Chapter 6

'Feudalism': A Memoir and an Assessment

Fredric L. Cheyette

Why is 'feudalism' a problematic term? In 1966 I began the introduction to my anthology of what were then recent trends in medieval social history with the same question.• 1 doubt whether way back then I expected that I would still be writing about this question four decades later. Despite the powerful attack launched by Elizabeth Brown in 1974 against the 'tyranny' of the construct and Susan Reynold's vigorous and elaborate reprise in 1994, the term refuses to release its hold, not just as a journalistic epithet of condemnation but as academic shorthand in more or less good standing. In September, 2006, there was an international conference in Bergen, Norway, on the subject (for which an earlier version of this article was orig inally prepared). Soon after my return from that conference my daughter, a middle-school math tutor, told me that while she was working with one youngster she overheard another repeating a phrase she was trying to memorize for a history exam: 'The invention of feudalism saved Europe from the Dark Ages'. ' Isn ' t it nice to know', my daughter added, 'that a good part of your life's work has been for naught.' The tyrant, quite c learly, refuses to retreat into a well-deserved retirement. An article to honor Steve White seems an appropriate place to ruminate on why I have campaigned for much of my career to eliminate both word and concept from professional writing on the Middle Ages,2 a campaign on which Steve has been my welcome and learned companion.

We all recognize that 'feudal', in everyday usage, and especially in the press, may mean 'aristocratic' (in contrast to democratic), ' reactionary' , ' hierarchic ' (as opposed to egalitarian), ' primitive', ' medieval ', or simply 'despotic 'or 'oppressive' when speaking about political, social, or economic regimes. Since the nineteenth century it has been used this way, most often as a term of opprobrium, in English, German, the Romance languages, and doubtless others as wel l. For journalists, the term is as easily applicable to contemporary Pakistan as it is to twelfth-century France. 3 ' Feudalism', meaning either a period or a regime dominated by lords,

F.L. Cheyelte, Lordship and Community in Medieval Europe (New York, 1966). 2 I demonstrated that it could be done even when writ ing about twelfth-century

society by making sure that the word appears only in quotes in my Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Tivubadours ( llhaca NY, 1981 ).

3 ' In Feudal Pakistan, Landlord Calls the Political Shots on Election Day', International Herald Ti·ibune, 18 Feb. 2008. At the time of writing, there is even a Wikipedia article entitled 'Feudalism in Pakistan '.

120 Feud. Violence and Practice

or domination by people who possess financial or social power and prestige, is a relatively late arrival. According to standard lexicons, it first appeared with this meaning in French in 1823, Italian in 1827, English in 1839 and only late in the nineteenth century in German.

What the word refers to, however, already appeared in 1727 as 'Ia feodalite' in the Comte de Boulainvillier's Histoire des anciens Parlements de France.4 Along with ' regime feodale' it quickly became a common collective term in eighteenth­century French historical and legal writing.5 Charles Forman used 'feodal government' to translate the expression in his English version of Boulainvilliers. A half-century later, Adam Smith adopted this term in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. From his reading of the voluminous French works on the subject, he likewise adopted the lurid portrayal of the many evils it represented. Smith was far more popular than any of his French predecessors, and it is doubtless to him that we owe the common equation of 'feudal government' with ' violence, rapine, and disorder. ' 6

By the time Smith sat down at h is Kirkcaldy writing desk, all the complexities - and problems - that we associate with the term 'feudalism' were well established. The medieval Libri feudorum, appended. to the standard texts of Roman Law, had long been part of Continental law school curricula and formed the starting point for sixteenth-century discussions of the 'law of fiefs.' When regional customals - largely concerned with fiefs and the rights and obligations associated with them - were collected and published in the sixteenth century, the issue of their authority and their relation to Roman Law and the Librifeudorum became a major preoccupation for their commentators. To these jurists, the authority of the law was strictly dependent on the authority of those who promulgated it. Therefore, only the history of sovereign authority could justify the validity of fiefs, or eventually argue for their suppression.7 Thus the need to embed the law of fiefs in its history.

