Early Middle Ages

What Is Feudalism?

The origins of the term feudalism, the traditional 'feudal pyramid' model, and why modern historians have largely abandoned it.

Question & answer

In popular usage, “feudalism” describes the social system of medieval Europe, organized as a hierarchy of kings, nobles, knights, and peasants bound together by ties of loyalty, landholding, and labor. The model, often called the “feudal pyramid,” was developed in the nineteenth century and long shaped how the Middle Ages was taught. Modern historians, however, have largely abandoned it as a description of the Early Middle Ages, while still using the term in narrower, more technical senses. The result is that “feudalism” means different things to different readers, and a clear answer requires distinguishing its popular use, its older scholarly model, and the more careful revisions of recent decades.

In school textbooks, popular histories, and many works of fiction, “feudalism” refers to a system in which the king sits at the top of a hierarchy, his chief nobles hold their lands as fiefs from him in return for military service, their knights hold sub-fiefs from them, and the mass of peasants work the land in return for protection. The system is held together by the ceremony of homage, in which a man places his hands between those of his lord and swears to be his man. Every person knows his place, and loyalty flows up and protection flows down.

This image is more than a hundred years old, and it has been used to describe everything from Japanese samurai society to Indian caste systems. In medieval contexts, it has shaped not only the academic study of the Middle Ages but popular culture - the castles, the jousts, the oaths of fealty, the chivalric ideals of the knight. The image is not wrong in all respects: lordship, vassalage, and the holding of land in return for service were all real features of medieval Europe. But as a description of the Early Middle Ages, it is misleading in important ways.

The scholarly model

The scholarly model associated with the French historian Marc Bloch and the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne described “feudal society” as a system with three main features: the personal bond of vassalage, sealed by homage and the oath of fidelity; the holding of land as a fief, in return for service; and a form of lordship exercised by lords over unfree peasants. The system, in this view, was the foundation of medieval Europe from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries.

The model was enormously productive. It brought together evidence from France, Germany, Italy, and England into a single explanatory framework, and it made the period intelligible as a coherent social system. It also had important weaknesses. The model relied heavily on evidence from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, when the system was at its height, and it projected that system back into the earlier Middle Ages, where the evidence looks quite different. The vocabulary of the early Middle Ages does not include the technical terms - feudum, vasallus, nobilis in its later sense - that defined the classical system. The relationships between lords and men were looser, more varied, and less formalized than the model allowed.

The critique of Elizabeth Brown and Susan Reynolds

The classical model began to unravel in the 1970s and 1990s. Elizabeth A. R. Brown, in a series of influential articles, showed that the ceremony of homage and the contract of fief had been artificially joined in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, when French and Norman lawyers were working out the rules of a new and highly developed system of land tenure. In the early Middle Ages, homage was a flexible ceremony, used to seal many different kinds of agreement, and it was not necessarily tied to the grant of a fief.

Susan Reynolds took the argument further in Fiefs and Vassals (1994). She argued that the elaborate system of vassalage and fief-holding that nineteenth-century historians had reconstructed for the Early Middle Ages was, in fact, a creation of the period between roughly 1050 and 1200. The technical terms acquired their meanings only in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when lawyers and churchmen were developing new theories of government, property, and obligation. Before that, what existed was a looser and more varied world of “lordly power” in which great men commanded the service of many people for many reasons. The neat pyramid, in Reynolds’s view, was largely a projection of later institutions onto an earlier past.

What the Early Middle Ages actually looked like

The revisionist account does not deny that hierarchy, lordship, and personal dependence were central to early medieval life. They were. But the question of how they were structured, how they changed, and how they varied by region is a much more open one. A few broad patterns can be identified:

  • Lordly power was the central fact. Across most of Western Europe, the local great man was the center of social and political life. He held a large estate, often in many separate parcels; he commanded the service of a war-band of free followers; he administered justice in his own hall and (in many cases) as a representative of the king.
  • The bonds were personal and multilayered. A single great man might hold land from several lords and command the loyalty of followers who owed him nothing in law but everything in practice. The chains of obligation ran in both directions and were constantly renegotiated.
  • The vocabulary was fluid. The specifically medieval terms - feudum, vasallus, nobilis in the technical sense - came later. The early Middle Ages used the language of Roman law (dominus, servus, cliens, miles) and of personal relationship (homo, fidelis, commendatus).
  • The system was not universal. In some regions - Scandinavia, much of the Slavic world, the highland zones of Britain and Ireland - the patterns of dependence were organized around the kin-group, the chief’s retinue, or the village community, and they did not fit the manorial model.
  • The transformation of the tenth through twelfth centuries was real. By the eleventh century, the vocabulary of fief and vassal had acquired a technical meaning, the ceremony of homage had been tied to the grant of land, the noble class had become more sharply defined, and the chivalric ideal of the mounted knight had become the foundation of the warrior elite. The classical “feudal system” is real, but it is a system of the High Middle Ages, not the Early.

Why the term survives

If the model has been so thoroughly criticized, why does “feudalism” still appear in textbooks and surveys? Several reasons. The term is too useful as a shorthand to discard. It captures real features of medieval society: hierarchy, lordship, the holding of land in return for service, the close connection between military and social function. It also captures something that most readers recognize from other sources: the ideal of loyalty, the imagery of the great hall, the elaborate rituals of homage and oath. And it has the merit of focusing attention on the long, slow transformation of the post-Roman world into the high medieval kingdom.

The result is that “feudalism” is now used in two main senses. In the strict technical sense, it refers to the developed system of fief, vassalage, and knightly service that crystallized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and formed the basis of the aristocratic societies of the High Middle Ages. In the looser popular sense, it refers to the whole range of lordly, hierarchical, and dependent relationships that characterized medieval Europe from the post-Roman period onward. Both senses are useful, but they should not be confused.

Feudalism and the Early Middle Ages

For the Early Middle Ages in particular, the strict technical sense of feudalism does not apply. The vocabulary, the institutions, and the elaborate contractual relationships of the later system were not yet in place. What existed instead was a world of lordly power, personal dependence, and customary rights that was more varied, more local, and more fluid than the older model allowed. The transformation of that world into the chivalric, manorial, and monarchic order of the High Middle Ages was one of the great stories of European history, and the early Middle Ages is where it begins.

The topic is taken further in the Feudalism and Manorialism in the Early Middle Ages. For the great men who occupied the top of the older pyramid, see the Who Were Medieval Nobles?. For the manor that supported them, see the What Was a Medieval Manor?. For the political system that framed it all, see the The Carolingian Empire.