’, on the other hand, is a historical construct that one must define before using. Like all historical constructs ‘feudalism’, however defined, describes an ‘ideal type’ rather than any particular historical society. This article will begin with descriptions of the traditional models of feudalism, emphasizing the one favored by Anglophone historians, and then explain the recent historiographical controversies this term has generated.

The term ‘feudal’ was invented by Renaissance Italian jurists to describe what they took to be the common customary law of property. Giacomo Alvarotto’s (1385–1453) treatise De feudis (‘Concerning Fiefs’) posited that despite regional differences the regulations governing the descent of aristocratic land tenure were derived from common legal principles, a customary shared ‘feudal law’. Based upon study of the twelfth-century Lombard compilation known as the Libri Feudorum (Books of Fiefs), the juridic concept of ‘feudalism’ was subsequently extended to cover the aggregate of institutions connected with the support and service of ‘vassals’ and with the descent of their tenures (‘fiefs’). Late medieval jurists, however, understood ‘fiefs’ (Latin: feoda) to constitute only one type of land tenure and property law rather than a universal system.9

Sixteenth-century French antiquarians, notably François Hotman (1524–90), added a historical dimension to the studies of the jurists by tracing the origin of ‘feudal law’ to the customs of the barbarian tribes, in particular, to the Franks.10 Aided by the appearance of an edition of the Libri Feudorum by Jacques Cujas (1520–90), the historical study of ‘feudal law’ spread out from France to Germany and Britain in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Comte de Boulainvilliers appears to have been the first to coin a term for the ‘feudal system’, la féodalité, in his Histoire des anciens Parlements de France (1737).

French Enlightenment philosophes, notably Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws (1748), understood the ‘feudal law’ to be a system of exploitation of peasants viewed against the backdrop of the parceling out of national sovereignty to private individuals. For them féodalité denoted the aggregate of seigneurial privileges and prerogatives, which could be justified neither by reason or justice. When the National Constituent Assembly abolished the ‘feudal regime’ in August 1789 this is what they meant.

Across the channel, Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) coined the phrase ‘feudal system’ to describe a form of production governed not by market forces but by coercion and force. For Smith the ‘feudal system’ was the economic exploitation of peasants by their lords, which led to an economy and society marked by poverty, brutality, exploitation, and wide gaps between rich and poor. This economic definition of feudalism found its way into the writings of Karl Marx (1818–83), who saw feudalism as a particular mode of production standing between the slave economy of the ancient world and modern capitalism. The definition of ‘feudalism’ favored by Marxist historians focuses on the economic and juridical privileges enjoyed by a landowning aristocracy over a subordinate peasantry.

This, however, is not the dominant definition of feudalism as used by Anglophone scholars. Modern British and American historians have generally employed ‘feudalism’ as a short hand to describe a political, military, and social system that bound together the warrior aristocracy of Western Europe between c.1000 and 1300. This system, it is asserted, only gradually took shape, and differed in detail from region to region.

Its key institutions were lordship, vassalage, and the fief. Lordship and vassalage represent the two sides of a personal bond of mutual loyalty and military service between nobles of different rank that found its roots in the Germanic war-band. The superior in this relationship was termed a lord, and the subordinate, who pledged loyalty and military service to his lord, was his ‘vassal’. A ‘fief ’ was a grant of land tenure or of revenues held by a vassal from a lord, whose property, in theory, the tenements remained, in return for specified services, which were usually a combination of military and social duties (e.g., attendance at the lord’s court, hospitality to the lord and his men) and miscellaneous payments (‘feudal incidents’) that reflected the lord’s continued rights over the property.

The most important of the services required from a fiefholder was knight service. When summoned to war by his lord, the holder of a fief was obliged to send to the lord’s host or retinue the quota of knights owed from his fief. These knights were then to render the lord military service for a period of time fixed by custom, which amounted to forty days in thirteenth-century France and England. British and American historians have traditionally regarded knight service as the raison d’etre of ‘feudalism’.

‘Feudalism’, as defined in this fashion, can be thought of as a military recruitment system in which land tenure was exchanged for the service of heavily armed warriors on horseback. In the Anglo-American paradigm, ‘feudalism’ is associated with the fragmentation of central authority, as political power and jurisdictional in the tenth and eleventh centuries devolved into the hands of ‘private’ individuals, that is, of nobles who held franchises, immunities or banal rights. In theory the king stood at the apex of a feudal network of personal loyalty and land tenure, since he was the lord of lords and the ultimate source of all rights over land. Before the late twelfth century, however, feudal kings were often merely the first among equals, and their claims to authority often masked their limited actual power.

Among the leading theorists of this approach are the Belgian historian Francois-Louis Ganshof (1895–1980), the English historians John Horace Round (1854–1928) and Sir Frank Merry Stenton (1880–1967), and the American historians Carl Stephenson (1886–1954) and Joseph Strayer (1904–87). Ganshof’s definition of feudalism may be offered as prototypical of this school:

a body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience and service – mainly military service – on the part of a free man (the vassal) towards another free man (the lord), and the obligations of protection and maintenance on the part of the lord with regard to his vassal. The obligation of maintenance had usually as on its effects the grant by the lord to his vassal of a unit of real property [actually the grant of tenure] known as a fief.11

Modern French historians have tended to combine the feudo-vassalic and Smithian/Marxist defintions of feudalism, through the linked phrase Féodalité et Seigneurie, the ‘Feudal and Seigneurial Systems’. For historians such as Marc Bloch (1886–1944), Georges Duby (1919–96), and their followers, feudalism is a general term that embraces the key aspects of the prevailing medieval social, political, and economic arrangements.

