Marc Bloch on the Feudal Society
A disordered ‘type of society’ based on land, fragmented power, personal bonds to chiefs
Marc Bloch wrote:
CHAPTER XXXII; FEUDALISM AS A TYPE OF SOCIETY
1. HAS THERE BEEN MORE THAN ONE FEUDALISM?
Egyptian feudalism, Achaean feudalism, Chinese feudalism, Japanese feudalism—all these forms and more are now familiar concepts. The historian of the West must sometimes regard them with a certain amount of misgiving. For he cannot be unaware of the different definitions which have been given of this famous term, even on its native soil. The basis of feudal society, Benjamin Guérard has said, is land. No, it is the personal group, rejoins Jacques Flach … Since it is obvious that all these societies, separated by time and space, have received the name “feudal” only on account of their similarities, real or supposed, to Western feudalism, it is the characteristics of this basic type, to which all the others must be referred, that it is of primary importance to define. …
… In the system which they christened “feudalism” its first godfathers, as we know, were primarily conscious of those aspects of it which conflicted with the idea of a centralized state. Thence it was a short step to describing as feudal every fragmentation of political authority; so that a value judgment was normally combined with the simple statement of a fact. Because sovereignty was generally associated in the minds of these writers with fairly large states, every exception to the rule seemed to fall into the category of the abnormal. This alone would suffice to condemn a usage which, moreover, could scarcely fail to give rise to intolerable confusion. …
… It is in fact very true that the identification of wealth—then consisting mainly of land—with authority was one of the outstanding features of medieval feudalism. But this was less on account of the strictly feudal character of that society than because it was, at the same time, based on the manor. Feudalism, manorial system—the identification here goes back much farther. It had first occurred in the use of the word “vassal”. The aristocratic stamp which this term had received from what was, after all, a secondary development, was not strong enough to prevent it from being occasionally applied, even in the Middle Ages, to serfs (originally closely akin to vassals properly so called because of the personal nature of their dependence) and even to ordinary tenants. …
2 THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF EUROPEAN FEUDALISM
The simplest way will be to begin by saying what feudal society was not. Although the obligations arising from blood-relationship played a very active part in it, it did not rely on kinship alone. More precisely, feudal ties proper were developed when those of kinship proved inadequate. Again, despite the persistence of the idea of a public authority superimposed on the multitude of petty powers, feudalism coincided with a profound weakening of the State, particularly in its protective capacity. But much as feudal society differed from societies based on kinship as well as from those dominated by the power of the State, it was their successor and bore their imprint. For while the characteristic relationships of personal subjection retained something of the quasi-family character of the original companionage, a considerable part of the political authority exercised by innumerable petty chiefs had the appearance of a usurpation of “regalian” rights.
European feudalism should therefore be seen as the outcome of the violent dissolution of older societies. It would in fact be unintelligible without the great upheaval of the Germanic invasions which, by forcibly uniting two societies originally at very different stages of development, disrupted both of them and brought to the surface a great many modes of thought and social practices of an extremely primitive character. It finally developed in the atmosphere of the last barbarian raids. It involved a far-reaching restriction of social intercourse, a circulation of money too sluggish to admit of a salaried officialdom, and a mentality attached to things tangible and local. When these conditions began to change, feudalism began to wane.
It was an unequal society, rather than a hierarchical one—with chiefs rather than nobles; and with serfs, not slaves. If slavery had not played so small a part, there would have been no need for the characteristically feudal forms of dependence, as applied to the lower orders of society. In an age of disorder, the place of the adventurer was too important, the memory of men too short, the regularity of social classifications too uncertain, to admit of the strict formation of regular castes.
Nevertheless the feudal system meant the rigorous economic subjection of a host of humble folk to a few powerful men. Having received from earlier ages the Roman villa (which in some respects anticipated the manor) and the German village chiefdom, it extended and consolidated these methods whereby men exploited men, and combining inextricably the right to the revenues from the land with the right to exercise authority, it fashioned from all this the true manor of medieval times. And this it did partly for the benefit of an oligarchy of priests and monks whose task it was to propitiate Heaven, but chiefly for the benefit of an oligarchy of warriors.
As even the most perfunctory comparative study will show, one of the most distinctive characteristics of feudal societies was the virtual identity of the class of chiefs with the class of professional warriors serving in the only way that then seemed effective, that is as heavily armed horsemen. …
… there came a time towards the end of the eleventh century when the [Byzantine] Empire, overwhelmed by economic conditions which made independence more and more difficult for a peasantry constantly in debt, and further weakened by internal discords, ceased to extend any useful protection to the free farmers. In this way it not only lost precious fiscal resources, but found itself at the mercy of the magnates, who alone were capable thereafter of raising the necessary troops from among their own dependants.
In feudal society the characteristic human bond was the subordinate’s link with a nearby chief. From one level to another the ties thus formed—like so many chains branching out indefinitely—joined the smallest to the greatest. Land itself was valued above all because it enabled a lord to provide himself with “men” by supplying the remuneration for them. We want lands, said in effect the Norman lords who refused the gifts of jewels, arms, and horses offered by their duke. And they added among themselves: “It will thus be possible for us to maintain many knights, and the duke will no longer be able to do so”.
It remained to devise a form of real property right suitable for the remuneration of services and coinciding in duration with the personal tie itself. From the solution which it found for this problem, Western feudalism derived one of its most original features. … For among the highest classes, distinguished by the honourable profession of arms, relationships of dependence had assumed, at the outset, the form of contracts freely entered into between two living men confronting one another. From this necessary personal contact the relationship derived the best part of its moral value.
Nevertheless at an early date various factors tarnished the purity of the obligation: hereditary succession, natural in a society where the family remained so strong; the practice of enfeoffment [property or land in exchange for pledged service] which was imposed by economic conditions and ended by burdening the land with services rather than the man with fealty; finally and above all, the plurality of vassal engagements. The loyalty of the commended man remained, in many cases, a potent factor. But as a paramount social bond designed to unite the various groups at all levels, to prevent fragmentation and to arrest disorder, it showed itself decidedly ineffective.
Indeed in the immense range of these ties there had been from the first something artificial. Their general diffusion in feudal times was the legacy of a moribund State—that of the Carolingians—which had conceived the idea of combating social disintegration by means of one of the institutions born of that very condition. The system of superposed protective relationships was certainly not incapable of contributing to the cohesion of the State: witness, the Anglo-Norman monarchy. But for this it was necessary that there should be a central authority favoured, as in England, not only by the fact of conquest itself but even more by the circumstance that it coincided with new material and moral conditions. In the ninth century the forces making for disintegration were too strong.
[It] is more important still to note that feudal Europe was not all feudalized in the same degree or according to the same rhythm and, above all, that it was nowhere feudalized completely. In no country did the whole of the rural population fall into the bonds of personal and hereditary dependence. Almost everywhere—though the number varied greatly from region to region—there survived large or small allodial properties. The concept of the State never absolutely disappeared, and where it retained the most vitality men continued to call themselves “free”, in the old sense of the word, because they were dependent only on the head of the people or his representatives.
A subject peasantry; widespread use of the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of a salary, which was out of the question; the supremacy of a class of specialized warriors; ties of obedience and protection which bind man to man and, within the warrior class, assume the distinctive form called vassalage; fragmentation of authority—leading inevitably to disorder; and, in the midst of all this, the survival of other forms of association, family and State, of which the latter, during the second feudal age, was to acquire renewed strength—such then seem to be the fundamental features of European feudalism.
Like all the phenomena revealed by that science of eternal change which is history, the social structure thus characterized certainly bore the peculiar stamp of an age and an environment. Yet just as the matrilineal or agnatic [descent from the same male ancestor] clan or even certain types of economic enterprise are found in much the same forms in very different societies, it is by no means impossible that societies different from our own should have passed through a phase closely resembling that which has just been defined. If so, it is legitimate to call them feudal during that phase.
CHAPTER XXXIII: THE PERSISTENCE OF EUROPEAN FEUDALISM
1. SURVIVALS AND REVIVALS
With the exception of England, where the first of the seventeenth-century Revolutions abolished all distinctions between tenure by knight-service and other forms of tenure, the obligations arising from vassalage and the fief were rooted in the soil, and they lasted, as in France, as long as the manorial system or, as in Prussia (which in the eighteenth century proceeded to a general “allodification” of fiefs), very nearly as long. The State, which alone was capable henceforth of utilizing the hierarchy of dependence, only very slowly abandoned recourse to it for the supply of military forces. …
… [In France] a society which continued to be beset with many disorders, the needs which had given rise to the ancient practice of companionage, and then to vassalage, had not ceased to be felt. Among the various reasons which led to the creation of the orders of chivalry which were founded in such great number in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the most decisive was undoubtedly the desire of the princes to attach to themselves a group of highly-placed retainers by an especially compelling bond. …
… More effective—and more dangerous—was the reconstitution, during the disorders of the closing years of the Middle Ages, of bands of private warriors, very much akin to the “satellite” vassals whose brigandage had been denounced by the writers of the Merovingian age. Frequently their dependence was expressed by the wearing of a costume displaying the colours of their chieftain or emblazoned with his arms. This practice was condemned in Flanders by Philip the Bold, but it seems to have been especially widespread in the England of the last Plantagenets, of the Lancastrians and the Yorkists—so much so that the groups thus formed round the great barons received the name of “liveries”. Like the household vassals of former days they did not consist exclusively of low-born adventurers, and in fact, the majority were probably recruited from the “gentry”. When one of these men was involved in a law-suit, the lord extended his protection to him in court. Although illegal, this practice of “maintenance” was extraordinarily tenacious, as is attested by repeated Parliamentary prohibitions; it reproduced practically feature for feature the ancient mithium which the powerful man in Frankish Gaul had extended over his retainer. And since it was also to the advantage of the sovereigns to make use of the personal bond in its new form, we find Richard II seeking to spread through the kingdom—like so many vassi dominici—his personal followers …
… “Even in the France of the early Bourbons the nobleman who in order to make his way in the world became the servant of a great man assumed a status remarkably akin to primitive vassalage. In a phrase that recalled the vigour of the old feudal language, one said of so-and-so that he “belonged” to Monsieur le Prince or to the Cardinal. True, the ceremony of homage was no longer performed, though it was often replaced by a written agreement. For, from the end of the Middle Ages, the “promise of friendship” was substituted for the dying practice of homage.
2. THE WARRIOR IDEA AND THE IDEA OF CONTRACT
To the societies which succeeded it the feudal era had bequeathed knighthood, which had become crystallized as nobility. From this origin the dominant class retained pride in its military calling, symbolized by the right to wear the sword, and clung to it with particular tenacity where, as in France, it derived from this calling the justification for valuable fiscal privileges. … Under the Ancien Régime, the nobility of ancient lineage, in contrast with the aristocracy of office, continued to call itself the nobility “of the sword” … “a continual reminder of the separation which took place, towards the beginning of feudal times, between the peasant and the knight.
Vassal homage was a genuine contract and a bilateral one. If the lord failed to fulfil his engagements he lost his rights. Transferred, as was inevitable, to the political sphere—since the principal subjects of the king were at the same time his vassals—this idea was to have a far-reaching influence, all the more so because on this ground it was reinforced by the very ancient notions which held the king responsible in a mystical way for the welfare of his subjects and deserving of punishment in the event of public calamity. These old currents happened to unite on this point with another stream of thought which arose in the Church out of the Gregorian protest against the myth of sacred and supernatural kingship. … [The] clerical theorists themselves did not fail to invoke, among the justifications for the deposition to which they condemned the bad prince, the universally recognized right of the vassal to abandon the bad lord.
It was above all the circles of the vassals which translated these ideas into practice, under the influence of the institutions which had formed their mentality. In this sense, there was a fruitful principle underlying many revolts which on a superficial view might appear as mere random uprisings: “A man may resist his king and judge when he acts contrary to law and may even help to make war on him…. Thereby, he does not violate the duty of fealty”. … Though most of these documents were inspired by reactionary tendencies among the nobility, or by the egoism of the bourgeoisie, they were of great significance for the future. They included the English Great Charter of 1215; the Hungarian “Golden Bull” of 1222; the Assizes of the kingdom of Jerusalem; the Privilege of the Brandenburg nobles; the Aragonese Act of Union of 1287; the Brabantine charter of Cortenberg; the statute of Dauphiné of 1341; the declaration of the communes of Languedoc (1356). It was assuredly no accident that the representative system, in the very aristocratic form of the English Parliament, the French “Estates”, the Stände of Germany, and the Spanish Cortés, originated in states which were only just emerging from the feudal stage and still bore its imprint … The originality of the … system [the feudalism of the West] consisted in the emphasis it placed on the idea of an agreement capable of binding the rulers; and in this way, oppressive as it may have been to the poor, it has in truth bequeathed to our Western civilization something with which we still desire to live. [END]
The Source:
Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, translated by L.A. Manyon, La Société Féodale (first published 1940 in French by Michel Albin, France), Routledge 1962
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.