The - Historiography - of - A - Construct - Feudalism and Medieval Historian PDF

History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.
Blackwell
Oxford,
History
HICO
1478-0542
March
10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x
610
1
0
Europe
1031???
008???
2009
The 2009
Compass
The
UKPublishing
AuthorofJournal
Historiography aLtd Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Construct
The Historiography of a Construct:

Feudalism and the Medieval Historian
Richard Abels*
United States Naval Academy
Abstract
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 Mid-
dle 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 pro-
bably 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 pro-

blem 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 con-
troversial 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 Hollisters 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.
2009 The Author
Journal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Historiography of a Construct 1009
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 feudal-
ism plays in this edition. Hollisters 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 pop-
ular medieval history textbooks of the day.6 Hollister, the young radical,
ended his career as a conservative in terms of the historiography of feu-
dalism, 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.
2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x
1010 The Historiography of a Construct
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 histo-
rian commented, Im 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 terms 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 historio-
graphical 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
Alvarottos (13851453) treatise De feudis (Concerning Fiefs) posited that
despite regional differences the regulations governing the descent of aristo-
cratic land tenure were derived from common legal principles, a customary
shared feudal law. Based upon study of the twelfth-century Lombard com-
pilation known as the Libri Feudorum (Books of Fiefs), the juridic concept
of feudalism was subsequently extended to cover the aggregate of insti-
tutions 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
Franois Hotman (152490), 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 (152090), 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 fodalit, 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 exploi-
tation of peasants viewed against the backdrop of the parceling out of national
sovereignty to private individuals. For them fodalit 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 exploi-
tation 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 (181883), 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., attend-
ance at the lords court, hospitality to the lord and his men) and miscel-
laneous payments (feudal incidents) that reflected the lords continued rights
over the property. The most important of the services required from a fief-
holder was knight service. When summoned to war by his lord, the holder
of a fief was obliged to send to the lords 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 detre 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 cen-
tury, 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 (18951980), the English historians John Horace
Round (18541928) and Sir Frank Merry Stenton (18801967), and the
American historians Carl Stephenson (18861954) 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 Fodalit
et Seigneurie, the Feudal and Seigneurial Systems. For historians such as
Marc Bloch (18861944), Georges Duby (191996), 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 socio-
economic 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 (18611940), Heinrich Mitteis (18891952),
and the Austrian Otto Brunner (18981992) have presented feudalism as
an ideal stage in state formation not limited to the medieval West.14
Brunners 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, Brunners
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 Confessors 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 commenda-
tion 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 Hast-
ings. The argument extends back to the seventeenth century when the
antiquary Sir Henry Spelman (c.1564 1641) first recognized the applica-
bility 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. Freemans argu-
ment for continuity in English tenurial and political history, Round rep-
resented 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 Rounds
thesis was Sir Frank Stenton, who rejected Rounds animus against the
Anglo-Saxons but who embraced his view that 1066 marked the beginnings
of English feudalism. Not everyone, however, was persuaded. Rounds
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 (19222000) in
the 1960s revived the arguments of the late nineteenth-century historian
H. Munro Chadwick for Anglo-Saxon royal armies made up of noble war-
riors who were personally commended to the ealdormen under whom thy
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
Williams 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 feudal-
ism on the then unquestioned assumption that land tenure was the basis
of authentic feudalism. The Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History,
Bishop William Stubbs (18251901) developed Plummers views in his influ-
ential 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 (132777).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 histori-
ographical consensus that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth 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 (190366) 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 (12721307) 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 McFarlanes and developed in the researches of his students,
notably G. L. Harriss. A lords 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 mag-
nates 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 con-
cluded, was a system of clientage well suited to an age in which good govern-
ment 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 neigh-
bors, 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.
McFarlanes interpretation of bastard feudalism quickly supplanted Stubbss
to become the new orthodoxy.27 One element in this thesis, the origin of
bastard feudalism in Edward Is demands for manpower, became a subject
of further historical controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As early
as 1972, Malcolm Bean (the authors dissertation advisor at Columbia Uni-
versity) 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 Beans 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 McFarlanes
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 phe-
nomenon. In 1939, Marc Bloch, a founding father of the Annales school
and arguably the most prominent modern medievalist after Henri Pirenne
(18621935), 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 charac-
teristic 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 local-
ities. 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 prim-
itively 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.
Blochs 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 monar-
chies 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 custom-
ary 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 socit aux
XIe et XIIe sicles dans la rgion mconnaise (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 Mcon persuaded him
that between the years 980 to 1030 the Mconnais experienced a break-
down 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-Franois Lemarignier
added to this by chronicling the devolution of power in the late Carol-
ingian period, as kingdoms fractured into principalities, counties, and, by
the end of the tenth century, into castellanies.35 The Capetian idea of king-
ship 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,
9001200 (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 intim-
idated 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 millen-
nium. 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 Barthlemys 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 Dubys 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 castel-
lans and others to increase or maintain their power, without any sense of
creating political institutions or structures.) Bissons 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 regula-
tions of their lords, but ruled with arbitrary force under their lords.
This debate is far from over. Richard Bartons findings for the county of
Maine have echoed Bathlemys for the Vendomais.38 Recently David Bates,
a specialist in early Norman history, has considered whether England expe-
rienced something akin to Bissons 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 dichot-
omy 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 lord-
ships, moreover, derived their power from the possession of castles and the
service of knights. England and Germany, however, cannot easily be accom-
modated under the feudal transformation paradigm, and White, Janet Nel-
son, and Barthlemy are right in maintaining that the Carolingian world
of the ninth and tenth centuries was also marked by the use of extra-
judicial 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 Transfor-
mation 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 funda-
mentally misleading. As far as pedagogy is concerned, Brown declared,
students should certainly be spared an approach that inevitably gives an unwar-
ranted 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
Browns 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 influ-
ence 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
Browns criticisms have been developed further by Susan Reynolds in an
influential monograph, Fiefs and Vassals (1994). Reynolds surveyed the docu-
mentary evidence for dependent military tenures in England, France, Ger-
many 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 institu-
tions 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 feu-
dalism 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.
Reynoldss 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 con-
tribution 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 lord-
ship, 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 Reynoldss 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 colle-
giality 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 acknowl-
edging 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 Barbara-
ossa 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. Browns
critique of feudalism as a construct is right on the mark. Skepticism

