ABELS - TheHistoriographyOf AConstruct.pdf

2009 The AuthorJournal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKHICOHistory Compass1478-05421478-0542 2009 The Author Journal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd61010.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.xMarch 2009001008???1031???EuropeThe Historiography of a ConstructThe Historiography of a Construct

The Historiography of a Construct: Feudalism and the Medieval Historian

Richard Abels*United States Naval Academy

AbstractBetween 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 in1994, that crystallized doubts about the construct of feudalism harbored by manyhistorians of the Middle Ages. Over the last few years textbooks have begun toreflect the new consensus. Medieval historians responsible for chapters on the Mid-dle Ages in Western Civilization and World Civilization textbooks now shy awayfrom the term feudalism. This reticence is less evident in civilization textbookslacking a medievalist among the collaborators. In several of these we still find thefeudal Middle Ages presented without apology, as well as comparisons drawnbetween Japanese, Chinese, and medieval Western feudalisms. Whether or not theassigned 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 conceptsfor the study of the Middle Ages, and an assessment of where the state of thequestion now stands. The author concludes that, although the critique offeudalism is powerful and necessary, the pendulum is threatening to swing too farin the other direction, away from the vertical ties and power relations that oncedominated discussions of medieval politics and society, and toward a new paradigmof 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 ifthey were authoritative statements of historical fact. To disabuse them ofthat notion, I sometimes have them compare the treatment accorded a con-troversial historical topic in different editions of the same textbook. Onesuch pedagogical exercise focuses on the term feudalism as treated indifferent editions of the late C. Warren Hollisters popular survey, MedievalEurope: A Brief History. In the third edition (1974), Hollister introducedthe term feudalism in a subsection of the book he entitled, Responseto the Invasions: French Feudalism.1 As a judicious scholar and a veteranof the historiographical battles over the introduction of feudalism intoEngland, Hollister began by carefully explaining what feudalism was not.

2009 The Author History Compass 7/3 (2009): 10081031, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00610.xJournal Compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The Historiography of a Construct 1009

It was not, he stated, a universal or symmetrical system. Even in northernFrance 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 ambiguitiesdue to vassals holding lands from multiple lords. It was not associated withchivalry. And it was not exclusively a military institution. But given thesecaveats, Hollister had no doubt that feudalism existed as both a militaryand political system. For specialists in medieval history, Hollister explained,feudalism referred to the network of rights and obligations existing amongmembers of the knightly aristocracy the holders.2 And this is how theterm 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 becomeFrance: Fragmentation, an indication of the less prominent role that feudal-ism plays in this edition. Hollisters discussion of feudalism survives but inmuch truncated form. Gone is his list of those things that feudalism wasnot. In its place is an acknowledgement, phrased almost as a cri de coeur, thatthe term feudalism had grown even more problematic over the interveningfourteen years. Even today, Hollister writes,

feudalism is heartbreakingly difficult to define. Some scholars reject the wordaltogether; others prefer the terms feudalisms to feudalism. I continue to findfeudalism a useful word if employed with caution no more misleading thenhumanism, democracy, communism, capitalism, classicism, or renaissance (all ofwhich some scholars would like to abolish).3

The change in content and tone reflects a historiographical shift with whichWarren Hollister was not completely comfortable. Between 1974 and 1998,two influential critiques of feudalism were published, an article in 1974by Elizabeth A. R. Brown and a book by Susan Reynolds in 1994, thatcrystallized doubts about the construct harbored by many historians of theMiddle Ages.4 Hollister himself had begun his career as a critic of thereceived tradition about English feudalism. In his second book and a seriesof articles, he demonstrated what he called the irony of feudalism, thatknight service owed in consequence of holding land from a lord had neverbeen the main mechanism whereby Anglo-Norman kings raised their armies,and that strong centralized government flourished in Anglo-NormanEngland, during what was supposed to be the heyday of feudalism.5 Histreatment of feudalism in the third edition of Medieval Europe was far morenuanced 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 inwriting about medieval politics and society, especially in surveys, despitea growing consensus among medieval historians that feudalism should bebanned not only from scholarly monographs, but from textbooks andclassrooms as well.

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Over the last few years textbooks have begun to reflect the new consensus.Medieval historians responsible for chapters on the Middle Ages in WesternCivilization and World Civilization textbooks now shy away from the termfeudalism.7 This reticence is less evident in civilization textbooks lackinga medievalist among the collaborators. In several of these we still find thefeudal Middle Ages presented without apology, as well as comparisonsdrawn between Japanese, Chinese, and medieval Western feudalisms.8

