The Second Century of English Feudalism
By D. A. Carpenter
Past and Present, No. 168. (2000)
Introduction: Over the last decade important new ideas have been advanced about the nature of English society and government in the years after 1166. In his classic work The Northerners, published in 1961, J. C. Holt averred that the rebellion of 1215 ‘revealed broadly feudal characteristics in that the tie of tenure was still a powerful bond, strong enough in many cases to determine the actions of the tenants of the great magnates’. He went on to make several qualifications. The tenurial bond was weakened when a tenant held from several lords, and was firmest when underpinned by ties of neighbourhood.’ Yet Holt clearly saw ‘feudalism’, in the sense of the rights, obligations and structures derived from the tenure of land by knight service, as fundamental to the workings of English government and society in the early thirteenth century.
Historians would be less sure of that today, many judging the decline of feudalism (or what used to be called feudalism) as far more rapid after 1166 than was once imagined. Hugh Thomas, in his study of the gentry of Angevin Yorkshire, has argued that Holt considerably overestimated the force of the tenurial bond in explaining the rebellion of 1215. David Crouch has shown that already before 1200, in the exercise of local power, lords were reaching out beyond feudal structures, and constructing affinities composed of men with whom they had no tenurial connection. In the recent debate over bastard feudalism he has thus moved the appearance of its institutions back from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the twelfth. These new ideas have originated in a determined challenge to the picture of England after the Conquest painted by F. M. Stenton in his seminal book, The First Century of English Feudalism, published in 1932. They are reinforced by Susan Reynolds’s much wider assault on what historians have conventionally understood by feudalism, an assault in which she has questioned whether there were anything like ‘feudal’ rights and revenues in England at In all this there have been divergent and cautionary voices. Holt himself, in a short review of Thomas’s book, has explicitly dissented from the new ‘non-feudal’ view of the early thirteenth century. He has also warned against neglecting the contemporary meaning and resonance of ’the language of feudalism’ which runs through so much of the evidence. Likewise Peter Coss has argued that the decline of feudal jurisdiction was slow and uneven. Indeed, feudal courts retained their importance into the thirteenth century and beyond.
This is not, then, a debate over the mere use of a term. It is about the very nature of English society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. True, the feudalism under consideration is not that of Annales and Marxist historians, which included manorialism and landlord-peasant relations. Rather, the feudal structures of Stenton and his successors are exclusively those of the upper classes. Yet for that very reason the question at issue remains important. It is nothing less than how the lives of the dominant sections of society were ordered. One’s picture of England becomes very different according to whether feudalism died rapidly after 1166 or continued to flourish.
This article will argue that historians, by writing almost exclusively about the processes of feudal decline, have come seriously to underestimate the significance of what, at any one time, remained. While qualifications are entered, they are rarely explored in detail and given their true weight. Essentially historians have been interested in feudal disintegration, not feudal survival. The idea that feudalism might even, in some respects, wax as well as wane is hardly considered. Even the most ‘pro-feudal’ historians have never really investigated the nature of feudal structures and attitudes after 1215, and considered their implications. The result, it may be suggested, is a very one-sided view of England in the century after 1166. In what follows I will argue that feudalism in its second century should not be ignored, as though in some deepening afternoon shade. In ways which will emerge, it continued to make a hugely important contribution to the social and political fabric of England.
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Tags: Economics - Rural, England
