I

The Feudal Mode of Production

The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe am

characterized by a complex unity. Traditional definitions of it have
often rendered this partially, with the result that it has become difficult
to construct any account of the dynamic of feudal development 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 literal
formula of this relationship was provided by the legal definition of
serfdom - glebae adscripti or bound to the earth: serfs had juridically
restricted mobility.' 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 the
manorial demesne attached directly to the person of the lord, and on
the strip tenancies or virgates cultivated by the peasant. 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
I. Chronologically, this legal definition emerged much later than the factual
phenomenon it designated. It was a definition invented by Roman-law jurists in
the 11-12th centuries, and popularized in the 14th century. See Marc Bloch, Les
Caructzres Originaux de I'Hiswire Rurale Fraqaise, Paris 1952, pp. 8-0. We
shall repeatedly encounter examples of this lag in the juridical codification of
economic and social relationships.
z 48 Western Europe

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,Z 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 inter-
mediary Iiilks of such a feudal hierarchy in the early mediaeval epoch,
between simple lordship and suzerain monarchy, were the castellany,
barony, county or principality. The consequence of such a system was
that political sovereignty was never focused in a single centre. The
functions of the State were disintegrated in a vertical allocation down-
wards, at each level of which political and economic relations were, on
the other hand, integrated. This parcellization of sovereignty was
constitutive of the whole feudal mode of production.
Three structural specificities of Western feudalism followed, all of
fundamental importance for its dynamic. Firstly, the survival of com-
munal village lands and peasant allods from pre-feudal modes of
production, although not generated by the latter, was not incom-
patible with it either. For the feudal division of sovereignties into
particularist zones with overlapping boundaries, and no universal
centre of competence, always permitted the exisrence of ‘allogenous’
corporate entities in its interstices. Thus although the feudal class tried
on occasion to enforce the rule of nulie terre sans seigneur, in practice
this was never achieved in any feudal social formation: communal
lands - pastures, meadows and forests - and scattered allods always
remained a significant sector of peasant autonomy and resistance, with
important consequences for total agrarian productivity.3 Moreover,
2.Liegeancy was technically a form of homage taking precedence over all
other homages, in cases where a vassal owed loyalty to multiple lords. In practice,
however, liege lords soon became synonymous with any feudal superior, and
liegeancy lost its original and specific distinction. Marc Bloch, FeudaC Society,
London 1962, pp. 214-18.
3. Engels always justly emphasized the social consequences of village com-
munities, integrated by common lands and the three-field system, for the condi-
tion of the mediaeval peasantry. It was they, he remarked in The Origin ofthe
Family, Private Property and the State, that gave ‘to the oppressed class, the
peasants, even under the harshest conditions of mediaeval serfdom, local cohesion
and the means of resistance which neither the slaves of antiquity nor the modern
 The Feudal Mode of Production 149

even within the manorial system itself, 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 sur-
plus but in which the organization and control of production was in the
hands of the villeins themselves.4 There was thus no simple, horizontal
concentration of the two basic classes of the rural economy within a
single, homogeneous property form. Relations of production were
mediated through a dual agrarian statute within the manor. Moreover,
there was often a further disjuncture between the justice to which serfs
were subject in the manorial courts of their lord, and the seigneurial
jurisdictions of territorial lordship. 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 hold-
ings of different lords would be interwoven. Above this tangled
juridical maze would typically lie the haute justice of territorial
seigneuries, whose area of competence was geographical, not do-
mainial.b The peasant class from which the surplus was extracted in
this system thus inhabited a social world of overlapping claims and
powers, the very plurality of whose ‘instances’ of exploitation created
latent interstices and discrepancies impossible in a more unified juridical

proletarians found ready to hand.’ Marx-Engels, Selected Works, London 1968,

p. 575. Basing himself on the work of the German historian Maurer, Engels
wrongly believed these communities, which dated back to the earliest Dark Ages,
to be ‘mark associations’; in fact, the latter were an innovation of the late Middle
Ages, which first appeared in the 14th century. But this error does not affect his
essential argument.
4.Mediaeval manors varied in structure according to the relative balance
between these two components within it. At one extreme, there were (a few)
estates entirely devoted to demesne-farming, such as the Cistercian ‘granges’
tilled by lay brethren; while at the other, there were some estates entirely leased
out to peasant tenants. But the modal type was always a combination of home-
farm and tenancies, in varying proportions: ‘this bilateral composition of the
manor and of its revenues was the true hallmark of the typical manor.’ M. M.
Postan, The Mediaevaf Economy and Society, London 1972, pp. 89-94.
5 . There is an excellent account of the basic traits of this system in B. H.
Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, London 1963, pp. 46-
5 I. Where territorial lordships were absent, as in most of England, plural manors
within a single village gave the peasant community considerable leeway for self-
regulation: see Postan, The Mediaeval Economy and Society, p. I 17.
 I 50 l/estern &rope

and economic system. The coexistence of communal lands, allods and

viqptes with the demesne itself was constitutive of the feudal mode of
production in Western Europe, and had critical implications for its
development.
Secondly, however, and even more importantly, the feudal parcel-
Iization of sovereignties produced the phenomenon of the mediaeval
town in Western Europe. Here again, the genesis of urban commodity
production is not to be located within feudalism as such: it of course
predates it. But the feudal mode of production nevertheless was the
first to permit it an autonomous development within a natural-agrarian
economy. The fact that the largest mediaeval towns never rivalled in
scale those of either Antiquity or Asian Empires has often obscured the
truth that their function within the social formation was a much more
advanced one. In the Roman Empire, with its highly sophisticated
urban civilization, the towns were subordinated to the rule of noble
landowners who lived in them, but not from them; in China, vast
provincial agglomerations were controlled by mandarin bureaucrats
resident in a special district segregated from all commercial activity.
By contrast, the paradigmatic mediaeval towns of Europe which
practised trade and manufactures were self-governing communes,
enjoying corporate political and military autonomy from the nobility
and the Church. Marx saw this difference very clearly, and gave
memorable expression to it: ‘Ancient classical history is the history of
cities, but cities based on landownership and agriculture: Asian history
is a kind of undifferentiated unity of town and country (the large city,
properly speaking, must be regarded merely as a princely camp, super-
imposed on the real economic structure); the Middle Ages (germanic
period) starts with the countryside as the locus of history, whose
further development then proceeds through the opposition of town
and country; modern history is the urbanization of the countryside,
not, as among the ancients, the ruralization of the city.’%Thus a dynamic
opposition of town and country was alone possible in the feudal mode of
production: opposition between an urban economy of increasing com-
modity exchange, controlled by merchants and organized in guilds and
corporations, and a rural economy of natural exchange, controlled by
nobles and organized in manors and strips, with communal and
6 . Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Formations, London 1964, pp. 7778.
 The Feudal Mode of Production 252

individual peasant enclaves. It goes without saying that the pre-

ponderance of the latter was enormous: the feudal mode of production
was overwhelmingly agrarian. But its laws of motion, as will be seen,
were governed by the complex unity of its different regions, not by any
simple predominance of the manor.
Thirdly, there was an inherent ambiguity or oscillation at the vertex
of the whole hierarchy of feudal dependencies. 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 exclu-
sively 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. The pure model of such a polity,
in which political power was stratified downwards in such a way that
its apex retained no qualitatively separate or plenipotentiary authority
at all, never existed anywhere within mediaeval Europe.‘ 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 incom-
patible with the class unity of the nobility itself, for the potential
7. The Crusader State in the Levant has often been considered the closest
approximation to a perfect feudal constitution. The overseas constructs of Euro-
pcan feudalism were created e x nihilo in an alien environment, and thus assumed an
exceptionally systematic juridical form. Engels, among others, remarked on this
Gngularity: ‘Did feudalism ever correspond to its concept? Founded in the king-
dom of the West Franks, further developed in Normandy by the Norwegian
conquerors, its formation continued by the French Norsemen in England and
Southern Italy, it came nearest to its concept - in the ephemeral kingdom of
Jerusalem, which in the Assice ofJerusalem left behind it the most classic expres-
sion of the feudal order.’ Mam-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965,
p. 484. But the practical realities of even the Crusader realm never corresponded to
the legal codification of its baronial jurists.
252 Vestern Europe

anarchy implied by it was necessarily disruptive of the whole mode of

production on which their privileges rested. There was thus an inbuilt
contradiction within feudalism, between its own rigorous tendency to
a decomposition of sovereignty and the absolute exigencies of a final
centre of authority in which a practical recomposition could occur.
The feudal mode of production in the West thus originally specified
suzerainty: it always existed to some extent in an ideological and
juridical realm beyond that of those vassal relationships whose summit
could otherwise be ducal or comital potentates, and possessed rights
to which the latter could not aspire. At the same time, actual royal
power always had to be asserted and extended against the spontaneous
grain of the feudal polity as a whole, in a constant struggle to establish
a ‘public’ authority outside the compact web of private jurisdictions.
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.
Such a political system necessarily precluded any extensive bureau-
cracy, and functionally divided class rule in a novel fashion. For on the
one hand, the parcellization of sovereignty in early mediaeval Europe
led to the constitution of a separate ideological order altogether. The
Church, which in Late Antiquity had always been directly integrated
into the machinery of the imperial State, and subordinated to it, now
became an eminently autonomous institution within the feudal polity.
Sole source of religious authority, its command over the beliefs and
values of the masses was immense; but its ecclesiastical organization
was distinct from that of any secular nobility or monarchy. Because of
the dispersal of coercion inherent in emergent Western feudalism, the
Church could defend its own corporate interests, if necessary, from a
territorial redoubt and by armed force. Institutional conflicts between
lay and religious lordship were thus endemic in the mediaeval epoch:
their result was a scission in the structure of feudal legitimacy, whose
cultural consequences for later intellectual development were to be
considerable. On the other hand, secular government itself was
characteristically narrowed into a new mould. It became essentially the
exercise of ‘justice’, which under feudalism occupied a functional
position wholly distinct from that under capitalism today. Justice was
the centraZ modality of political power - specified as such by the very
 The Feudal Mode of Production 153

nature of the feudal polity. For the pure feudal hierarchy, as we have
seen, excluded any ‘executive’ at all, in the modem sense of a per-
manent administrative apparatus of the State for the enforcement of
the law: the parcellization of sovereignty rendered one unnecessary and
impossible. At the same time, there was no room for an orthodox
‘legislature’ of the later type either, since the feudal order possessed no
general concept of political innovation by the creation of new laws.
Royal rulers fulfilled their station by preserving traditional laws, not
by inventing novel ones. Thus political power came for a period to be
virtually identified with the single ‘judiciary’ function of interpreting
and applying the existing laws. Moreover, in the absence of any public
bureaucracy, local coercion and administration - policing, fining,
tolling and enforcing powers - inevitably accrued to it. It is thus
necessary always to remember that mediaeval ‘justice’factually included
a much wider range of activities than modern justice, because it
structurally occupied a far more pivotal position within the total
political system. It was the ordinary name of power.