German historians, on the other hand, carefully distinguish between these two definitions of feudalism. Feudalismus in German historical writings refers to a socioeconomic system in which landed lords, bound to one another by ties of vassalage, dominate peasants economically and judicially, requiring from them rents, labor, and dues while enjoying seignory (Grundherrschaft) over those who lived upon and work their lands. Lehnswesen, on the other hand, expresses the rights, obligations, and dues associated with the holding of fiefs, as well as the type of governance based on it, ‘an hierarchy of fiefs and powers, from the king down to the minor lord’.12

Like the French historians of feudalism, German scholars of Feudalismus emphasize the emergence of a regime of serfdom in place of the slave and free peasant rural economy of the Carolingian era. Unsurprisingly, this was a dominant theme in East German historiography. During the Cold War, the very terminology of feudalism became politicized, with East German historians writing about Feudalismus and West Germans about Lehnswesen.13 More generally, German historians such as Otto Hintze (1861–1940), Heinrich Mitteis (1889–1952), and the Austrian Otto Brunner (1898–1992) have presented ‘feudalism’ as an ‘ideal’ stage in state formation not limited to the medieval West.14 Brunner’s formulation about the fundamental roles played by lordship and mutuality (protection by the lord, aid from his dependents) in the medieval German polity has dominated German historiography since the publication of his Land und Herrschaft in 1939. Over the last decade, however, Brunner’s representation of the benign character of the Schutz und Schirm that lords supposedly provided their peasants has been vigorously challenged, notably by Gadi Algazi.15

The Origins of English Feudalism and Bastard Feudalism

Until recently, the ‘feudalism question’ that had most occupied Anglophone scholars concerns the origins of English feudalism: whether William the Conqueror introduced into England the conjoined institutions of vassalage, fief, and knight service from Normandy in 1066, or whether the origin of these institutions is to be sought in Edward the Confessor’s England. Those who wished to portray the Norman conquerors as the architects of the feudal system have minimized the resemblance of the royal army of pre- Conquest England to the Anglo-Norman host, Anglo-Saxon commendation to Norman vassalage, and Anglo-Saxon land tenure to that found in Domesday Book (1087).

Others have argued with vehemence that the Anglo-Saxons developed dependent military tenures at least a century before Hastings. The argument extends back to the seventeenth century when the antiquary Sir Henry Spelman (c.1564–1641) first recognized the applicability of the feudal terminology formulated by early modern French legal writers to describe the laws governing the descent of fiefs to the situation of medieval England.16

The modern debate, however, began in 1891 with the publication of an essay by John Horace Round on the introduction of knight service into England. Taking exception to Edward A. Freeman’s argument for continuity in English tenurial and political history, Round represented the Conquest as a dividing line between a pre-feudal and feudal England. According to Round, William the Conqueror revolutionized the military organization of England by imposing upon the fiefs he distributed to his followers precisely defined quotas of knight service. Round, who had previously argued that 1066 marked a tenurial revolution, posited that the Norman Conquest marked a dramatic and absolute break with English traditions of military service, which he saw as arising from a public duty incumbent upon all free men.

The most prominent advocate of Round’s thesis was Sir Frank Stenton, who rejected Round’s animus against the Anglo-Saxons but who embraced his view that 1066 marked the beginnings of English feudalism. Not everyone, however, was persuaded. Round’s distinguished contemporary, the legal historian Frederic Maitland (1850–1906), remarked, tongue firmly in cheek,

Now if an examiner were to ask who introduced the feudal system into England? one very good answer, if properly explained, would be Henry Spelman. . . . If my examiner went on with the question and asked me, when did the feudal system attain its most perfect development? I should answer, about the middle of the last century.17

Whereas Maitland argued for tenurial continuity, others discovered evidence of ‘feudal’ institutions in pre-Conquest England. Eric John (1922–2000) in the 1960s revived the arguments of the late nineteenth-century historian H. Munro Chadwick for Anglo-Saxon royal armies made up of noble warriors who were personally commended to the ealdormen under whom they fought.18

C. Warren Hollister both argued for elements of continuity between the military organizations of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England, and, more radically, demonstrated that ‘feudal’ military service never constituted the main source of warriors for the Norman kings.19 John Gillingham followed Hollister by critically reexamining the evidence for William’s sudden imposition of knight quotas, and David Bates demonstrated that Normandy before 1066 was not as ‘feudal’ as Round had supposed.20

The author of this article demonstrated that in 1066 English armies were organized according to the principle of lordship and raised, in part, through the obligation of those who held their lands freely, ‘with sake and soke’, to render military service to the Crown, the extent of which was determined by a rough approximation of the value of their lands.21

Since around 1990 the debate has died down, in large part because of increasing doubts of the validity of the feudal paradigm itself. The consensus at present is that both England and Normandy possessed rudimentary elements of a ‘feudal system’ – dependent tenures, lordship, and dependent military tenures – before 1066 but they coexisted with other forms of tenure and military obligation, and English feudalism as exemplified in the works of Glanvill and Bracton was the result of an evolutionary process that had much to do with the unsettled conditions that followed the Norman Conquest.

Historians of late medieval England also have their feudalism controversy. This one concerns the origins and effects of ‘bastard feudalism’, a term coined in 1885 by the Oxford University historian Charles Plummer to describe a system of patronage in which personal loyalty and military service were secured by the payment of money rather than the granting of fiefs.22 Plummer characterized money-fiefs as constituting a ‘bastard’ form of feudalism on the then unquestioned assumption that land tenure was the basis of ‘authentic’ feudalism.

The Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History, Bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901) developed Plummer’s views in his influential Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Developments. Stubbs posited a decisive shift from feudal obligation to paid military service in the reign of King Edward III (1327–77).23 For Plummer and Stubbs, the replacement of feudal vassals by liveried retainers bound to their lords through cash payments was a debased form of tenurial feudalism (hence the designation ‘bastard’). In this new order, great nobles maintained private armies of retainers to fight their battles, political and legal, and regularly overturned justice by upholding their men in their quarrels, regardless of merit, and shielding them from punishment for their crimes.

