16 Feudalism

Brown Abstract

In this article I reflect on feudalism and the attack I launched in 1974 against it and such similar constructs as feudal system, feudal society, and feudal monarchy. I first review the reasons for my campaign and its timing. Re-evaluating the extent and gravity of the disapproval the term had long elicited, I reconsider the relationship between my uncompromising assault and earlier opposition to feudalism. Before examining the reactions to the article, positive and negative, I treat the feudal constructs’ appeal and powers of endurance, and the cognitive roots of their advocates’ attachment to them. In appraising the article’s reception, I discuss Susan Reynolds’s book, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted, published in 1994, and the similarities and differences between our approaches to the feudal constructs and to medieval society and politics. In a final section I assess the diminished fidelity that feudalism has commanded since 2000, and the progressive waning of the feudal constructs’ influence on studies of medieval Europe, which focus increasingly on the complexities of its evolution. The conclusion reiterates the call I issued in 1974 to renounce the constructs and cautiously forecasts their imminent demise, except as evidence of the styles of conceptualization that led their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fabricators to invent them.

Brown (2022) Feudalism: Reflections on a Tyrannical Construct’s Fate (paywall)