The Feudal Mode of Production
The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe was characterized by a complex unity.It was a mode of production dominated by the land and a natural economy, in which neither labour nor the products of labour were commodities. The immediate producer -the peasant -was united to the means of production – the soil – by a specific social relationship. The peasants who occupied and tilled the land were not its owners. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion.
This extra-economic coercion, taking the form of labour services, rents in kind or customary dues owed to the individual lord by the peasant, was exercised both on themanorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on the strip tenancies.Its necessary result was a juridical amalgamation of economic exploitation with political authority. The peasant was subject to the jurisdiction of his lord.
At the same time, the property rights of the lord over his land were typically of degree only: he was invested in them by a superior noble (or nobles), to whom he would owe knight-service – provision of a military effective in time of war. His estates were, in other words, held as a fief. The liege lord in his turn would often be the vassal of a feudal superior, and the chain of such dependent tenures linked to military service would extend upwards to the highest peak of the system – in most cases, a monarch – of whom all land could in the ultimate instance be in principle the eminent domain. Typical intermediaries in this feudal hierarchy were the barons,counts or principality. The consequence of having such intermediaries was that the power was not focused at a single centre.
The Manorial Estate
In the Manorial system the scalar structure of property was expressed in the characteristic division of estates into the lord’s demesne, directly organized by his stewards and tilled by his villeins, and the peasant virgates, from which he received a complementary surplus but in which the organization and control of production was in the hands of the villeins themselves. Manors did not normally coincide with single hamlets, but were distributed across a number of them; hence conversely in any given village a multiplicity of manorial holdings of different lords would be interwoven.
The coexistence of communal lands, allods and vigrates with the demesne itself was constitutive of the feudal mode of production in Western Europe, and had critical implications for its development.
The ‘Summit’ of the Feudal hierarchy-its weakest link
The ‘summit’ of the chain was in certain important respects its weakest link. In principle, the highest superordinate level of the feudal hierarchy in any given territory of Western Europe was necessarily different not in kind, but only in degree, from the subordinate levels of lordship beneath it. The monarch, in other words, was a feudal suzerain of his vassals, to whom he was bound by reciprocal ties of fealty, not a supreme sovereign set above his subjects. His economic resources would lie virtually exclusively in his personal domains as a lord, while his calls on his vassals would be essentially military in nature. He would have no direct political access to the population as a whole, for jurisdiction over it would be mediatized through innumerable layers of subinfeudation. He would, in effect, be master only on his own estates, otherwise to great extent a ceremonial figurehead. For the lack of any real integrating mechanism at the top of a feudal system implied by this type of polity posed a permanent threat to its stability and survival. A complete fragmentation of sovereignty was incompatible with the class unity of the nobility itself, for the potential anarchy implied by it was necessarily disruptive of the whole mode of production on which their privileges rested. The feudal mode of production in the west thus originally specified in its very structure a dynamic tension and contradiction within the centrifugal State which it organically produced and reproduced.
(The concrete Social formations of mediaeval Europe were always composite systems, in which other modes of production survived and intertwined with feudalism proper: slaves, for example, existed throughout the Middle Ages, and free peasants were never wholly wiped out anywhere by the Dark Ages. The core region of European feudalism was that in which a ‘balanced synthesis’ of Roman and Germanic elements occurred. The ‘balanced’ synthesis generated feudalism most rapidly and completely, and provided its classic form – which in turn had a great impact on outlying zones with a less articulated feudal systems. It was here that serfdom first emerged; a manorial system was developed; seigneurial justice was most pronounced; and hierarchical subinfeudation became thickest.)
(Swedish peasantry was still in possession of half the cultivated surface of the country. Although this was later to be declared the dominiurn directum of the monarch by royal lawyers and was hedged with regal restrictions on leasing and dividing of plots, in practice it formed abroad allodial sector which owed taxes to kings, but no further dues and services. The other half of the peasantry tilled lands owned by the monarchy, the church and the nobility owing feudal rents and services to its respective landlords.)
The Feudal Dynamic
Feudalism in Western Europe emerged in the 10th century, expanded during the 11th century, and reached its zenith in the late 12th and 13th centuries. Having traced something of its varied paths of implantation in the major West European countries, we can now consider the remarkable overall economic and social progress that it represented.’ By the 13th century, European feudalism had produced a unified and developed civilization that registered a tremendous advance on the rudimentary, patchwork communities of the Dark Ages The indices of this advance were multiple. The first and most fundamental of them was the great jump forward in the agrarian surplus yielded by feudalism. For the new rural relations of production had permitted a striking increase in agricultural productivity.
(Technologies)
The technical innovations which are the material instruments of this advance were, essentially, the use of the iron-plough for tilling, the stiff-harness for equine traction, the water-mill for mechanical power, marling for soil improvement and the three-field system for crop rotation. But these innovations did not suddenly become widespread. Indeed, there is a gap of some two or three centuries between their initial sporadic appearance in the Dark Ages and their constitution into a distinct and prevalent system in the Middle Ages. For it was precisely only the formation and consolidation of new social relations of production which could set them to work on a general scale. It is only after the crystallization of a developed feudalism in the countryside that they could become widely appropriated. It is in the internal dynamic of the mode of production itself, not the advent of a new technology which was one of its material expressions, that the basic motor of agrarian progress must be sought.
Feudal mode of production was characterized by a scalar gradation of property which was therefore never cross-divisible into homogeneous and exchangeable units. This organizing principle generated the eminent domain and the revocable fief at the knightly level: at the village level, it determined the division of land into the demesne and peasant virgates, over which the lord’s rights were in their turn differentiated by degree.
The level of organization achieved by the feudal noble on his demesne was of often critical importance for the application of new techniques: the most obvious example of this, amply documented by Bloch, was the introduction of the water-mill, which needed a catchment of a certain size to be profitable, and so gave rise to one of the first and most long-lived of all exploitative monopolies – the obligation of the local peasantry to take their grain to be ground in the lord’s mill. The banalites (exploitative monopolies) were deeply hated throughout the Middle Ages, and were always one of the first objects of popular attack during peasant uprising.
The direct role of the lord in managing and supervising the process of production, of course, declined as the surplus itself grew: from early on, reeves and bailiffs administered large estates for a higher nobility that had become economically parasitic. Below the magnate level, however, the smaller nobles and ministerial intermediaries typically exerted close pressure on land and labor for a greater output at the disposal of the proprietors: and the social and economic importance of this stratum tended to rise steadily during the mediaeval period.
(Viticulture)
One typical sign of the seigneurial role in the development of the feudal economy in this epoch was the spread of viticulture during the 12th century: wine was an elite beverage, and vineyards were characteristically aristocratic ventures, involving a higher degree of skilled labour and of profitability than grain crops.
(Responsibility of Agrarian development on the Peasants)
On the other hand, it was in the class of immediate producers themselves that lay the mass impetus of mediaeval agrarian development. For the feudal mode of production that had emerged in Western Europe generally afforded the peasantry the minimal space to increase the yield at its own disposal, within the harsh constraints of manorialism, The typical peasant had to provide labour rents on the seigneurial demesne – often up to three days a week – and numerous additional dues; he was nevertheless free to try to increase output on his own strips in the rest of the week. Thus the high Middle Ages were marked by a steady spread of cereal cultivation, and a shift within it towards the finer crop of wheat, that was essentially the work of a peasantry that consumed bread as its staple food. There was gradual transition to the use of horses for ploughing, faster and more efficient than the oxen that had preceded them, if also more expensive. More and more villages came to possess forges for local production of iron tools, as a scattered rural artisanate developed. The improvements in technical equipment thus created tended to lower the demand for labour services on noble demesnes, allowing a corresponding rise in inputs on peasant plots themselves.
At the same time, however, as population grew with the expansion of the mediaeval economy, the average size of peasant holdings steadily diminished because of fragmentation, dropping from perhaps some 100 acres in the 9th century to 20 or 30 acres in the 13th century.
However, both prosperous and pauper peasants were structurally opposed to the lords who battened on them, and constant, silent rent struggles between the two were waged throughout the feudal epoch.
The lords, whether lay or ecclesiastical, for their part resorted to the peasant resistances through legal fabrication of new dues, straightforward coercive violence to secure rent increases or seizure of communal or disputed lands. Rent struggles could thus be generated from either pole of the feudal relationship, and tended to stimulate productivity at both ends.
(Great Medieval expansion)
More generally, in the later 12th and 13th centuries sharply contradictory movements could be observed in the rural society of Western Europe. On the one hand, demesne lands contracted and labor services on them diminished in most regions, with the notable exception
of England. Seasonal laborers, paid in wages but prescribed customary duties, became more frequent on seigneurial estates; while leasing of manorial reserves to peasant tenants increased greatly at the expense of direct home cultivation. These conflicting agrarian trends were all manifestations of the silent social struggle for land which gave its economic vitality to the age. It was this hidden yet ceaseless and restless tension between the rulers and the ruled, the military masters of society and the direct producers beneath them, which lay behind the great mediaeval expansion of the 12th and 13th centuries.
(Agrarian output and Demographic changes)
The net result of these dynamic pressures, innate to the Western feudal economy, was to increase total output very considerably. The improvement in yields has been estimated somewhat precisely, if still cautiously, by historians. Duby’s calculation is that between the 9th and the 13th centuries, average harvest seed yields increased at a minimum from 2.5 : I to 4: I, and that the portion of the harvest at the disposal of the producer thus effectively doubled. The dramatic quickening of the forces of production in turn set off a corresponding demographic boom. The total population of Western Europe probably more than doubled between 950 and 1348, from some 20,000,000 to 54,000,00. It was in the midst of this multiplying society that trade revived after its long decline during the Dark Ages, and ever more numerous towns sprang up and prospered as intersection points for regional markets and centres for .manufactures.