The historiographical consensus that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries blamed bastard feudalism ‘for the principal woes of the fifteenth century: aristocratic disorder, the abuse of power and the blight of the overmighty subject’, culminating in the chaos of the War of the Roses.24

K. B. McFarlane (1903–66) challenged this orthodoxy in a series of articles, the earliest of which were published in 1944 and 1945.25 For McFarlane, as for his predecessors, the ‘quintessence’ of bastard feudalism was ‘payment for service’ in the form of a personal contract between master and man, the distinctive instrument of which was the indenture of retainer for life. McFarlane located the origins of bastard feudalism in the manpower needed by Edward I (1272–1307) for his Welsh and Scottish wars. The noble affinities that came into being because of this, however, were not purely military – a point made by McFarlane’s and developed in the researches of his students, notably G. L. Harriss. A lord’s retainers included his kinsmen, household, tenants, neighbors, and estate officials who served him in peace as well as war, and served as

the means of organizing the social, political, and administrative life of the magnate’s ‘country’ – the area over which his good lordship was paramount – for the mutual advantage of himself and the leading gentry families in his service.26

Unlike Plummer and Stubbs, McFarlane did not blame the political violence and social disturbances of late medieval England on bastard feudalism. Rather, he explained the shift to contractual obligation as a mechanism to preserve the ideals of ‘responsibility, loyalty, and good faith’, which were threatened by the weakening of the tenurial bond. Bastard feudalism, McFarlane concluded, was a system of clientage well suited to an age in which good government depended less upon institutions than harmonious relations among the king and the magnates of the realm. Lords, to be sure, used retainers to intimidate juries, pack commissions, and pursue quarrels with their neighbors, but to blame bastard feudalism for this violence and subversion of justice would be to mistake the instrument for the cause, the political and social competition of magnates.

McFarlane’s interpretation of bastard feudalism quickly supplanted Stubbs’s to become the new orthodoxy.27 One element in this thesis, the origin of bastard feudalism in Edward I’s demands for manpower, became a subject of further historical controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As early as 1972, Malcolm Bean (the author’s dissertation advisor at Columbia University) traced the origin of the practice of retaining for money fees to the ‘bachelors’ of the thirteenth century, whom he defined as ‘a special kind of retainer associated, whatever the precise provenance of the payments made to him, with service in the household’.28

Bean’s researches culminated in a book, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (1989), in which he located the origins of bastard feudalism in the mechanisms used by nobles, from Anglo-Saxon times on, to maintain their households. He found evidence for indentures, annuities, livery, and fief-rentes (cash fees granted in return for homage and service) in the thirteenth century, well earlier than the reign of Edward I. The distinction between ‘feudalism’ and ‘bastard feudalism’, for Bean, was forced and artificial; these two forms of maintenance, he contended, had coexisted throughout the medieval period. For that reason, he found the connotations of the term ‘bastard feudalism’ to be misleading and the term itself to be without historical value. David Crouch not only concurred with Bean on this, but found evidence for the use of fief-rentes and the appearance of non-tenurial elements in noble retinues in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.29

Peter Coss in a 1989 article and a subsequent debate with David Crouch and D. A. Carpenter in the journal Past & Present, challenged McFarlane’s framework in a more fundamental manner, finding its origins in the response of English magnates in the late 1250s and early 1260s to the success of Angevin legal reforms.30 The victory of royal over honourial justice forged a more direct relationship between free subject and the crown and between central government and the society of the localities, which threatened to undermine the ability of the great lords to dominate their lesser neighbors. The barons of the weak King Henry III responded to this latent threat by penetrating and subverting the administration and the courts, retaining local officials, packing commissions of oyer and terminer with their retainers, and, in general, using money and patronage to bind the local gentry to them and dominate local society. The deleterious impact upon law and order in late medieval England was much as Plummer and Stubbs had thought.

Most radically, Coss, whose definition of feudal society as ‘a total social formation’ owes more to Marc Bloch (see below) than Ganshof,31 regarded the ‘invasion and subversion of law courts and offices of administration’, rather than the replacement of the tenurial bond with the cash nexus, as lying at the very heart of bastard feudalism.32 Coss and his critics in the Past & Present debate, David Crouch and D. A. Carptenter, ended up generally agreeing about the early antecedents for bastard feudalism, but, ironically, disagreeing on what ‘bastard feudalism’ was.

Marc Bloch and Feudal Society

Discomfort with the ambiguity of the term ‘feudalism’ is not a new phenomenon. In 1939, Marc Bloch, a founding father of the ‘Annales’ school and arguably the most prominent modern medievalist after Henri Pirenne (1862–1935), was well aware of the multiple meanings assigned to the term ‘feudalism’ when he published the first volume of Feudal Society in 1939. (The second volume appeared in the following year while Bloch was in hiding from the Nazis.)

Feudal Society, a study of the development of the ties that bound the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, is one of the most influential works of medieval history published in the twentieth century. Bloch begged the question of what ‘feudalism’ was. Rather than defining the term, he opted instead to list the characteristics of what he termed a ‘feudal society’:

A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority – leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength.33

Bloch was very conscious that the forms taken by the institutions characteristic of feudal society evolved over time in consequence of economic, political, and social developments. He expressed this by identifying two distinct Feudal Ages. The First Feudal Age, lasting from the collapse of the Carolingian Empire to the mid-eleventh century, was characterized by the breakdown of the central authority of the state, in part as a consequence of the Viking raids. Authority during this period devolved upon the localities. Motte-and-bailey castles, man made hills with wooden towers on top of them and enclosures created by ditches and palisades at their base, sprang up all over the western half of the Carolingian Empire. The castellans who controlled these castles were essentially politically autonomous, despite the efforts of counts and dukes to rein them in and the exalted theocratic claims made by kings and their ecclesiastical supporters. The economy was primitively agrarian; commerce took the form of a long-distance luxury trade, in which the west exchanged slaves and raw materials for silks, incense, and spices from the east.

