Men of Men

Feudal Society, Marc Bloch, 1939 (1961).

Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Rake, 1932.

Imagine two men face to face; one wishing to serve, the other willing or anxious to be served. The former puts his hands together and places them, thus joined, between the hands of the other man - a plain symbol of submission, the significance of which was sometimes further emphasised by a kneeling posture. At the same time, the person proffering his hands utters a few words - a very short declaration - by which he acknowledges himself to be the “man” of the person facing him. Then chief and subordinate kiss each other on the mouth, symbolising accord and friendship. Such were the gestures - very simple ones, eminently fitted to make an impression on minds so sensitive to visible things - which served to cement one of the strongest social bonds known in the feudal era.¹

So Marc Bloch begins his chapter on vassalage, somewhere in the middle of Feudal Society. I wanted to start with this lengthy quotation for two reasons. Firstly, it reveals that this is a very old book - I doubt one would find similar passages in more contemporary histories. Written in 1939 and translated to English in 1961, the book is more than eighty years old. That makes my inner historian gulp nervously - let alone my inner economist! As one would hope, Feudal Society has been surpassed by the literature in almost every way. It is extraordinary, and epochal, but also outdated. My relative unfamiliarity with the economic history of the period renders me incapable of engaging with it in such a way as to pick up on this consistently, however. I have to take Bloch at face-value more often than I would like - so be wary of my credulousness.

That aside, the quotation also reveals what makes Feudal Society so special. It encapsulates how Bloch manages a Braudelian finesse for description - could anyone evoke the ritual of homage between liegeman and liegelord with such poetry? - without forgetting (as Braudel often does) to explain why it matters. Feudal Society is filled with vivid descriptions of medieval life. But it is also no chronicle - barely any battles, kings, or popes are mentioned. Bloch’s focus on serious history - the “science of constant change”, he calls it - is something to behold. No doubt, he was limited by his era. The scarcity of citations for each chapter is stunning, and the book only really covers France, England, and bits of Germany and Italy. But I was struck, again and again, by how contemporary Bloch can sometimes seem, especially in his mode of thinking.

I could start by sketching what Bloch thinks feudal society was - it is, after all, a very contested concept. But perhaps the most profound observations Bloch makes concern what feudal society was not. It was not a neat hierarchy which stretched from serfs at the bottom, via knights, to kings at the top. The feudal pyramid, hereditary aristocracy, and even ‘nobility’ itself - these concepts are late-medieval inventions, retrospectively imposed. Neither was the ‘manor’ - “an agglomeration of small dependent farms” - essential. On the one hand, it was an institution older than feudal society, and destined to outlive it. On the other, not all peasants lived and worked on the manor. Allodial estates - small ‘owner-occupier’ farms - were everywhere, if unevenly distributed. Finally, it was also not the case that feudal society was characterised by an absence of commerce. Trade was limited, and money was scarce, but none lived without either. The dream of a fully self-sufficient manor was just a dream.

However, what was essential to feudal society, Bloch argues, is vassalage. The bounds of Bloch’s feudal era - split into two phases, but roughly from the 9th century to the 13th - are demarcated by the pre-eminence of this institution for organising social, political, and economic affairs. In the beginning, being a vassal meant being someone’s ‘man’ (in fact, the word vassal originally meant ‘boy’). It was an exchange of subservience for protection between two men - highly personal and not linked to land, nor hereditary in nature. It was broad in meaning - just as a count was the ‘man’ of his king, so a serf was the ‘man’ of his lord. More often than not, Bloch argues, the weaker parties flocked to vassalage of their own will - it was not a simple matter of subjugation. Why? Bloch points to many factors: the decay of kinship ties, persistent Germanic customs, and the destabilising impact on Europe of invasions from the south (Islam), the north (the Vikings), and the east (the Magyars). Regardless, every other social relation was subordinated to vassalage during the feudal era; it was the institution through which social and economic life flowed.

Vassalage was, of course, intended as a security measure above all. First and foremost, it gave weak men protection in return for providing protection to strong men. But it had a vital economic dimension. The fief was land ‘loaned’ by a lord to his vassal, not - initially - in expectation of money or goods, but military service. Without much in the way of monetary revenue, and limited capacity to put up vassals within the lord’s own household, distributing fiefs became the natural economic basis of vassalage. But fiefs - as with vassalage itself - were, in this early period, highly personalised. They could not be ‘sold’, nor were they inherited by default. The entire system was founded on man-to-man relationships, with two-way obligations, that ceased with death.