Whether or not the assigned textbook mentions feudalism, most Westerncivilization instructors probably continue to use the term because it is familiarto them and to their students. As one of my colleagues, an American histo-rian commented, Im going to keep on teaching feudalism until you guyscome up with some other generalization I can use. Given this seismic shiftin the treatment of one of the key concepts for the study of the MiddleAges, 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 multipleusages. Feudalism is not a medieval term; nor does it have a single, agreedupon definition. In recent decades, many medieval historians have goneso far as to question whether the term has any historical or heuristic value.Lordship, dependent tenures, and manors were real institutions in the elevenththrough fourteenth centuries, even if the words used to connote them alsobore other meanings and differed from region to region. Feudalism, on theother hand, is a historical construct that one must define before using. Likeall historical constructs feudalism, however defined, describes an ideal typerather than any particular historical society. This article will begin withdescriptions of the traditional models of feudalism, emphasizing the onefavored 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 describewhat they took to be the common customary law of property. GiacomoAlvarottos (13851453) treatise De feudis (Concerning Fiefs) posited thatdespite regional differences the regulations governing the descent of aristo-cratic land tenure were derived from common legal principles, a customaryshared feudal law. Based upon study of the twelfth-century Lombard com-pilation known as the Libri Feudorum (Books of Fiefs), the juridic conceptof feudalism was subsequently extended to cover the aggregate of insti-tutions connected with the support and service of vassals and with the descentof their tenures (fiefs). Late medieval jurists, however, understood fiefs(Latin: feoda) to constitute only one type of land tenure and property lawrather than a universal system.9 Sixteenth-century French antiquarians, notablyFranois Hotman (152490), added a historical dimension to the studies ofthe jurists by tracing the origin of feudal law to the customs of the barbariantribes, in particular, to the Franks.10 Aided by the appearance of an edition



of the Libri Feudorum by Jacques Cujas (152090), the historical study offeudal law spread out from France to Germany and Britain in the latesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Comte de Boulainvilliers appears tohave been the first to coin a term for the feudal system, la fodalit, in hisHistoire des anciens Parlements de France (1737).

French Enlightenment philosophes, notably Montesquieu in his The Spiritof 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 nationalsovereignty to private individuals. For them fodalit denoted the aggregateof seigneurial privileges and prerogatives, which could be justified neitherby reason or justice. When the National Constituent Assembly abolished thefeudal regime in August 1789 this is what they meant. Across the channel,Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) coined the phrase feudal systemto describe a form of production governed not by market forces but bycoercion and force. For Smith the feudal system was the economic exploi-tation of peasants by their lords, which led to an economy and society markedby poverty, brutality, exploitation, and wide gaps between rich and poor.This economic definition of feudalism found its way into the writings ofKarl Marx (181883), who saw feudalism as a particular mode of productionstanding between the slave economy of the ancient world and moderncapitalism. The definition of feudalism favored by Marxist historians focuseson the economic and juridical privileges enjoyed by a landowning aristocracyover a subordinate peasantry.

This, however, is not the dominant definition of feudalism as used byAnglophone scholars. Modern British and American historians have generallyemployed feudalism as a short hand to describe a political, military, andsocial system that bound together the warrior aristocracy of Western Europebetween c.1000 and 1300. This system, it is asserted, only gradually tookshape, and differed in detail from region to region. Its key institutions werelordship, vassalage, and the fief. Lordship and vassalage represent the twosides of a personal bond of mutual loyalty and military service between noblesof different rank that found its roots in the Germanic war-band. Thesuperior in this relationship was termed a lord, and the subordinate, whopledged loyalty and military service to his lord, was his vassal. A fief wasa grant of land tenure or of revenues held by a vassal from a lord, whoseproperty, 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 rightsover the property. The most important of the services required from a fief-holder was knight service. When summoned to war by his lord, the holderof a fief was obliged to send to the lords host or retinue the quota of knightsowed from his fief. These knights were then to render the lord militaryservice for a period of time fixed by custom, which amounted to fortydays in thirteenth-century France and England. British and American



historians have traditionally regarded knight service as the raison detre offeudalism.

Feudalism, as defined in this fashion, can be thought of as a militaryrecruitment system in which land tenure was exchanged for the service ofheavily armed warriors on horseback. In the Anglo-American paradigm,feudalism is associated with the fragmentation of central authority, as politicalpower and jurisdictional in the tenth and eleventh centuries devolved intothe 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 feudalnetwork of personal loyalty and land tenure, since he was the lord of lordsand the ultimate source of all rights over land. Before the late twelfth cen-tury, however, feudal kings were often merely the first among equals, andtheir claims to authority often masked their limited actual power.

Among the leading theorists of this approach are the Belgian historianFrancois-Louis Ganshof (18951980), the English historians John HoraceRound (18541928) and Sir Frank Merry Stenton (18801967), and theAmerican historians Carl Stephenson (18861954) and Joseph Strayer (190487). Ganshof s definition of feudalism may be offered as prototypical ofthis school:

a body of institutions creating and regulating the obligations of obedience andservice mainly military service on the part of a free man (the vassal) towardsanother free man (the lord), and the obligations of protection and maintenanceon the part of the lord with regard to his vassal. The obligation of maintenancehad usually as on its effects the grant by the lord to his vassal of a unit of realproperty [actually the grant of tenure] known as a fief.11

