TWO CHEERS FOR FEUDALISM
By Charles W. Moore
© 1998 Charles W. Moore
Tony Blair's British Labour government recently announced plans to terminate the ancient right of hereditary aristocrats to sit and vote in Westminster's upper chamber, and to start "a process of reform to make the House of Lords more democratic and representative."
A bill will be introduced to strip 759 hereditary peers, some of whose titles date back to the Middle Ages, of their Parliamentary entitlement.
Blair declared that it is time to end "feudal domination" of one-half the legislature by one party (half the hereditary Lords are members of the opposition Conservative Party). Presumably he calculates that rhetorical reference to feudalism strengthens his argument in the court of public opinion, and he's probably right. "Feudal" and "medieval" are almost universally understood as expressions of contempt in our culture. Contrarian that I am, I think feudalism is getting a bad rap.
The received and seldom-examined assumption of our time is that society has progressed from alleged tyranny, oppression, and feudal servitude that supposedly characterized the Middle Ages, through a great awakening of humanistic consciousness in the philosophical Enlightenment, to arrive in a brave new world of democratic social justice -- a rose-tinted view somewhat attenuated by contemplation of the manifold horrors "enlightened" societies have unleashed on one another in this century.
Actually, the much-maligned feudal system actually conferred numerous rights on its peasant classes, who were exempt from military conscription, and highly valued by society. In exchange for their work they were granted both freedom and tenured quasi-ownership of their land. Low taxes and generally fair contracts between feudal landlords and peasant farmers arguably resulted in a more equitable division of property than exists in Europe today.
Feudal parishes were typically governed by council assemblies presided over by the local priest assisted by stewards elected to one year terms. It was the Industrial Revolution that transformed free peasants and guildsmen who worked out of their own homes for their own profit in organic local economies, into wage-slaves drudging in factories owned by faceless corporations and living subject to remote, centralized governments -- a state of affairs that persists today.
Feudalism was a complex system of personal, economic, and legal relationships, held together by a consensus that every person had a place in the scheme of things with fixed duties inherited at birth which would be passed on to his descendants. Feudal landlords and their tenants shared a symbiotic relationship bounded my mutual obligations. It was taken for granted that every member of society owed it certain dues, but was in return guaranteed subsistence for himself and his family. Peasants could not be detached from the land they worked, and retained tenure even if the land passed from one lord to another.
While the Middle Ages were a time of sharp contrasts and contradictions, it is arguable that the medieval system of guilds and freehold peasantry better expressed belief in the infinite worth of every human soul than does industrialism and technocracy. Modern capitalism and socialism have widened the social gulf between economic classes, while feudalism gradually transformed slaves (who made up two-thirds to three-quarters of humanity in the pre-Medieval era) into serfs, serfs into free peasants, and peasants into peasant proprietors and guildsmen.
The filthy, pestilence-ridden industrial sweatshops of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries are gone, at least in the West, but wage-slavery remains the economic paradigm for most people. Late 20th Century slavery has taken the insidious form of servitude to material appetites, which keep most people chained to a treadmill of acquisition and debt.
In contrast to the caricature of grinding oppression, poverty, drudgery, disease, famine, and superstition today associated with the Middle Ages, pre-Enlightenment Europe's stable civilization allowed merchants and artisans considerable freedoms of movement and from arbitrary demands for services or taxes. Merchants and tradesmen organized guilds as voluntary commonwealths of mutual help and solidarity. The rule and spirit of the Guild forbade accumulation of excessive wealth by the few. Apprentices were subject to their masters, but earned the right to become masters themselves in turn.
Feudalism was based not on materialistic greed, as modern socialism and capitalism are, but upon the belief that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Individuals’ loyalties were to their families and local communities, to their immediate feudal lords, to higher temporal lords on up through the feudal hierarchy, and ultimately to God. Even monarchs perceived their kingdoms as a tenancy under God, the true Owner. Feudalism had no concept of ownership without responsibility.
So, while I probably still agree with Winston Churchill that "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time," I believe feudalism deserves honourable runner-up status, and that gratuitous attempts to purge its remaining vestiges amount to an exercise in philistine ignorance.
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