The Abolition of Feudalism

11 Key excerpts on "The Abolition of Feudalism"

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  The Bee and the Eagle

  Napoleonic France and the End of the Holy Roman Empire, 1806

  • Alan Forrest, Peter H. Wilson(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  In fact, there was no uncontested body of such legislation for Napoleon to apply. Rather, for the duration of Napoleonic rule, the feudal question was the subject of contentious discussion and the object of shifting jurisprudence in France itself. Napoleon’s policies 7 Napoleon and The Abolition of Feudalism Rafe Blaufarb 132 Napoleon and The Abolition of Feudalism towards feudalism in Europe were thus tied up with a domestic French debate. Re-examined in this light, it will become clear that Napoleon’s abolition of feudalism in Europe was aimed not only at foreign lands, but also at France itself. Before we proceed, however, some groundwork must be laid. 2 First, by the eighteenth century feudalism was primarily (but not solely) a system of property law rather than a mode of production or a form of social domination. Originally, French feudalism involved royal grants of land (called fiefs) in exchange for military service. Over time, these service obligations lapsed and fiefs became private property – bequeathed, inherited, subdivided and traded in the land market. The vast majority of all real estate in Old Regime France was of this type, including in cities where even apartment dwellers typically had to pay feudal dues. 3 Thus, feudal property law was not a subcategory of some broader system of property law in the Old Regime: it was the system. From this perspec- tive The Abolition of Feudalism was less about transforming the rural economy or challenging lordly predominance than about redefining the legal and cultural parameters of property. Second, the feudal question was still an open one, a politically divisive one, in France when Napoleon took power and remained so throughout his rule. Even in 1806 and 1807, while busy fighting Prussia and Russia, Napoleon had to take time from his military preoccupations to send decrees back from the front to France on this contentious issue.

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  The Political Economy of Nation Building

  The World's Unfinished Business

  • Mack Ott(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  As technology advanced and monetary payments substituted for fixed allocations of men, material and land, the structure of feudalism disintegrated. Fixed land ownership, serfdom, and a barter military system were replaced by fee simple land title, laissez-faire markets in labor and goods, and a paid military. Central to this was the rise of towns and cities—particularly London, Bristol and York—which transformed England from a barter-based agricultural economy of self-sufficient manors into a network of markets whose interdependence was based on monetized trade. The focus in what follows is an elaboration of how technology shapes society and creates markets, and how markets expand freedom; the contribution of financial arrangements to this evolution is addressed in Chapter 4. Feudalism was a highly centralized form of production organization with wealth and power very concentrated, inflexibly organized, with both production and military services based on barter exchange and with involuntary servitude at its labor base. Feudal relations were hierarchical and governed land tenure and controlled the lives of most peasants who were tied to the manors, which comprised nearly 90 percent of the estimated population of England in 1086. The urban population was about 10 percent, and more than half of national output was produced on the lords’ own demesnes of their estates. Nevertheless, even in this barter/planned economy, there was substantial market activity involving both manor and urban producers and peasant farmers: About 40 percent of the economy was involved in market activity—that is production sold to buyers in markets rather than produced for own consumption

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  At the Dawn of Modernity

  Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000

  • David Levine(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  189 3 Living in the Material World the seigneurial mesh Viewed from the bottom up, the feudal revolution captured the mass of the population in “The Seigneurial Mesh.” Feudalism was not taken for granted; rather, it was violently imposed. The transformation of freemen and slaves into serfs occurred around the year 1000 under conditions of brutal subjugation. The subsistence economy of use and common rights of the mass of the population was thereafter pitted against the lords’ seigneurial economy of exchange and fiscal extraction. The political econ-omy of feudalism imposed a double rent on the servile population—they paid economic rent for the land they worked while being subjected to a be-wildering variety of extra-economic charges on their bodies and their time. Particular attention is focused on the divergent routes followed in the aftermath of the feudal revolution. Commutation of extra-economic rent proceeded faster on the continent during la révolution censive, whereas, in contrast, thirteenth-century England was characterized by a feudal reaction. This, in turn, led to the creation of a massive inventory of manorial documents, making it possible to describe not only the range of extra-economic charges that feudalists levied upon the servile population but also the strategic implementation of feudal dues. If the success of the Gregorian Reformation represented one aspect of the early modernization of Europe, then the feudal social revolution was the other side of this coin. In the period around the year 1000 the various grades of dependent cultivators found themselves being assimilated into a single class, although originally they and their landholdings had been arrayed in a continuum of juridical conditions, stretching from freedom to slavery. The fact that “innumerable peasants, by ancestral status free—in the primitive sense; not slaves—had got entangled in the meshes of the seigneurie ” is “really the crucial problem” in the rise of dependent cultivation.

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  Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism

  Essays in Medieval Social History

  • Rodney Hilton(Author)
  • 1985(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  The social and economic order of medieval Europe is sufficiently distinct and recognisable, with its own laws of motion, to require some term by which it can be distinguished from preceding and following social formations. If we do not use the word 'feudalism' we would have to invent one, and it would have to encompass within its definition both feodalite and seigneurie. The feudal organisation which is implied by the word feodalite had emerged by the eleventh century in France and England in different ways but with similar contours. Its coherence must not be exaggerated. Even in England, where the feudal institutions of the new aristocracy were formed quickly as a result of the conquest of 1066, and much less in France, there was no perfect, completed hierarchy of mutual obligation between barons and fief-holding vassals owing military service and expecting protection. One should imagine, especially in France, a series of untidy regional groupings dominated by one or two great land-owning families who derived most of their income from the rents and services of peasants. They also held jurisdictional power, not only over 228 Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism their peasants but over their free vassals—landowners, some of noble pretensions, whose male members were either warriors or destined for office in the Church. By this time personal relationships between the great lords and their vassals were assuming tenurial form, the rendering of homage and fealty and the promise of military service, financial aid and counsel in return for fiefs in land. In fact the mobilisation of military service on this basis, once presented as the essence of feudalism, was in practice by no means general. By the twelfth century, if not earlier, all the best wars were fought for pay in cash and the hope of booty. The persisting strength of 'feudalism' in the narrower sense of relations within the landowning class, was as much ideological as it was tenurial or jurisdictional.

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  Warfare in Japan

  • Harald Kleinschmidt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Although it appeared at first that the land reform had decisively revolutionized the self-reinforcement of these two groups, dissolving large-scale landlordism and high rent tenancy and thereby destroying the feudal relationships within the village, actually it did not produce any such fundamental change. To the contrary, recent studies have shown that it resulted in a re-strengthening of feudal relationships under colonial control. 1 American historians who reject this view are apt to be reminded by their Japanese colleagues that they have been spared the onus of living under feudalism and hence cannot appreciate its reality. Certainly the American scholar does not commute through a countryside which to him constitutes a living reminder of "the feudalism of the village". But while we cannot deny the Japanese his emotions of social protest, we can question whether the object of his attack is the same feudal system against which our European forefathers railed. This surely is a problem which can be studied objectively. The question of whether the idea of feudalism can be applied to Japan (or any other society outside Wetsern Europe) has exercised the minds of scholars since the time of Voltaire and Montesquieu. The endless conflict between what we might term the "broad" and "narrow" approaches to this problem has led down to the present generation in which we find a Marc Bloch suggesting the existence of "feudalism as a type of society" or a Bryce Lyon insisting that Western European feudalism is "unique". 2 In the light of this controversy the general historian who has no special stake in the problem is apt to assume a double standard, accepting as popular but misguided the usage that generalizes the term beyond the confines of Europe, and retaining for his own professional purposes a usage which limits the term to Western European societies

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  Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning

  • Maurice Dobb(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  One Transition from feudalism to capitalism DOI: 10.4324/9780203120859-1

  The question of what was the nature and what were the moving forces of the decline of Feudalism as an economic system, and what connection had this decline with the birth of modern Capitalism, is not entirely without interest, I think, for many underdeveloped countries today. However, it is in the context, rather, of historical interpretation that I want to deal with this question here. For historical interpretation, at any rate for one that attaches primary importance to distinctive modes of production in defining stages in the historical process, a true understanding of this crucial transition is, I believe, essential. Moreover, without it much in our definition of Capitalism as a mode of production, as well as of its origins, must inevitably remain blurred and unclear.

  I should perhaps explain that when I talk about Feudalism, I am not referring to this as a juridical form or set of legal relations; I am speaking of it primarily as a socio-economic system. But in looking at it in this light, I do not wish to identify it with Schmoller’s ‘natural economy’, even if it be true that trade and money-dealings (certainly long-distance trade) occupied a smaller place in this type of economy than in others, both preceding and succeeding it. I refer to it as a system under which economic status and authority were associated with land-tenure, and the direct producer (who was himself the holder of some land) was under obligation based on law or customary right to devote a certain quota of his labour or his produce to the benefit of his feudal superior. Regarded in this way, as a system of socio-economic relations, it is almost identical with what we generally mean by serfdom; provided that we do not confine the latter to the performance of direct labour services (on the lord’s estate or in his household) but include in it the provision of tribute or feudal rent in produce or even in a money-form. Using Marc Bloch’s phrase, it implies the existence of ‘a subject peasantry’: he goes on to say, ‘the feudal system meant the rigorous economic subjection of a host of humble folk to a few powerful men … the land itself (being) valued because it enabled a lord to provide himself with “men”’. To which Bloch added: ‘whatever the source of the noble’s income, he always lived on the labour of other men’. Summing it up we can say that the differentiating feature of this type of exploitation is accordingly that the sanction behind it, whereby it is enforced and perpetuated, is so-called ‘extra-economic in some form.

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  Life & Work In Medieval Europe

  • P, Boissonnade, Boissonnade(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  jacquerie at the hands of a sinister butcher, the great lord Raoul de Fougère. But force was powerless to stop this social fermentation, which was still going on at the beginning of the twelfth century, as the most perspicacious of contemporary observers bear witness. It was the forerunner of the great social and economic revolution, which 200 years later was to transform the whole system of labour.

  1 Payable on the marriage of a serf to a person belonging to another lord’s estate. See below, p. 138.

  Passage contains an image CHAPTER III PART PLAYED BY CHURCH AND STATE IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE RÉGIME OF PRODUCTION.

  THE primary condition necessary to stimulate the activity and progress of labour was the formation of some tutelary authority able to assure the necessary protection and order to the masses.

  For over two centuries feudal government showed itself powerless to realize this condition. A work of circumstance, which imminent dangers had brought to birth, it left too free a hand to the force and greed of thousands of little local sovereigns, who knew neither faith nor law. The feudal system had undoubtedly brought certain principles of progress into medieval society. In France, above all, from whence it spread all over the West, feudal civilization substituted for the ancient Græco-Roman conception of the omnipotent state, with its absolute power over individuals, the new idea of a political association founded upon liberty and upon the reciprocal obligations of men voluntarily bound together by contract. It favoured the revival of the sentiment of human dignity and individual energy, of voluntary devotion and discipline, of faith and loyalty between suzerains and vassals. Under the influence of the Church the military institution of chivalry was transformed, and for an élite it became a moral and educative force which tended to put might at the service of right, to guarantee public peace, and to protect the labouring masses against violence and anarchy. In the upper ranks of society were born the chivalrous virtues of humanity and courtesy, which resulted from the softening of manners. But this transformation of feudal society had only a limited effect. It had little influence upon the condition of subject classes, and, in fact, liberty remained for the first two centuries of the feudal age limited to the nobility. The terms freeman (liber) and baron or knight (miles

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  The Middle Ages without Feudalism

  Essays in Criticism and Comparison on the Medieval West

  • Susan Reynolds(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Encyclopaedia Britannica depicted “the intercourse betwixt” lord and vassal before “the romantic ideas of chivalry ceased” as having been “of the most tender and affectionate kind.” Early nineteenth-century historians took over the idea, highly suited as it was to the Age of Romanticism, of knights or vassals living and fighting in a social and political void. The Middle Ages became the age of Feudal Anarchy. Public spirit was assumed to have gone with the end of the Roman Empire, so that historians who were only or chiefly interested in high politics and the relations between kings and nobles, could easily assume that the only or primary bonds of society were those of vassalage.

  This was the background of historiography against which Marx and Engels worked out their idea of feudalism. Although they both read quite widely in what was then available about medieval history, and therefore started from the picture of feudal society and government drawn by other historians, they were interested in it chiefly as the background or thesis to capitalism’s antithesis.21 They took over the idea of stages of history propounded by Adam Smith and other scholars of the eighteenth century and argued, by an adaptation of Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, that what causes the movement from one stage to another is the inevitable conflict between those who work and those who rule them and live off their work. The relations between kings and nobles that had hitherto interested most historians were less important to Marx than were those between landlords and peasants. Serfdom, rather than fiefholding and vassalage, was therefore the defining characteristic of his concept of feudalism. That made it quite different from the concept that his contemporaries had adopted and which many later medieval historians would continue to cherish and elaborate.

  Throughout the twentieth century, and even into the beginning of the twenty-first, the historiography of medieval Europe has continued to be shaped by the ideas of fiefholding that sixteenth-century scholars derived from late medieval academic law and the ideas of vassalage that eighteenth-century scholars drew from literary sources. As knowledge has expanded, it has been fitted into a framework of feudalism that has been enlarged with very little rethinking. Some medievalists avoid the problem of fitting the phenomena they find or do not find into the enlarged framework represented by Bloch’s and Weber’s definitions by appealing to ideal types, though sometimes without much consideration of how an ideal type should relate to empirical phenomena, or how the varying concepts of feudalism might constitute one.22

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  The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 4, AD 1804–AD 2016

  • David Eltis, Stanley L. Engerman, Seymour Drescher, David Richardson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The result was a decree remarkable both for being sponsored by the prime beneficiaries of the system and its destruction in a few short sentences of the seigniorial system, begin- ning with the abolition of serfdom. The first article of the decree declared: 3 The National Assembly completely destroys the feudal regime. It decrees that, in rights and duties, both feudal and censuel, deriving from real or personal mortmain, and personal servitude, and those who represent them, are abolished without compensation; all others are declared redeemable, and the price and manner of the Table 18.1 The Major Emancipations of Serfs in Europe State Year of Emancipation State Year of Emancipation Savoy 1771 Saxony 1832 Baden 1783 Brunswick 1832 Denmark 1788 Schaumburg-Lippe 1845 France 1789 Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen 1848 Switzerland 1798 Reuss (older line) 1845 Schleswig-Holstein 1804 Saxe-Weimar 1848 Poland 1807 Austria 1848 Prussia 1807 Saxe-Gotha 1848 Bavaria 1808 Anhalt-Dessau-Kothen 1848 Nassau 1812 Saxe-Coburg-Gotha 1848 Estonia 1816 Oldenburg 1849 Courland 1817 Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt 1849 Wurttemberg 1817 Anhalt-Bernburg 1849 Livonia 1819 Lippe 1849 Mecklenburg 1820 Saxe-Meiningen 1850 Grand Duchy of Hesse 1820 Reuss (younger line) 1852 Hannover 1831 Hungary 1853 Electoral Hesse 1831 Russia 1861 Saxe-Altenburg 1831 Romania 1864 Source: Jerome Blum, The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1978), p. 356. 3 Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789–1799 (Oxford, 2002), p. 58. 428 cambridge world history of slavery redemption will be set by the National Assembly. Those of the said rights that are not abolished by this decree will continue nonetheless to be collected until settlement. Subsequent articles suppressed manorial courts, hunting privileges, and the collection of tithes, all without compensation. The scope of the reform was breathtaking, as was its terse and seemingly unambiguous language.

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  The State

  Its History and Development Viewed Sociologically

  • Franz Oppenheimer(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  92 and in that publication it was pointed out that in all the instances noted a process takes place, identical in its principal lines of development. It is only on this line of reasoning that one can explain the fact, to take Japan as an example, that its feudal system developed into the precise details which are well known to the students of European history, although Japan is inhabited by a race fundamentally different from the Arians; and besides (a strong argument against giving too great weight to the materialistic view of history) the process of agriculture is on a totally different technical basis, since the Japanese are not cultivators with the plow, but with the hoe.

  In this instance, as throughout this book, it is not the fortune of a single people that is investigated; it is rather the object of the author to narrate the typical development, the universal consequences, of the same basic traits of mankind wherever they are placed. Presupposing a knowledge of the two most magnificent examples of the expanded feudal state, Western Europe and Japan, we shall, in general, limit ourselves to cases less well known, and so far as possible give the preference to material taken from ethnography, rather than from history in its more restricted sense.

  The process now to be narrated is a change, gradually consummated but fundamentally revolutionary, of the political and social articulation of the primitive feudal state: the central authority loses its political power to the territorial nobility, the common freeman dnks from Us status, while the “subject” mounts.

  (b) THE CENTRAL POWER IN THE PRIMITIVE FEUDAL STATE

  The patriarch of a tribe of herdsmen, though endowed with the authority which flows from his war-lordship and sacerdotal functions, generally has no despotic powers. The same may be said of the “king” of a small settled community, where, generally speaking, he would exercise very limited command. On the other hand, as soon as some military genius manages to fuse together numerous tribes of herdsmen into one powerful mass of warriors, despotic centralized power is the direct, inevitable consequence.93

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  The History of Democracy

  A Marxist Interpretation

  • Brian S. Roper(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  9 The crisis of feudalism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was followed by a period of recovery from the mid-fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth centuries and then another major crisis in the seventeenth century. These crises prompted a generalized intensification of class struggle, which ultimately produced different outcomes across Europe. In Eastern Europe the nobility successfully expropriated the lands of peasant freeholders and tightened the grip of serfdom over the peasantry. In France and western Germany serfdom was successfully overthrown by the peasantry but peasants then became subject to the extraction of surplus from the absolutist state (in addition to the rents that many peasants still had to pay to local lords and the tithes that almost all peasants owed to the church). In England the outcome of the first generalised crisis of feudalism was the creation of conditions conducive to the emergence of capitalism: the gradual of achievement of absolute property ownership of land by the nobility, but a nobility which increasingly derived its income from the rents paid by capitalist tenant farmers, who in turn were able to exploit the growing class of agricultural wage labourers (Brenner, 1985, 1990, 2003a, 2007). It is worth focusing in more depth on France and England because the remainder of this chapter and the next focuses on the revolutions that subsequently unfolded in these two countries.

  French absolutism

  The absolutist state in France emerged from the crisis and class struggles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.10 It was developed as a response by the monarchy and sections of the ruling class to the peasant gains that:

  were significant at the beginning of the fifteenth century; in many areas of France, village communities had won corporative status and the right to enforce their claims to common lands. In addition, individual peasants had won heritability rights over their tenures. ... In short, for the peasantry as a whole this was a period of significant prosperity and economic advance.

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