about feudalism as a system predated Browns 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 Reynoldss 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 Reynoldss attacks upon the importance of
lordship/vassalage and dependent tenures as central elements in early medi-
eval society and politics. The historiographical pendulum threatens now
to swing too far toward horizontal bonds of association, consensus mak-
ing, 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 cen-
tury). 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 Conquerors distribution
of lands to his followers was on the basis of fiefs. Domesday Book describes
the lands of Englands tenants-in-chief in 1087 as held de rege (from the
king), and Henry IIs 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

Reynoldss 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 Tyres 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 kings 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 Guys 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 kingdoms history and had come into being at a time of acute man-
power shortage. The main argument against that conclusion is that it
contradicts Reynoldss model.52
Browns and Reynoldss 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 depend-
ent 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.
Short Biography
Dr Richard Abels is chair of the History Department of the United States
Naval Academy. He received a B.A. (American History, magna cum laude,
1973), M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (Medieval History, 1982) from Columbia
University. Dr Abels has written two books, Lordship and Military Obliga-
tion in Anglo-Saxon England (1988) and Alfred the Great: War, Kingship, and
Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, and co-edited a third, The Normans and their
Adversaries: Essays in Memory of C. Warren Hollister (2001). He is also the
author of numerous articles on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman military
and cultural history. Dr Abels taught at Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa,
in 19811982, and in the History Department of the U.S. Naval Academy
from 1982 to the present, where he is the first and only professor to have
won all three civilian faculty excellence awards: for Teaching (1991), Research
(2003), and Service (2008). Dr Abels is currently working on a book about
the relationship between culture and warfare in the Middle Ages.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Sampson Hall, Annapolis, Maryland, United States, 21402-5044.
Email: abels@usna.edu.
1
C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: John Wiley
& Sons, Inc., 1974), 11722.
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): 106388; 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, 2730, and Hollisters rejoinder, The Irony of the Iron Age, 301.
6
See e.g., Carl Stephenson and Bryce Lyon, Mediaeval History, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Harper
& Row, 1962), 155, 1601, 199218.
7
See e.g., Barbara Rosenweins 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. Martins, 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,

