From Melissa Snell,
Your Guide to Medieval History.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

In the late 19th century, the field of medieval studies began to evolve into a serious discipline. No longer did the average historian accept as fact everything that had been written by his predecessors and repeat it as a matter of course. Scholars of the medieval era began to question interpretations of the evidence, and they began to question the evidence, as well.

This was by no means a swift process. The medieval era was still the bastard child of historical study; a "dark age" of ignorance, superstition and brutality; "a thousand years without a bath."³ Medieval historians had a great deal of prejudice, fanciful inventions and misinformation to overcome, and there was no concerted effort to shake things up and reexamine every theory ever floated in the study of the Middle Ages. And feudalism had become so entrenched in our view of the time period, it wasn't an obvious choice of target to overturn.

Even once historians began to recognize the "system" as a post-medieval construct, the validity of the construct wasn't questioned. As early as 1887, F. W. Maitland observed in a lecture on English constitutional history that "we do not hear of a feudal system until feudalism ceased to exist."⁴ He examined in detail what feudalism supposedly was and discussed how it could be applied to English medieval law, but never did he question its very existence.

Maitland was a well-respected scholar, and much of his work is still enlightening and useful today. If such an esteemed historian treated feudalism as a legitimate system of law and government, why should anyone think to question him?

For a long time, nobody did. Most medievalists continued in Maitland's vein, acknowledging that the word was a construct, and an imperfect one at that, yet going forward with articles, lectures, treatises and entire books on what exactly feudalism had been; or, at the very least, incorporating it into related topics as an accepted fact of the medieval era. Each historian presented his own interpretation of the model -- even those claiming to adhere to a previous interpretation deviated from it in some significant way. The result was an unfortunate number of varying and even conflicting definitions of feudalism.

As the 20th century progressed, the discipline of history grew more rigorous. Scholars uncovered new evidence, examined it closely, and used it to modify or explain their view of feudalism. Their methods were sound, as far as they went, but their premise was problematic: they were trying to adapt a deeply flawed theory to such a wide variety of facts that some of them actually countered that theory -- but most of them didn't seem to realize it.

Continued on page five: The Emperor Has No Clothes.

Notes

³ It was Jules Michelet who used this phrase in one of his mid-19th-century works, and it has been endlessly repeated ever since. However, medieval people did bathe regularly; see the Weddings & Hygiene and Baths portions of our Bad Old Days feature.

⁴ Maitland, F.W., Constitutional History of England - A Course of Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 1919, p. 142.