What Was Feudalism?

People in the Middle Ages didn’t actually use the words “feudalism” or “feudal society,” which are both derived from the Latin word feudum, meaning fief. Beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries, historians developed the concept of feudalism to help explain how society worked in that earlier time period. Yet even throughout medieval Europe, laws and customs differed from region to region, rather than one uniform feudal system. As a result, many medieval historians today believe “feudalism” is far too simple a label to fully explain the complex web of social, political and economic relationships that existed in the medieval world.

In the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, Western Europe largely lacked a centralized governing authority apart from a brief period of relative unity in the late 8th and 9th centuries under the Carolingian rulers, including Charlemagne. In the absence of this central government, people faced frequent raids from hostile neighboring states, roving bandits and even Vikings or other foreign invaders. They sought protection from powerful local lords and nobles, who in return demanded loyalty and service. As a result, the lords came to exercise greater control over the territories that were subject to them, as well as the people who lived there.

Later scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries looked back at documents from this medieval period in search of the origins of certain legal and political institutions that still existed at that time. This included the fief—a piece of land granted by a lord (or seigneur in France) to someone in exchange for that person’s loyalty, labor or service, possibly including military duties.

By tracing the roots of such institutions to documents such as the 12th-century legal compilation Libri Feudorum (“Books of Fiefs”), these scholars eventually developed the concept of feudalism to explain life in medieval Europe. In the 18th and 19th centuries, influential thinkers such as French philosopher Montesquieu and Scottish economic theorist Adam Smith expanded and popularized the concept.

According to the traditional view of feudalism, it was a political, social and economic system that tied people in medieval Europe together through land ownership and obligation. At the top of a rigid, pyramid-like social hierarchy was a king, who divided the lands under his rule among various nobles and clergy. Those nobles, or lords, in turn granted pieces of that land to tenants, or vassals, along with their protection.

In exchange, the vassals pledged loyalty and service, as well as a percentage of the revenue they earned from the land. This exchange was typically sealed in a formal ceremony known as homage, an institution that survived into the 17th century in England and even later in France. Fiefs were generally passed down from tenants to their descendants in a hereditary system.

At the bottom of the social hierarchy were peasants, also known as serfs or villeins. While some peasants were free laborers, serfs and villeins were tied to the land, which they worked to provide food for themselves and profit for those above them, whether vassals or lords. Modern historians typically describe feudalism as the relationship between lords and vassals, while the relationship between serfs and tenants or landowners is referred to as the “manorial system” or “manorialism,” named for the large estates, or manors, on many properties.

Multiple factors—including the growing complexity of land ownership, the rise of large towns and cities, the emergence of nation-states and the impact of wars and plagues (most notably the Black Death)—had weakened feudal ties in Europe by the 14th century.

Today, many historians warn that using the term “feudalism” as a blanket description of systems of landholding and obligation in medieval Europe risks oversimplifying a more complex reality. In her influential 1974 article published in the American Historical Review, historian Elizabeth A.R. Brown argued that feudalism is a “construct” created by later scholars as a way to fit medieval society into a single unified system “instead of investigating the social and political relationships found in medieval Europe.”

While life in the Middle Ages was far too varied and nuanced for one simple label, it can be helpful to understand feudalism as a system that linked land, power and loyalty in a medieval society lacking strong centralized government—and as an interesting glimpse into the thinking of later historians who developed the concept.