Bloch’s Second Feudal Age, which he saw as beginning around 1050 and continuing until around 1250, was the product of a European economic take-off. Agricultural revolution (three-field rotation, heavy plough, horse harness, windmills) and the expansion of commerce led to the growth of towns and the rebirth of a cash economy. These economic changes helped kings and the great princes of Europe consolidate power, as feudal monarchies arose that were to be the basis of the modern European nation states.

These economic changes also led to a transformation of feudal relations and the definition of nobility. The knightly class became an hereditary nobility by the year 1100. The influx of wealth led to an increasing emphasis upon expenditure and conspicuous consumption as a reflection of nobility. Since this was also an age of rampant inflation, the aristocracy found itself continually pressed for money, which led, in many instances, to attempts to increase the economic exploitation of manorial resources through the use of professional bureaucratic staff in noble households and on manors. By the thirteenth century, aristocrats in England, France, Germany, and Italy tended to be literate, at least in the vernacular, and all great landowners had professional administrators to look after their affairs. (Here is where the universities became especially important in the secular history of medieval Europe). The aristocracy, faced by the emergence of the merchant class, began to define itself as a special order with the help of the Church. This led to chivalry and to the rituals of knighthood (e.g., dubbing ceremony, courtly love, etc.).

Though still defining itself as a warrior class, the military value of knights in the Second Feudal Age declined due to the rigid customary limitations on service. Already by the middle of the twelfth-century English and French kings were relying on mercenaries, many of whom were poor or landless knights. The aristocracy, however, continued to display its martial prowess in games (tournaments) as well as in war. Feudal incidents began to displace military service as the most important render owed by a feudal tenant to his lord.34

The ‘Feudal Revolution’ Debate

Marc Bloch was vague about precisely when his ‘First Feudal Age’ began. Georges Duby, arguably the most influential French medieval historian of the second half of the twentieth century, remedied this. In La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1953) Duby proposed that France underwent a ‘feudal transformation’ around the year 1000. His study of the charters of the abbeys of Cluny and St Vincent of Mâcon persuaded him that between the years 980 to 1030 the Mâconnais experienced a breakdown in public law and order coincident with the emergence of a ‘new and harsh regime of lordship’ based on castles and knights. Lords, according to Duby, imposed new obligations on the peasants, both those of servile and free descent, who became a new class-the serfs. Public law and order gave way to violence, custom and violent custom.

Jean-François Lemarignier added to this by chronicling the devolution of power in the late Carolingian period, as kingdoms fractured into principalities, counties, and, by the end of the tenth century, into castellanies.35 The Capetian idea of kingship was weakened and finally, by the 1020s, swamped in the seignurial tide and lost its public character.

Pierre Bonnassie found the same process in the Spanish March, discovering that in the 1020s ‘an old public order based on Visigothic law preserving peasant property and slavery was smashed by castle-generated violence’, which produced a revolutionary change in the social order.36 Duby further linked this new form of domination to the development and popularization in the 1020s of the paradigm of the three orders – the heaven sanctioned obligation of the many who work to serve those who fight and those who pray.

A summary of this view was offered by J.-P. Poly and Eric Bournazel, The Feudal Transformation, 900–1200 (French 1980, trans 1991). This feudal transformation (mutation) or ‘revolution’ described a cluster of changes:

1) collapse of public justice,

2) new regimes of arbitrary lordship over recently subjected and often intimidated peasants,

3) the multiplication of knights and castles, and

4) a new ideology of the three orders.

Thus while fiefs and vassals could be found in the eighth and ninth centuries, ‘feudalism’ arose only around the millennium. The most extreme statement of this view is by Guy Bois (1989) who saw the persistence of the antique order-characterized by private property and slave labor – lasting until around the year 1000 when it was swept away.

The reaction against the ‘Feudal Transformation’ thesis was not slow in coming. Dominique Barthélemy’s research on the Vendomais proved to him that the feudal transition was a phantom. He contended that changes to terminology had been misinterpreted as actual social and political changes. The new paradigm also drew fire from the ‘hyper-Romanists’ who see the persistence of Roman order into the twelfth century and who challenge the validity of the public versus private paradigm itself.37

The question of whether there was a ‘Feudal Transformation’ around the year 1000 was vigorously debated in the journal Past & Present. T. N. Bisson in 1994 (vol. 142) initiated it with a defense of Duby’s thesis, but with important modifications, in his article, ‘The Feudal Revolution’. This was followed by criticisms by Barthelemy and Stephen White (1996: vol. 152), and by T. Reuter and Chris Wickham (1997: vol. 155).

Bisson emphasizes the transformation of violence from ‘political’ (maintenance of public order through public officials and courts) to non-political and non-constructive (the use of violence by castellans and others to increase or maintain their power, without any sense of creating political institutions or structures.) Bisson’s restatement takes into account that the shift from slavery/free peasants to serfs was gradual and that serfdom coexisted with both in the tenth through twelfth centuries. He also acknowledges that the ‘revolution’ was not complete by 1200 and was, in fact, a continuing process. Bisson makes the interesting point that even in the twelfth century the ‘officers and agents’ of counts, dukes, and kings did not enforce law and order or implement the orders and regulations of their lords, but ruled with arbitrary force under their lords.