Modern French historians have tended to combine the feudo-vassalic andSmithian/Marxist defintions of feudalism, through the linked phrase Fodalitet Seigneurie, the Feudal and Seigneurial Systems. For historians such asMarc Bloch (18861944), Georges Duby (191996), and their followers,feudalism is a general term that embraces the key aspects of the prevailingmedieval social, political, and economic arrangements. German historians,on the other hand, carefully distinguish between these two definitions offeudalism. Feudalismus in German historical writings refers to a socio-economic system in which landed lords, bound to one another by ties ofvassalage, dominate peasants economically and judicially, requiring fromthem rents, labor, and dues while enjoying seignory (Grundherrschaft) overthose who lived upon and work their lands. Lehnswesen, on the other hand,expresses the rights, obligations, and dues associated with the holding offiefs, as well as the type of governance based on it, an hierarchy of fiefs andpowers, from the king down to the minor lord.12 Like the French historiansof feudalism, German scholars of Feudalismus emphasize the emergence ofa regime of serfdom in place of the slave and free peasant rural economyof the Carolingian era. Unsurprisingly, this was a dominant theme in EastGerman historiography. During the Cold War, the very terminology of



feudalism became politicized, with East German historians writing aboutFeudalismus and West Germans about Lehnswesen.13 More generally, Germanhistorians such as Otto Hintze (18611940), Heinrich Mitteis (18891952),and the Austrian Otto Brunner (18981992) have presented feudalism asan ideal stage in state formation not limited to the medieval West.14

Brunners formulation about the fundamental roles played by lordship andmutuality (protection by the lord, aid from his dependents) in the medievalGerman polity has dominated German historiography since the publicationof his Land und Herrschaft in 1939. Over the last decade, however, Brunnersrepresentation of the benign character of the Schutz und Schirm that lordssupposedly provided their peasants has been vigorously challenged, notablyby Gadi Algazi.15

The Origins of English Feudalism and Bastard Feudalism

Until recently, the feudalism question that had most occupied Anglophonescholars concerns the origins of English feudalism: whether William theConqueror introduced into England the conjoined institutions of vassalage,fief, and knight service from Normandy in 1066, or whether the originof these institutions is to be sought in Edward the Confessors England.Those who wished to portray the Norman conquerors as the architects ofthe 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 inDomesday 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 theantiquary Sir Henry Spelman (c.15641641) first recognized the applica-bility of the feudal terminology formulated by early modern French legalwriters to describe the laws governing the descent of fiefs to the situationof medieval England.16 The modern debate, however, began in 1891 withthe publication of an essay by John Horace Round on the introduction ofknight 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 feudalEngland. According to Round, William the Conqueror revolutionized themilitary organization of England by imposing upon the fiefs he distributedto his followers precisely defined quotas of knight service. Round, whohad previously argued that 1066 marked a tenurial revolution, posited thatthe Norman Conquest marked a dramatic and absolute break with Englishtraditions of military service, which he saw as arising from a public dutyincumbent upon all free men. The most prominent advocate of Roundsthesis was Sir Frank Stenton, who rejected Rounds animus against theAnglo-Saxons but who embraced his view that 1066 marked the beginningsof English feudalism. Not everyone, however, was persuaded. Rounds



distinguished contemporary, the legal historian Frederic Maitland (18501906), 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. . . . Ifmy examiner went on with the question and asked me, when did the feudalsystem attain its most perfect development? I should answer, about the middleof the last century.17

Whereas Maitland argued for tenurial continuity, others discovered evidenceof feudal institutions in pre-Conquest England. Eric John (19222000) inthe 1960s revived the arguments of the late nineteenth-century historianH. Munro Chadwick for Anglo-Saxon royal armies made up of noble war-riors who were personally commended to the ealdormen under whom thyfought.18 C. Warren Hollister both argued for elements of continuitybetween the military organizations of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-NormanEngland, and, more radically, demonstrated that feudal military servicenever constituted the main source of warriors for the Norman kings.19 JohnGillingham followed Hollister by critically reexamining the evidence forWilliams sudden imposition of knight quotas, and David Bates demonstratedthat Normandy before 1066 was not as feudal as Round had supposed.20

The author of this article demonstrated that in 1066 English armies wereorganized according to the principle of lordship and raised, in part, throughthe obligation of those who held their lands freely, with sake and soke,to render military service to the Crown, the extent of which was determinedby a rough approximation of the value of their lands.21 Since around 1990the debate has died down, in large part because of increasing doubts of thevalidity of the feudal paradigm itself. The consensus at present is that bothEngland and Normandy possessed rudimentary elements of a feudal system dependent tenures, lordship, and dependent military tenures before1066 but they coexisted with other forms of tenure and military obligation,and English feudalism as exemplified in the works of Glanvill and Bractonwas the result of an evolutionary process that had much to do with theunsettled 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 termcoined in 1885 by the Oxford University historian Charles Plummer todescribe a system of patronage in which personal loyalty and military servicewere 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 basisof 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. Stubbsposited a decisive shift from feudal obligation to paid military service inthe reign of King Edward III (132777).23 For Plummer and Stubbs, the



replacement of feudal vassals by liveried retainers bound to their lordsthrough cash payments was a debased form of tenurial feudalism (hencethe designation bastard). In this new order, great nobles maintained privatearmies of retainers to fight their battles, political and legal, and regularlyoverturned justice by upholding their men in their quarrels, regardless ofmerit, 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 thefifteenth century: aristocratic disorder, the abuse of power and the blightof the overmighty subject, culminating in the chaos of the War of theRoses.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 paymentfor 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 neededby Edward I (12721307) for his Welsh and Scottish wars. The noble affinitiesthat 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 aswar, 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 forthe mutual advantage of himself and the leading gentry families in his service.26

