'Then Begins an Epoch of Social Revolution': Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism.

Article by Simon Lax. Edited by Antony Lowe and Helen Lambert. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard.

Guard: Sire, the Peasants are revolting!

Lord: I know, I can smell them from here.

Revolutions are a peculiarly modern concept. This is not because the word is modern, but that the meaning under discussion in this issue is. Before sometime in the 18th, maybe even 19th century, the only place you would find a reference to ‘revolutions’ would be in your handy Copernican tome ‘De revolutinibus orbium coelestium‘ or similarly weighty scientific tomes. After the French Revolution, and perhaps more significantly the analysis of Karl Marx, the concept of Revolution shrank from the celestial to encompass the terrestrial, political, social, economic, cultural and sexual spheres. The word ‘revolution’ has been applied to various points in medieval history recognised as being periods of change and turbulence, but which had not previously had much by way of labelling. The most problematic of these points is what is known as the ‘Feudal Revolution’, which in most modern conceptions is either entirely denied, or held to span the years c. 950-1100. As with most attempts at labelling a series of chronologically, geographically and often rather conceptually distinct periods of history with a buzz-word, it seems to have created just as many problems as it attempted to solve. Though there is not enough space in this article to go into too much detail on the recent scholarship, I shall explain as best I can the problem of applying the modern and loaded concept of revolution onto the very non-modern and complex issue of the advent of feudalism.

In this article, I’m going to confine myself to the methodological problems of revolution in the medieval period, with reference to the so-called Feudal Revolution. The first part of the article shall take the Marxist challenge head on, and look for the shift from an Antique to Feudal mode of production, and most importantly where it falls chronologically. Secondly, dealing with the less historiographically constrained use of revolution and whether even that makes enough concessions to convince us of its usefulness as a label for the advent of Feudalism.

Firstly, the Marxist use of the Feudal revolution is drawn mainly from Marx’s 1859 preface, Marx’s theory holds that revolutions are the change from one mode of production to another, modes of production being labels that cover an era of similar groupings of production methods, labour relationships, and patterns of object creation. In the West, four modes of production were defined by Marx: Antique, Feudalism, Capitalism, and Communism. Once an old mode could no longer support the population and the social relationships engendered, it collapsed into a new mode, the foundations of which will have arisen within the old mode. The first half of the title of this article is taken from that point, when revolution occurs. The strength of the statement is somewhat diluted by the admission that the indicators of the economic structure such as law, religion, and so on (Marx conceiving of the change as one primarily of economic and thus social relationships), which Marx calls the superstructure, change ‘more or less rapidly’. The qualification is important: Marx’s analysis was a response to the tumultuous nature of his own time and the need for an explanation for the truly rapid changes of the early to mid 19th Century meant that Marx’s universal answer for historical change fits well with his own time but less well with the period he understood less about. By avoiding specificity in the nature of revolution, Marx answered to his satisfaction the reason for tumultuous change primarily in his own time: he also created a headache for Medievalists in trying to link the Antique Mode with the Feudal within a time span that could possibly be described as more or less rapid.

The primary problem, though it may not seem so to Marxists is that Antiquity is held to have ended at some point between 500 and 700 A.D. The beginnings of the social relationships that are seen as peculiarly feudal (villeinage, serfdom, the pyramid diagrams that every English schoolchild will have come across during their education) are not present before at least the tenth century. Generally this appears not to pose too much of a problem to Marxists for two reasons: firstly, the primacy of economical change as defining history means that the outward labelling of chronological periods is wrong: modes of production define periods, not the other way round. I think this trivialises the importance of the Early Medieval period as distinct in many respects, economically as well as socially and culturally, from Rome before it and the Feudal kingdoms that followed it. Marx’s airbrushing of this period from history is not new, and the work of Chris Wickham and Michael McCormick has shown conclusively the economic situation is very distinct. Secondly, the other Marxist try is to see the Early Medieval period as a necessary revolutionary epoch between the Antique and Feudal modes. The difficulty is that the sheer length of time between what we know to be Antique and what we know to be Feudal stretches Marx’s quantification of ‘more or less’ too far. Even if it were the case that it wasn’t, the length of time precludes the kind of instantaneous collapse of old modes of production in the face of unsustainable populaces: if the transition is a revolutionary epoch as Marx described, it denies the necessary breakdown of the economic mode that should have preceded the epoch. Historically though, the superstructure of religion, law, and other social relations seem to have maintained themselves for a fair amount of time after the fall of Antique culture, so the point may be moot.

Finally, the term revolution, though often drawing from Marxist concepts initially has itself had a bit of a revolution. To have told Copernicus that revolution would soon apply to political turbulence would have seemed unbelievable; to tell Marx that one day his term designed to cover only the transition between modes of production could be prefixed by ‘sexual’ would have seemed equally absurd. In Medieval History, this broadening of the term revolution has meant that Medievalists have felt more comfortable ascribing revolution to various phenomena, such as the Gregorian and Feudal Revolutions. My main problem with this is twofold: firstly, the term revolution has particular progressive connotations that we should be aware of; the Feudal Revolution is argued to have been a more violent and bloody time than what had gone before or what followed. The failure of states to exercise successfully central authority (or what in medieval times passed for such...) allowed the lawless nobles to instigate a century of rape and pillage. When the states and religious hierarchy managed to re-establish control through re-directing violence between states and against the Muslims in Palestine, through the clearing smoke the new order appeared. In no sense is this progressive or looking towards the future: it was the annihilation of the old order with little thought as to what economic structures would be left. Secondly and finally, if the revolution can sensibly be suffixed to Feudal, French, Industrial and Sexual then the term must either be broad enough to encapsulate all of them (in which case the term is so broad as to lose meaning), or have so many implicit meanings that more accurate terms should be used.

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Francois Louis Ganshof provided the classic definition of feudalism in 1947. Feudalism was the legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility revolving around ideas about Lords, Vassals and Fiefs. Ganshof argued feudal relations appeared only within the nobility but Marc Bloch had previously outlined a much wider definition of the term to include the relationship between nobles and peasants. Historians such as Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Susan Reynolds have gone so far to reject the term due to its many varied and often contradictory meanings. Brown claims the word is only a construct invented by historians and had no place in medieval reality.

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“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged ... the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder. Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class. A similar movement is going on before our own eyes ... The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring order into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

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