This debate is far from over. Richard Barton’s findings for the county of Maine have echoed Bathélemy’s for the Vendomais.38 Recently David Bates, a specialist in early Norman history, has considered whether England experienced something akin to Bisson’s ‘Feudal Revolution’ of the year 1000. Unsurprisingly given his area of specialization, Bates focuses on the impact of the Norman Conquest and in doing so touches on many of the same issues raised by the insular debate over the introduction of feudalism into England. Bates argues that, despite the ‘massive tenurial change, violence and castle-building’ associated with the Norman Conquest, ‘when the whole is set in a broad context, continuity and evolution are the predominant characteristics’ of English society, economy, and politics not only over the course of the eleventh century but between c.850 to 1200. ‘The main messages from England for French historiography’, he concludes, ‘are that feudalism, castle-building and cultural violence can co-exist with power which for the sake of convenience we can call public’. Bates also finds that the evidence for Normandy ‘points to a paradigm which acknowledges evolutionary change’.39

The evidence does suggest a break down in public order maintained through public officials and courts in late tenth- and eleventh-century France and Italy, and although the transformation from the free/slave peasant dichotomy to general servility (serfdom) was gradual and hardly unidirectional, the trend from 950 to 1150 was toward the domination of peasant villages by lords claiming proprietary and juridical rights over these lands and the authority to command the labor of their inhabitants. Such ‘banal’ lordships, moreover, derived their power from the possession of castles and the service of knights.

England and Germany, however, cannot easily be accommodated under the ‘feudal transformation’ paradigm, and White, Janet Nelson, and Barthélemy are right in maintaining that the Carolingian world of the ninth and tenth centuries was also marked by the use of extrajudicial violence as a tool for dispute resolution among the elites. One also must acknowledge that the idea of public (that is, royal) authority continued throughout this period in the person of counts and dukes, whatever their actual powers and de facto relationships with the kings whom they nominally served.

Oddly, the historians involved in the debate over the ‘Feudal Transformation’ never found a need to define what they meant by ‘feudalism’. They apparently assumed that their readers would understand what was implied by the term ‘feudal’. Ironically, in the same year that Bisson published his article in Past and Present, another scholar, Susan Reynolds, did her very best to sweep the term ‘feudalism’ into the dustbin of historiography.

Criticism of Feudalism as a Construct

However they define feudalism, academic historians understand that the term represents a historical construct (although some tend to reify it in their writings). In the words of Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn,

The idea of feudalism is an abstraction derived from some of the facts of early European history, but it is not itself one of those facts. . . . [Eighteenth-century] scholars, looking at certain peculiar institutions which had survived to their day, looking back to the period when these institutions had originated and flourished, coined the word feudalism to sum up a long series of loosely related facts’ 40

Despite the historiographical debates about feudalism, few scholars before the 1970s challenged (at least in print) that this term, however problematic, had heuristic and pedagogical value.41 Elizabeth A. R. Brown was the first to throw down the gauntlet. In an article in the American Historical Review (1974) entitled, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe’, she contended that it would be best to discard entirely the term feudalism because it has no agreed upon definition and is fundamentally misleading. ‘As far as pedagogy is concerned’, Brown declared,

students should certainly be spared an approach that inevitably gives an unwarranted impression of unity and systematization. . . . To advocate teaching what is acknowledged to be deceptive and what must later be untaught reflects an unsettling attitude of condescension toward younger students.42

Brown’s criticism is far-reaching. She regards not only feudalism but all isms –

abstract analytic constructs formulated and defined as a shorthand means of designating the characteristics that the observers consider essential to various time periods, modes of organization, movements, and doctrines43

– as artificialities that distort through simplification and which are fraught with the unstated assumptions of those who coined these terms. As Brown concludes,

The tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed and its influence over students of the Middle Ages finally ended. Perhaps in its downfall it will carry with it those other obdurate isms – manorial, scholastic, and human – that have dominated for far too long the investigation of medieval life and thought.44

Brown’s criticisms have been developed further by Susan Reynolds in an influential monograph, Fiefs and Vassals (1994). Reynolds surveyed the documentary evidence for dependent military tenures in England, France, Germany and Italy, and concluded that even terms such as ‘fief ’, ‘benefice’, ‘vassal’ lacked any technical meaning until the late twelfth century when they were given legal definition by the Italian lawyers who produced the Libri Feudorum.

In essence, Reynolds argued that in the early Middle Ages custom rather than law ruled, and that this custom was both highly localized and mutable. There is no evidence, to her mind, for precise ‘feudal’ institutions or obligations in the tenth or eleventh centuries. If anything, dependent tenures were less important than inheritable family lands and horizontal bonds of association more important than the vertical bonds (lordship) that historians have traditionally emphasized. Reynolds argues for the persistence of public power in the form of kingship and the centrality of community in the eleventh century. (One might observe that she does so without the nuance and skepticism she reserves for lordship and fiefs, but the meaning of terms such as rex, regnum, gens, gield, and communitas and the concepts of ‘king’, ‘kingdom’, ‘guild’, and ‘community’ in the early medieval sources are no less problematic than dominus, homo, vassus, and feudum.45) The ‘feudalism’ of history textbooks, Reynolds concludes, owes far more to the Libri Feudorum of late twelfth-century professional Italian lawyers than to the institutions and practices of earlier centuries.

Reynolds’s book pays far more attention to fiefs than to vassals, but her work has inspired others to challenge received wisdom about the latter. Paul Hyams is among those who have taken up the challenge. His essay, ‘Homage and Feudalism: A Judicious Separation’, makes an important contribution to the debate by demonstrating that another of the favorite terms of medieval historians, ‘homage’, had a broader meaning than traditionally believed. Hyams, a self-pronounced skeptic of the utility of feudalism as an analytical model, demonstrates in a carefully argued paper that the ritual of ‘intermixed hands’ was not specific to ‘the creation of honourable lordship’, as usually believed, but was used for various purposes to make manifest ‘an act of submission, the conveyance of self into some state of dependence’.46

Susan Reynolds’s nominalist argument has largely swept the field, as the many favorable reviews of Vassals and Fiefs attest.47 Indeed, over the last decade, ‘feudalism’ has become an ‘F-word’ at some professional conferences for medieval historians, only uttered ironically or with the intention to provoke. That professional medievalists have been so willing to jettison as central a construct to their discipline as ‘feudalism’ may have something to do with the changing character of the academic profession.

I suspect that the old paradigm of feudalism was more persuasive to an earlier generation of scholars because it meshed well with a traditional ‘masculine’ academic system that emphasized hierarchy, conflict, academic patronage, and power relations. That system still exists, of course, but it has been moderated and the discourse of academic politics, if not the substance, has changed to emphasize collegiality and departmental consensus. The discourse on medieval social history has changed accordingly to one which now places greater emphasis upon horizontal bonds of association and reconciliation of disputes. The passing of the WWII and Korean War generations and the discredit into which military history fell in the post-Vietnam era may also have had a role in calling into question old assumptions about the centrality of warfare to medieval politics and to the self definition of the aristocracy.

There are, of course, American and British medieval historians who reject the Brown-Reynolds thesis, but they have been oddly hesitant to engage the subject head-on in print.48 German historians, however, have shown no such reluctance.49 Karl Kroeschell, for example, while acknowledging the prevalence of allods in the early middle ages and the imprecise character of the Carolingian terminology for dependent tenures, concludes that ‘Reynolds’ extreme position is untenable from a German perspective’. Kroeschell criticizes Reynolds for distorting or ignoring the Carolingian evidence for vassalage and dependent tenures, and points out that the Concordat of Worms (1122) and the dispute between Frederick Barbaraossa and the papacy in the mid-1150s can only be understood in ‘feudal’ terms, although both occurred too early to have been influenced by the Libri Feudorum.50

Like the late Warren Hollister, I find myself ambivalent about this paradigm shift. On the one hand, I think that Elizabeth A. R. Brown’s critique of ‘feudalism’ as a construct is right on the mark. Skepticism about ‘feudalism’ as a system predated Brown’s AHR article. Indeed, several of my mentors and senior colleagues pointedly remarked that Brown had merely published what they had been teaching for years. Nor can one take exception to Reynolds’s admonitions to read texts critically within context, and to guard against reading into sources what one expects to find in them.

But I am less persuaded by Reynolds’s attacks upon the importance of lordship/vassalage and dependent tenures as central elements in early medieval society and politics. The historiographical pendulum threatens now to swing too far toward horizontal bonds of association, consensus making, and community and away from vertical ties and power. Both types of social bonds appear in the sources for the tenth and eleventh centuries, not only in France, Italy, and Germany, but in pre-Conquest England as well. Listening to disputes over whether lordship or community was the foundation of medieval society, I am reminded of physicists attempting to determine whether light is a wave or a particle. The answer is, of course, both.

Susan Reynolds is right in noting that ‘vassalage’ and dependent tenures were not the only – and probably not even the most prevalent – political and material ties among the European nobility of the tenth and eleventh centuries. She is also undoubtedly right that the distinction between ‘property’ and ‘tenure’ was less distinct in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than it is for historians today (or professional lawyers in the thirteenth century). But this was less a matter of confusion or vagueness as it was the recognition of a social fact: a gift of land, even in the form of ‘property’, continued to bind the donor and recipient long after the transaction had been concluded.51

‘Feudalism’ as a historical construct or ideal type may never have existed. Lords, retainers, and dependent tenures, however, did, and were critical elements in the governance of early medieval polities. By the early thirteenth century, the institutions of lordship and the fief had become ubiquitous throughout western Europe. Pace Reynolds, this development probably had less to do with professional Italian lawyers systematizing feudal law than with the realization by rulers that they could enhance their authority by defining themselves as royal liege lords of all free men and as the fount of all landholding in their realms.

It is telling that the most ‘feudalized’ societies of the twelfth century were Norman England, Norman Sicily, and the Crusader principalities, all polities established through conquest in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. William the Conqueror’s distribution of lands to his followers was on the basis of fiefs. Domesday Book describes the lands of England’s tenants-in-chief in 1087 as held de rege (‘from the king’), and Henry II’s Cartae Baronum of 1166 enumerates the military obligations attached to them fifty years later. Whether or not Normandy (or Anglo-Saxon England) was ‘feudal’ in 1066, it is indisputable that William structured the Norman settlement of his newly acquired kingdom upon the principle of dependent military tenures.

A similar case can be made for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Peter Edbury, an admirer of Susan Reynolds’s book, attempted to apply her model to the evidence from the Latin East in the twelfth century. The result was not, I think, what he intended. He found no explicit evidence that the great lords of the ‘First Kingdom’ had a formal obligation to produce a stipulated number of knights to the king when he went on campaign, or that their lordships were termed ‘feoda’. On the other hand, he uncovered a great deal of evidence for lesser landowners holding their lands as ‘fiefs’ (in the sense as dependent tenures) in return for fixed quotas of military service. Edbury suggests that the distinction might be significant, but admitted that there is a danger here of arguing ex nihilo: the absence of evidence that the great lordships were regarded as fiefs and that the magnates of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were contractually bound to produce a fixed number when summoned by the king ‘is not evidence that such features did not exist’.

Certainly, by the 1180s the great nobles of the Kingdom were conceived of as ‘vassals’ of the king. William of Tyre’s account of an oath of fidelity in 1183 sworn by the higher nobility to the new regent Guy of Lusignan explicitly represents the higher nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as such. The principes and the king’s fideles on that occasion ‘took a ritual oath manualiter, placing their hands in those of their lord as they repeated the formulae’ by which they became Guy’s vassalli. Edbury also found that knights holding fiefs (in the traditional sense of the word) from magnates in return for heavy military service was the norm in the twelfth century. Edbury admits that the most cogent and logical explanation for the heavy military quotas and the absence of fiscal dues is that these knights’ fees ‘dated from early in the kingdom’s history and had come into being at a time of acute manpower shortage’. The main argument against that conclusion is that it contradicts Reynolds’s model.52

Brown’s and Reynolds’s arguments to the contrary, it is difficulty to deny that the Normans who conquered England in the second half of the eleventh century and the French who settled in the Latin East at the beginning of the twelfth brought with them a concept of dependent tenures (and fief-rentes) held from lords in return for military service. The nexus of dependent tenures with military service in these polities was as yet ill defined. The obligations attached to ‘fiefs’ (whether in the form of land or money or direct maintenance) probably depended more on practical circumstances than law or even custom, as the institutions of governance and society evolved in response to dynamic conditions. These were not yet the knights’ fees described in Bracton (or even Glanvill). Nonetheless, it seems to me that England, Sicily, and the Latin East at the turn of the twelfth century might be termed ‘feudal societies’ without apology.

If defined clearly and narrowly, as in Ganshof ’s definition, ‘feudalism’ remains a useful short-hand term to describe vertical social and political relations among the aristocracies of England and France from the mid-eleventh through thirteenth centuries (and of Germany in the thirteenth century). One must always be aware, however, that an ideal construct only approximates reality; the danger is mistaking the construct for reality, and either interpreting source evidence through the construct or judging the actual social, political, and tenurial relationships in a particular society, whether medieval European or not, against this ideal. What all medieval historians can agree on is that the question, ‘was this society feudal?’ is less meaningful than understanding the institutions and relationships of that society in their historical context.

Richard Abels is professor emeritus at the United States Naval Academy and a medieval historian. He now hosts the podcast ’tis but a scratch: Fact and Fiction about the Middle Ages.

This article was first published in History Compass, Vol. 7:3 (2009). We thank Professor Abels for his permission to republish it.

End Notes

1 C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1974), 117–22.

2 Ibid., 121.

3 C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 8th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 1998), 127.

4 Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe’. American Historical Review, 79 (1974): 1063–88; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994).

5 C. Warren Hollister, ‘The Irony of English Feudalism’, Journal of British Studies, 2 (1963): 1–26. Cf. the response of Robert S. Hoyt in the same volume, ‘The Iron Age of English Feudalism’, 27–30, and Hollister’s rejoinder, ‘The Irony of the Iron Age’, 30–1.

6 See e.g., Carl Stephenson and Bryce Lyon, Mediaeval History, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962), 155, 160–1, 199–218.

7 See e.g., Barbara Rosenwein’s explanation why ‘many historians have stopped using the word feudalism’ in Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, and Bonnie G. Smith, The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 343.

8 See e.g., Peter N. Stearns, Michael Adas, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Marc J. Gilbert, World Civilizations: The Global Experience, 5th ed. (New York, NY: Pearson/Longman, 2007), 59, 327–8, 395–7. The seminal work for feudalism in non-European premodern states is Rushton Coulborn (ed.), Feudalism in History (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965). This approach underlies Peter Duus’s Feudalism in Japan, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1993), which is still in print.

9 David Herlihy (ed.), The History of Feudalism (New York, NY: Walker and Company, 1970), xv.

10 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 5–7; Donald R. Kelley, ‘De Origine Feudorum: The Beginnings of an Historical Problem’, Speculum, 39/2 (1964): 225–6.

11 F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism, trans. Philip Grierson, 3rd English ed. (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964), xvi.

12 Frederic Cheyette, ‘Feudalism: A Brief History of the Idea’ (2005). See also Karl Kroeschell, ‘Lehnrecht und Verfassung im deutschen Hochmittelalter’, Forum historiae iuris: Erste europäische Internetzeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte, 27 April 1998.

13 Heide Wunder, ‘Feudalismus’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 4 (1989): 411–15. For a more extended discussion, see Ludolf Kuchenbuch, ‘ “Feudalismus”: Versuch über die Gebrauchsstrateigien eines wissenspolitischen Reizwortes’, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G. Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus / Présence du féodalisme et présent de la féodalité / The Presence of Feudalism, Veröffenlichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 293–305.

14 Otto Gerhard Oexle provides an overview of the German historiography of ‘Feudalismus’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Oexle, ‘Feudalismus, Verfassung under Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich 1868–1920’, in Fryde, Monnet, and Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus, 211–46.

15 See Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs in Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984); Gadi Algazi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im späten Mittelalter (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996). For the historiographical debate over Brunner’s model of the medieval German polity, see ‘Translators’ Introduction’, in Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), xiii–xli. For a recent overview of the role played by lordship in the development of the medieval German state, see the essays in Die Macht des Königs. Herrschaft in Europa vom Frühmittelalter bis in die Neuzeit, ed. Bernhard Jussen (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005).

16 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 102–11.

17 Frederic William Maitland, The Constitutional History of England. A Course of Lectures Delivered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908; reprinted: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2001), 142.

18 Eric John, Orbis Britanniae (Leicester: Leicester University, 1966), 135–6.

19 C. Warren Hollister, The Military Organization of Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). Hollister engaged in a debate published in the Journal of British Studies over the military value of English feudalism with Robert S. Hoyt and Frederic Cheyette.

20 John Gillingham, ‘The Introduction of Knight Service into England’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 4 (1982): 53–64; David Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London/New York, NY: Longman, Inc., 1982).

21 Richard Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley, CA/London: University of California Press, 1988).

22 J. Fortescue, Governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885), 15–16. The best overview of bastard feudalism is Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London/New York, NY: Longman, 1995).

23 William Stubbs, The Consitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols., 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 3:543–67.

24 A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (London/New York, NY: Longman, 2000), 246.

25 K. B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 20 (1943–45): 161–80; reprinted in K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, ed. G. L. Harriss (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 23–43.

26 G. L. Harriss, ‘Introduction’, in McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century, xvii–xviii.

27 For a critical appreciation of the influence of McFarlane and his academic ‘affinity’ on studies of English feudalism, see Peter Coss, ‘From Feudalism to Bastard Feudalism’, in Fryde, Monnet, and Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus, 76–107.

28 J. M. W. Bean, ‘Bachelor and Retainer’, Mediaevalia et Humanistica, new ser., 3 (1972): 117–31; Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 121–53. See also Scott Waugh, ‘Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England’, English Historical Review, 101 (1986): 811–39.

29 David Crouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, c.1147–1219 (London/New York, NY: Longman, 1990), 157–60. See also Crouch, ‘Debate: Bastard Feudalism Revised’, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 165–77.

30 Peter Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised’, Past & Present, 125 (1989): 27–64; David Crouch and D. A. Carptenter, ‘Debate: Bastard Feudalism Revisited’, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 165–89; Peter Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revisited: Reply’, Past & Present 131 (1991): 190–203.

31 Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revisited: Reply’, 198–9. See also comments by Hicks, Bastard Feudalism, 24–7.

32 Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised: Reply’, 193.

33 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 446.

34 Ibid., 59–71.

35 Jean-François Lemarignier, ‘Political and Monastic Structures in France at the End of the Tenth and the Beginning of the Eleventh Century’ (1957), trans. Frederic Cheyette, Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (Huntingdon, NY: Robert E. Krieger, Publishing Co., 1968), 100–27.

36 Pierre Bonnaissie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe à la fin du XIe siècle: croissance et mutations d’une sociètè, 2 vols. (Toulouse: l’Université de Toulouse, 1975–76). The characterization of Bonnaissie’s thesis is a quotation from Thomas N. Bisson, ‘The “Feudal Revolution” ’, Past and Present, 142 (1994): 7.

37 Dominique Barthélemy, La sociéte dans le comté de Vendôme de l’an mil au XIVe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1993).

38 Richard E. Barton, Lordship in the County of Maine, c.890–1160 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).

39 David Bates, ‘England and the “Feudal Revolution” ’, in Il feudalesimo nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di Studi del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo 47 (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del Centro, 2000), 646.

40 Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn, ‘The Idea of Feudalism’, in Coulborn (ed.), Feudalism in History, 3.

41 Frederic L. Cheyette, however, came close in his response to Hollister’s and Hoyt’s debate over ‘the irony’ of English feudalism. ‘Some Notations on Mr. Hollister’s “Irony” ’, Journal of British Studies, 5 (1965): 1–14.

42 Brown, ‘Tyranny of a Construct’, 1078.

43 Ibid., 1080.

44 Ibid., 1088.

45 See e.g., Reynolds, Vassals and Fiefs, 34–46; Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 8: ‘The Community of the Realm’. Although in her introduction to the second edition of Kingdoms and Communities, Reynolds repeats her observation in Vassals and Fiefs (12–14) about the need to distinguish words, concepts, and phenomena, and warns that there is ‘no necessary connection between any particular word and the concept or notion that that people may have in their minds when they use the word’, she immediately follows this with the assertion that the nouns regnum, gens, natio were ‘so fundamental that they seldom needed to be argued about’ (xliv).

46 Paul Hyams, ‘Homage and Feudalism: A Judicious Separation’, in Fryde, Monnet, Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus, 49.

47 See e.g., Paul Hyams’s review article, ‘The End of Feudalism?’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1997): 655–62. But cf. Thomas N. Bisson, ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995): 743–79. By ‘nominalism’ I mean Reynolds’s distinction between ‘word’, ‘concept’, and ‘phenomenon’, and her assertion that for historians, words are less important than either concepts or phenomena.

48 The closest is Thomas N. Bisson’s presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America, published as ‘Medieval Lordship’, Speculum, 70 (1995): 743–58.

49 See e.g., the critical reviews of Fiefs and Vassals by Otto Gerhard Oexle, ‘Die Abschaffung des Feudalismus ist gescheitert’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 (19 May 1995), and by Johannes Fried in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 19/1 (1997): 28–41. Cf. Reynolds’ response to the latter, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 19/2 (1997): 30–40.

50 Kroeschell, ‘Lehnrect und Verfassung im deutschen Hochmittelatler’.

51 See, e.g., Frederic Cheyette, ‘On the Fief de reprise’, in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal: Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse: CNRS/Université de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, 1999), 319–24. In a series of charters from twelfth-century Montpellier, historian Frederic Cheyette discovered that the same land could be granted in alodio, that is, as property, repeatedly by the same donor to the heirs of the original recipient, and then granted back to the donor as a feudum. As Cheyette observes, what seemed to be important for the participants is that the entire ritual of donation, return grant, and oath of fidelity served to implant a personal relationship, what the document from Pignan refers to as ‘love’. See also Frederic L. Cheyette, ‘Review of Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals’, Speculum, 71 (1996): 998–1006.

52 Peter W. Edbury, ‘Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Twelfth Century to the Thirteenth’, Crusades, 1 (2002): 49–52, 59–60. In a paper published in 1998, Edbury explicitly attempted to apply Reynolds’s method and ideas to the Latin East. ‘Fiefs, vassaux et series militaire dans le royaume latin de Jérusalem’, in Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (eds), Le Partage du Monde: échanges det colonization dans la Méditerranée médievale (Paris, 1998), 141–50, discussed in Edbury, ‘Fiefs and Vassals’, 49–50. Cf. Susan Reynolds’s tortured attempt to explain away the evidence for fiefs and vassals in the early Latin Kingdom in the same volume. ‘Fiefs and Vassals in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem: A View from the West’, Crusades, 1 (2002): 29–48. Reynolds’s argument largely comes down to the assertion that ‘those who acquired lordships or lesser properties in the East after the First Crusade cannot [emphasis added] have brought with them ideas about fiefs and their rights that would only be worked out by later lawyers’ (40). In other words, Reynolds employs the same method she condemned in other historians of feudalism: reading the sources through a conceptual lens. Most recently, Alan V. Murray has argued for the importance of money-fiefs for military recruitment during the early decades of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. ‘The Origin of Money-Fiefs in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in John France (ed.), Mercenaries and Paid Men. The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 275–86.

Top Image: British Library MS Royal 2 B.VII, fol. 78v