What Was Feudalism? Lords, Vassals and the Myth of the Pyramid

Somewhere in an old school exercise book, there is probably a triangle with your handwriting on it. King at the top. Then lords, then knights, then a big crowd of peasants squashed along the bottom. Underneath, in your neatest letters: FEUDALISM. Good news, that drawing earned you a tick at the time. Slightly awkward news, a lot of historians now wince when they see it. So what was feudalism, really? Pull up a stool by the fire. We are going to look at the actual handshakes, oaths and rent bills behind that triangle, and find out why some experts would happily rub the whole word out.

What was feudalism? The short answer

In the classic textbook version, feudalism was a web of personal deals that held medieval society together. A powerful man gave land to a follower. In return, the follower promised loyalty and service, above all military service. That follower might then hand out some of his land to his own followers on similar terms. And at the very bottom, peasants worked the land and paid for the privilege of living on it.

Land for loyalty. Protection for service. That is the heart of it.

But here is the first plot twist, and it’s a big one. Nobody in the Middle Ages ever said “feudalism”. Not once.

The word nobody in the Middle Ages used

The historian Richard Abels traced where the label came from in a 2009 article for the journal History Compass. The adjective “feudal” was a creation of Renaissance lawyers in Italy. The French writer the Comte de Boulainvilliers coined the French term la féodalité in the 1730s, and the Scottish economist Adam Smith gave English readers the phrase “feudal system” in 1776.

So the name was stuck on centuries after the fact, a bit like calling the people of the 1990s “the dial-up generation”. Nobody living through it would have recognised the label. They did, however, recognise the things underneath it: lords, vassals, oaths and land. So let’s meet those.

The deal: land for loyalty

If anyone ever corners you at a dinner party and asks “what was feudalism, then?”, three words will get you through:

• Lord: the one who gives the land and offers protection.
• Vassal: the one who receives it and promises service in return.
• Fief: the land (or sometimes an income) that changes hands.

The deal was sealed in person, and it was quite a show. We have an eyewitness account from Flanders. On 7 April 1127, after Count Charles the Good was murdered, the local nobles lined up to bind themselves to the new count, William. A notary named Galbert of Bruges wrote down what happened, and the Internet Medieval Sourcebook at Fordham University has his description in English.

It went in three steps. First came homage: each vassal declared he would be the count’s man, put his hands together between the count’s hands, and the two sealed it with a kiss. Next came fealty: the vassal swore on his faith to be loyal to the count, and swore it again on the relics of saints. Finally came investiture: the count touched each man with a little rod he was holding. Hands, kiss, oath, stick. Contract signed, medieval style.

Most of these vassals were fighting men. In return for their land, they were expected to turn up armed when their lord went to war. If you want to know what that kind of war looked like up close, the article on medieval siege warfare shows where a lot of that service ended up.

The small print: a bishop explains the rules

Like every contract, this one had terms and conditions. In 1020, the Duke of Aquitaine wrote to Bishop Fulbert of Chartres asking what exactly fealty involved. Fulbert’s reply is one of the clearest descriptions we have, and it’s surprisingly practical.

According to Fulbert, a sworn vassal had to keep six words in mind: harmless, safe, honourable, useful, easy and possible. In plain English, the vassal must never hurt his lord’s body, give away his secrets or his castles, damage his honour or his property, or turn the lord’s easy jobs into hard ones and his possible jobs into impossible ones.

Then comes the part people forget. The lord owed the same to his vassal. Fulbert says a lord who failed to keep his side would rightly be accused of bad faith. This was not a one-way street. It was a relationship, and like most relationships, it went wrong when one side stopped pulling its weight.

Kings, dukes and a lot of kneeling

Here’s where the neat triangle starts to wobble. In real life, the chains of loyalty were tangled.

A man could hold land from several different lords at once. So whose side do you take when two of your lords start a war? Excellent question. Medieval nobles spent a lot of time and a lot of lawyers on it.

Even kings got caught up in it. The king of England also held lands in France, and for those lands he was, technically, the vassal of the king of France. That is why the Fouquet painting near the start shows an English king kneeling before a French one. Awkward family photos, medieval edition. How rulers juggled these overlapping loyalties is a big part of how medieval kings kept their thrones.

And when a king pushed his vassals too hard, they pushed back. In England in 1215, barons angry at King John’s endless demands for money forced him to accept Magna Carta. Much of that famous charter is about exactly these obligations: what a lord may fairly ask of the men who hold land from him.

Down on the manor: the people at the bottom

Now for the people who actually grew the food. Strictly speaking, the oath-and-kiss system was for the elite. Most ordinary people were tied into a different arrangement, which historians often call manorialism. In everyday conversation, though, it all gets lumped together as “feudalism”.

Many peasants were serfs. World History Encyclopedia describes them as unfree workers who farmed a landowner’s land and received protection and a plot of their own in return. Here’s what that meant in practice:

• Work for the lord. Two or three days a week on the lord’s own fields, and more at harvest time.
• Pay up. Part of their own harvest belonged to the lord, and the parish church took its tithe, a tenth.
• Fees for everything. Serfs paid when the lord’s eldest daughter got married, and their families paid a charge when they died. Even death came with paperwork.
• Stay put. Moving away was normally off the table. The law tied a serf to the estate.

Serfs were not slaves, though. The same encyclopedia points out that a lord could buy a serf’s labour, but not the serf as a person, and serfs were entitled to stay on the plots they farmed. Not exactly freedom, but not ownership either. If you’d like to see what the rest of their day looked like, from bedtime to bathtime, there is a whole article on daily life in the Middle Ages waiting for you.

The great medieval stocktake

Want to see this whole system written down? England has the receipt.

Twenty years after his conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror wanted a full inventory of his new kingdom. In 1086 his officials fanned out across the kingdom and recorded landowners, tenants, peasants, animals and the yearly income of each manor. According to World History Encyclopedia, the final record covers some 30,000 manors. Later generations called the finished survey the Domesday Book.

People at the time were not thrilled. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle grumbled that not a single yard of land, ox, cow or pig escaped the king’s inspectors. Honestly, it’s the most relatable complaint in medieval history. The book is still kept today at The National Archives in Kew, London.

Why historians are falling out of love with the word

Now for the twist we promised. Ask a room of medieval historians what was feudalism, and some of them will answer very carefully. Others will refuse to use the word at all.

The opening shot came in 1974, when the American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown published an article with the wonderful title “The Tyranny of a Construct”. Her point was simple: the word had so many different meanings that it was confusing people more than it was helping them. Her verdict, quoted in Abels’ review of the debate, was that “the tyrant feudalism must be declared once and for all deposed”.

Twenty years later, the British historian Susan Reynolds went further in her book Fiefs and Vassals. She argued that local customs in the centuries before 1100 varied far too much to fit one neat model, and that much of the textbook picture actually came from Italian legal writings of the late 1100s. She also stressed that ties between equals, such as neighbours and communities, mattered as much as the ties running up and down the ladder.

Not everyone agrees with the critics. Abels himself thinks Reynolds goes too far in playing down lordship. Some scholars prefer to talk about “feudalisms”, in the plural, to show that the arrangements varied from place to place. But almost everyone now agrees on one thing: the tidy triangle is a teaching shortcut, not a photograph of the past. It belongs on the same shelf as the other popular myths about the Middle Ages, somewhere between “useful” and “not quite true”.

How the system came apart

If there was one event that loosened the grip of the manor, it was the Black Death. When plague swept Europe from 1347, it killed so many people that workers suddenly became scarce. Scarce workers can bargain. As World History Encyclopedia explains, peasants increasingly paid rent in money instead of labour, some bought their freedom, and before the 1300s were over, more farm work was done by paid labourers than by unpaid serfs.

Not every lord accepted this quietly, and not every peasant waited politely. In 1381, rebels in England rose up in what became known as the Peasants’ Revolt and demanded an end to serfdom. The revolt was crushed, but the old system was already crumbling. Over the next two centuries, money, wages and stronger royal governments slowly did what the rebels could not.

So, what was feudalism? It was never a single tidy system. It was a messy, local, ever-changing set of deals about land, loyalty and labour, sealed with clasped hands and broken with surprising regularity. Far more human than a triangle, wouldn’t you say?

Frequently asked questions

What was feudalism in simple terms?

Feudalism describes a medieval arrangement in which lords granted land to vassals in return for loyalty and military service, while peasants worked the land in return for protection and a plot of their own.

Did medieval people use the word feudalism?

No. The term was invented much later. “Feudal” came from Renaissance Italian lawyers, the French word féodalité appeared in the 1730s, and Adam Smith used “feudal system” in 1776.

What is the difference between a vassal and a serf?

A vassal was normally free, often a knight or a noble, and held land from a lord in exchange for his sworn loyalty and service. A serf was an unfree peasant who worked a lord’s land and could not normally leave the estate.

When did feudalism end?

There was no single end date. Serfdom in western Europe declined after the Black Death of the 1340s, as labour became scarce and money rents replaced unpaid work. In some parts of eastern Europe, serfdom lasted into the 1800s.

Sources

• Richard Abels, “The Historiography of a Construct: ‘Feudalism’ and the Medieval Historian”, History Compass 7:3 (2009), republished by Medievalists.net
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, Galbert of Bruges: Commendation and Fealty (1127)
• Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University, Fulbert of Chartres: On Feudal Obligations (1020)
• Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia, Serf (2018)
• Mark Cartwright, World History Encyclopedia, Domesday Book (2018)
• Elizabeth A. R. Brown, “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe”, American Historical Review 79 (1974)
• Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford University Press, 1994)