Unlike Plummer and Stubbs, McFarlane did not blame the political violenceand social disturbances of late medieval England on bastard feudalism. Rather,he explained the shift to contractual obligation as a mechanism to preservethe ideals of responsibility, loyalty, and good faith, which were threatenedby 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 amongthe king and the magnates of the realm. Lords, to be sure, used retainers tointimidate juries, pack commissions, and pursue quarrels with their neigh-bors, but to blame bastard feudalism for this violence and subversion ofjustice would be to mistake the instrument for the cause, the political andsocial competition of magnates.

McFarlanes interpretation of bastard feudalism quickly supplanted Stubbssto become the new orthodoxy.27 One element in this thesis, the origin ofbastard feudalism in Edward Is demands for manpower, became a subjectof further historical controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As earlyas 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 kindof retainer associated, whatever the precise provenance of the paymentsmade to him, with service in the household.28 Beans researches culminatedin a book, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (1989),in which he located the origins of bastard feudalism in the mechanismsused by nobles, from Anglo-Saxon times on, to maintain their households.He found evidence for indentures, annuities, livery, and fief-rentes (cash feesgranted in return for homage and service) in the thirteenth century, wellearlier than the reign of Edward I. The distinction between feudalism andbastard feudalism, for Bean, was forced and artificial; these two forms ofmaintenance, he contended, had coexisted throughout the medieval period.For that reason, he found the connotations of the term bastard feudalismto be misleading and the term itself to be without historical value. DavidCrouch not only concurred with Bean on this, but found evidence for theuse of fief-rentes and the appearance of non-tenurial elements in noble retinuesin the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.29

Peter Coss in a 1989 article and a subsequent debate with David Crouchand D. A. Carpenter in the journal Past & Present, challenged McFarlanesframework in a more fundamental manner, finding its origins in the responseof English magnates in the late 1250s and early 1260s to the success ofAngevin legal reforms.30 The victory of royal over honourial justice forgeda more direct relationship between free subject and the crown and betweencentral government and the society of the localities, which threatened toundermine the ability of the great lords to dominate their lesser neighbors.The barons of the weak King Henry III responded to this latent threat bypenetrating and subverting the administration and the courts, retaining localofficials, packing commissions of oyer and terminer with their retainers,and, in general, using money and patronage to bind the local gentry to themand dominate local society. The deleterious impact upon law and orderin late medieval England was much as Plummer and Stubbs had thought.Most radically, Coss, whose definition of feudal society as a total socialformation owes more to Marc Bloch (see below) than Ganshof,31 regardedthe invasion and subversion of law courts and offices of administration,rather than the replacement of the tenurial bond with the cash nexus, aslying at the very heart of bastard feudalism.32 Coss and his critics in thePast & Present debate, David Crouch and D. A. Carptenter, ended upgenerally 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 schooland 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 inhiding from the Nazis.) Feudal Society, a study of the development of theties that bound the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, is one of the mostinfluential works of medieval history published in the twentieth century.Bloch begged the question of what feudalism was. Rather than definingthe term, he opted instead to list the characteristics of what he termed afeudal society:

A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) insteadof a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specializedwarriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, withinthe warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation ofauthority leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survivalof other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during thesecond 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 twodistinct Feudal Ages. The First Feudal Age, lasting from the collapse of theCarolingian Empire to the mid-eleventh century, was characterized by thebreakdown of the central authority of the state, in part as a consequenceof the Viking raids. Authority during this period devolved upon the local-ities. Motte-and-bailey castles, man made hills with wooden towers on topof them and enclosures created by ditches and palisades at their base, sprangup all over the western half of the Carolingian Empire. The castellans whocontrolled these castles were essentially politically autonomous, despite theefforts of counts and dukes to rein them in and the exalted theocratic claimsmade 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, andspices from the east.

Blochs Second Feudal Age, which he saw as beginning around 1050and continuing until around 1250, was the product of a European economictake-off. Agricultural revolution (three-field rotation, heavy plough, horseharness, windmills) and the expansion of commerce led to the growth oftowns and the rebirth of a cash economy. These economic changes helpedkings 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 relationsand the definition of nobility. The knightly class became an hereditarynobility by the year 1100. The influx of wealth led to an increasing emphasisupon expenditure and conspicuous consumption as a reflection of nobility.Since this was also an age of rampant inflation, the aristocracy found itselfcontinually pressed for money, which led, in many instances, to attempts



to increase the economic exploitation of manorial resources through theuse of professional bureaucratic staff in noble households and on manors.By the thirteenth century, aristocrats in England, France, Germany, and Italytended to be literate, at least in the vernacular, and all great landownershad professional administrators to look after their affairs. (Here is where theuniversities became especially important in the secular history of medievalEurope). The aristocracy, faced by the emergence of the merchant class,began to define itself as a special order with the help of the Church. Thisled to chivalry and to the rituals of knighthood (e.g., dubbing ceremony,courtly love, etc.). Though still defining itself as a warrior class, the militaryvalue of knights in the Second Feudal Age declined due to the rigid custom-ary limitations on service. Already by the middle of the twelfth-centuryEnglish and French kings were relying on mercenaries, many of whom werepoor or landless knights. The aristocracy, however, continued to display itsmartial prowess in games (tournaments) as well as in war. Feudal incidentsbegan to displace military service as the most important render owed bya 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 ofthe second half of the twentieth century, remedied this. In La socit auxXIe et XIIe sicles dans la rgion mconnaise (1953) Duby proposed that Franceunderwent a feudal transformation around the year 1000. His study of thecharters of the abbeys of Cluny and St Vincent of Mcon persuaded himthat between the years 980 to 1030 the Mconnais experienced a break-down in public law and order coincident with the emergence of a newand harsh regime of lordship based on castles and knights. Lords, accordingto Duby, imposed new obligations on the peasants, both those of servileand free descent, who became a new class-the serfs. Public law and ordergave way to violence, custom and violent custom. Jean-Franois Lemarignieradded to this by chronicling the devolution of power in the late Carol-ingian period, as kingdoms fractured into principalities, counties, and, bythe end of the tenth century, into castellanies.35 The Capetian idea of king-ship was weakened and finally, by the 1020s, swamped in the seignurialtide and lost its public character. Pierre Bonnassie found the same processin the Spanish March, discovering that in the 1020s an old public orderbased on Visigothic law preserving peasant property and slavery was smashedby castle-generated violence, which produced a revolutionary change inthe social order.36 Duby further linked this new form of domination tothe development and popularization in the 1020s of the paradigm of thethree orders the heaven sanctioned obligation of the many who workto serve those who fight and those who pray. A summary of this viewwas 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 newideology of the three orders. Thus while fiefs and vassals could be foundin the eighth and ninth centuries, feudalism arose only around the millen-nium. The most extreme statement of this view is by Guy Bois (1989) whosaw the persistence of the antique order-characterized by private propertyand slave labor lasting until around the year 1000 when it was swept away.

The reaction against the Feudal Transformation thesis was not slow incoming. Dominique Barthlemys research on the Vendomais proved to himthat the feudal transition was a phantom. He contended that changes toterminology had been misinterpreted as actual social and political changes.The new paradigm also drew fire from the hyper-Romanists who see thepersistence of Roman order into the twelfth century and who challenge thevalidity of the public versus private paradigm itself.37 The question of whetherthere was a Feudal Transformation around the year 1000 was vigorouslydebated in the journal Past & Present. T. N. Bisson in 1994 (vol. 142) initiatedit with a defense of Dubys thesis, but with important modifications, inhis article, The Feudal Revolution. This was followed by criticisms byBarthelemy and Stephen White (1996: vol. 152), and by T. Reuter and ChrisWickham (1997: vol. 155). Bisson emphasizes the transformation of violencefrom political (maintenance of public order through public officials andcourts) to non-political and non-constructive (the use of violence by castel-lans and others to increase or maintain their power, without any sense ofcreating political institutions or structures.) Bissons restatement takes intoaccount that the shift from slavery/free peasants to serfs was gradual andthat serfdom coexisted with both in the tenth through twelfth centuries.He also acknowledges that the revolution was not complete by 1200 andwas, in fact, a continuing process. Bisson makes the interesting point thateven in the twelfth century the officers and agents of counts, dukes, andkings 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 ofMaine 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 impactof the Norman Conquest and in doing so touches on many of the sameissues raised by the insular debate over the introduction of feudalism intoEngland. Bates argues that, despite the massive tenurial change, violenceand castle-building associated with the Norman Conquest, when the wholeis set in a broad context, continuity and evolution are the predominantcharacteristics of English society, economy, and politics not only over thecourse of the eleventh century but between c.850 to 1200. The main



messages from England for French historiography, he concludes, are thatfeudalism, castle-building and cultural violence can co-exist with powerwhich for the sake of convenience we can call public. Bates also finds thatthe evidence for Normandy points to a paradigm which acknowledgesevolutionary change.39

The evidence does suggest a break down in public order maintainedthrough public officials and courts in late tenth- and eleventh-century Franceand 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 villagesby lords claiming proprietary and juridical rights over these lands and theauthority to command the labor of their inhabitants. Such banal lord-ships, moreover, derived their power from the possession of castles and theservice 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 worldof the ninth and tenth centuries was also marked by the use of extra-judicial violence as a tool for dispute resolution among the elites. Onealso must acknowledge that the idea of public (that is, royal) authoritycontinued throughout this period in the person of counts and dukes,whatever their actual powers and de facto relationships with the kingswhom 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. Theyapparently assumed that their readers would understand what was impliedby the term feudal. Ironically, in the same year that Bisson published hisarticle in Past and Present, another scholar, Susan Reynolds, did her verybest to sweep the term feudalism into the dustbin of historiography.

Criticism of Feudalism as a Construct

However they define feudalism, academic historians understand that theterm represents a historical construct (although some tend to reify it in theirwritings). In the words of Joseph R. Strayer and Rushton Coulborn,

The idea of feudalism is an abstraction derived from some of the facts of earlyEuropean history, but it is not itself one of those facts. . . . [Eighteenth-century]scholars, looking at certain peculiar institutions which had survived to theirday, looking back to the period when these institutions had originated andflourished, coined the word feudalism to sum up a long series of loosely relatedfacts 40

Despite the historiographical debates about feudalism, few scholars beforethe 1970s challenged (at least in print) that this term, however problematic,had heuristic and pedagogical value.41 Elizabeth A. R. Brown was the firstto throw down the gauntlet. In an article in the American Historical Review



(1974) entitled, The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians ofMedieval Europe, she contended that it would be best to discard entirelythe 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 whatis acknowledged to be deceptive and what must later be untaught reflects anunsettling attitude of condescension toward younger students.42

Browns criticism is far-reaching. She regards not only feudalism but allisms

abstract analytic constructs formulated and defined as a shorthand means ofdesignating the characteristics that the observers consider essential to varioustime periods, modes of organization, movements, and doctrines43

as artificialities that distort through simplification and which are fraughtwith the unstated assumptions of those who coined these terms. As Brownconcludes,

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 itwill carry with it those other obdurate isms manorial, scholastic, and human that have dominated for far too long the investigation of medieval life andthought.44

Browns criticisms have been developed further by Susan Reynolds in aninfluential 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 whenthey were given legal definition by the Italian lawyers who produced theLibri Feudorum. In essence, Reynolds argued that in the early Middle Agescustom rather than law ruled, and that this custom was both highly localizedand mutable. There is no evidence, to her mind, for precise feudal institu-tions or obligations in the tenth or eleventh centuries. If anything, dependenttenures were less important than inheritable family lands and horizontalbonds of association more important than the vertical bonds (lordship) thathistorians have traditionally emphasized. Reynolds argues for the persistenceof public power in the form of kingship and the centrality of communityin the eleventh century. (One might observe that she does so without thenuance and skepticism she reserves for lordship and fiefs, but the meaningof terms such as rex, regnum, gens, gield, and communitas and the concepts ofking, kingdom, guild, and community in the early medieval sourcesare no less problematic than dominus, homo, vassus, and feudum.45) The feu-dalism of history textbooks, Reynolds concludes, owes far more to theLibri Feudorum of late twelfth-century professional Italian lawyers than tothe institutions and practices of earlier centuries.



Reynoldss book pays far more attention to fiefs than to vassals, but herwork 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 termsof medieval historians, homage, had a broader meaning than traditionallybelieved. Hyams, a self-pronounced skeptic of the utility of feudalism as ananalytical model, demonstrates in a carefully argued paper that the ritualof intermixed hands was not specific to the creation of honourable lord-ship, as usually believed, but was used for various purposes to make manifestan act of submission, the conveyance of self into some state of dependence.46

Susan Reynoldss nominalist argument has largely swept the field, as themany favorable reviews of Vassals and Fiefs attest.47 Indeed, over the last decade,feudalism has become an F-word at some professional conferences formedieval historians, only uttered ironically or with the intention to provoke.That professional medievalists have been so willing to jettison as central aconstruct to their discipline as feudalism may have something to do withthe changing character of the academic profession. I suspect that the oldparadigm of feudalism was more persuasive to an earlier generation of scholarsbecause it meshed well with a traditional masculine academic system thatemphasized hierarchy, conflict, academic patronage, and power relations. Thatsystem still exists, of course, but it has been moderated and the discourseof academic politics, if not the substance, has changed to emphasize colle-giality and departmental consensus. The discourse on medieval social historyhas changed accordingly to one which now places greater emphasis uponhorizontal bonds of association and reconciliation of disputes. The passingof the WWII and Korean War generations and the discredit into whichmilitary history fell in the post-Vietnam era may also have had a role incalling into question old assumptions about the centrality of warfare tomedieval politics and to the self definition of the aristocracy.

There are, of course, American and British medieval historians whoreject the Brown-Reynolds thesis, but they have been oddly hesitant toengage the subject head-on in print.48 German historians, however, haveshown no such reluctance.49 Karl Kroeschell, for example, while acknowl-edging the prevalence of allods in the early middle ages and the imprecisecharacter of the Carolingian terminology for dependent tenures, concludesthat Reynolds extreme position is untenable from a German perspective.Kroeschell criticizes Reynolds for distorting or ignoring the Carolingianevidence for vassalage and dependent tenures, and points out that theConcordat of Worms (1122) and the dispute between Frederick Barbara-ossa and the papacy in the mid-1150s can only be understood in feudalterms, although both occurred too early to have been influenced by theLibri Feudorum.50

Like the late Warren Hollister, I find myself ambivalent about thisparadigm shift. On the one hand, I think that Elizabeth A. R. Browns



critique of feudalism as a construct is right on the mark. Skepticismabout feudalism as a system predated Browns AHR article. Indeed, severalof my mentors and senior colleagues pointedly remarked that Brown hadmerely published what they had been teaching for years. Nor can one takeexception 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 oflordship/vassalage and dependent tenures as central elements in early medi-eval society and politics. The historiographical pendulum threatens nowto swing too far toward horizontal bonds of association, consensus mak-ing, and community and away from vertical ties and power. Both types ofsocial bonds appear in the sources for the tenth and eleventh centuries,not only in France, Italy, and Germany, but in pre-Conquest England aswell. Listening to disputes over whether lordship or community was thefoundation of medieval society, I am reminded of physicists attempting todetermine whether light is a wave or a particle. The answer is, of course,both. Susan Reynolds is right in noting that vassalage and dependenttenures were not the only and probably not even the most prevalent political and material ties among the European nobility of the tenth andeleventh centuries. She is also undoubtedly right that the distinction betweenproperty and tenure was less distinct in the eleventh and twelfth centuriesthan 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 therecognition 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 hadbeen concluded.51

Feudalism as a historical construct or ideal type may never have existed.Lords, retainers, and dependent tenures, however, did, and were criticalelements in the governance of early medieval polities. By the early thirteenthcentury, the institutions of lordship and the fief had become ubiquitousthroughout western Europe. Pace Reynolds, this development probably hadless to do with professional Italian lawyers systematizing feudal law thanwith the realization by rulers that they could enhance their authority bydefining themselves as royal liege lords of all free men and as the fount ofall landholding in their realms. It is telling that the most feudalizedsocieties of the twelfth century were Norman England, Norman Sicily, andthe Crusader principalities, all polities established through conquest in theeleventh and early twelfth centuries. William the Conquerors distributionof lands to his followers was on the basis of fiefs. Domesday Book describesthe lands of Englands tenants-in-chief in 1087 as held de rege (from theking), and Henry IIs Cartae Baronum of 1166 enumerates the militaryobligations attached to them fifty years later. Whether or not Normandy(or Anglo-Saxon England) was feudal in 1066, it is indisputable thatWilliam structured the Norman settlement of his newly acquired kingdomupon the principle of dependent military tenures. A similar case can be



made for the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Peter Edbury, an admirer of SusanReynoldss book, attempted to apply her model to the evidence from theLatin East in the twelfth century. The result was not, I think, what heintended. He found no explicit evidence that the great lords of the FirstKingdom had a formal obligation to produce a stipulated number of knightsto the king when he went on campaign, or that their lordships were termedfeoda. On the other hand, he uncovered a great deal of evidence forlesser landowners holding their lands as fiefs (in the sense as dependenttenures) in return for fixed quotas of military service. Edbury suggests thatthe distinction might be significant, but admitted that there is a dangerhere of arguing ex nihilo: the absence of evidence that the great lordshipswere regarded as fiefs and that the magnates of the Kingdom of Jerusalemwere contractually bound to produce a fixed number when summoned bythe king is not evidence that such features did not exist. Certainly, bythe 1180s the great nobles of the Kingdom were conceived of as vassalsof the king. William of Tyres account of an oath of fidelity in 1183 swornby the higher nobility to the new regent Guy of Lusignan explicitlyrepresents the higher nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem as such. Theprincipes and the kings fideles on that occasion took a ritual oath manualiter,placing their hands in those of their lord as they repeated the formulaeby which they became Guys vassalli. Edbury also found that knights holdingfiefs (in the traditional sense of the word) from magnates in return forheavy military service was the norm in the twelfth century. Edbury admitsthat the most cogent and logical explanation for the heavy military quotasand the absence of fiscal dues is that these knights fees dated from earlyin the kingdoms history and had come into being at a time of acute man-power shortage. The main argument against that conclusion is that itcontradicts Reynoldss model.52

Browns and Reynoldss arguments to the contrary, it is difficulty to denythat the Normans who conquered England in the second half of the eleventhcentury and the French who settled in the Latin East at the beginning ofthe 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 moneyor direct maintenance) probably depended more on practical circumstancesthan law or even custom, as the institutions of governance and society evolvedin response to dynamic conditions. These were not yet the knights feesdescribed in Bracton (or even Glanvill). Nonetheless, it seems to me thatEngland, Sicily, and the Latin East at the turn of the twelfth century mightbe termed feudal societies without apology.

If defined clearly and narrowly, as in Ganshof s definition, feudalismremains a useful short-hand term to describe vertical social and politicalrelations 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 onlyapproximates reality; the danger is mistaking the construct for reality, andeither interpreting source evidence through the construct or judging theactual social, political, and tenurial relationships in a particular society,whether medieval European or not, against this ideal. What all medievalhistorians can agree on is that the question, was this society feudal? is lessmeaningful than understanding the institutions and relationships of thatsociety in their historical context.

Short Biography

Dr Richard Abels is chair of the History Department of the United StatesNaval Academy. He received a B.A. (American History, magna cum laude,1973), M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (Medieval History, 1982) from ColumbiaUniversity. Dr Abels has written two books, Lordship and Military Obliga-tion in Anglo-Saxon England (1988) and Alfred the Great: War, Kingship, andCulture in Anglo-Saxon England, and co-edited a third, The Normans and theirAdversaries: Essays in Memory of C. Warren Hollister (2001). He is also theauthor of numerous articles on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman militaryand cultural history. Dr Abels taught at Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa,in 19811982, and in the History Department of the U.S. Naval Academyfrom 1982 to the present, where he is the first and only professor to havewon all three civilian faculty excellence awards: for Teaching (1991), Research(2003), and Service (2008). Dr Abels is currently working on a book aboutthe relationship between culture and warfare in the Middle Ages.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Sampson Hall, Annapolis, Maryland, United States, 21402-5044.Email: [email protected].

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 MedievalEurope. American Historical Review, 79 (1974): 106388; Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: TheMedieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University, 1994).5 C. Warren Hollister, The Irony of English Feudalism, Journal of British Studies, 2 (1963): 126. Cf. the response of Robert S. Hoyt in the same volume, The Iron Age of EnglishFeudalism, 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 wordfeudalism in Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein, R. Po-chia Hsia, andBonnie 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, WorldCivilizations: 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 RushtonCoulborn (ed.), Feudalism in History (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965). This approachunderlies 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 Beginningsof 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 europischeInternetzeitschrift 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 moreextended discussion, see Ludolf Kuchenbuch, Feudalismus: Versuch ber dieGebrauchsstrateigien 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 / ThePresence 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 inthe nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Oexle, Feudalismus, Verfassung under Politikim deutschen Kaiserreich 18681920, in Fryde, Monnet, and Oexle (eds), Die Gegenwart desFeudalismus, 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). Forthe historiographical debate over Brunners model of the medieval German polity, see Trans-lators Introduction, in Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in MedievalAustria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, PA: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1992), xiiixli. For a recent overview of the role played by lordship in thedevelopment of the medieval German state, see the essays in Die Macht des Knigs. Herrschaft inEuropa 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 HistoricalThought 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 militaryvalue 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., 5thed. (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 (194345): 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 studiesof 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): 11731; Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1989), 12153. See also Scott Waugh, Tenure to Contract: Lordship andClientage 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 Crouchand D. A. Carptenter, Debate: Bastard Feudalism Revisited, Past & Present, 131 (1991): 16589; Peter Coss, Bastard Feudalism Revisited: Reply, Past & Present 131 (1991): 190203.31 Coss, Bastard Feudalism Revisited: Reply, 1989. See also comments by Hicks, BastardFeudalism, 247.32 Coss, Bastard Feudalism Revised: Reply, 193.33 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1964), 446.34 Ibid., 5971.35 Jean-Franois Lemarignier, Political and Monastic Structures in France at the End of theTenth and the Beginning of the Eleventh Century (1957), trans. Frederic Cheyette, Lordshipand 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 dunesocit, 2 vols. (Toulouse: lUniversit de Toulouse, 197576). The characterization of Bonnaissiesthesis 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 Sededel 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 debateover the irony of English feudalism. Some Notations on Mr. Hollisters Irony , Journal ofBritish 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 inWestern Europe 9001300, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 8: TheCommunity of the Realm. Although in her introduction to the second edition of Kingdomsand Communities, Reynolds repeats her observation in Vassals and Fiefs (1214) about the needto 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 theirminds when they use the word, she immediately follows this with the assertion that the nounsregnum, 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 InterdisciplinaryHistory, 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 distinctionbetween word, concept, and phenomenon, and her assertion that for historians, words areless 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 Abschaffungdes Feudalismus ist gescheitert, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 (19 May 1995), and byJohannes Fried in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, 19/1 (1997): 2841. Cf. Reynoldsresponse 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 socitsmridionales lge fodal: Hommage Pierre Bonnassie (Toulouse: CNRS/Universit de Toulouse-Le-Mirail, 1999), 31924. In a series of charters from twelfth-century Montpellier, historianFrederic 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 tothe donor as a feudum. As Cheyette observes, what seemed to be important for the participantsis that the entire ritual of donation, return grant, and oath of fidelity served to implant apersonal 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 (postedat http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/reynolds-2%20reviews.html#Cheyette, accessedSeptember 20, 2008).52 Peter W. Edbury, Fiefs and Vassals in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: From the Twelfth Centuryto the Thirteenth, Crusades, 1 (2002): 4952, 5960. In a paper published in 1998, Edburyexplicitly attempted to apply Reynoldss method and ideas to the Latin East. Fiefs, vassaux etseries 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 explainaway the evidence for fiefs and vassals in the early Latin Kingdom in the same volume. Fiefsand 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 lordshipsor lesser properties in the East after the First Crusade cannot [emphasis added] have brought withthem 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 offeudalism: reading the sources through a conceptual lens. Most recently, Alan V. Murray hasargued for the importance of money-fiefs for military recruitment during the early decades ofthe Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Origin of Money-Fiefs in the Latin Kingdom ofJerusalem, in John France (ed.), Mercenaries and Paid Men. The Mercenary Identity in the MiddleAges (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 27586.

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