4 Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, Histoire de /'ancien gouvernement de Ia France, avec X1 V. fell res historiques sur les parlemens ou etats-generaux (La Haye and Amsterdam, 1727). English translation by Charles Forman, esq., An Historical Account of the Antient Parliaments of France ... in Fourteen Leiters (London, 1739). Letter IV is entitled 'Detail of the feodal government, and the establishment of the fiefs'.

5 J.Q.C. Mackrell, The A/lack on 'Feudalism ' in Eighteenth-century France (London, 1973), esp. chs 2 and 3.

6 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (many editions), most notably bk. 2, ch. 3, bk. 3, ch. 4. It is in these pages that 'feudal government' goes far beyond the laws of fiefs to encompass not just the organization of the economy but 'the state of property and manners from which the disorders arose,' an early attempt to encapsulate ' feudal society'. Mackrell comments on such portrayals, ' In every eighteenth­century historian there was a Hollywood director screaming to get out.' (A/lack, p. 34.)

7 For example, Titulus I of Charles Dumoulin's sixteenth-century, Commemarii in parisienses ... consuetudines (of many editions, I used Berne, 1603), is primarily devoted to reconstructing the historical origins of the law of fiefs. Having accomplished this, he was

re ared to a ue a ainst the validi of feudal ri hts in his Traite des fie s. See Mackrell ,

Fredric L.. Cheye/le 121

But for Du Moulin and his fellow legists Cujas, Hotman, and Bodin, because fiefs were a source of power and prestige, no discussion of the law that governed them or the history of that law could be separated from the political polemics in which the writers were deeply engaged. And both their histories and their polemics came alive again in the po litical agitations of the eighteenth century. To a ll but specialists, these sixteenth- and eighteenth-century authors have largely been forgotten; but the histories they constructed, and the images, true or fancifu l, of the 'feudal government' that went along with that history, still formed the master narrative of'feudalism' that !learned in mid-twentieth-century America. Though the polemics this narrative once served are now forgotten phantoms, they continue to infect the concept of'feudalism ' that survives in modern historical writing.8

From the eighteenth century, modern usage of 'feudalism' has inherited, fi rst of all , the obloquy with which it was tarred by so many French pamphleteers in the decades before the Revolution, tarred as well by the many peasant cahiers de doleances to which the Assembly finally responded by abol ishing the regime feodale on 3 August I 789 (though they had to appoint a commission to figure out what they meant by doing so).9 Usually deplored or simply ignored by modem medievalists, this connotation nevertheless echoes quietly through al l the more 'professional' usages of the term, as we shall see.

The late-medieval, early-modem lawyer 's usage continues in what we may

call the narrow or technical definition: the legal rules, rights, and obligations that governed the holding of fiefs, especia lly (but not exclusively) in the Middle Ages. This was the only definition of 'feudal ' in any language before the e ighteenth century. Early commentators emphasized among those rights the exercise of jurisdiction and constraint over a subject population, either by customary right (in which case, some - most notably Adam Smith - considered the powers not 'feudal' but 'allodial'), by grant from king or emperor, or by usurpation. When viewed through the lens of the growing royalist ideology of the sixteenth century, and later through the ideology of the State, such jurisdictions were considered the ' private exercise of public power'. And so they continue to be described in many modem texts. This is the most common meaning of 'feudalism' in Anglo­American historiography. It is the one I will be paying the most attention to. In

Attack, pp. 53- 5. On the legists' historical writing, see Kathleen Davis, 'Sovereign Subjects, Feudal Law, and the Writing of History', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Swdies 36 (2006): 223-61, further elaborated in her (unfortunately 'theory' -encrusted) Periodization and sovereignty: how ideas of feudalism and secularization govern the politics of time (Philadelphia, 2008).

8 There is neither space nor reason to summarize the history of ·feudalism' during the nineteenth century here. I wrote a brief history of the concept for a never-published Dictionary of the History of Ideas. It appears on my web site: <http://www3.amherst.edu/ - flcheyette/Publications!Feudalism DH I. pdf.>

122 Feud, Violence and Practice

French it remains ' feodalite,' in German ' Lehnswesen'. In the discussion that follows, I will call this definition ' feudalism # I.'

A second version of 'feudalism' is that of a social economy in which landed lords dominate a subject, servile peasantry from whom they demand rents, labor services, and various other dues, and over whom they exercise justice. This was essentially the meaning given to the term by Adam Smith, and in the twentieth century it was most commonly associated with Marxist historiography. This sense of the word is ' Feudalismus' in German, ' feodalisme' in French, but commonly distinguished as the ' manorial system ' in Anglo-American history writing about medieval rural society and economy. ll will be my 'feudalism #2' .

There is, in addition, the concept of ' feudal society' which seeks to combine feudal isms # I and #2 in a systematic way as a form of socio-political organization dominated by a military class or Estate, who were connected to each other by ties of lordship and honorable subordination (' vassalage') and who in tum dominated a subject peasantry. In one standard version (already elaborated in early-modem commentaries) lordship gave protection and defense, vassalage required service, especially service in arms. This personal relationship inseparably involved a tenurial relationship as well, the vassal holding land of his lord. Feudal domination therefore took shape within an economy where the primary source of wealth was land and its products. This too was anticipated by various scattered sections of Smith's Wealth of Nations. The classic modem account is Marc Bloch's La societe f eodale.10

In the present as well as in centuries past, all these ways of thinking about feudalism have assumed explicitly or implicitly the notion of historical progress, or at least of the succession of states, or systems, or structures. In this they are decidedly, all of them, the children of the humanist lawyers of the sixteenth century, who already associated fiefs with medieval barbarism, as well as of the progress­obsessed political philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is for this reason that, try as we might, we cannot escape the derogatory coloring of popular usage. And it is hardly any wonder that the use of the term should be called into question as the belief in progress as a secularized form of Providence has seemed (at least among intellectuals) increasingly untenable. There are other assumptions as well, some quite visible, others deeply buried in the DNA of these 'feudalisms.' I will only mention those that have been central to my colleagues' and my own critiques in our longstanding efforts to challenge the terms in which medieval society is portrayed.

Because 'feudalism # I ' long dominated Anglo-American discussions I will begin with the important assumptions there, working from the visible to the hidden.

Most older textbooks on the subject - Fran9ois Ganshof's Qu 'est-ce que Ia f eodalite? will doubtless be the one most familiar to the reader, but he drew on a

1° First published in the series 'Evolution de l 'humanite' (Paris, 1939-40). The title was previously used by Joseph Calmette in 1923.

124 Feud, Violence and Practice

so the argument goes, there emerged the world that Thomas Hobbes described, where the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must. This Hobbesian view was still quite explicitly called upon by Georges Duby in his famous thesis on the Maconnais.13 It is fundamental to all conceptions of the 'mutation feodale,' dear to a whole generation of French social historians, as it is to Thomas Bisson's 'feudal revolution,' and recent reading tells me that it is sti ll very much alive in certain neighborhoods of the medievalist village. 14 That is to say, medievalists, at least by my reckoning, are often unaware of the political and ideological contexts from which their arguments have sprung and are ready to mix and match as suits their needs.

The period of ' feudal anarchy' is, as I have said, sometimes described as the period when 'public power fell into private hands.' Here again, Duby's Maconnais thesis may stand as a relatively late locus classicus. That the distinction between public and private existed, and that it was identical to our own western notions of public and private, is again simply assumed, as it was by the legists of the Old Regime. Where and when the distinction appeared is never explained, and whether it is applicable to the ninth or to the twelfth century is never questioned.

There is one further pair of assumptions vital both for 'feudalism# I' once it moved beyond the narrow bounds of the law governing fief-holding and become a 'form of government' and for 'feudalism #2', once that became a stage in the evolution of society. Each assumed an unproved statistical fact. Any coherent conception of 'feudalism # I' that goes beyond the peculiar legal antiquities associated with a form of landholding called feudum to imagine that those antiquities describe a type of society or form of government must necessarily assume that fiefs were the universal form of landholding and power-holding among the military elite, or at the very least the most important form. Given the prominence of fiefs and their associated rights in sixteenth-century customals, there would have been no reason for legists of that period to question this. But for modem historians not to question it amounts to assuming (as did those sixteenth­century legists) that what existed around 1500 could be projected backwards en

13 Georges Duby, La societe aux Xle et X lie siecles dans Ia region miiconnaise (Paris, 1953). For an elaboration of the argument here see my 'George Duby's La societe dans Ia region miiconnaise after fifty years: reading it then and now', Journal of Medieval History 28 (2002): 291- 317.

14 Thomas N. Bisson, 'The "Feudal Revolution,"' Past and Present 142 (1994): 6-42, and the comments on this article by Dominique Barthelemy, Timothy Reuter, Chris Wickham, and Stephen D. White in ' Debate: The "Feudal Revolution," 'Past and Present I 52 ( 1996): 196-223 and I 55 ( 1997): 197- 255. Bisson's The crisis of the twelfth century: power, lord5hip, and the origins of European government (Princeton, 2009) appeared when this article was in press. See also Warren Brown and Piotr Gorecki, Conflict in Medieval Europe (Aldershot, 2003), esp. pp. 28- 33. For a recent example of the Hobbesian argument, see Helene Debax, La f eodalite languedocienne Xle - Xlle siecles (Toulouse, 2003), and my review in TMR-L (2004).

126 Feud, Violence and Practice

Charles Plummer who, as far as 1 know, coined the term, nor of Bishop Stubbs or Sir Frank Stenton, because there was rarely if ever a tenurial connection between these lords and their retainers. But why 'bastard'? We might expect such a judgmental adjective from a Victorian divine, and censoriousness bleeds from the sentence in which it first appeared. 19 Curiously, the term became a fixture of English historiography. Why so?

The answer, I believe, lies not in the late-medieval political phenomenon itself nor in contemporary attitudes towards it. There were, to be sure, contemporaries who deplored the practice of 'retaining' , as it was known in Yorkist and Lancastrian England. But just as surely the real reason for the term's longevity resides elsewhere: in the larger narrative within which the phenomenon found its historiographical place, the standard textbook narrative of the triumphal rise of English parliamentary government Herbert Butterfield, in an old but ever­engaging polemic, dubbed it 'The Whig Interpretation of History' . And the label 'the Whig narrative ' has stuck.

The Whig narrative made these late medieval political practices of retaining illegitimate because the direction of the larger narrative within which it was placed was towards the creation of centralizing state institutions, and the activities of magnates creating their own power centers, in part by manipulating what should have been uniquely royal institutions, seemed not just a distraction but a detour that risked taking the narrative down the wrong road. The affinities of magnates and their organization of local dominance had no meaning for the future. The motives and actions of late medieval aris tocrats who pursued their own interests were subversive of the March of History. They were therefore illegitimate. Calling those practices ' bastard feudalism ' neatly summarized the way those practices were leftovers from an earlier world, eventually to be relegated (as Marx said of other kinds of leftovers) to the 'dust bin of History'. The historian seemed to be saying, ' I know in what direction history was moving. Why didn ' t they?'

It requires but a moment's reflection to see that the particular Whig narrative of the triumph of the English Parliament, or the triumph of Anglo-Protestant culture, the narrative that Butterfield deplored, is actually only a subset of a more generalized historical-rhetorical mode. One need only abstract the narrative form and the method it presupposes, removing the historical particulars of the English example to arrive at a form of meta-narrative. When I taught historiography 1 was in the habit of calling it the Whig meta-narrative, though in its abstract form it need not have anything either political or English about it. Why not just call it

19 In the introduction to Plummer's edition of Sir John Fortescue, The governance of England (Oxford, 1885), p. 15: 'The reign of Edward Ill was moreover the period of that pseudo-chivalry, which, under a garb of extennal splendour and a factitious code of honour failed to conceal its ingrained lust and cruelty ... ; and it saw the beginning of that bastard feudali sm, which , in place of the primitive relation of a lord to his tenants, surrounded the great man with a horde of retainers .. . '

Fredric L. Cheyette 127

teleological?20 One might indeed do so, for the meta-narrative fits many ideologies, and may as easily take the form of ' decline and fall' as it does of progress and triumph. Calling it ' Whig,' aside from helping it stick in undergraduates ' minds, reminds us, with Butterfield 's help, of the particular historical context in which it assumed the dominance it had in anglophone historiography until late in the twentieth century. It also helps to focus our attention on the particular ways it is teleological, which it may not share with other te leological narratives.

The method and resultant structure of this Whig meta-narrative is simple. Although normally written from the past forward, because that is what the rhetoric of history demands, the Whig meta-narrative is first constructed in the opposite direction, from the present or from what was once a present, backwards. It asks, 'How did X become what it is (or once was)?' whether the X is the English Parliamentary system, Capitalism, or the game of footbal l. It then takes the particular elements that make up X and tu!llnels backwards through time to discover their 'origins'. The X need not be the historian's present. It can be any moment that could serve as a quasi-present. To hide that procedure, the historian then writes his or her narrative in the opposite d irection, from the 'orig ins' forward, riding back through the tunnel to arrive at the terminus that was also the beginning. The resulting narrative thereby gains not only unceasing forward motion but an aura of inevitabi lity. In its most generalizable form, the Whig meta-narrative can be seen to encompass most of the forms of historical narrative invented in the nineteenth century, including the Hegelian and its off-shoot, the Marxist. We must a lways suspect its presence in any narrative concerned with 'origins'.

The dangers inherent in this meta-narrative form are clear. As the historian digs his tunnel back through time, the persons, events, ideas, phenomena that form the seam being excavated are tom from their own contemporary contexts and meanings, as their significance (and therefore their content) is narrowed to what they 'will become'. They are voided of the atmosphere of their own world to become transients on the road to somewhere else. Not only does anachronism lie in wait for the unwary (as when the mean ings of words in the modem world are ascribed to those words a half-millennium ago), but the process is capable ofturning phenomena into exactly the opposite of what they were in themselves. Perhaps the most memorable example for those of my generation was the appearance, in a widely-used textbook of the mid-twentieth century, of Luther as an early hero in the development of religious toleration.21

Now, what does this Whig meta-narrative have to do with the paradoxes and mysteries of feudalism? I will begin once again with feudalism # 1.

In the Anglo-American Whig narrative of medieval history that I learned in college, feuda lism appeared as what one might call the ' primal soup' out of which centralized monarchical states developed. It was interesting less for itself than

20 As Susan Reynolds argued at Bergen when I first presented this paper. 21 John Herman Randall , Jr. The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston, New York,

1940), pp. 165- 8.

128 Feud, Violence and Practice

for what it became in the world of Henry II of England or Philip TV of France. The quasi-present that was the starting point of analysis, however, was not 1166 or 1285 but, as Elizabeth Brown long ago brought to our attention, the sixteenth and seventeenth century. F. W. Maitland's jest, ' ... were an examiner to ask who introduced the feudal system into England? one very good answer would be Henry Spelman', was right on target, even if Spelman, a learned antiquarian of the seventeenth century, never used the term ' feudal system' and ought to have shared the rights of invention with another antiquarian lawyer, Sir Thomas Craig. Both Craig and Spelman discovered 'feudal law' in the writings of the same sixteenth­century French jurists that eventually became the source for all nineteenth- and twentieth-century descriptions of 'feudalism # I'.

The interests of these sixteenth-century lawyers were practical and professional. They were also profoundly political. Their trade required them to make sense of documents, some of them three or four hundred years old, filled with obscure technical terms. It also involved dealing with courts whose rules and laws determined what those terms might allow or disallow. They themselves lived in a world of tenures and lordly rights of all sorts. More important for the subject of 'feudalism', they lived in a world rife with conflict over the scope of royal prerogative and the rights of magnates, towns, estates, pari iament and parlements, and they sought to create out of what they knew of the past a justification for what they thought to be the proper distribution of power in the present. Their tools and their frames of reference were, as was natural, oftheir own times. They were trained in Roman Law, which would have included the Libri f eudorum - the Books of Fiefs- and the late-medieval French and Italian jurists' comments on those books. They had on their shelves copies of provincial customs and commentaries on those customs. Their vision of law, both civil law and custom, was directly descended from medieval scholastic commentaries. The texts they composed resemble far more the glosses and commentaries of their thirteenth- and fourteenth-century predecessors than they do the treatises of the eighteenth century. More importantly, for them the Law existed within the framework of that recent invention, the State, structured by ideas of sovereignty that had been developing, by that time, for at least two hundred years. But because the documents they found in their clients' archives were old, they simply lumped them together conceptually to represent a former time, a relatively unchanging barbarian 'Gothic' world out of which their own had emerged.

Into those earlier centuries the legal antiquaries dug, searching for the State, for legislation and customs, as well as the first signs of the particular ' liberties ' or prerogatives for or against which they were arguing. They were also seeking to understand the kinds of documents their clients presented them - oaths of homage, recognitions of fiefs, and the multitude of ' rights and customs' - many of them quite obscure - demanded from peasant tenants. Robert Boutruche in the documents he appended to his Seigneurie et f eodalite reminded us that in May 1783 the royal government of France issued an edict regulating ' how vassals of the king's domaine are to render faith and homage'. For our delectation he also

Fredric L. Cheyette 129

included in his documentary appendix to the book the latest act of homage he had found in a French archive. It was dated July 6, 1789, a little more than a month before the revolutionary Assembly abolished the regime feodal e. 22 The work of these antiquaries locked into the history and description of the feoda/ite they described all the ideological trappings of the developing monarchical regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, along with the conflicts that those regimes engendered.

It is important to note that these early antiquaries did not ask whether a State existed in those earlier centuries, or, if it did, what it may have been. As royal lawyers, they simply accepted the continuity from Merovingians to Carolingians to Capetians, from Pharamond to Charlemagne to Hugh Capel, their only question being when and how feudalism fitted into that sequence and what might have been the consequences. Their seventeenth-century English followers adapted the sequence and the problematics of their French guides, as two centuries later, Bishop Stubbs would follow his German guides, themselves distant inheritors of the same tradition. 'Law' for all these antiquarians was equally unproblematic. They knew from their studies that the sources of Law were both royal legislation and 'custom,' as the latter was defined by the commentators on Roman and Canon Laws, and they applied that rule to the formal compi lations of provincial customs then being published. And so for 'feudal law' it was to legislation and customals that they looked.

They also did not question the notion of sovereignty inherent in the monarchical project and eventually given its classic philosophical statement by Thomas Hobbes. And so, for them, the history of the State, which enclosed the history of feudalism, was the history of the power to constra in. This Hobbesian assumption, as I have said, has remained a permanent feature of' feudalism ' both # 1 and #2. The later Jacobin vision of the State only served to emphasize that feature. At the same time, an alternative view that feudalism was the source of 'liberties' (which we would parse as ' privileges'), passed through Montesquieu and Boulainvilliers to another variant of feudalism's history, represented, for example, by the nineteenth-century German legal historian, Otto von Gierke. Any modern medievalist reading the chapter on feudalism in Montesquieu's De /'esprit des lois, or Boulainvillier's Histoire des anciens Par/ements de France cannot help but be struck by the prominence in these texts of all the fami liar way-stations of modern histories of feudalism, from the comitatus described by Tacitus, to Carolingian immunities, to the capitulary ofQuierzy-sur-Oise and beyond.23

22 Robert Boutruche, Seigneurie et f eoda/ite (2 vols, Paris, 1959- 1970), vol. l, documents 39, 40.

23 The 'Roman' vs. 'Germanic ' debate, already prominent in Ou Moulin, still streams through Carl Stephenson, "The Origin and Significance of Feudalism ', American Historical Review 46 ( 1941 ): 788-8 12, in which Montesquieu and the Gennan feudists of the nineteenth century figure prominently (though all of them abstracted from the political context in which the wrote . Montes uieu seems likewise to have uided, at some remove

Fredric L. Cheyeue 131

as centuries that had lost their way. For a full expression of this sentiment one need only read the account of these centuries in what may be the last grand example of the Whig narrative, Joseph R. Strayer's On the Medie val Origins of the Modern

State.26

To those of us immersed in the archival sources, however, that question of relevancy to the larger narrative of state formation seemed relatively unimportant. What we were finding had its own interest, and often enough the theme of centralization got lost as we puzzled out the micro-politics that had given rise to the documents we were reading, whether it was John Henneman tracking tax negotiations, Russell Major investigati111g local assemblies, Howard Kaminsky tracing the political career of a French cardinal, or William Weary mapping the clientage network of a great noble house, to mention only a few of those whose paths crossed my own in the manuscript room of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Archives Nationales during the 1960s.27 The subjects themselves, though originating in the narrative of the history of the State, were beginning to give the lie to the premises of that narrative. In this research, 'centra lization' or nascent absolutism was often hard to find. What we saw was rather the multiplication of other regional and local political communities, a politics of patronage and clientage, a seignorial conception of power, that is to say, power as a form of property, ideas of sovereignty percolating out of the glossa tors and commentators but always only one of a number of alternative arguments. Those of us working in France watched with fascination as simi lar themes emerged from the work of our colleagues studying late-medieval English and Italian history.

Even if our research took us into the last centuries of the Middle Ages, as teachers of the entire period we could not help but ponder what our discoveries implied for understanding earlier centuries. If the state was still only one possible political structure among many, around, let us say, 1500, what would give us cause to think that a Carolingian State had been there to be 'feudalized' 600 years earlier? If the distinction between public and private power was only slowly making its way out of the professorial discourse of the schools in the late Middle Ages, what reason was there to talk about public power falling into private hands in the tenth or eleventh century?

26 Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modem State (Princeton, 1970), ch. 2. It is a tribute to Strayer 's teaching that many of the Americans whose work undermined the Whig narrative (myself included) were his students .

27 John B. Henneman. Royal Taxation in Fourteenth-century France: the Developme111 of War Financing. 1322- 1356 (Princeton, 1971 ), and Royal Taxation in Fourteentlt-centwy France: the Captivity and Ransom of John II, 1356- 1370 (Philadelphia, 1976); J. Russell Major, Represemative Governmem in Early Modern France (New Haven, 1980). Howard Kaminsky, Simon de Cramaud and the Great Schism (New Brunswick NJ, 1983); William H. Weary, 'Royal Policy and Patronage in Renaissance France: The Monarchy and the House of La Tremoille' (Dissertation, Yale U niversity, 1972).

Fredric L. Cheyette 133

is now, I believe, a permanent fixture of medieval social history in the United States. The turn has not been without its vehement critics. But the consequences have been important. It has led some to break with structuralism, whether derived from the legal-institutional tradition promoted in the United States by Charles Homer Haskins and his students, or from Durkheim by way of the Annates school, or from the structuralist-functionalist school of anthropology. That in turn has led to a different way of reading our sources.

Both the legal-institutional tradition and the various forms of structuralism encouraged historians to abstract the individuals from the documents in which they appeared. Individuals were only stand-ins for abstract categories, whether legal categories or social categories, and their names could as easily be John Doe or Richard Roe or ' a certain castellan' and 'a man identified as a serf' . The alternative was to begin with the particulars of the occasion momentarily illuminated by each document, and to e lucidate as far as possible the complexities of the situation in which the named individuals were acting. The possibility of choice now insinuated itself into the historical narrative, not just for the great actors on the high political stage but fo r those whom we see only in a flash of light before they vanish. For the historian, the rhetorical problems were wholly new, as micro-biography and micro-politics had somehow to be integrated into the larger narrative. These were the issues, both historical and rhetorical , that I had to solve in order to bring to fruition my own work on Occitania. They remain a continuing challenge. At this late stage of my own career, I envy those who wi ll have to face this challenge, released from the false certainties of an antique master narrative.

In conclusion, my reading of current literature suggests that the old standard narrative, represented by Ganshof, Mitteis, Stenton, Strayer and others, if not put to rest, has taken its final refuge in those graveyards of idees ret;ues, high school textbooks. The alternative, so brilliantly proposed by Georges Duby and expanded on by Poly, Bournazel, Bonnassie, and Bisson is perhaps living on borrowed time. The challenges to the assumptions behind a ll such narratives are clear. What will replace ' feudalism'? I cannot predict. But I look forward to seeing how the next generation wi ll answer that question.