by Jack Lindsay
Langland, Chaucer, the 1381 revolt, and Wyclif, were different aspects of the rapid emergence of a great new synthesis, English solidarities developing among the masses of the people. Their diversity and contradictions reveal the dynamic breadth and richness of the nationhood thus emerging from the many interrelated elements.
Chapter Sixteen – A Wider Perspective
Argument still goes on as to the exact definition of the term feudalism, though no doubt most medievalists would basically accept Hollister’s definition of it as signifying ‘an institution based on the holding of a fief, usually a unit of land, in return for a stipulated honourable service, normally military, with a relationship of homage and fealty existing between the grantee and the grantor’. Yet once such a definition is accepted, interminable argument goes on as to how one defines Anglo-Saxon society. Sayles comments: ‘To deny the descriptive term of “feudal” to the changes which had produced the Anglo-Saxon social structure on the ground that it did not fully resemble the social structure in Normandy is begging the question; it could equally well be argued that Norman society was never feudalized because it did not reach the still more developed form of feudal society in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Feudalism is an unsatisfactory word: however, if what went on in England before 1066 was not feudal, even though it was no more than tentative in military and political aspects, the word to describe it will have to be invented.’ The term was unknown to the medieval world itself, and one is tempted to fall back on the witticism that feudalism was introduced into England in the seventeenth century by Sir Henry Spelman. To think that a whole new kind of social order can suddenly appear with the advent or completion of some particular institution is frivolous in the extreme — as if one were to pinpoint the day of opening of the first steam-driven textile mill and announce that capitalism was then born. The inadequacy of a definition of feudalism in terms of Norman fief systems alone is brought out by the fact that from the very beginnings of the Norman systems the seeds of something quite different were present: the fief-rente with its substitution of money payment for military service. ‘Ironically, the Conqueror’s system of military tenures, seemingly a consummate expression of the feudal idea,’ says Hollister, ‘was in fact compromised from the beginning by factors that would ultimately destroy it: a money economy, a strong monarchy with a long tradition of direct and general allegiance, a military situation that favoured the use of mercenaries, and a political situation in which Norman feudal vassals were often less dependable to the monarchy than native Englishmen.’[563] The factors of direct allegiance and native reliability were particularly English factors, which help us to understand the main points in which our developments differed from those on the continent.
There are certain common factors that operated in western Europe in the centuries following the breakdown of Roman authority and law — factors which remain as what we may call the bedrock structure of society, despite continuous changes and modifications in their forms of expression, until the definite intrusion of the first modes of capitalist production. These common factors include at their core the ownership of the land and the enjoyment of its profits by a ruling class which holds its own by sheer force. Even if its officials and agents play useful parts in different phases by helping to organize agricultural and other work, the position of the ruling class is based on armed might and not on an economic role. Such a system inevitably has a class of warriors or retainers in close relation to the lords, and since land is one of the most valuable gifts at the disposal of the lords, some of the land will be held by warriors or companions, so that in effect there will be a relation between war service and such holdings even if it is not at all legally precise. Further there will be some sort of homage relation between such landholders and their lords. From the outset then, after the breakdown of the Roman state, the tribal successors of that state reveal all the ingredients that we find in Norman feudalism, though in a more fluid form, without sharply defined conditions — though custom would in its own way have laid down clearly enough for the men of the time just what they expected to do in return for gifts or privileges.
We should naturally expect that as society advances, with more play of money forces, economic expansion, and the growth of literacy and governmental organization, the relations between lord and retainers or companions could tend to be defined in more precise legal terms, with more definite obligations on both sides. This tendency appears everywhere in western Europe in early medieval times, but, for a number of reasons (which we have analysed), it was in Normandy, and then in Norman-conquered England, that the tenurial obligations of the military class were most precisely defined. There can be no doubt then that the Norman fief represents a particular development of a general trend, and that to isolate it as a special and separate type of social order to be labelled feudalism is myopic in the extreme. The key aspect of feudalism is the ownership of the land by a ruling class that maintains its hold by force; all the other aspects flow from this central point. Whether the dues or rents from the land are paid in products, labour services, or money, may be highly important for determining the particular phase of the system, but does not affect that central point.
There is one more aspect of feudalism to be noted. In a feudal society there will certainly be a strong tribal element, at least in its early phases. The tribal groups may be settling down and developing the first stages of urban society, like the early Sumerians; they may be conquered by members of a society with more advanced techniques, like the Amerindians under the Spaniards; or they may irrupt on a world with a higher culture, which they help to disrupt, like the Germanic peoples who overran the Roman west. But though the circumstances may vary, the first phases of a feudal society will have a strong tribal imprint; and what we see is the steady breakdown of the original elements of tribal brotherhood and equality in a situation where the lords and their warriors constitute a superior class set over the class of peasants. Not that we must visualize a simple antagonism. As we have seen, what actually happens is a complex mixture of force and assent, ruthless exploitation and tangled loyalties. The way in which the old tribal elements of cooperation and the new feudal elements of compulsion merge and conflict is what constitutes the actual living energy and coloration of any particular situation.[564]
One problem raised by this kind of formulation is the wide range of societies to which it refers. Indeed it covers all societies beyond the tribal level (that is, in which classes have developed) and which have not created a slave economy or become capitalist or socialist. The result is a rather unmanageable conglomeration of societies which includes ancient Sumeria, Egypt, China and India, as well as western Europe in its post-Roman phases. European feudalism, for one thing, was unique in issuing in bourgeois or capitalist society: something that no other feudal society showed any real signs of doing. Faced with this problem, one might be tempted to give up. But categorizing the stages of historical development is useful — indeed necessary if one is not to succumb to pragmatism and the mere description of societies and their stages. The only proviso is that we must keep watching that the categories are not pushed too far or allowed to become rigid, so that the facts are fitted into them rather than their being reconstituted to meet the facts. All general theories need to be continually overhauled and tested in the light of new facts or hypotheses.
I myself therefore incline to the use of the term feudalism for the European west alone. Feudalism would then be seen as a particular form of what we might call serf society; and we could put it in a larger category that also included, say, Sumerian serf society. In turn we might subdivide feudalism itself. Fief feudalism would serve as a term to define the phase developed in an intensified form by the Normans; the earlier phases in England, where we find king and warriors set against the free peasantry we might call tribal feudalism; the final phase, emerging in England with the Tudors, we might call the absolute monarchy.[565]
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At almost every new start made in
past history — apart from the turn to bourgeois society there has been an influx of peoples at various tribal stages to the more advanced areas. In general, whatever divisions, social or economic, have grown up during the phases of tribal development, there has survived a strong element of what we may call primitive democracy: that is, notions of the equality of all able-bodied clansmen, which are carried on as notions of the equal rights of all arms-bearing men — together with various forms of assembly through which the clansmen can express their opinions, discuss matters that concern them, and play a part in the making of all important decisions. The classic case of the carry-over of such tribal notions into settled life, with a continual revaluation and reapplication of their forms of expression to suit the changed conditions, is that of the ancient Greeks, above all in the city-state of Athens. Such a development was made possible by the rejection of the kingship and of the organized priesthoods which had dominated the serf societies of the Near East and Egypt, and had limited the extent of their social development. The Romans too, in a different way, showed the carry-over of tribal ideas and forms into the complex political situation of the city-state, despite the division of the citizens into patricians and plebeians. Hence the republican forms of government, voting, and assembly, which survived the many strains until the fall of the Republic. In both Greece and Rome class conflict, which implies some degree of freedom of action in the conflicting classes, was able to continue without either chaos or arrest of the system. The crucial point then in the development from tribalism into fully settled or civilized life is the way in which the tribal forms are broken down, transformed, or readapted, with the advent of urban life and of the state. An analysis which attempted to show the distinctive qualities of each emerging civilization would need to grapple with this question and to show the different ways in which the transition from tribal bases was carried out.
The influx of Germanic tribal groups into the breaking down West of the Roman empire introduced a new life, or at least the possibility of a new life, however much the situation was complicated by the degree of social differentiation and the emergence or strengthening of warlords among the tribes, and by the extent to which the tribal societies assimilated elements from the Roman provinces they invaded and settled in. (Various social and economic elements had also been absorbed for long before the invasions.) In Anglo-Saxon England there was the cleanest break with the Roman past and therefore also the fullest development of the forms and attitudes of the tribal systems of the invaders. And this point is valid even if we make allowance for more contacts with and influences from the Romano-Celts than has usually been accepted, and for more connection with Gaul and other parts of the continent than is usually taken into account, especially after the conversion of the various Anglo-Saxon groups. Hence the strong folk element in Anglo-Saxon society, which we must not ignore or undervalue because it has been sentimentalized and seen by nineteenth-century scholars in terms of an idealized Victorian democracy. There was a richness of folk culture in English society not to be found elsewhere in western Europe. Whatever similar elements persisted in Germany lacked the English cohesive and unifying quality. The folk basis of English life implied all sorts of binding elements as well as elements of sturdy independence.
