LightSpectra
me autem minui
I suppose that I should call this some sort of informal mini-article. Since this subject comes up somewhat frequently, I thought a short thread that talks about a revolution in medieval historiography that killed "feudalism" as a blanket term would be lovely.
Still to this day you're likely to learn about how the Middle Ages were a feudal society: with the collapse of the old levying system after the Goths, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons swept through and dismantled the old Roman institutions, military organization now revolved around oligarchical tributaries. The great conquering kings like Clovis and William of Normandy would grant their conquests to their nobles and the Church as a reward for their loyalty, in order for them to administrate the lands (fiefs) in the name of the king (vassalage) after a ritual homage, called a commendation ceremony. In order to work the land, the nobles then would then do the same for peasants, who became serfs that were legally obliged to stay on the manor of their lord.
The whole narrative of the above was really written by François-Louis Ganshof, a Belgian early-20th century historian who thought that this was a uniform social-economic relationship that lasted all the way from the barbarian invasions until the Protestant Reformation. Ganshof's description of feudalism was really detailed, all of that was based on a 13th Lombardy legal treatise, Libri Feudorum, which was a collection of statements regarding the legal details of vassalage. So this is pretty good, right? We have a fat codex that tells us all of the minutiae of how this worked.
Well, it turns out that describing a gigantic geographic entity over the course of a 1,000 years using a single legal document doesn't actually fly. This is something medieval historians before and after Ganshof realized. In many places, Libri Feudorum-vassalage was totally irreconcilable with the given evidence for what the actual relationship between peasants and nobles was like. So each historian tried to cram what they saw into the Ganshof terminology, while redefining feudalism in their work. For example, in works about the 15th century Wars of the Roses, authors will examine "English bastard feudalism", a very complex system that depends on the regional influence of individual barons (nothing like 13th century Lombardy's structure); but you'll also read about how David I introduced feudalism during his reign in 12th century Scotland based on the employ contracts of French knights (also nothing like 13th century Lombardy's structure).
Since every historian tried to talk about "feudalism" in ways that were nothing like each other, especially not like 13th century Lombardy as Ganshof described, the word "feudalism" became a Frankensteinian monster that really meant nothing except how each individual author wanted it to mean for the time period they were discussing. This was pointed out in Elizabeth A. R. Brown's paper The Tyranny of a Construct in 1974, basically a paper which asks "why the heck are we trying to cram intensely different things into one word?" Then in 1994, Susan Reynolds published Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, an extremely detailed and scathingly critical book that deconstructs both vassalage and fiefdom. Very quickly in the book, she writes that "vassalage... is a term that no longer matches either the evidence we have available or the conceptual tools we need to use in analyzing it. It is both too diffuse and too narrow -- not surprisingly, since it survives from a primitive stage of the study of social relations... Vassalage is too vacuous a concept to be useful" (p. 47). The rest of the book then talks about fiefdom and why the Ganshof narrative gives us really bad parameters in terms of terminology.
This is an exerpt from Fred Cheyette's review of Reynold's work:
In other words, what Ganshof takes for granted is the fact that each community, and even individual person, looked at "property" and "fealty" in different ways. One such example of this is by looking at the Domesday Book compiled by William of Normandy in 1086 after conquering England: we can see that many Anglo-Saxon peasants were "cheated" by the Norman aristocrats who devalued the tributes that were given to the previous sheriffs under the Godwin kings, despite the fact that William had an earnest desire to maintain the old privileges of the crown he had just won. This was such a problem under the Ganshof narrative that the historians of ancient England merely wrote off William as an oppressive king, a ridiculously simplified view that utterly failed to consider the ramifications of why a different people across the channel would record economic data the way they did. Modern historians are now really seeing how amazingly resourceful and complicated the Domesday Book is for telling us about the top-to-down economic structure in Norman England.
Reynold's work, of course, is not the end-all-and-be-all of the subject. She actually utilizes such a huge amount of primary evidence that historians, to this day, are wading through it to see if her analyses of certain periods are accurate. A recent criticism of her, as well, is that since her criticism is aimed at debunking the old Ganshof narrative (and some modulations to it made by a handful of historians after him), that while not inaccurate, it's a work that is dialectic in nature; she looks entirely at the social-economic relationship between "peasants" and "aristocrats" (also not rigidly-defined roles that can be uniformly used), not truly in the fullest context that "fiefs" had in medieval society. Since I'm no expert on medieval history myself, I cannot even begin to talk about all of the post-Reynolds studies in feudalism.
So where does that leave us? Well, for one, "feudalism" is dead and you have to look at archaeological and textual histories to see how each individual microcosmic region in Europe worked in its given time period. Secondly, confining the "Middle Ages" to the "feudal period" is annoyingly preposterous, as well as Marxist and other anthropological narratives that try to build a linear progression of human beings based on economic progress.
Still to this day you're likely to learn about how the Middle Ages were a feudal society: with the collapse of the old levying system after the Goths, Franks, Lombards and Anglo-Saxons swept through and dismantled the old Roman institutions, military organization now revolved around oligarchical tributaries. The great conquering kings like Clovis and William of Normandy would grant their conquests to their nobles and the Church as a reward for their loyalty, in order for them to administrate the lands (fiefs) in the name of the king (vassalage) after a ritual homage, called a commendation ceremony. In order to work the land, the nobles then would then do the same for peasants, who became serfs that were legally obliged to stay on the manor of their lord.
The whole narrative of the above was really written by François-Louis Ganshof, a Belgian early-20th century historian who thought that this was a uniform social-economic relationship that lasted all the way from the barbarian invasions until the Protestant Reformation. Ganshof's description of feudalism was really detailed, all of that was based on a 13th Lombardy legal treatise, Libri Feudorum, which was a collection of statements regarding the legal details of vassalage. So this is pretty good, right? We have a fat codex that tells us all of the minutiae of how this worked.
Well, it turns out that describing a gigantic geographic entity over the course of a 1,000 years using a single legal document doesn't actually fly. This is something medieval historians before and after Ganshof realized. In many places, Libri Feudorum-vassalage was totally irreconcilable with the given evidence for what the actual relationship between peasants and nobles was like. So each historian tried to cram what they saw into the Ganshof terminology, while redefining feudalism in their work. For example, in works about the 15th century Wars of the Roses, authors will examine "English bastard feudalism", a very complex system that depends on the regional influence of individual barons (nothing like 13th century Lombardy's structure); but you'll also read about how David I introduced feudalism during his reign in 12th century Scotland based on the employ contracts of French knights (also nothing like 13th century Lombardy's structure).
Since every historian tried to talk about "feudalism" in ways that were nothing like each other, especially not like 13th century Lombardy as Ganshof described, the word "feudalism" became a Frankensteinian monster that really meant nothing except how each individual author wanted it to mean for the time period they were discussing. This was pointed out in Elizabeth A. R. Brown's paper The Tyranny of a Construct in 1974, basically a paper which asks "why the heck are we trying to cram intensely different things into one word?" Then in 1994, Susan Reynolds published Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, an extremely detailed and scathingly critical book that deconstructs both vassalage and fiefdom. Very quickly in the book, she writes that "vassalage... is a term that no longer matches either the evidence we have available or the conceptual tools we need to use in analyzing it. It is both too diffuse and too narrow -- not surprisingly, since it survives from a primitive stage of the study of social relations... Vassalage is too vacuous a concept to be useful" (p. 47). The rest of the book then talks about fiefdom and why the Ganshof narrative gives us really bad parameters in terms of terminology.
This is an exerpt from Fred Cheyette's review of Reynold's work:
In other words, what Ganshof takes for granted is the fact that each community, and even individual person, looked at "property" and "fealty" in different ways. One such example of this is by looking at the Domesday Book compiled by William of Normandy in 1086 after conquering England: we can see that many Anglo-Saxon peasants were "cheated" by the Norman aristocrats who devalued the tributes that were given to the previous sheriffs under the Godwin kings, despite the fact that William had an earnest desire to maintain the old privileges of the crown he had just won. This was such a problem under the Ganshof narrative that the historians of ancient England merely wrote off William as an oppressive king, a ridiculously simplified view that utterly failed to consider the ramifications of why a different people across the channel would record economic data the way they did. Modern historians are now really seeing how amazingly resourceful and complicated the Domesday Book is for telling us about the top-to-down economic structure in Norman England.
Reynold's work, of course, is not the end-all-and-be-all of the subject. She actually utilizes such a huge amount of primary evidence that historians, to this day, are wading through it to see if her analyses of certain periods are accurate. A recent criticism of her, as well, is that since her criticism is aimed at debunking the old Ganshof narrative (and some modulations to it made by a handful of historians after him), that while not inaccurate, it's a work that is dialectic in nature; she looks entirely at the social-economic relationship between "peasants" and "aristocrats" (also not rigidly-defined roles that can be uniformly used), not truly in the fullest context that "fiefs" had in medieval society. Since I'm no expert on medieval history myself, I cannot even begin to talk about all of the post-Reynolds studies in feudalism.
So where does that leave us? Well, for one, "feudalism" is dead and you have to look at archaeological and textual histories to see how each individual microcosmic region in Europe worked in its given time period. Secondly, confining the "Middle Ages" to the "feudal period" is annoyingly preposterous, as well as Marxist and other anthropological narratives that try to build a linear progression of human beings based on economic progress.
) era anyway?
