Peter Brugel, The Harvesters, 1565

That’s Not Feudalism

Jasper McChesney
Published in
4 min readJul 25, 2017

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Medieval peasants were not kings, and their lives weren’t governed by the same systems or traditions. But in the popular imagination, everyone in the middle ages is a warrior. Let’s sort things out.

(I am most familiar with medieval England, and will use terms and make generalizations that work there. As with any bit of historical summary, be aware that there was enormous variation over time and space.)

Feudalism

First, let’s tackle the namesake of the article. We are familiar with this term, but usually use it too broadly. Feudalism describes relationships between elites: it does not pertain to peasants or even mere wealthy individuals, but specifically those with titles and land. That is, the nobility or gentry.

Feudalism establishes a hierarchical order of mutual dependency. The king nominally grants lands and titles to his dukes, and in return expects military aid. The dukes similarly are bound to the earls beneath them, and so on down to the lowly country knights. Like this, an army can be raised. These relationships are legal but also highly personal, built on pledges of loyalty, struggle in war, and familial connections — most of the gentry are inter-related somehow. There is authority, but it is heavily constrained, both by tradition and the real-world power each class has.

This brings us to the struggles inherent within the feudal classes. Every member of the continuum is concerned with those immediately above and below him, as well as his peers. There are rivalries, legal disputes, money problems, old grievances, marriage arrangements…on and on. Individuals jockey for prestige, wealth and power with those around them; whether it’s in the royal court or a backwoods province. They also band together to resist impositions from their lords: there is a constant tug of war between kings and their sworn vassals. In general, kings gained more central authority through the time period.

The Manors

Separate and parallel to feudalism is another system of social organization, manorialism. It organizes agricultural output and labor, instead of military service, and therefore defines the lives of the peasants, who farm land. It also related the peasantry to their local lord (who could be a noble or a church facility), via petty local officials.

Physically, the manor is a large farm or set of farms. Rather than collect taxes in coin, or even in kind, the lord collects it through labor: peasants are bound to work on the manor farm some portion of every week. The food stuffs they produce are collected at the manor house, which is often more like a barn, before going to the lord. This building also sometimes serves as an office for the lord’s appointed officers, and it may serve as the lord’s house when he’s visiting.

Villages and manors sound sort of like the same thing then, but often weren’t. A village could be split between two manors, governed by two different lords. And multiple villages might be part of the same manor, if they were close enough together.

Two key officials typically oversaw the workings of a manor. The bailiff managed the agricultural activities, including tracking and moving the food it produced. The reeve was in charge of getting the peasants to show and work the land. He took on other duties, like the collection of fines, and was therefore the most local law-enforcement officer. (Above him would be the reeve for the whole shire, or shire reeve, hence the word sheriff.)

Peasants had to do manor work as part of their traditional obligation to the local lord (on top of other taxes). Most peasants owned land — with some having more and others having less (and some none) — but just as in feudalism, the idea of land “ownership” was a little murky. The land was still nominally the lord’s, which meant he could charge a rent for using it. Peasants were also not strictly “free”: they were bound to the land their families had worked, and to the arrangements that had always been in place. They couldn’t stop working that land or move somewhere else, unless their lord allowed it.

This sounds very oppressive, and in many ways it certainly was, but we should remember that the authority of the lord was also limited in the manorial system. Most importantly, he was bound by tradition: he could demand of peasants only what had traditionally been demanded. The yearly “manor court” would decide various issues related to manor work, the treatment of the peasants, taxes and fines, and so on — as well as civil cases, such as assaults or infidelities. These courts would sometimes find against the lord for breaking with tradition. As we saw in feudalism, there was a constant tug of war between peasants and lords. Each might see their power wax or wane, depending on various circumstances, like the labor shortages that followed the black death and significantly helped the (surviving) peasants all over Europe. When things swung the other way, peasants often suffered. They might try a rebellion, but these were invariably crushed very quickly.

Recap

There are many other kinds of important relationships in the middle ages. There was the church. Cities flourished with professional guilds and fraternities, as well as strongly defined neighborhoods, which competed fiercely on various fronts (Siena’s staged elaborate religious floats; Venice’s fought mock battles with wooden sticks). The thin slice of society belonging to a mercantile class was exempt from many traditional roles. So too were the free men and women of mining towns — granted special status by lords to attract labor. In the later middle ages, mercenary units formed the beginnings of modern armies, and operated under their own rules.

But for most medieval people, it was the dual systems of feudalism and manorialism that bound them into a web connecting all the different classes, ultimately all tied to the land.

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