This wasn\u2019t always the case. In fact there are three distinctive historiographical traditions within which feudalism has played a major role \u2013 or, put differently, three slightly different answers to the question: \u2018What was feudalism?\u2019 The first, and the oldest, is a legal tradition, stretching back to the French philosopher Montesquieu (d1755). This thinks of feudalism as a post-Roman legal system, based on the fief (Latin: feodum<\/em>). A fief was typically a landed estate which was granted by a lord to someone, sometimes called a vassal, in exchange for a promise of loyalty, sometimes termed homage. From the later Middle Ages, lawyers piled elaboration after elaboration on this basic relationship, exploring all the implications in great technical detail. Could a vassal sell their fief to a third party? Was a fief hereditary? What could a lord reasonably ask their vassal to do? Did vassals have obligations to their lord\u2019s lord? And so on. Many of these questions were first aired systematically in a work known as the Libri Feudorum <\/em>(\u2018Books of Fiefs\u2019), a mid 12th-century legal compilation made in northern Italy.<\/p>\n From this original concept of feudalism, historians developed two other approaches. The first to emerge was a Marxist understanding. Here feudalism refers not so much to the legal technicalities of fiefs and vassalage, but to the economic circumstances which underpinned them. Feudalism in this tradition became a label for an economy where most work was done not by enslaved people (as Karl Marx<\/a> imagined had been the case in the ancient world), nor by wage labourers (as is the case in industrialised societies), but by tenant farmers. These tenants, or peasants, were constrained by various extra-economic ties to their landlords, but retained a great deal of autonomy in how they organised their labour within a family structure. By this definition, many parts of the world for much of recorded history could be defined as feudal, not just medieval Europe.<\/p>\n The second variant is most often associated with the great French historian and Second World War resistance fighter, Marc Bloch (d1944), who wrote a celebrated book called Feudal Society<\/em> (La Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 F\u00e9odale<\/em>) in 1939. For Bloch, feudalism referred neither to a legal system nor to a way of organising economic production, but was rather a convenient label for a particular kind of society: one characterised by a militarised elite, an absence of wage labour, a lack of salaried officials, the fragmentation of authority, and the rise of private justice, amongst other features. For Bloch, this kind of society gradually developed in Europe after the fall of the Carolingian Empire c900, and ended with the rise of administrative states in the early modern period. But as an ideal type, it could also be applied to a wide range of times and places, with Bloch himself suggesting \u2018medieval\u2019 Japan.<\/p>\n All three of these approaches to feudalism are linked, and they often overlap in practice. And though historians undoubtedly talk about feudalism less than they used to, all three are still around in one form or another in scholarly work (for instance, Chris Wickham has recently published an article on feudalism<\/a> as an economic system in the journal Past and Present<\/em>). In short, there is more than one understanding of feudalism in historiographical circulation. This can create confusion if people aren\u2019t being clear what they are talking about. For instance, it is sometimes argued that the Norman Conquest brought feudalism to England in 1066: but is this an argument about the legal system, the economy, or society in general?<\/p>\n![\"""\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2022\/03\/GettyImages-932821830-44e93fe-e1647945532164.jpg?quality=90&resize=533%2C413"\" "\\"\"\"\\"\/")
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