RE: Rethinking the transition from feudalism questi on

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:25884] Rethinking the transition from feudalism question

>From the introduction to the newly published "Making a Living in the
Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850-1520" by Christopher Dyer:

>... There is always a tendency to belittle the achievements of the past
and to assume in a patronizing way that medieval people were
primitive and ignorant. For example, the yield of corn in the
fifteenth century was low by modern standards, and indeed had fallen
since the thirteenth century. Does this mean that the people who grew
the crops were stupid and lazy? In fact, if we look at the price of
grain and the consumption of bread, we find that food was cheap and
plentiful. Corn production was adequate for society's needs, and as
it was unnecessary for cultivators to strain themselves to increase
their output, we should not criticize them for their imagined
failings. Recent experience of technological failures, such as the
BSE epidemic and the threat of climate change, has perhaps made us
rather less confident of our superiority, and a little more
appreciative of common sense and skilful management in the middle
ages. Scottish economic history has suffered in particular from
assumptions about that country's backwardness before modern
'improvement'. Scottish agriculture was not very productive, but the
country was thinly populated and not especially prone to famine. In
the thirteenth century the abundant Scottish currency and urban
growth suggest that the country participated in the general European
expansion.<

It should be mentioned that Brenner (a common target of Louis' ire) doesn't "belittle the achievements of the past and to assume in a patronizing way that medieval people were primitive and ignorant..." Rather, he assumes that people were basically "economically rational" and that it was the feudal mode of exploitation that was irrational. The fact that "the yield of corn in the fifteenth century ... had fallen since the thirteenth century" is not used to imply "that the people who grew the crops were stupid and lazy." Rather, the problem was that feudal social relations of production weren't very good at producing a surplus for the feudalists, i.e., at dealing with the widely-recognized Ricardian problem of diminishing returns in agriculture. (Capitalism seems to be able to deal with this problem, but we're now discovering the environmental and health impact...)

>... It is sometimes believed that the crucial decisions were taken by
powerful elites of rulers, aristocrats and merchants. We often find,
however, that when kings or great lords initiated some change, the
results were unplanned and unforeseen. At the beginning of our period
King Alfred ordered the building of a system of forts to keep the
Danes out of his kingdom of Wessex. Many of those forts would become
towns, but it is not certain that the king intended that result. More
often change emerged from the combination of thousands of
uncoordinated actions, involving people at all levels. Formal
descriptions of medieval society imply the subordination of the
masses. Yet even serfs had some use of property, and had some choice
in the management of their holding of land, though they were of
course restrained in many ways. One of the dynamic forces in medieval
society, and the motive force behind many economic changes, was not
dictatorial decisions, but the opposite - the competition and
frictions between different groups, not just between lords and
peasants or merchants and artisans, but also between laymen and
clergy, higher aristocrats and gentry, and subjects and the state,
and between individuals within those various groups. A society that
appears to be governed by rigid laws and customs, in reality allowed
people to take initiatives.<

I believe that Brenner would agree with this: one of the problems he points to with feudalism is that the serfs and other underlings had control over their own tools, so that the feudalists had a hard time getting them to produce. Also, Bloch's magisterial book on feudalism emphasizes the decentralized nature of the system, so that the bit about people being able to take initiatives is quite logical. No-one has described the feudal period as being "totalitarian." (Methinks that this author, like so many others, is over-emphasizing the novelty of his book in order to drum up sales.)

BTW, the author's definitions are also pretty standard.
JD