By the turn of the first millennium, this institution was, to different extents, the organising social and economic principle of (western) Europe. Vassalage was the sole mechanism through which the state functioned - legal systems depended on it, while the ‘knight’ had a near monopoly on force. Institutions familiar to previous eras - such as wage-earning soldiers, taxes, and central government more broadly - were largely unknown. In Bloch’s second feudal age, however, this system would be gradually ‘unwound’. Three shifts would fundamentally alter feudal society: inheritance, ‘serfdom’, and the transition from payments in services to payments in rents. The first two changes were symptomatic of the depersonalisation of feudal society: the first in favour of family, and the second the land itself. Gradually, fiefs came to be seen as the property of vassals, not loans from the lord; free to be traded and passed on through the family at will. Similarly, the obligations of peasants shifted from the lord to the fief itself. Previously, the son of a peasant would not have any legal - or moral - obligation of work the land of his father’s lord - this would have been tantamount to slavery! But such inheritance of responsibility also became widespread during the 12th century.

The third shift is perhaps the most interesting. As feudalism depersonalised, so obligations in service were supplanted by those in rents. The causal story in Bloch is not so clear - did the feasibility of non-service payments (in part due to an improved supply of currency) encourage the depersonalisation of feudal ties, or did such social and political processes weaken personal links and thus allow their economic reformulation? In either case, the end result was a transformation of the fiscal-political arrangement that characterised feudal society. Lords ‘paid’ the military service obligations on their fief with money or goods, and so paved the way for the age of mercenary companies that was late-medieval and early-modern Europe: a significant development if concepts like the ‘military revolution’ and the ‘fiscal state’ mean anything.

The economic dimension behind Bloch’s feudal arc that I found most striking is money; or more precisely, the structural consequences of its scarcity. The supply of money is something which today we mostly think of as a short-run concern - relevant to inflation, deflation, and understanding financial crises. For Bloch’s Europe, however, a persistent scarcity of currency had structural implications. A scarcity of money is what led to the death of the foot-soldier and the necessity of vassalage. It pushed taxation to the margin, encouraged decentralisation, and influenced a whole number of administrative practices, such as the creation of offices (which are essentially administrative fiefs - i.e, the right to collect a certain payment). For Bloch, it is the rectification of this situation - at least in part - which is responsible for the ‘gentle’ centralisation of feudal governance from the 12th century on, and the transition to a system based on rents rather than services. Once again, I cannot speak to how true this narrative is - I would not be surprised if the reality is far less transparent. Regardless, Bloch presents an important reminder to take money seriously.

I think it is interesting to draw out a brief comparison with Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (which so happens to be the first book I wrote about here, nearly a year ago). Anderson has read Bloch, and cites him often. But I was left with the feeling that the version of feudal society carried through into Passages represents a simplification of Bloch. Anderson’s feudal society is a clean synthesis of two inheritances: Roman manorial institutions (agglomerated farms and dependent coloni farmers), with Germanic political customs (vassalage). Bloch’s story, however, is not so neat. Bloch insists that there is no clean coloni-to-serf arc, that vassalage was not inherited so much as haphazardly constructed from mixed roots, and that the manor - while in a sense traceable to Roman villae - varied enormously in prevalence and form. The impression I received from Bloch is that feudal institutions owed more to the circumstances of their conception than any deep-rooted process.

So what to make of Feudal Society? I wish I could comment insightfully, but my knowledge is simply too limited (I hope to rectify this soon, starting with some Chris Wickham). Geoffrey Koziol’s introduction to the Routledge edition outlines areas where Bloch has been surpassed. Apparently, Bloch overstates the importance of vassalage, since “vassals and fiefs simply were not all that important”. Further, the division of the feudal age into two eras, with the first defined by crisis and the second by relative prosperity, is overstated: the 8th-10th centuries were not so dire, nor were the 10th-12th centuries so relatively productive. These are potentially serious flaws. Both may strike the thesis of Feudal Society in the heart. So is it a mistake to read Bloch? I do not think so. For while his arguments show their age, in terms of style and methodological ambition, Bloch lives up to the legend. Feudal Society is still a touchstone for how we should think - and write - about history.

1. Feudal Society, p. 157.