The official explanation I have been given for this in history class is that peasants sought protection from wealthy lords, and traded their freedom in exchange for protection. I am curious if there are any alternative explanations for the rise of Feudalism during the Middle Ages, and if the official explanation is correct, then why wouldn’t the lords have chosen to exchange protection for money instead of protection for serfdom?
Why wouldn’t they want to have dependent serfs? Guaranteed payment, eliminates competition.
European serfdom actually dates back to the collapse of the Roman empire. The Roman government started to tax the hell out of everybody. One class that was exempt from taxation were slaves, as slaves had not income, and the landlords were too powerful to be taxed. People sold themselves into slavery to escape taxation. Eventually the Roman government wisened up to it, and made it illegal to change one’s occupation, as well as making it hereditary.
Ultimately the empire collapsed economically, and the barbarian chiefs took over the scraps of its power. After a few centuries the church made some marginal improvements in the rights of slaves, turning them into serfs with a limited claim to the land.
Serfdom still exists in many places in the world, usually in the form of multi-generational debts. (Not only can people not declare bankruptcy on their debt, they are thrown in prison if they fail to pay, and their children are also liable for the debts.)
I must digress.
Simply because serf labor is always less efficient than free labor, and that is why it is always preferable to employ someone than just to enslave him. It costs less to just feed a slave into substance than pay wages BUT fewer free workers can do the job of many slaves. So, I can’t agree that a successful landlord would have choosen serfs over free labor. Else slavery wouldn’t have collapsed in the world (mostly :). So what about feudalism and slavery in general?
European serfdom actually dates back to the collapse of the .
Untrue, I believe. Slavery has been present since the dawn of mankind, up to very recent times, and it still is practiced in some industries (prostitution). It truly doesn’t matter whether one calls it slavery or serfdom or whatever, it’s just the same thing. Let me forward an explanation for the resilience and indeed for the existence of slavery.
As we know, in every society there is an “optimal” population level. If a country gets overpopulated, it means that every new human born not doesn’t increase everyone’s wellbeing by specialization as much as he decreases it by consuming goods: shortly, he’s unneeded. The optimal level of the population is set by and large by the stock of capital. A large stock of capital will mean that specialization can progress further, meaning that more people can produce more, increasing the “cap” of the optimal population. On the other hand, a dwindling capital stock means that specialization can’t even be sustained, and thus some people become a “net loss” for others.
Now, when this happens, when the population level is higher than the optimal level, when a country is overpopulated, one can witness two scenarios.
First, Malthusian theory: people just start killing each other, until the optimal population level is again achieved. You can witness this in Africa, where due to a population kept artificially high by western food aids, homicide is rampant, disease abound and genocide breaks every record ever set by the Nazis. Shortly a hell on earth, and all of this because there are far more people that it would be reasonable to have, given the capital stock.
Second, some of these “surplus” guys must be converted into capital, to “right he balance”. And when people are treated as capital, a thing to be owned and used, you get slavery.
Now, during the Roman reign in , the capital stock increased until, as every empire, the Roman also decided to get interventionist thus marking its decline. And after centuries of decline and stagnation of , and after its fall, the capital stock of Europe was only a fraction of what it had been during the heydays of the . So what happened is that people just started killing each other AND slavery was revived, under this new fancy name, “serfdom”.
Slavery has been eliminated lately only because the population has been hovering around the optimal level, and hence there was no need for slaves, but for free, productive labor, as I already hinted.
The only places when you can still find slaves are either dirt poor, overpopulated countries or else some industries in which competition is strictly regulated and hence, no one has to be afraid of a competitor using free labor instead of slave labor: I’m talking about prostitution. Girls are still treated as slaves because there’s no such thing as ”free entry” into the industry, ensuring high profits for those already in, who’re shielded form competing with far more ‘efficient’ labor form “freely employed” personnel.
So, feudalism arose (i.e. slavery was boosted) because the capital stock of dwindled, mandating a conversion of labor to capital.
The answer is, as usual, very complicated but I think the main causes were Germanic culture and the need of the hour.
The Germanic people who took over Europe when the Roman Empire started to disintegrate had a peculiar organization. Sure, each had a king or paramount chief, by strength of arms or right of blood, but he needed to be backed up by the heads of the greatest families giving him their oath of allegiance. These great chiefs in turn received the allegiance of the heads of lesser noble clans and so on. This was very clear in process used by the early Byzantine Empire to recruit Buccellarii, or foreign mercenaries: a well known warlord or general gave his personal oath of allegiance to the Emperor to serve him under certain conditions. In turn the various nobles which flocked to his banner gave their oaths to serve their own warlord as a “lieutenant general” of the Emperor. In turn the Emperor gave his barbarian “chief ally” the so-called annona foederatica, payment in coin, land or nature, and he distributed it among his troops according to the oath of service. The Byzantine historians assure us this was a perfect mirror of how the Germanic society worked.
Germanic reigns were very fractured, they had none of the central administration of the Romans: a king could be respected for his wisdom and courage or feared because of his cruelty but he was usually a world away and it took him weeks to send out orders and months to assembly an army. What he usually had available at any time was a small band of highly experienced professional warriors, bound by personal oath: while fearful for their skill and equipment their numbers were always much limited by the lack of resources, the “bane” of all Middle Ages rulers up to the Angevin kings of England. The nearest figure of authority was always the earl or the bishop, according to the various treaties between the kingdom and the Church and the personalities involved. You could try petition the king or the Pope but it took months to get a reply, if your message arrived in the first place, and the reply was often “must assembly an army, will be there in three months if God helps me”. Not exactly what you want to hear when Moorish cavalry are swarming all over the place.
Charlemagne tried to rebuild the old Roman Empire. In this he was much aided by his own personality and the patent lack of strength of his neighbors (not to mention the downright betrayal of their king by a good part of the Lombard nobility) . However he was still bound by the rules of the time: his armies took months to assemble and feeding them in field stretched the resources of the Empire to its limits. He could not afford the large standing army he had always wanted. When he died it was only a matter of time before the Frankish Empire, deprived of his centralizing personality, disintegrated. The invaders which pounded at the gates of Europe, particularly the Magyars and the Norsemen, helped speed up the process no end. Again the defense of the land fell on the shoulders of the earls and bishops: the king could assemble a large relief army and march to war but by the time he got there the swift-moving invaders were already gone. When the Norsemen and the Magyars were accepted in the Christian commonwealth the seeds of feudalism had already sprouted.
Rome had turned small farmers into tenant farmers (coloni) by gradually replacing small independent farms with latifundia (which were to be cultivated by slaves, but there was soon a shortage of those), then it with an Imperial decree turned tenant farmers into serfs by tying them to the land (preventing them from leaving for a better landlord). Serfdom was totally a creation of the alliance between the powerful landlord class and the empire.
See pages 137-139 of the preview: http://books.google.com/books?id=9il6P3TPj-AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The idea of bankruptcy must have an argument therefore. I wonder what it is. I understand how generations after would not be obligated to a debt (they did not partake in the transaction), and bankruptcy puts some of the blame on the risk taker (lender) instead of full blame on the borrower as serfdom seems to recognize. The idea of bankruptcy seems to be a revolutionary concept.