Despite all the pressures of Norman feudalism, the hundredal and the honorial courts never fused, and never showed the least signs of fusing or linking together. The hundredal system had embodied the determination of Edmund, Athelstan, and Edgar, to enforce peace through the king’s justice. The Normans, by making the sheriff the chief military and police officer of the crown in the shire, and by associating the hundred with police measures like murdrum and frankpledge, prepared the way for the Angevin policy that worked the communal traditions of shire and hundred into the new bureaucracy. The juries of Henry II and the tax-assessing knights of Henry III not only paved the way for the shire representatives of Edward I, but also assured to the Anglo-Saxon system of shire and hundred ‘a permanence that is unique in European history, and thus blended Teutonic and Roman elements into that characteristic hardy hybrid which we call the English constitution’ (Cam).[566]
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We may now try to summarize and extend some of the main findings that have emerged from our analyses. England, however different in many respects from the rest of western Europe in the eleventh century, was ultimately a part of the same general development. If we can imagine Harold as having won at Hastings, we can be sure he would have taken many steps that strengthened the links between England and the continent, especially Flanders and northern France. Just how he would have done it, we cannot tell; though he would certainly not have initiated anything like the sudden leap into fief feudalism which the Conquest brought about. But ‘ifs’ are usually not fruitful in the discussion of history. The Conquest did take place; and that involved a sharp collision of English and Norman forms, and the ultimate development of a synthesis out of them. On the one hand there was England, the one state in the West with a high level of unifying law, a close link between the kingship and popular courts, a kingship with a tradition of issuing law codes, and a relative absence of internal war; and on the other hand there was a highly militarized system, linking land tenures with specific services, with a powerful drive for centralization. The result might have been chaos, a country breaking down between unrelieved tensions; but the Normans, however ruthless and violent they might have been, always had a strong sense of the possible, allied to a capable organizing faculty.
We have noted the mixture of archaic and advanced elements in pre-1066 England. The society was archaic because it rested ultimately on a large-scale reaffirmation of tribal kingship; it was advanced because this aspect anticipated the more integrated relationship of the state system and the people which came about in England in the sixteenth century. Many changes had to occur before the Tudor state could be reached. There had to be a big expansion of mercantile and productive capacities, a considerable growth of towns and their burgess class, and an extension of kingly power as the result of a long class struggle in which king, lords, burgesses and peasants all played their parts. What gave an element of inertia to the old English kingdom was the high degree to which it was ruled by consensus, customary law and tribal survivals in the courts and in the relations of man with man, even of peasant with lord. But there was slow, steady organic growth, despite all the warfare between the early kingdoms and the many exploitations. This was something unparalleled on the continent, except to some extent in Salian Germany. But for a mixture of political, economic and geographical reasons (at some of which we have glanced), Germany could not attain the comprehensive solidarity that was emerging in England, stage by stage, especially after Alfred. The intensification of feudal tenures and services came about in Germany only in the anarchic half-century after the investiture controversy; and what then developed was not at all like the state emerging in England under Henry III. The centrifugal forces were too strong.[567] Similar centrifugal forces in England, active both in the old English particularism under the unifying kingship and in Anglo-Norman feudalism with its baronial divisions, were controlled and redirected by the fusion of Norman centralism linked with the fief settlements, with the tough tribal cohesiveness of the Anglo-Saxon court system and administration.
Thus England was saved from the over-simple fief feudalism of Normandy itself and of other comital states like Anjou or Maine, and from the cumbrous breakdown of effective centralization which happened in Germany. A vital union of English and Norman elements came about: a maximum of central organization was merged with extended local forms in the tenures and in the courts, shire, hundred and honorial: that is, a maximum of centralization in terms of the concrete possibilities of the epoch, where the limits of governmental organization were determined by the level of the social and economic nexus, the supply of literate and trained officials, and so on. Perhaps something analogous had occurred in the creation of the Merovingian kingdom in Gaul, the first important attempt
to build a wide-reaching state on the Roman ruins. That was brought about by the Salian Franks, who seem to have remained quietly in Betuwe and north Taxandria, then to have started moving in the mid fifth century. As a result of their conquest, some 30,000 Franks were settled over the whole area between the Somme and the Loire; all the tribal fighters thus constituted something of a ruling class to hold the region together. But this development —and that of the Carolingian state that followed — occurred at a much lower level, economic, political and cultural, than that of the eleventh century, and so had different though noteworthy effects. France in the medieval era shared with England a strong centralizing trend, but without the rich set of cohesive factors.[568]