FEUDALISM

TRACE THE CHANGES THAT TOOK PLACE IN THE ORGANIZATION OF FEUDAL PRODUCTION FROM 8 TH 12 TH CENTURIES AD IN EUROPE.
The large empire built by Charlemagne (Charles the Great) began to disintegrate in the 9th century A.D. The collapse of central authority was accompanied by external invasions and decline of trade, commerce and towns. Many of the military commanders and chiefs became independent rulers of their regions. During this period a new social formation was emerging in Europe which is termed as Feudalism. Feudalism as a form of political, economic and social system dominated Europe from around 9th 14th century A.D. Specifically, it means a social system of rights and duties based on land tenures and personal relationships, in which land is held in fief by vassals from lord. Broadly, it means a form of society or stage of civilisation that flourishes, especially in a closed agrarian economy, and has certain general characteristics besides the mere presence of lords, vassals, and fief. Thus, the socio-economic political system that developed in the medieval period, first in Western Europe and later in other parts of Europe and the rest of the world, is called feudalism. The idea of two evolutionary phases in feudalism owes much to the pioneering research of Marc Bloch.

1 ST PHASE
The 1st phase, which began with the establishment of the barbarian successor states on the collapsed political system of the Roman Empire and lasted until the middle of the 11th century, substantially preserved the basic social relations which characterised the late Empire. This phase corresponds to the organisation of a fairly stable rural territory where trade was insignificant and uncommon, coins were rare, and a wage-earning class almost non-existent. Ties of vassalage between the greater and lesser elements hierarchically linked the territorial aristocracies who monopolised both the social means of coercion and the regulation of jurisdiction. Most of the peasants were either completely unfree in the eyes of the law or so dependent in various ways on their lords that, if they were free, their freedom was a mere formality. In this phase the agrarian economy was producing very little surplus beyond what was necessary to support the power and position of the landed aristocracy. Production for market was low; rents tended to be in labour or in kind; there was little money in circulation; and there was little effective demand for the luxury commodities of international trade since

upper-class incomes were received in produce rather than in cash. Consequentially, western European life was predominantly rural and localised. The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe was characterized by a complex unity. 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. Agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by politico-legal relations of compulsion. Three structural specificities of Western feudalism followed, all of fundamental importance for its dynamic. Firstly, the survival of communal village lands and peasant allods from pre-feudal modes of production, although not generated by the latter, was not incompatible with it either. For the feudal division of sovereignties into particularist zones with overlapping boundaries, and no universal centre of competence, always permitted the existence of allogenous corporate entities in its interstices. Thus although the feudal class tried on occasion to enforce the rule of nulle 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. Moreover, even within the manorial system itself, the scalar structure of property was expressed in the characteristic division of estates into the lords demesne, directly organized by his stewards and tilled by his villeins, and the peasant virgates, from which he received a complementary surplus but in which the organization and control of production was in the hands of the villeins themselves. Relations of production were mediated through a dual agrarian statute within the manor. The coexistence of communal lands, allods and virgates with the demesne itself was constitutive of the feudal mode of production in Western Europe, and had critical implications for its development. Secondly, the feudal parcellization of sovereignties produced the phenomenon of the mediaeval town in Western Europe. A dynamic opposition of town and country was alone possible in the feudal mode of production: opposition between an urban economy of increasing commodity 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 individual peasant enclaves. Thirdly, there was an inherent ambiguity or oscillation at the vertex of the whole hierarchy of feudal dependencies. The highest super ordinate 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 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. 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 By the beginning of the 10th century, a social formation which was fundamentally different from the social formation of Greco-Roman antiquity had come into existence in Western

Europe. At the end of a long period of transition the slave social formation was replaced by the feudal social formation. The feudal social formation contained Roman as well as Germanic elements. The crisis in the slave mode of production had given rise to new surplus extraction relationships. These surplus extraction relationships were the foundations of the feudal social formation. Social differentiation among the Germanic tribes had undermined earlier tribal ties. A decentralized structure with hierarchical distribution of power had acquired concrete shape. This political system which was the political dimension of feudalism took care of the interests of the lords as a whole, and minimized their conflicts. In this system each hierarchical chain consisted of lords who were linked to one another in a personal manner. The underlying principle of the relationship between the superior and inferior lord was the formation of a personal bond. The inferior or subordinate lord (vassal) pledged lifelong personal loyalty to his superior who in turn promised to protect the vassal. It was from the comitatus that the institution of vassalage gradually evolved. An integral part of the lord-vassal relationship was that the lord was expected to provide for the maintenance of his vassals. For this purpose a grant would be made to the vassal for his own sustenance and for the support of his troops. The grant was made when someone was formally recognized as a vassal through the ceremony of homage. The conditional grant made by the lord to his vassal was known as a fief. A vassals submission was inseparably linked to the grant of a fief by the lord to the vassal. It was in the latter half of the 9th century that vassalage, fief, and military service was organically fused, which was central to the feudal system. The consensus among historians is that the linking of vassalage and fief with military service was related to Carolingian efforts to recruit troops on a regular basis. The Carolingians devised a viable system for recruiting soldiers through fiefs. Although technology never remains static, in this period it was extremely labour intensive and yields were low. Trade though scanty was never completely absent, but it was not the economys driving force. Production was largely for consumption rather than for the market.

2 ND PHASE
The second phase, from the mid-eleventh to the early fourteenth century, was the result of the substantial growth of population, the great land clearances, the considerable technical progress, the revival of trade, the diffusion of a monetary economy, and the growing social superiority of the merchant over the producer. During this period, Bloch argues, the evolution of society and the evolution of the economy began to move in opposite directions: the former, which was slowing down, tended to hone the class structure into closed groups, while the latter eventually led to freedom from serfdom and the relaxation of restrictions on trade and commerce. In the specific context of Maconnais, Georges Duby places the turning point a century later, about 1160 from when an increase in the agricultural surplus facilitated a greater involvement in the network of a monetary economy, an increasing differentiation between urban and rural conditions, and various forms of the general social upheaval. Jacques Le Goff points out that the shift from the first to the second feudal age was a remarkably slow and stretched-out process, and was not evenly or simultaneously accomplished across Western Europe.

Feudalism in Western Europe, then, emerged in the 10th century, expanded during the 11th century, and reached its zenith in the late 12th and 13th centuries. The growth of population at a noticeable rate is evident from the 11th Century which continued till the middle of 14th century. The main reason can be traced to the sharp decline in tribal attacks in the tenth century. The creation of feudal institutions for providing peace and security was also a contributory factor. Relaxation of legal restraints on peasant households helped in the process. Another important reason was the gradual improvement in technology and organisation of agricultural production without which it would not have been possible to meet the demand of food for growing numbers. The sharp rise in population was the main stimulus for the great economic venture of land clearance during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In most of the regions the available food resources could not keep pace with the demographic expansion and in spite of considerable emigration the pressure on land was not effectively reduced. According to Le Goff, the focus of the new agricultural concern was a quantitative increase in the cultivable area rather than a qualitative shift in the methods of enhancing productivity or improving tools. Land clearances also radically transformed the layout of the farmland by shifting the focus of extensive tillage from the central parcels of arable lands closer to houses to the assarted or cleared area on the perimeter. Cattle farming was organised more methodically. Famines did not altogether disappear but considerably decreased in scale and frequency by the end of the twelfth century. During the second half of the 12th century, the lords frequently agreed to codify customary usages, regularise their fiscal powers and thus loosen the strongest bonds of servitude because such concessions helped to increase the number of peasant families subject to their authority and enabled the rural population to accumulate more cash. Demographic growth led to the fragmentation and multiplication of agricultural holdings, and to the increased mobility of the rural population. An abundance of unoccupied land and a remarkable shortage of agricultural labour had marked the early medieval economy. Since landed property was valueless without the labour of the peasantry, the propertied class took special care to impose heavy restrictions on the mobility of the workforce. During the 12th and 13th centuries increased amounts of cultivable lands with higher productivity and an increased supply of labour accelerated the process of manumission and placed large areas of farmland into the hands of the non-nobles. By the 13th century, European feudalism had produced a unified and developed civilization that registered a tremendous advance on the rudimentary, patchwork communities of the Dark Ages. There was a great jump forward in the agrarian surplus yielded by feudalism. Large scale extension of land under the plough and improved technology for cultivation and irrigation was bound to change the organisation of agricultural production. The technical innovations which are the material instruments of this advance were, essentially, the use of the iron-plough for tilling, the stiff-harness for equine traction, the water-mill for mechanical power, marling for soil improvement and the three-field system for crop rotation. There was gradual transition to the use of horses for ploughing, faster and more efficient than the oxen that had preceded them, if also more expensive. More and more villages came to possess forges for local production of iron tools, as a scattered rural artisanate developed. The improvements in technical equipment thus created tended to lower the demand for labour services on noble demesnes, allowing a corresponding rise in inputs on peasant plots themselves.

The areas of dense population saw the most rapid development of towns and of the political importance of their inhabitants. Technological innovations not only increased production, but also increased the peasants productivity to such a degree that a smaller portion of the population had to be directly engaged in the raising of food and a number of people could now devote themselves to the full-time pursuit of non-agricultural activities. In these towns the merchants, the craftsman, the moneychangers, the doctors, the notaries, and the like did not have to acquiesce in an inferior social position when they acquired wealth. They emerged as the politically, socially and culturally dominant urban group.

CONCLUSION
The feudal system in Europe took roots and survived for almost five hundred years. In its initial phase it was not very well structured and was mostly confined to a sort of bond between the Lord and the Vassal. Over the years the bonds got defined and streamlined with various hierarchical levels. The feudal age also witnessed growth of new institutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Early Social Formations Amar Farooqi Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism Perry Anderson