Feudalism on Trial: Ganshof vs Bloch, Cattle Fiefs and Sark's 2008 Vote

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No 11th century knight would have recognized the word feudalism, and historians still disagree on what it means. In the 1940s François-Louis Ganshof defined it narrowly as a legal and military contract in which a lord granted a vassal a fief in return for service. A few years earlier Marc Bloch had argued for the whole society, including manorialism, the system binding peasants to a lord's estate where they worked his fields and paid to use his mill. The arrangement grew from a 9th century Carolingian crisis: the empire needed costly armored cavalry but lacked the tax machinery to pay salaries, so it paid in land. Heinrich Brunner's 19th century claim that Charles Martel invented the system by seizing church land has been dismantled by historians such as Paul Fouracre.

The vocabulary shifted from the Latin beneficium to feudum, possibly from a Germanic word for cattle or movable goods, or, by another theory, from an Arabic term for returned land heard in southern France near Muslim Spain. Vassals knelt bareheaded to perform homage and swore fealty, owing military service and counsel. Over time fiefs became hereditary, castellans seized tolls and courts, and knights pledged to several lords, forcing the 12th century invention of the liege lord. Montesquieu used the concept as a weapon, Karl Marx as an economic stage, and in 1974 Elizabeth A. R. Brown called it the tyranny of a construct, an argument Susan Reynolds expanded in 1994.

• In the commendation ceremony the vassal placed his clasped hands between the lord's hands.
• After the Black Death, scarce labor gave surviving peasants bargaining power that eroded manorialism.
• France's National Assembly abolished feudal dues and tithes in a single night on August 4, 1789.
• Russia abolished serfdom in 1861, and Scotland formally ended feudal tenure only in 2004.
• The island of Sark held its first democratic elections to replace its feudal parliament in December 2008.