Feudalism is a specific type of patronage-based political structure. Generally speaking, feudalism means that in exchange for support a lord makes land available to a vassal. Specifically, feudalism refers to a very particular kind of political structure found in medieval Europe, although the term may be applied in a much looser way to a variety of premodern states outside Europe.
The ‘invention’ of feudalism is attributed to Charles Martel (689-741), major-domo of the Frankish kingdom of Austrasia, who needed mounted soldiers to combat the invading Saracens. Though the actual situation was more complicated, in essence this view still holds true (McKitterick 1983; Reuter 1991). To reward his cavalry Charles handed out land, which he extracted partly from the royal domains, but mainly from the extended landed property of the Church. In doing this he combined three long-established institutions: (1) the retinue, the group of warriors around a leader, who pledged oaths of fidelity, and who lived and died with their leader; (2) the vassalage, the custom, that a free man placed himself under the protection of some lord, and in return had to give military service and counsel; and (3) the beneficium, the custom that a lord gave a piece of land to a man to earn a living, or in order to help him cover certain expenses (Ganshof 1957; Bloch 1965 [1940]). To indemnify the Church it was decided that, though the land remained de facto in the hands of the warriors, when the holder of the land died it would return to the Church, unless the military situation did not allow it. The king would then endow another vassal with the land and the Church would receive a tithe. In this way the original gift of the land became a fief.
In the course of time the feudal system underwent considerable changes. The landed aristocracy gained more power and the position of the king eroded. When after the death of Louis the Pious (840) his sons battled each other fiercely for succession, each of them tried to contract as many vassals as possible, and in doing so spread their power thinly over more and more lower-ranked lords. Soon the territorial princes in their turn lost their influence to the local seigneurs. In the end these castellans possessed the military, judicial, and economic powers that once were the prerogatives of king and counts (Bloch 1965 [1940]). It would take till the twelfth century until under the Capetians royal power and the state in France were restored. Under the influence of Abbot Suger new concepts of kinship and feudalism developed. The king became the highest feudal lord; he owed homage to no one but God; all other lords had to pay homage to the king. In this way feudal kingship was given its own place, with a religious legitimation that none of the territorial princes could ever hope to claim.
Ideally, the fully developed feudalism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had the following characteristics:
1 A pyramidal, hierarchical power structure headed by a king, whose power was believed to be god-given; his position thus was legitimized sacrally. Under the king came the feudal lords. Their power was derived from, and legitimized by the king. Higher placed feudal lords could have their own vassals who, indirectly, were also legitimized by the king. In the service of a feudal lord were keepers of manors, sheriffs, soldiers and servants, some of whom were authorized by their lord to exercise power in his name. Finally there were the humble subjects, who tilled the land and owed the lord food, goods and service. In return the lord was supposed to protect them.
2 The relations between the members of the feudal hierarchy were asymmetrical, vertical, formal, dyadic, personal and reciprocal (Bloch 1965 [1940]; Wolf 1966). A man commending himself to another paid homage by ceremonially placing his hands between those of his lord and taking an oath of fidelity to him. From that moment on there existed feudal relations between the two. Taking the act of homage as defining the feudal relation, it will be clear that the subjects of a lord fell outside the feudal system. It is also doubtful whether many members of the servant category had feudal relations with their lord. Yet, the servants, as well as the subjects, were inextricably bound up with the feudal system.
3 Positions in the feudal system were gained in principle by achievement, though in the course of time heredity played an increasing role. As the feudal lord received land in recompensation for his services, he was economically independent of the king. This made it difficult for the ruler to keep his lords under control; this was the main weakness of the feudal system.
‘The feudal system meant the rigorous economic subjection of a host of humble folk to a few powerful men’ (Bloch 1965 [1940]: 443; Wolf 1966). In fact, the exploitation of peasantry made the whole system possible. Marxist scholars paid much attention to the exploitative aspects of the system, and the concept of the feudal mode of production was developed. Though feudalism dominated the social, political and economic relations during the Middle Ages, people such as clergy, monks, free cultivators, townsfolk and traders did not belong to the system. Bishops or abbots often played a role as feudal lords, however, but they did this in their capacity as worldly administrators, not as clergymen.
In the fifteenth century the feudal system gradually lost its dominating position. Heavy losses of the aristocracy on the battlefields, a growing influence of the money economy, an increasing role of towns and townspeople, and a new balance of power, were among the factors causing the emergence of new social and political conditions in Europe.
Feudalism poses a particular problem for political anthropology. On the one hand, it bears sufficient superficial resemblance to pre-modern state forms in Asia and Africa — in the dependence on dyadic ties between lord and follower, or the use of overlapping tenurial rights in land — to suggest all may be usefully compared as variations on a single type. On the other hand, though, some of the features of the European case are more distinctively European — the emphasis on bearing arms and military service for the higher lord, for example. The situation is rendered even more unclear by feudalism’s historical position as the political-economic predecessor to the emergence of capitalism in Europe. In the doctrinaire Marxism that prevailed for many years in Russian and Soviet anthropology, all precapitalist state forms had to be defined as ‘feudal’, however awkward that might be empirically.
