Feudalism as a Contested Concept in Historical Political Economy

“The tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed and its influence over students of the Middle Ages finally ended” (Elizabeth Brown, 1974)

This post is cross-posted at the How the World Became Rich

A goal of Historical Political Economy (HPE) is to build connections between social scientists and historians. But this laudable goal is, in fact, very hard to realize. Interdisciplinary scholarship has become ever more challenging. Academic specialization does not reward it and the intensive methods training required for mastering new techniques in economics or quantitative social science in general crowd out reading in other fields or disciplines.

Consider one of my favorite papers in historical political economy: “The Feudal Revolution and Europe’s Rise: Political Divergence of the Christian West and the Muslim World before 1500 CE” published in the American Political Science Review in 2013 by Lisa Blaydes and Eric Chaney.

Blaydes and Chaney compile data on ruler duration in Europe and the Middle East. Ruler duration — how long a king or queen reigned for — is a basic measure of political stability. The findings of the paper are straightforward:

“First, ruler duration in Western Europe statistically diverged from duration in the Islamic world during the medieval period. Second, this divergence was driven, in part, by a reduced probability of monarchical overthrow in Western Europe”.

Figure one from their paper demonstrates their main results. No fancy econometrics are needed: it is a simple and powerful empirical finding. Until sometime in the 10th century, rulers in the Islamic Middle East and Western Europe ruled for similarly short reigns. However, after that point ruler duration diverged. Rulers in Western Europe enjoyed longer and more stable periods of rule.

In other words, there was a divergence in political outcomes long before the start of the economic divergence between Western Europe and the Middle Age.

How do Blaydes and Chaney explain this divergence? Their answer is the “Feudal Revolution”. They provide a potted history of the rise of feudalism":

“ . . . with the collapse of the western Roman Empire. The fiscal position of the Germanic successor states to the Roman Empire tended to be weak. Unable to fund military expenditure through tax receipts, European rulers sought other avenues for raising armies. The innovations introduced by Charlemagne marked a pivotal change. Lacking the capacity to introduce a system of tax collection, Charlemagne required landholders to contribute troops instead of funds.

This change increased the power of large landlords in two ways. First, small, independent landowners pooled their lands with those of larger landholders to avoid having to offer themselves up for military service. As individual landholders began to “aggregate up,” large landowners emerged who could ensure the cultivation of land while distributing the burden of military service across the larger body of peasants. Second and contemporaneously, European kings—like Charlemagne—required mounted troops, not just infantrymen, as a result of the introduction of the stirrup. The technological innovation of the stirrup meant that “mounted shock combat” became the norm in warfare and the large investment required to purchase a horse and armor for battle meant that monarchs needed to recruit individuals with wealth to serve as the mounted military elite (White 1962).

Mounted warriors, or knights, were often compensated for their service to the king through land grants (North, Wallis and Weingast 2009, 79). According to Mann (1986, 393), the primitive state of European economies left “land grants, which gave the vassal soldier a potentially autonomous power base” as the only option for cash-strapped monarchs. European barons operating in the feudal system entered battle with their own, privately financed equipment, archers, and associated infantry. Such individuals often enjoyed opportunities to increase their land holdings or other forms of advancement as a result of their fighting. Together, the methods of military recruitment that emerged in medieval Europe came to be known as the feudal system.’’

This is a paper that should be highly influential on subsequent scholarship. And it is. At least within political science and economics. The paper has been cited 319 times on Google Scholar and the technique of using ruler duration as a proxy for political stability has been applied to other parts of the world. But almost all of these citations are from other social scientists. As far as I can tell, the paper has been totally ignored by historians. Why is this?

---

How Feudalism Became the F-Word

Historians would no doubt quibble with the potted history Blaydes and Chaney provide (quoted above). The deterioration of the Roman fiscal system and reliance on levies long predates Charlemagne. The emergence of mounted shock combat is more properly dated to the late 11th or early 12th century. But this unlikely to be the reason why they have neglected it.

The bigger barrier to interdisciplinary dialogue is concept/ideological.

What do I mean by conceptual barrier to dialogue?

Many historians reject the term “feudalism” entirely. In a survey written in History Compass in 2009, Richard Abels describes “a growing consensus among medieval historians that ‘feudalism’ should be banned not only from scholarly monographs, but from textbooks and classrooms as well . . . 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”.

Why do historians reject feudalism, even as an organizing concept for thinking about the medieval world?

It is impossible to fully do justice to this debate here. A concise version is as follows.

First, there were general reasons why scholars came to distrust the term. A influential article published in 1974 by Elizabeth Brown noted that feudalism had too many definitions. Was feudalism introduced into England in 1066? Or was Anglo-Saxon England already feudal? Based on the variety of different definitions of feudalism available, there was no obvious way to settle this question. The Marxian definition of feudalism in a stage in history is very different to the precise legalist definition to it given by mid-20th century historians like F.L. Ganshof who viewed it as primarily a system of military recruitment. Similarly, it has been applied to too many times and places. Pre-Meiji Japan, 18th century France, Tsarist Russia, and 12th century Germany have all been labelled feudal but they have almost nothing in common. As Brown noted:

“The variety of existing definition of the term and the general unwillingness of any historian to accept any other historian's characterization of feudalism constitute a prime source of confusion” (p. 1070).

A term so flexible in application surely has no fixed meaning?

Then, Susan Reynolds wrote Fiefs and Vassals in 1994 and this book was a serious scholarly attack on the key concepts underlying the concept of feudalism, as it had been established by 20th century historians like Ganshof and Marc Bloch. Eschewing Marxian or popular notions of feudalism, Ganshof and Bloch had focused on the legal relationship between lords and vassals. This was idea that lords granted lands (fiefs) to their vassals in exchange for military service. They saw this fief-vassal relationship as underpinning the larger feudal order.

Reynold’s argument was technical and scholarly. She argued that modern historians understanding of feudal law was in fact the product of the development of late medieval and early modern legal culture:

“The resultant academic law of fiefs was concerned only with the law about properties called fiefs, whose holders it called vassals. Its connection with the law actually practised in the courts of the supposedly feudal kingdoms of medieval Europe was for the most part rather tenuous and indirect” (Reynolds 1994, p 4).

The upside of this is that

“The concepts of vassalage and of the fief, moreover, as they have been developed since the sixteenth century, originated in the work of the sixteenth-century scholars rather than in the late medieval texts they studied”.

For Reynolds the legal relationship between fiefs and vassals that lies at the heart of feudalism was not a core feature of actual medieval societies. Rather, it was an abstraction created by lawyers centuries later.

Reynolds does not reject generalizations or ideal types. She agrees that “we must have some generalizations . . . but generalizations are propositions that can be verified or falsified, rather than abstract nouns that we use as labels to save us having to look at the contents of the bundle”:

“It has been suggested that the concept of feudalism . . . may ‘inform us of what manner of creature we may expect to encounter on our travels without purporting to lay bare the nature of the beast’ . . . “

But, she counters, this:

“ . . . does not apply to feudalism in any of its senses. What the concept of feudalism seems to have done since the sixteenth century is not to help us recognize the creatures we meet but to tell us that all medieval creatures are the same so that we need not bother to look at them. Put another way, feudalism has provided a kind of protective lens through which it has seemed prudent to view the otherwise dazzling oddities and varieties of medieval creatures.” (p. 11)

Regardless of what we think about the merits of this argument (and most non-specialists are not equipped to have an informed opinion), Fiefs and Vassals is an impressive, indeed intimidating, piece of work.

Though it remains commonly used in popular histories, feudalism began to drop out of scholarly usage among historians. It became the F-word.

---

What to do?

So where does this leave those of us interested in doing historical political economy? Everyone will have their own response, but my thinking is as follows.

First, it goes without saying that good historical social science should be in dialogue with the most up-to-date historical scholarship. This is hard. The demands of publishing in general interest journals often makes it even harder. Long footnotes referencing some obscure debate in the historiography are the first to go on the chopping board when a paper is being edited for submission. Editors, referees and readers want the gist of things, not all of the historical nuance.

Second, however, while I think social scientists should be up to date with how historians are currently thinking about a topic, we cannot be hostage to scholarly fashions in another field.

A concept like feudalism may have needed to have been taken down a peg or two in the 1970s. But this does not mean that we should be barred from using it today. Indeed, reading Brown’s 1974 essay, one gets the sense that she is fighting battles against foes who simply don’t exist in 2025:

“Another problem is the inclination to employ the idea of fully developed, classical, or perfectly formed feudalism as a standard by which to rank and measure areas or societies” (p 1076)

“To say that a person or a group is attempting to live up to or realize a standard certainly suggests virtuous dedication on the part of the people in question. To declare that a country which is not feudalized is lagging behind is to indicate that the area is in some sense backward. Even more evidently evaluative are such expressions as decayed, decadent, and bastard feudalism, all of them implying a society's failure or inability to maintain pure principles that were once upheld” (p 1077)

“Using the terms seems to lead almost inevitably to treating the ism or its system as a sentient, autonomous agent, to assuming that medieval people-or at least the most perspicacious of them-knew what feudalism was and struggled to achieve it, and to evaluating and ranking societies, areas, and institutions in terms of their approximation to or deviation from an oversimplified Ideal Type.” (p. 1088)

All valid points, no doubt, but also hardly relevant to how feudalism is being used by social scientists.

So does this play out in my own research? I think feudalism remains a useful concept if properly used.

Desiree Desierto and I have recently published a paper entitled Feudal Political Economy where we argue that medieval Europe c. 1000-1300 did have a distinctive system of government and it makes sense to call that system of government “feudal”. And we rely on this definition in our paper with Jacob Hall on Magna Carta.

We just have to persuade our colleagues in history that the f-word is back.