Sure enough, Rullus replies that, when free men have been wiped out by exorbitant Imperial taxation, it will be:
" 'Better to seek some great landholder's protection. Not that I'd make a serf he'd want; but the monks at Turonum may take me in...' " (Poul and Karen Anderson, The Dog And The Wolf (London, 1989), p. 399)
Rullus has here summarized all the features of feudalism:
great landholders;
protection;
serfs;
monasteries as also landholders.
The landholder does not own the land in the modern sense. He can neither sell it nor develop it as he sees fit. Fortunately, cities and trade grew up alongside feudalism and eventually overthrew it.
I think that the Mafia ethos of protection, violence, religious observance and personal loyalty to individual leaders as against the rule of law is a modern survival of feudal social relationships.
In The High Crusade, Poul Anderson imagined European feudalism succeeding on an interstellar scale but this was a joke, I hope.
11 comments:
Feudalism is sort of a retrospective name for a set of varied arrangements. The Roman-law sense of personal property (very similar to ours) never entirely died out, but the post-Carolingian collapse of large-scale governments led to an overlay of different concepts.
"Classic" feudalism only really existed in places like Norman England or the Crusader realms or parts of southern Italy, where it could be imposed "de novo" on a blank sheet of paper by people with the system in their heads and now able to implement it without all the infinite local complexities that obtained in the areas of north-central France where it evolved organically through the 9th-11th centuries.
(This is analogous to the way that fee-simple private property and individualistic market relationships existed in a much purer form in the English colonies in America than they did back in the homeland. That was the way England was moving, but the colonies could -start- with a uniform set of the most advanced institutional arrangements. Attempts to transfer late-feudal and bastard-feudal arrangements to America always failed, as in Maryland and South Carolina.)
Norman England and Outre-Mere were where you get something fairly consistently like the "no land without a lord" setup and the full elaborate pyramid of fiefs in feu covering all nonurban land and systematic subinfeudiation.
The -concept- of property (especially landed property) under feudalism is that nobody "owns" the land except, in a very theoretical way, the monarch. A series of graduated rights of use and lordship exists instead. This coexisted with market relationships that were always there and which became very powerful after the 11th-century economic-political recovery from the post-Carolingian collapse.
What Norman Arminger and Sandra implement in the PPA is something else again.
There's far more of a blank sheet that even Godfrey de Bouillon or William the Bastard had available, because agriculture itself has broken down over most of the area, and there's virtually no continuity of property systems. Everything has to be built from the ground up.
And Norman has an ideal system in his head -- one which avoids the developments which eventually broke down medieval feudalism. His system is much more "tidy" than any historical feudal system; no manors divided between different lordships, for example, and no kinks in the chains of homage and fealty. It's more like an simplified bookish concept of an "ideal" Anglo-Norman feudalism, much more consistent than anything which existed previously and one with institutions built in to try and keep it that way.
And one which uses more advanced organizational technique -- good accounting, for example, and good record-keeping with all land relationships recorded on paper with accurate surveys and a paper trail of all successions.
Norman's manorial economy is actually a fairly efficient way of handling the period just after the Change.
Even ex-farmers don't understand how to operate a pre-mechanization system. The number of people with the skills necessary is small, and they have to spend most of their time directing everyone else until they learn by doing, which means productivity is initially low; meanwhile, restoring basic order is a prerequisite to getting anything done, and delegating authority to lords and their subordinates creates an "instant" set of vested interests.
Historical note: manorialism was a relatively late development in Europe. It really developed as a byproduct of the process whereby "knights" ceased to be retainers of a (small, but very rich) aristocracy and became themselves the lowest level of the aristocracy, and possessed land of their own which they organized and exploited rather intensely.
In 900, a Duke in say France would not regard himself as a knight. By about 1100 he would (all lords were knights, some were much more as well) and would have his sons knighted with the elaborate ceremonies which had developed in the interim.