3278, 3957. 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 Duuss 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, 57; Donald R. Kelley, De Origine Feudorum: The Beginnings
of an Historical Problem, Speculum, 39/2 (1964): 2256.
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), http://
www3.amherst.edu/~flcheyette/Publications/Feudalism%20DHI.pdf. See also Karl Kroeschell,
Lehnrecht und Verfassung im deutschen Hochmittelalter, Forum historiae iuris: Erste europische
Internetzeitschrift fr Rechtsgeschichte, 27 April 1998, http://www.rewi.hu-berlin.de/online/fhi/
98_04/krsch.htm.
13
Heide Wunder, Feudalismus, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 4 (1989): 41115. For a more
extended discussion, see Ludolf Kuchenbuch, Feudalismus: Versuch ber die
Gebrauchsstrateigien eines wissenspolitischen Reizwortes, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G.
Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus / Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The
Presence of Feudalism, Verffenlichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Gt-
tingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 293305.
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 18681920, in Fryde, Monnet, and Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des
Feudalismus, 21146.
15
See Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte ster-
reichs in Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984); Gadi Algazi,
Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im spten Mittelalter (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996). For
the historiographical debate over Brunners model of the medieval German polity, see Trans-
lators 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), xiiixli. 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 Knigs. Herrschaft in
Europa vom Frhmittelalter 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), 10211.
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), 1356.
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): 5364; 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),
1516. 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), 3:54367.
24
A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 13991509 (London/New York, NY: Longman, 2000), 246.
25
K. B. McFarlane, Bastard Feudalism, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 20 (1943
45): 16180; reprinted in K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, ed.
G. L. Harriss (London: Hambledon Press, 1981), 2343.
26
G. L. Harriss, Introduction, in McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century, xviixviii.

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, 76107.
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), 12153. See also Scott Waugh, Tenure to Contract: Lordship and
Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England, English Historical Review, 101 (1986): 81139.
29
David Crouch, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, c.11471219
(London/New York, NY: Longman, 1990), 15760. See also Crouch, Debate: Bastard Feu-
dalism Revised, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 16577.
30
Peter Coss, Bastard Feudalism Revised, Past & Present, 125 (1989): 2764; 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): 190203.
31
Coss, Bastard Feudalism Revisited: Reply, 1989. See also comments by Hicks, Bastard
Feudalism, 247.
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., 5971.
35
Jean-Franois 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),
10027.
36
Pierre Bonnaissie, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe la fin du XIe sicle: croissance et mutations dune
socit, 2 vols. (Toulouse: lUniversit de Toulouse, 197576). The characterization of Bonnaissies
thesis is a quotation from Thomas N. Bisson, The Feudal Revolution , Past and Present, 142
(1994): 7.
37
Dominique Barthlemy, La socite dans le comt de Vendme de lan mil au XIVe sicle (Paris:
Fayard, 1993).
38
Richard E. Barton, Lordship in the County of Maine, c.8901160 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).
39
David Bates, England and the Feudal Revolution , in Il feudalesimo nellalto medioevo,
Settimane di Studi del Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto 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 Hollisters and Hoyts debate
over the irony of English feudalism. Some Notations on Mr. Hollisters Irony , Journal of
British Studies, 5 (1965): 114.
42
Brown, Tyranny of a Construct, 1078.
43
Ibid., 1080.
44
Ibid., 1088.
45
See e.g., Reynolds, Vassals and Fiefs, 3446; Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in
Western Europe 9001300, 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 (1214) about the need
to distinguish words, concepts, and phenomena, and warns that there is no necessary connec-
tion 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 Hyamss review article, The End of Feudalism?, Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, 28 (1997): 65562 (posted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/reynolds-
2%20reviews.html#Hyams, accessed September 20, 2008). But cf. Thomas N. Bisson, Medi-
eval Lordship, Speculum, 70 (1995): 74379. By nominalism I mean Reynoldss 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. Bissons presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America,
published as Medieval Lordship, Speculum, 70 (1995): 74358.
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): 2841. Cf. Reynolds
response to the latter, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 19/2 (1997): 3040.
50
Kroeschell, Lehnrect und Verfassung im deutschen Hochmittelatler.
51
See, e.g., Frederic Cheyette, On the Fief de reprise, in Hlne Dbax (ed.), Les socits
mridionales lge fodal: Hommage Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse: CNRS/Universit de Toulouse-
Le-Mirail, 1999), 31924. 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): 9981006 (posted
at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/reynolds-2%20reviews.html#Cheyette, accessed
September 20, 2008).
52
Peter W. Edbury, Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Twelfth Century
to the Thirteenth, Crusades, 1 (2002): 4952, 5960. In a paper published in 1998, Edbury
explicitly attempted to apply Reynoldss method and ideas to the Latin East. Fiefs, vassaux et
series militaire dans le royaume latin de Jrusalem, in Michel Balard and Alain Ducellier (eds),
Le Partage du Monde: changes det colonization dans la Mditerrane mdievale (Paris, 1998), 14150,
discussed in Edbury, Fiefs and Vassals, 4950. Cf. Susan Reynoldss 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): 2948.
Reynoldss 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), 27586.
Bibliography
Abels, Richard, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley, CA/London:
University of California, 1988).
Abels, Richard, Feudalism, in A. Christopher Snyder (ed.), Early Peoples of Britain and Ireland:
An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 22433.
Algazi, Gadi, Herrengewalt und Gewalt der Herren im spten Mittelalter (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag,
1996).
Aurell, Martin, Apprhension historiographiques de la fodalit anglo-normande et mditer-
ranenne XIeXIIe sicles, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G. Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart
des Feudalismus / Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The Presence of Feudalism,
Verffenlichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2002), 17594.
Barthlemy, Dominique, La socite dans le comt de Vendme de lan mil au XIVe sicle (Paris:
Fayard, 1993).
Barthlemy, Dominique, and White, Stephen D. Debate: The Feudal Revolution , Past &
Present, 152 (1996): 196223.
Barton, Richard E., Lordship in the County of Maine, c.8901160 (Woodbridge: Boydell,
2004).
Bates, David, Normandy before 1066 (London/New York, NY: Longman, Inc., 1982).

Bates, David, England and the Feudal Revolution, in Il feudalesimo nellalto medioevo,
Settimane di Studi del Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto Medioevo 47 (Spoleto: Presso la
Sede del Centro, 2000), 61150.
Bean, J. M. W., Bachelor and Retainer, Mediaevalia et Humanistica, new ser., 3 (1972): 1173.
Bean, J. M. W., From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1989).
Bisson, Thomas N., The Feudal Revolution, Past & Present, 142 (1994): 642.
Bisson, Thomas N., Medieval Lordship, Speculum, 70 (1995): 74379.
Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society [French ed. 1939], trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1964).
Bonnaissie, Pierre, La Catalogne du milieu du Xe la fin du XIe sicle: croissance et mutations dune
socit, 2 vols. (Toulouse: lUniversit de Toulouse, 197576).
Brown, Elizabeth A. R., The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval
Europe, American Historical Review, 79 (1974): 106388.
Brunner, Otto, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte sterreichs in
Mittelalter, 5th ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984).
Brunner, Otto, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard
Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1992).
Cheyette, Frederic L., Some Notations on Mr. Hollisters Irony , Journal of British Studies, 5
(1965): 114.
Cheyette, Frederic L. (ed.), Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe: Selected Readings
(Huntington, NY: Robert E. Krieger, 1975).
Cheyette, Frederic, On the Fief de reprise, in Hlne Dbax (ed.), Les socits mridionales
lge fodal: Hommage Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse: CNRS/Universit de Toulouse-Le-Mirail,
1999), 31924.
Cheyette, Frederic L., Review of Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, Speculum, 71 (1996): 998
1006.
Coss, Peter, Bastard Feudalism Revised, Past & Present, 125 (1989): 2764.
Coss, Peter, Bastard Feudalism Revised: Reply, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 165203.
Coss, Peter, From Feudalism to Bastard Feudalism, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G. Oexle
(eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus / Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The
Presence of Feudalism, Verffenlichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173
(Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 79107.
Coulborn, Rushton (ed.), Feudalism in History (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965).
Crouch, David, and Carptenter, D. A., Debate: Bastard Feudalism Revisited, Past & Present,
131 (1991): 165189.
Crouch, David, William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, c.11471219
(London/New York, NY: Longman, 1990), 15760.
Crouch, David, Debate: Bastard Feudalism Revised, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 16577.
Duus, Peter, Feudalism in Japan, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1993).
Edbury, Peter W., Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Twelfth Century
to the Thirteenth, Crusades, 1 (2002): 4962.
Fortescue, J., Governance of England, ed. C. Plummer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1885).
Fried, Johannes, Rezension zu Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinter-
preted, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 19/1 (1997): 2841.
Fryde, Natalie, Monnet, Pierre, and Oexle, Otto Gerhard (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus
/ Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The Presence of Feudalism, Verffenlichungen
des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2002).
Ganshof, F. L., Feudalism, trans. P. Grierson, 3rd English ed. (New York, NY: Harper & Row,
Publisher, 1964).
Gillingham, John, The Introduction of Knight Service into England, Anglo-Norman Studies, 4
(1982): 5364.
Herlihy David (ed.), The History of Feudalism (New York, NY: Walker and Company, 1970).
Hicks, Michael, Bastard Feudalism (London/New York, NY: Longman, 1995).

Hollister, C. Warren, The Irony of English Feudalism, Journal of British Studies, 2 (1963): 126.
Hollister, C. Warren, The Irony of the Iron Age, Journal of British Studies, 2 (1963): 3132.
Hollister, C. Warren, The Military Organization of Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1965).
Hollister, C. Warren, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., 1974).
Hollister, C. Warren, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 8th ed. (Boston, MA: McGraw Hill,
1998).
Hoyt, Robert S., The Iron Age of English Feudalism, Journal of British Studies, 2 (1963): 27
30.
Hunt, Lynn, et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Bedford/
St. Martins, 2005).
Hyams, Paul, The End of Feudalism?, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1997): 65562.
Hyams, Paul, Homage and Feudalism: A Judicious Separation, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and
O. G. Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus / Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit
/ The Presence of Feudalism, Verffenlichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol.
173 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 1349.
John, Eric, Orbis Britanniae (Leicester: Leicester University, 1966).
Jussen, Bernhard (ed.), Die Macht des Knigs. Herrschaft in Europa vom Frhmittelalter bis in die
Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005).
Kelly, Donald R., De Origine Feudorum: The Beginnings of an Historical Problem, Specu-
lum, 39/2 (1964): 20728.
Kuchenbuch, Ludolf Feudalismus: Versuch ber di Gebrauchsstrateigien eines wissenspoli-
tischen Reizwortes, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G. Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des
Feudalismus / Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The Presence of Feudalism, Verffen-
lichungen des Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2002), 293305.
Lemarignier, Jean-Franois, 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),
10027.
McFarlane, K. B., England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays, ed. G. L. Harriss (London:
Hambledon Press, 1981).
Maitland, Frederic William, The Constitutional History of England. A Course of Lectures Delivered
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908; reprinted: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2001).
Murray, Alan V., 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), 27586.
Oexle, Otto Gerhard, Die Abschaffung des Feudalismus ist gescheitert, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 19 (19 May 1995).
Oexle, Otto Gerhard, Feudalismus, Verfassung under Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich, 1868
1920, in N. Fryde, P. Monnet, and O. G. Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus /
Prsence du fodalisme et prsent de la fodalit / The Presence of Feudalism, Verffenlichungen des
Marx-Planck-Institut fur Geschichte, vol. 173 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002),
21146.
Pocock, J. G. A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Pollard, A. J., Late Medieval England 13991509 (London/New York, NY: Longman, 2000).
Poly, Jean-Pierre, and Bournazel, Eric, The Feudal Transformation, 9001200, trans. Catherine
Higgit (New York, NY/London: Holmes & Meier, 1991).
Reuter, Timothy, and Wickham, Chris, Debate: The Feudal Revolution , Past & Present,
155 (1997): 177225.
Reynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1994).
Reynolds, Susan, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 9001300, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997).

Reynolds, Susan, Susan Reynolds responds to Johannes Fried, Bulletin of the German Historical
Institute, 19/2 (1997): 3040.
Reynolds, Susan, Fiefs and Vassals in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem: A View from the West,
Crusades, 1 (2002): 2948.
Round, J. H., Feudal England (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1895). [Includes the essay,
The Introduction of Knight Service into England, English Historical Review, 6 (1891): 41743,
62545.]
Stearns, Peter N., Adas, Michael, Schwartz, Stuart B., and Gilbert, Marc J., World Civilizations:
The Global Experience, 5th ed. (New York, NY: Pearson/Longman, 2007).
Stenton, Frank M., The First Century of English Feudalism 10661166 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1932).
Stephenson, Carl, Mediaeval Feudalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1942).
Stephenson Carl, and Lyon, Bryce, Mediaeval History, 4th ed. (New York, NY: Harper & Row,
1962).
Stubbs, William, The Consitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols., 5th
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903).
Waugh, Scott, Tenure to Contract: Lordship and Clientage in Thirteenth-Century England,
English Historical Review, 101 (1986): 81139.
Wunder, Heide, Feudalismus, Lexikon des Mittelalters, 4 (1989): 41115.


The - Historiography - of - A - Construct - Feudalism and Medieval Historian PDF

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

The - Historiography - of - A - Construct - Feudalism and Medieval Historian PDF

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.

The Historiography of a Construct:

As a teacher of undergraduates, I am confronted every semester by the pro-

It was not, he stated, a universal or symmetrical system. Even in northern

of the Libri Feudorum by Jacques Cujas (152090), the historical study of

historians have traditionally regarded knight service as the raison detre of

Modern French historians have tended to combine the feudo-vassalic and

feudalism became politicized, with East German historians writing about

The Origins of English Feudalism and Bastard Feudalism

distinguished contemporary, the legal historian Frederic Maitland (1850

Whereas Maitland argued for tenurial continuity, others discovered evidence

replacement of feudal vassals by liveried retainers bound to their lords

bachelors of the thirteenth century, whom he defined as a special kind

Marc Bloch and Feudal Society

feudalism when he published the first volume of Feudal Society in 1939.

to increase the economic exploitation of manorial resources through the

The Feudal Revolution Debate

9001200 (French 1980, trans 1991). This feudal transformation (mutation)

messages from England for French historiography, he concludes, are that

Criticism of Feudalism as a Construct

Despite the historiographical debates about feudalism, few scholars before

(1974) entitled, The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of

critique of feudalism as a construct is right on the mark. Skepticism

made for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Peter Edbury, an admirer of Susan

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.x

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi