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Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted
Fiefs and Vassals is a book that will change our view of the medieval world. Offering a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism, Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of fiefs and vassalage that have been central to the understanding of medieval society for hundreds of years are in fact based on a misunderstanding of the primary sources.
Reynolds demonstrates convincingly that the ideas of fiefs and vassalage as currently understood, far from being the central structural elements of medieval social and economic relations, are a conceptual lens through which historians have focused the details of medieval life. This lens, according to Reynolds, distorts more than it clarifies. With the lens removed, the realities of medieval life will have the chance to appear as they really more various, more individual, more complex, and perhaps richer than has previously been supposed.
This is a radical new examination of social relations within the noble class and between lords and their vassals, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages.
Reynolds demonstrates convincingly that the ideas of fiefs and vassalage as currently understood, far from being the central structural elements of medieval social and economic relations, are a conceptual lens through which historians have focused the details of medieval life. This lens, according to Reynolds, distorts more than it clarifies. With the lens removed, the realities of medieval life will have the chance to appear as they really more various, more individual, more complex, and perhaps richer than has previously been supposed.
This is a radical new examination of social relations within the noble class and between lords and their vassals, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages.
556 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 24, 2014
Fiefs and Vassals has the dubious distinction of being both an important read and a tedious one. Susan Reynolds' study is a systematic reassessment of the concept of 'feudalism' in France, England, Italy and Germany, which argues that the entire concept of 'feudal' landholding and relationships are based on assumptions which don't hold up to serious examination. Too much of our understanding of medieval land tenure and social interactions has been based on reading later, high medieval meanings of terms (fief, vassal, benefice) back into earlier documents, and the very concept of 'feudalism' is not one which appears in a medieval text. The model is one which most historians would admit doesn't hold up—and yet the F word keeps showing up in textbooks and academic works.
Reynold's survey of the sources is vast and much of it beyond the areas with which I'm familiar, but the meticulous footnotes offer the reader easy access to follow up the original material. I think her central idea—that feudalism is an untenable concept—is a convincing one, as are several of the points she makes about historical methodology. Yet her prose style can be a bit leaden and opaque—Fiefs and Vassals is emphatically not a book for the non-specialist, and even as a medievalist who doesn't specialise in legal history I found it tough going at points.
I also think a good editing session would have made this book stronger (and shorter) by removing some of the repetition and a very British tendency to apologise a lot for this or that aspect of her argument/approach, etc. Some of her nominalist tendencies can also be taken to the extreme and while Reynolds does repeatedly point to the importance of context in determining meaning, it doesn't take much to see that it would also be possible to succumb to a paralysing skepticism if that nominalism was also applied to a study of contexts.
Reynold's survey of the sources is vast and much of it beyond the areas with which I'm familiar, but the meticulous footnotes offer the reader easy access to follow up the original material. I think her central idea—that feudalism is an untenable concept—is a convincing one, as are several of the points she makes about historical methodology. Yet her prose style can be a bit leaden and opaque—Fiefs and Vassals is emphatically not a book for the non-specialist, and even as a medievalist who doesn't specialise in legal history I found it tough going at points.
I also think a good editing session would have made this book stronger (and shorter) by removing some of the repetition and a very British tendency to apologise a lot for this or that aspect of her argument/approach, etc. Some of her nominalist tendencies can also be taken to the extreme and while Reynolds does repeatedly point to the importance of context in determining meaning, it doesn't take much to see that it would also be possible to succumb to a paralysing skepticism if that nominalism was also applied to a study of contexts.
March 16, 2019
This is one of those books that is so far out of your element, but seems so excruciatingly important that you can't stop reading it, despite its tedium, density, and propensity to make you feel like you've been acting like a complete and utter dunderhead for the entirety of your life.
Reynolds' thesis is simple: the ideas of feudalism as developed over the last couple of centuries of historiographical meanderings do not hold upon under the weight of the extant evidence. Fief and vassal and feudalism itself either didn't exist as terms back then or meant something different when they did appear. Relations between societal divisions were interpersonal, not based on power diffusion and sharing. I think that's the main point here. Vassals weren't vassals, that was a label appended much later. Instead, there existed a kind of social assignment that was based on earlier virtues that combined deference to authority, since most actual instances of what we call "feudalism" was church0centric.
I'm probably missing something in the above. The book is daunting and colossal and fell of way more detail than any mere lay mortal might need. Still, one has to appreciate such fine iconoclasm when it happens, for it is rare!
Reynolds' thesis is simple: the ideas of feudalism as developed over the last couple of centuries of historiographical meanderings do not hold upon under the weight of the extant evidence. Fief and vassal and feudalism itself either didn't exist as terms back then or meant something different when they did appear. Relations between societal divisions were interpersonal, not based on power diffusion and sharing. I think that's the main point here. Vassals weren't vassals, that was a label appended much later. Instead, there existed a kind of social assignment that was based on earlier virtues that combined deference to authority, since most actual instances of what we call "feudalism" was church0centric.
I'm probably missing something in the above. The book is daunting and colossal and fell of way more detail than any mere lay mortal might need. Still, one has to appreciate such fine iconoclasm when it happens, for it is rare!
December 6, 2024
There is a crackpot theory that the middle ages mostly didn’t happen and that several centuries of European history, 614–911, were fabricated. “Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted” has slightly that mood to it. The book’s main claim is that the central dogma of medieval history is basically false. But Reynolds is not the least bit a crackpot or a crank. She is an eminent medieval historian, and the view she is articulating appears to be the scholarly consensus.
It's not even a new consensus. Already in the late 19th century, Frederick Maitland, the most prominent English legal historian of his era, remarked that feudalism was brought to England by the 17th century antiquarian Henry Spelman and reached its peak development about the middle of the 18th century. Medieval historians have been snarking intermittently ever since.
It turns out nobody, including specialists, is especially precise in explaining what feudalism means and where it might happen. The theory Reynolds would rebut is that medieval society was essentially fractal and personalized, and held together by loyalty owed between lords and their men in which the men (vassals) would promise obedience in exchange for land (fiefs) held from the lord. That land ownership started off as temporary assignments from above in exchange for loyalty and gradually became permanent.
Reynolds shows, at great length, that this basically did not happen. In her account, most medievals (and most medieval legal documents) treated land as property in more or less the way that we do and the Romans did. They did not perceive a close association between landholding and feudal service. Lords would demand services and fees from landholders in their domain, true enough. But they made those claims to anybody they could, without even claiming that the people being shaken down held their lands through the lord. The counts of France thought of themselves as territorial rulers exerting governmental power, without any concession that these rights were the result of prior grants or agreements from the people below. People whose land was described as "alods" paid the same as those who held fiefs.
Royalty everywhere claimed the authority to directly demand service and revenue from the population at large. Especially in England, the monarchs had pretty effective means to raise troops and revenue from the whole population. They did not waste any time asking their tenants-in-chief to raise their vassals who would raise their knights, etc. No. The king, directly, demanded the knights. Almost immediately the kings in fact are demanding cash. And they demand it directly from the tenants on the ground; they do not go through the pyramid of land claims.
The weakness of the book is that it vacillates between being a medieval history and being a historiography. She does both, but without a very clear structure or separation. It's a slog to read.
She has a number of error theories to explain why people saw a feudal system that wasn’t there. Some of the doctrines of the theory are quite old. Italian lawyers of the 13th century would make assertions about feudal grants from centuries before; they had almost no access to primary sources and were very much making up just-so-stories to justify the laws of their own era. Subsequent lawyers, antiquarians, and others fleshed out the story -- again, more motivated by explaining the law of their era than by honest inquiry into the distant past. Once this story became entrenched, people read the primary sources through that lens, without checking what the sources really were saying.
Also, Reynolds points out that church records are highly influential but also highly atypical. Kings and nobles would coerce the churches to give land to people the ruler wished to benefit. Officially, churches were not supposed to ever alienate land and so the church would give a restricted or temporary benefice (for life, or for a few generations) as a workaround. Church land might’ve been a third of all land, was much better documented than anything else, and was competitively easy for the government to grab, so this generated a lot of what looked like subinfeudation, but in fact was a soft confiscation by royalty.
I think the basic claim about feudalism is clearly right, and there are several other lines of evidence, not in the book, to show this. The philosophy and literature of the middle ages hardly acknowledges feudalism. The Knights of the Round Table do not appear to be Arthur’s vassals nor do they appear to have fiefs anywhere.
It's not even a new consensus. Already in the late 19th century, Frederick Maitland, the most prominent English legal historian of his era, remarked that feudalism was brought to England by the 17th century antiquarian Henry Spelman and reached its peak development about the middle of the 18th century. Medieval historians have been snarking intermittently ever since.
It turns out nobody, including specialists, is especially precise in explaining what feudalism means and where it might happen. The theory Reynolds would rebut is that medieval society was essentially fractal and personalized, and held together by loyalty owed between lords and their men in which the men (vassals) would promise obedience in exchange for land (fiefs) held from the lord. That land ownership started off as temporary assignments from above in exchange for loyalty and gradually became permanent.
Reynolds shows, at great length, that this basically did not happen. In her account, most medievals (and most medieval legal documents) treated land as property in more or less the way that we do and the Romans did. They did not perceive a close association between landholding and feudal service. Lords would demand services and fees from landholders in their domain, true enough. But they made those claims to anybody they could, without even claiming that the people being shaken down held their lands through the lord. The counts of France thought of themselves as territorial rulers exerting governmental power, without any concession that these rights were the result of prior grants or agreements from the people below. People whose land was described as "alods" paid the same as those who held fiefs.
Royalty everywhere claimed the authority to directly demand service and revenue from the population at large. Especially in England, the monarchs had pretty effective means to raise troops and revenue from the whole population. They did not waste any time asking their tenants-in-chief to raise their vassals who would raise their knights, etc. No. The king, directly, demanded the knights. Almost immediately the kings in fact are demanding cash. And they demand it directly from the tenants on the ground; they do not go through the pyramid of land claims.
The weakness of the book is that it vacillates between being a medieval history and being a historiography. She does both, but without a very clear structure or separation. It's a slog to read.
She has a number of error theories to explain why people saw a feudal system that wasn’t there. Some of the doctrines of the theory are quite old. Italian lawyers of the 13th century would make assertions about feudal grants from centuries before; they had almost no access to primary sources and were very much making up just-so-stories to justify the laws of their own era. Subsequent lawyers, antiquarians, and others fleshed out the story -- again, more motivated by explaining the law of their era than by honest inquiry into the distant past. Once this story became entrenched, people read the primary sources through that lens, without checking what the sources really were saying.
Also, Reynolds points out that church records are highly influential but also highly atypical. Kings and nobles would coerce the churches to give land to people the ruler wished to benefit. Officially, churches were not supposed to ever alienate land and so the church would give a restricted or temporary benefice (for life, or for a few generations) as a workaround. Church land might’ve been a third of all land, was much better documented than anything else, and was competitively easy for the government to grab, so this generated a lot of what looked like subinfeudation, but in fact was a soft confiscation by royalty.
I think the basic claim about feudalism is clearly right, and there are several other lines of evidence, not in the book, to show this. The philosophy and literature of the middle ages hardly acknowledges feudalism. The Knights of the Round Table do not appear to be Arthur’s vassals nor do they appear to have fiefs anywhere.
January 11, 2010
An important book, debunking the myth of pyramidal feudal society in medieval Europe. Full of negative conclusions about the regional variation in the structure and reality of feudalism and feudo-vassalic ties, such as they existed, if they existed at all. Tedious use of sources, but might be interesting to those better versed in them.
January 7, 2011
This is an extremely important book. Yes, it is very tedious to read. No, I would not suggest it to the casual reader. That said, anyone interested in medieval Europe in any scholarly capacity is cheating themselves by not reading this.
January 21, 2014
The scholarship in this book is top-notch. Yet the book is also accessible to a wide readership, basically anyone interested in the medieval history of Europe.
July 14, 2021
A fascinating deep dive into what exactly the primary source evidence says regarding "feudalism," Reynolds presents a dispassionate, well-articulated, careful piece of scholarship. She admirably sets the limits of her scope of inquiry (feudo-vassalic relationships between various echelons of the upper class, not Marxian feudalism concerned with the self and noble), she admits when the evidence is inconclusive or when she has not been able to dive as deeply into a particular area (Germany, for instance), and she points out where certain areas meet the traditional definition of vassalic relations more closely.
Although the reader may come away dizzy from the level of historical detail (paragraphs upon paragraphs concerning how specific Latin words were used and in what times/places/cultures), which might make the book a difficult prospect to read cover-to-cover, if one is able to surmount the minutiae necessary in a work such as this, a better understanding of Medieval reality (and Medieval historiography) is the reward.
Finally, the author's consistent emphasis on cultural context, on the structures and relationships of power, and to the fundamentally dynamic humanity of the Medieval person are a welcomed shift away from the staid theory-men of many Medieval histories, that pigeonhole entire societies into too-tidy formulae of property relations and rigid reciprocity.
Her work is a wonderful tonic against needless dogmatism, of putting the theoretical cart before the evidentiary horse.
Although the reader may come away dizzy from the level of historical detail (paragraphs upon paragraphs concerning how specific Latin words were used and in what times/places/cultures), which might make the book a difficult prospect to read cover-to-cover, if one is able to surmount the minutiae necessary in a work such as this, a better understanding of Medieval reality (and Medieval historiography) is the reward.
Finally, the author's consistent emphasis on cultural context, on the structures and relationships of power, and to the fundamentally dynamic humanity of the Medieval person are a welcomed shift away from the staid theory-men of many Medieval histories, that pigeonhole entire societies into too-tidy formulae of property relations and rigid reciprocity.
Her work is a wonderful tonic against needless dogmatism, of putting the theoretical cart before the evidentiary horse.
March 7, 2015
I found this to be very interesting, but also very tedious to read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews