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The word feudalism was not a medieval term. It was invented by French and English lawyers in the 17th century to describe certain traditional obligations between members of the warrior aristocracy. The term first reached a popular and wide audience in Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois ("Spirit of the Laws") in 1748. Since then it has been redefined and used by many different people in different ways.
The term feudalism has been used by different political philosophers and thinkers throughout history.
Starting in the late 18th Century during the French revolution, radicals wrote about feudalism to tar the antiquated system of the ancien regime, or French monarchy. This was the age of Enlightenment when reason was king and the radicals were appealing to the negative image of the Dark Ages. Enlightenment authors generally mocked and ridiculed anything from the "Dark Ages" including Feudalism, projecting its negative characteristics on the current French monarchy as a means of political gain.
Like the French revolutionaries, Karl Marx also used the term feudalism for political ends. In the 19th Century Karl Marx described feudalism as the economic situation coming before the inevitable rise of capitalism. For Marx, what defined feudalism was the military elite accumulating the surplus wealth of those under them by exploitation through military dominance. This was the definition of feudalism to Marx, a purely economic model.
The term feudalism is, among medieval historians, one of the most widely debated concepts. There exist many definitions of feudalism and indeed some have revolted against it, saying the term does not exist at all.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century historians John Horace Round and Frederic William Maitland, who focused on medieval Britain, arrived at different conclusions as to the character of English society prior to the start of Norman rule in 1066, the former arguing for a Norman import of feudalism and the latter contending that the fundamentals were already in place in Britain - a debate which continues to this day.
A historian whose concept of feudalism remains highly influential in the 20th Century is Francois-Louis Ganshof , who belongs to a pre-Second World War generation. He defines feudalism on very narrow legal and military perspective, arguing that feudal relationships existed only within the medieval nobility itself. Ganshof articulted this concept in Francois-Lois Ganshof , Feudalism (Trans. Philip Grierson; New York: Harper & Row, 1964). It is Ganshof's classic definition of feudalism that is the most widely known today and also the easiest to understand. Simply, when a lord granted a fief to a vassal, the vassal provided military service in return.
One of Ganshof's contemporaries, a French historian by the name of Marc Bloch, is arguably the most influential medieval historian of the 20th Century. He approached feudalism not so much from a legal and military point of view but from a sociological one. He developed his ideas in his book Feudal Society (Trans. L.A. Manyon; 2 volumes; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961; BooksEnthsiast.com). Marc Bloch did not conceive of feudalism as being limited soley to nobility, but as a type of society. Like Ganshof, he recognized that there was a hierarchal relationship between lords and vassals, but saw as well a similar relationship obtaining between lords and peasants. This radical notion that peasants are part of the feudal relationship sets Bloch apart from his peers. While the vassal performed military service in exchange for the fief, the peasant performed physical labour in return for protection. Both are a form of feudal relationship. According to Bloch, other elements of society can be seen in feudal terms; all the aspects of life were centered on "lordship," and so we can speak usefully of a feudal church structure, a feudal courtly (and anti-courtly) literature, a feudal economy. See Feudal society.
More recently there has been a revolt by some historians regarding the use of the term feudalism, with some arguing that the term should not be used at all.
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