These tenants, or peasants, were constrained by various extra-economic ties to their landlords, but retained a great deal of autonomy in how they organised their labour within a family structure. Feudalism in this tradition became a label for an economy where most work was done not by enslaved people (as Karl Marx imagined had been the case in the ancient world), nor by wage labourers (as is the case in industrialised societies), but by tenant farmers. Here feudalism refers not so much to the legal technicalities of fiefs and vassalage, but to the economic circumstances which underpinned them. The first to emerge was a Marxist understanding. (Image by Getty Images)įrom this original concept of feudalism, historians developed two other approaches. In the oldest understanding of feudalism, explains Prof Charles West, a landed estate would be granted by a lord to someone, sometimes called a vassal, in exchange for a promise of loyalty. Many of these questions were first aired systematically in a work known as the Libri Feudorum (‘Books of Fiefs’), a mid 12th-century legal compilation made in northern Italy.Ī vintage engraving of a medieval lord receiving a grant of land from a king. Could a vassal sell their fief to a third party? Was a fief hereditary? What could a lord reasonably ask their vassal to do? Did vassals have obligations to their lord’s lord? And so on.
From the later Middle Ages, lawyers piled elaboration after elaboration on this basic relationship, exploring all the implications in great technical detail. A fief was typically a landed estate which was granted by a lord to someone, sometimes called a vassal, in exchange for a promise of loyalty, sometimes termed homage. This thinks of feudalism as a post-Roman legal system, based on the fief (Latin: feodum). In fact there are three distinctive historiographical traditions within which feudalism has played a major role – or, put differently, three slightly different answers to the question: ‘What was feudalism?’ The first, and the oldest, is a legal tradition, stretching back to the French philosopher Montesquieu (d1755).
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