That meant the aristocracy now encompassed a much larger share of the total population and that the countryside was much more tightly controlled by men who considered themselves part of a unified (but hierarchically arranged) class or caste of "those who exercise lordship and hold land on pledge of fealty".
I never knew it was that complicated!
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for what amounted to a very interesting short article about feudalism. It does fit in with what I vaguely recall from real history. Esp. the part about classical feudalism taking form after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire.
Sean
Yeah, it was a prolonged process, not a direct outgrowth of the post-Roman period.
The Roman economy was extremely highly developed for a pre-industrial state; in most respects it achieved levels of population and output that weren't reached again until the 18th century or even later.
(Roman Britannia had a population larger than England had right down to Tudor times, for example, and ice-cores from Greenland show unprecedented levels of pollution from metal smelting.)
When the Roman state collapsed in the West, there was an appalling crash to much, much more primitive levels and lower population and output, accompanied by plague outbreaks (the Justinian plague may have been as bad as the Black Death). The barbarian invaders didn't -want- to destroy the Roman structures (except in England and a few other marginal places), they wanted to exploit them -- but they didn't have the capacity to do so. The whole thing had depended on the vast free-trade area and internal peace of the Empire, and its tax and financial structures which supported a big standing army of paid professionals and a ruling class capable of administering it all.
The villa economy just disintegrated, for example. Villas might become villages, but the de-monitized subsistence system that followed wasn't anything like the high Empire's commercialized agriculture.
The aristocracies of the post-Roman period in places like Merovingian Gaul had very large properties which they exploited rather lightly away from their residences, relying on quantity rather than quality.
After the Carolingian attempt at recreating the Empire failed, authority devolved to lower and lower levels as subordinates simply stopped obeying those above them and then -their- subordinates did, combined with the VIking-Magyar-Saracen external threats, until defense and production were reconstituted on a very local basis and in an economy where trade and the market had become rather peripheral institutions and the literate bureaucracies of the Roman era had dwindled to the point where even kings couldn't sign their names and only priests were really able to read, write and keep accounts.
When recovery came it was from the bottom up, and was associated with things like manorial organization, the three-field system, extensive castle networks(*) and so forth.
That's all a gross simplification, of course. Whole books have been written about it... 8-).
(*) a countryside with a lot of castles is an absolute bugger for an army to operate in; it's why medieval warfare is a compendium of sieges spiced with an occasional battle. Add in that feudal armies were rather shambolic.
From villas to villages! (I can only take in one point at a time.)
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, MANY thanks for taking the trouble to write such an interesting short essay. Yes, I recall now the steadily increasing HELPLESSNESS of many kings in the century after the death of Louis the Pious. Because many of their subordinates were refusing to obey them.
And, of course, another reason for why post-Carolingian armies seemed small and inefficient was from lacking good LOGISTICS. A new military tradition had to be built up from the bottom.
Sean
Thanks Mr Stirling for your comments on the post-roman period.
I would be interested in your sources.
I have run across both the claim that 'Dark Ages' is inaccurate & rebuttals of that noting that post roman Europe had a drastic decline in both the economy & in learning. I am more impressed with the rebuttals, but something I can link to when I run across the 'no dark ages' claim would be nice.
Kaor, Jim!
"Dark Age" in post-Roman Europe was always something of a misnomer. "Chaotic" or "anarchic," esp. during the two centuries after the death of Charlemagne, would be more accurate.
Ad astra! Sean
The current consensus is that the collapse of the Western Empire led to a drastic fall in basic numbers -- population, which collapsed back to Iron Age levels, in urbanization, and in long-distance trade.
Even in things like the average size of domestic animals.
Roman peak levels of population, production and trade were not reached again until the Renaissance in some places, and not until the 19th or 20th centuries in others.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I think you commented elsewhere that more recent historical studies concluded that even as late as AD 400, these "basic numbers" had recovered from the losses due to the civil war provoked by Magnentius during the reign of Constantius II. It was the military/political collapse of the Western Empire after the death of Honorius in 423 which led to these drastic falls.
Ad astra! Sean
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