The Rise And Fall Of Feudalism

How power transferred from land to capital, and how feudalism will rise again.

Some Background, And Asking a Favor

I’ve recently been on a hunt for books that focus on the castes and classes of pre-Rennaissance Europe in hopes of understanding two subjects:

1. Medieval Peasantry.

2. Feudalism and the relationship between lord and serf.

So I rang up a local bookstore owned by a man who is exceptional in his ability of mining through esoteric and rare literature to find books pertaining to the aforementioned subjects. He was quick to searching through his vast collection, that he acquires secondhand from bizarre corners of the world, and stumbled upon three of the following books:

1. Ancient and Medieval (1969)

2. Renaissance and Reformation 1300-1648 (1968)

3. Europe: A Brief History (1971)

The fourth book on the top right was acquired from the same bookstore a few weeks earlier, but we will get to that later.

What spurred me to embark on this journey to dig through the trenches of medieval classes and society originated from a podcast interview of Thomas777 that J. Burden did on the subject of “class” and how it has not only lost its meaning in modernity, but was misunderstood and misused in Marx’s writings. However, after making a few cursory google searches, asking around for books on this subject, and even getting some books that might lend a few perfunctory words on the question of medieval class and feudalism, I have realized the array of knowledge isn’t as vast as I’d hoped.

Now one can instantly takes a few guesses on why that is. Perhaps it is the overfocus on Marx’s, and subsequently pro- and anti-Marxian philosophers and economists, that has led to too much modernist and industrialist noise clanging about this subject. Perhaps it is the buffer of 17th century commons privatizations throughout Europe, and not too soon after, industrialization, that has the previous era of feudalism lost; seen as an irrelevant historical buffer between Charlemagne and Charles I. Perhaps I am just not looking hard enough. Obviously, there are a few more books I must take a look at in pertinence to feudalism, but when one wishes to seek out books specifically analyzing the lives of peasants in a devoutly curious way - no cigar. So, if you can help for further investigation on this topic, please recommend any literature or media on the topic of medieval feudalism and peasantry.

The following article will take a glance at what I’ve ascertained from these books, on the mystery of the medieval peasant, his relationship with his lord, and of course as a reactionary, analyzing how might the issues of modernity remedy its problems by taking from the wisdom of the past (whether modernity wants to or not).

What is Feudalism?

For this section, we will be deriving the bulk of our facts from the chapter “Feudalism and the Rise of Feudal Monarchy” from Ancient and Medieval (1969).

The term “feudalism” is often loaded and carries with it the baggage of modern misconceptions about pre-industrial European civilizations. When “feudalism” is brought up, it is normally used negatively and is supposed to conjure an image of harsh oppression and slavery shrouded in primitiveness and savagery. The latter is quite apt in a lot of ways, but as we will speak about later, elements of feudalism are likely to be used in coming decades and centuries.

What is necessitated here is to have a clear definition of “feudalism” and why exactly it came about. Feudalism is a system wherein there is owed fealty between a serf to his lord. A serf, in their desire to not rot away in nature and lawlessness, voluntarily became indentured to lords (landowners) to have safety and land to live on. In return, paid rents - generally, if not always, in the form of crop yield. This contract was known as vassalage - the serf a vassal to his lord.

Vassalage was a common contractual agreement that went up a line of hierarchs - all the way to the King, who was a vassal of God. Lords, depending on their level of power, were vassals to dukes, margraves, counts, princes, etc, and they all being vassals to the king. Obviously, these systems varied greatly depending on how centralized a nation was. In the instance of England, much of its centralization and civility carried on through the feudal era, whereas for nations like France, the king was generally seen as nothing more than ceremonial - albeit still harboring prestige and recognition in hierarchy (or else, he wouldn’t be “King”). In the instance of Germany, other than the isolated case of the Ottonian German Empire in the 900s, the same level of decentralized power distribution was widespread. Otto I found great success, albeit for a short time, in handing out vassalage to bishops and family members, rather than nobles and landowners, as there would be no other hereditary competition. It didn’t really last long as his house would die off less than a century after the end of his reign.

When a serf entered into a contract of vassalage with his lord, one can’t help but recognize its similarities to the modern tentative contract between employee to employer. In the modern liberal view, however, the immediate comparison is downplayed and a gnashing of the teeth is had. The liberal will view serfdom as a bygone, primitive institution reminiscent to slavery, and that the freedom of the serf has led to the modern liberty in which all freemen may delight. I will let paragraphs 3-4 on page 258 deflect this haughty remark:

In time, several formal acts became attached to the vassalage ceremony. One was homage, a rite in which the vassal knelt, bareheaded and unarmed, placed his hands between those of his lord and declared that he wished to be his ‘man.’ This was followed by an oath of fealty, taken by the vassal with his hand on a sacred object such as the Bible. A ceremony of 1127 was described like this:

First they did homage in the following manner. The count demanded of the future vassal if he wished without reserve to become his man, and he replied “I wish it”; then, with his hands clasped and enclosed between those of the count, their alliance was sealed by a kiss. Secondly, he who had done homage engaged his faith . . . by the following words. “I promise by my faith that from this time forward I will be faithful to Count William and will maintain towards him my homage entirely against every man, in good faith and without any deception.” Thirdly, all this was sworn on the relics of saints.

Now before I go on to dispel the modern myths on the feudal era, one last important fact must be noted before the polemics ensue.

While it is true that the serf would lay his life down for his lord, count, king, etc - there was also, as we will speak about, a confident relationship between serf and lord. A serf who paid what was owed to his lord, proved himself in being loyal would generally go on to owning his own land, or being gifted more land - known as a fief or benefice. In addition, there was a hierarchy among the serfs themselves, where a lord may confide in one among others. Whether it was the tumults of war or a bad harvest, the relationship of lord and serf was symbiotic, and it was in the best interest of a lord to imbue compassion to his serfs.

Privatization of the Commons - Capitalism Versus Feudalism

For many reasons, a revolution in land management took place during the onset of the Renaissance, and most notably, during the first industrial revolution. Commons were communally shared land where the idea of property wasn’t even taken into account. Serfs shared usually several dozens of hundreds of acres together in community. The cession of commons to being private property is what led to, in part, the expropriation of the serf, and subsequent obligatory migration to the city. Obviously, with advancing technology making many of their jobs obsolete.

Compared to the last century and a half, the economies of Europe in the feudal era were quite stagnant. A common misconception - during the epithetical “dark ages” - is that after the fall of Western Rome, Europe was plunged into an age of darkness. As spoken about in Ancient and Medieval, Europe experienced, relative to the feudal era, massive centralizing powers among the Germanic tribes, Frankish Empire and its successor states, and the Vikings up until the 9th century. Europe would not see such levels of centralization until the 18th century. Feudalism was a reaction to lawlessness, and a symptom of catabolic collapse. The lords of the feudal era were the law-bringers, and roundaboutly united by a king.

The onset of industrialization and technological advancement, specifically the dominance of science and reason as the foundation of European societies’ teloses, the breakdown of feudalism began. No longer was there a need for lords, who now had to compete with lucrative industries overrunning cities, the wave of liberalism “freeing” serfs from the lot as indentured servants, and seceding the mandate of hierarchy for a new era of equality and egality. Here began the secular myth of individualism. Rather than being given land, a roof over their head, and the simple life of an agrarian, the modest serf now was given a perpetual sense of economic and social insecurity. Overtime, they had to voyage to the cities to earn wages, pay ever-increasing rent, and live in shame as they saw the formation of the “middle class” that had a leg up on them intellectually. Such insecurity would lead to the patchwork of later trade unions and collective bargaining, socialist movements, and progressive movements.

What isn’t spoken of, however, is how such indigent insecurity was birthed from the serfs’ obligatory migration to the cities, and treated economically equal to their once-lords, but without the status, education, material means, connections, or property. Later movements for labor suffrage would not quell the eventual ingratiation of the working poor to a state of sedation in welfare.

The Corporate Slave Class

The modern managerial class, technician class, and interloper laptop class are all a culmination of not only technological advancement, but a logical conclusion of the abandonment of a divine hierarchy that was once-present in all societies, feudal, and pre-feudal. I will leave it to the reader to make their own assumptions if feudalism is somehow better than capitalism in several aspects, or if capitalism and the free market created many problems it has yet to solve. In retrospect, we can easily bemoan the atrocities of the past and present, but it isn’t productive to want to return to another time. It gets quite Hegelian when we enter into this debate mode of whether or not the past was superior, because regardless of the greatness of another time, it is quite clear that technological advancement and the Faustian Spirit has carried the world on into a new paradigm. One can learn from the past but desiring to recreate it is - well - beyond delusional.

The managers and technicians are all a pacified knowledge class that very much was a symptom of the industrial revolution. As remarked by John Kenneth Galbraith in The New Industrial State (1967):

The eminence of capital is a relatively recent matter; until about two centuries ago no perceptive man would have doubted that power was decisively associated with land. The comparative wealth, esteem, military position and the sanguinary authority over the lives of the populace that went with land ownership assured its possessor of a position of eminence in his community and power in the state. These perquisites of land ownership also gave a strong and even controlling direction to history. For two centuries, until about two hundred years before the discovery of America, it helped inspire the recurrent military campaigns to the East which are called the Crusades.

He would go onto say:

So power over the enterprise passed to capital. And so did prestige in the community and authority in the state. . . At the beginning of the century, the United States government was dominated by landed and slave-owning gentlemen of Virginia; by the end of the century, by common agreement power had passed, depending on the point of view, to the men of enterprise or the malefactors of great wealth. The Senate had become a club of rich businessmen.

This development in the abolition of the slower, agrarian life - much treasured among Southerners in the United States - led to the enslavement of the lower classes to a state of perpetual wage slavery. Regardless of the War Between the States/War of Northern Aggression, technical and technological developments would have inevitably resulted in some level of liberty for black slaves. This truth evidently would have to lead to societal restructuring, which as any honest person would admit to, never occurred in postbellum America. Subsequently, the centralizing forces of the increasingly free market and liberalizing West would act as a bandaid on the gunshot wound of the impoverished freshly-emancipated blacks. Society abandoned the obligation of lord to serf, master to slave, and with it, the onus has since been on the individual to cut away an ever-indigent lifestyle at the behest of corporations - never achieving a sense of economic confidence in themselves, their families, and their communities. Ever since, people have atomized themselves from communities, facing inward to the self, hoping to find a sense of self-assurance in the vacuum of individualism. Economies for over a thousand years, and some might say for all of history, were dominated by economically stagnant agrarian life. Once the power shifted, permanently, to the merchant class through their investments in exponentially profitable industry, the power of the rural lord ceded to the rootless merchant urbanite.

The natural impulse towards duty has shifted to the self in the advent of landed gentry ceding their power to capitalists, leaving the peasant class stranded.

The Coming Feudal Era

The lack of economic expansion since 2008 has left the majority of the world’s economies stagnant. Any hope of capitalistic innovation by the ronin class of entrepreneurs has left the onus on governments to try and revamp economic stimulation, leading to increased government deficits and unmet promises. Look at a GDP chart of any European nation, and even most developing economies, and what will be revealed is a long, depressing stagnant line since the year 2008. If one is to accept the reality of ecological limitations, and perceive the myths of the modern science telos as false, the reality of catabolism seems like the only likely outcome.

As someone who has dived deep on the topic of historical societal collapses, it seems quite clear the eventual maintenance crisis of the globalized paradigm is getting close. What we can learn from the feudal era is that the centralized powers, no longer able to be agreed upon, had to be ceded to more decentralized powers that would vassalize for the sake of maintaining some semblance of law. This is why from about 900-1500, most of Europe was heavily decentralized, and kings generally could only enforce their own personal sovereignty over their own fief, and for the most part, could only maintain federative power over their vassalized lords and dukes. So, what is the future to hold in a similar era of delegitimized sovereigns, economic stagnation and in some cases decline, increasing indebtedness to the state on the part of the insecure laptop class, precarious job security of a highly indebted middle class?

Well, the issue of technological stasis cannot be left out of question. As long as there is an interconnected economy that is dominated by the US Dollar, there is going to be some level of global centralization and peace. What will act in defiance to this, and bring about a demand for catabolism is economic stagnation and decline. Catabolism, as in the breakdown of centralized power, only comes when the maintenance for that centralized power becomes too great, and the natural proclivity towards decentralized, lower energy states arise. Material conditions are always the basis for revolution and the disbarment of power from the incumbent(s). If the world experiences further supply chain interruptions, and distrust within the international community due to their increasing need to assert national authority over neoliberal trade agreements, then it is inevitable that catabolism will take hold of any recipients of the eventual chaos.

For example, as China has recognized its own precarious position in maintaining internal peace, skirting economic crashes from their own speculative bubbles, asserting dominance on their neighbors and African and South American colonies, and being undermined by a lack of dollar-funding from the West, then they are likely to become more catabolized. The reigning CCP will have to decentralize into semi-feudal states to maintain peace, which will cede power from the top dogs and their ability to make China the reigning world power.

In Europe, the situation is more unpredictable, and likely worse. With the same issues of the European Union to fully actualize itself as even a semi-sovereign entity, internal derision between nationalists and neoliberal globalists will heighten. Without grabbing ahold of the migration issue with swift and authoritarian directive, European nations will simply fall into constant chaos. Obviously, many nations in Europe will do better than others, and some may be able to retain a sense of peace and centralization, but at the cost of cheap foreign goods, labor, and the capitalistic prosperity of their citizens.

The United States is a very bizarre case, however. For many reasons, especially as long as the US Dollar maintains its own prosperity, freedom, and sovereignty, the reaction within the US will be much more cogent and planned as it witnesses the fall of other developed nations. There is no sign de jure state secession will ensue, but decentralization has already become a factor in recent years as states like New York and California are essentially completely different nations with different mandates of heaven than states like Texas or Florida. It is obvious there is power being ceded, slowly, but subtly, to states. Likewise, on an even more local level, Americans are developing ways to live more communally and self-sufficiently away from the government - thanks to both technology, and the massive amount of land one can buy. This is where possibly some return to land as the dominant form of wealth will be had as more and more Americans homestead, become debt-free, and form communities that barely have any connection to the broader globalized meta-society. In this situation, the onset of feudalism is inevitable, in a form that is similar to that of pre-Renaissance, but with the perks of modernity.

It won’t be explicitly anti-technology. It’s simply that the last few decades have shown present and future people where the weeds are to separate from the wheat. The feudal structure within the States will be subtle, unrecognizable, slow, and in my opinion, inevitable. Not in the same way the European Union will catabolize, or communist China will catabolize, and all the world will experience some form of feudalistic land management, but because our nation is slowly realizing it can supersede the need for the United States Government as a hegemon that provides for us. It will exist, but increasingly unapparent. It is likely Americans a hundred years from now won’t even recognize themselves as American, but by subsequent future substates. For Chicanos, there will likely be a subtle de facto state that they more-so identify than with the US. For white Americans, their eventual communities, large and small, will harbor more of an identity.

In Closing

Much as the feudal era is something to harken back upon as good or evil depending on who you ask. It existed for a purpose though, and the future will hold similar qualities as the catabolizing factors that brought about the post-Roman, and especially post-Carolingian Europe. The era of capital seems to be coming to a close, as the abilities for the capitalist to achieve a larger place of power comes with increasing costs and diminishing returns. The loss of the fealty offered to a lord from a serf, and the protection brought by a lord seems much-desired in modern societies that lack any surety of community and protection. The term anarcho-tyranny very much describes this age, and if material conditions are to achieve some level of stasis with a sense of economic confidence, there has to be a great reckoning for those in power in the form of delegitimization. Such just due will come in time. Perhaps it will take decades or over a century, but the stage has already set for decline as the peasant made insecure by the free market needs an ascending ray of progress to chase. Without that, he is left to salvage what he can from the ashes, and in doing so, requires a lord to restore confidence.

“Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”

Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel