Lecture
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(predominantly Germanic and Celtic) that occupied the territory of Western Europe in the course of the "Great Migration of Peoples." It should be noted that feudal orders also took shape in those territories of Europe that experienced no strong (or indeed no) Roman influence at all — in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe. The peoples inhabiting this territory passed to feudalism directly from early-class societies, bypassing the Asiatic or ancient mode of production. Regardless of the particulars of the genesis of feudalism — whether it arose on the basis of a synthesis of early-class and late-ancient orders, or was based entirely on the development of the internal contradictions of early-class society — this transition constituted a social revolution. It consisted in the violent destruction of the previous social order — ancient and/or early-class — and the establishment of the new, feudal mode of production. The components of this transition were, first, the establishment of a new form of community based on private family farming and family land tenure (allod); second, the development of various forms of personal and land-based dependency of the peasantry, with the long-term preservation of a significant stratum of free community members; third, the development of conditional private landholding, evolving from conditional tenure "for service" (benefice) to hereditary, though still conditionally service-based, landholding (fief, feudum); and fourth, the formation of a system of vassalage and seigneurial immunity.
Allod — the hereditary plot of a peasant-community member, possessing the property of alienability — a transition from conditional tenure sanctioned by the community to conditional tenure sanctioned by private individuals or the church.
Benefice — the grant of land (originally by royal authority, and later also by great territorial magnates) into personal conditional tenure (usually on condition of military or military-administrative service).
Fief, feudum — hereditary tenure of a plot of land on condition of performing military or military-administrative service.
Vassalage — a system of relations within the ruling class (the feudal lords), presupposing the vassal's performance of service to his suzerain in exchange for the latter's protection.
The social structure of the early feudal states was highly varied. It was made up of free (fully entitled) community members belonging to the ethnic core of the state, semi-free (not fully entitled community members) — usually inhabitants of conquered territories — as well as slaves and persons found in various, initially quite diverse, forms of personal and land-based dependency. In the course of the formation of feudal relations, there occurs an erosion of the ownership right of community members to their plots, which are held in private tenure (conditional private property). It should be noted that this process took several centuries, for the right of the families making up the community to their land plot was guaranteed by the community and was regarded as inalienable. Nevertheless, gradually (under the influence both of the interests of the family's independent, private economic activity and of the interests of the secular and church nobility, which sought to lay hold of communal lands) the plot came to be capable of alienation — as a pledge, a gift, and so on. However, this possibility did not mean the transformation of the plot into full private property or a transition to free circulation of land plots. The peasant-community member remained as before bound to his plot, although his rights could, owing to the circumstances noted, be restricted to one degree or another.
Precisely because the property of the peasant family now took the form of an allod — that is, a private, alienable land plot — economic losses from various state obligations (tax, military, judicial), from debt transactions, and from military conflicts led to a threat of loss of part of the community member's ownership rights to the allod. Also widespread in the course of military conflicts was the outright predatory seizure of peasants and their reduction to slavery or serfdom. However, in most cases these processes did not take the form of dispossessing the peasantry of their land (as in antiquity), but led to the transformation of the allod into a conditional tenure, burdened with obligations in favor of its new nominal owner — the feudal lord. The transfer of part of the ownership rights to a peasant's plot to the feudal lord took place through the formation of relations of personal dependency of the peasant on his seigneur.¹ Thus, under feudalism the real economic relations of landholding and land use take the form of personal dependency. This dependency could take quite diverse forms, up to and including serfdom (which, though rare in early feudalism, was already emerging, alongside the survival of vestiges of slavery). It was precisely the struggle against the formation of relations of personal dependency, for the preservation of the peasant's personal freedom, that constituted the principal form of social conflict between peasants and the ruling estate in the early feudal era.
1 See: Gurevich, A. The Beginnings of Feudalism in Europe // A. Ya. Gurevich, Selected Works in 2 vols., vol. 1, Moscow; St. Petersburg: TsGNII INION RAN, 1999. Pp. 217–222.
The peasant-community member's personal dependency on the seigneur at the same time implies the precondition for the formation of land-based dependency as well. And yet "attachment to the land" rarely took extreme forms in Western Europe. In the early feudal era, seigneurs were more interested in increasing the number of their subjects than in the size of the rent obtained from the land. It was precisely the number of subjects that above all determined the social status of the new, feudal estate. The ranks of this estate were usually joined by the military-service nobility, who turned into large landowners, as well as by the royal power and the church (the latter widely made use of the right of gift and testamentary bequest of land in its favor). The forms of personal and land-based dependency in the period of early feudalism were quite diverse. However, the general tendency consisted in the gradual, very slow reduction of these diverse forms of dependency to a single form of serfdom, and in the formation, out of the numerous categories of dependent and semi-dependent peasantry (including those inherited from ancient and early-class orders — slaves and coloni), of a single stratum of serfs (English villeins, French serfs, Russian kholops, etc.). Such a reduction of the various forms of dependency to a single one occurred only later, in the era of classical feudalism, and was far from being fully completed everywhere.
In legal terms, feudal states are characterized by a tendency, developed in the course of the mass enserfment of the peasantry, to regard serfs as slaves from the standpoint of the norms of Roman law. Nevertheless, in their actual economic position (ownership of movable and immovable property, of a land plot, the conclusion of transactions in their own name, the existence of a family) and in a whole series of elements of their legal relations (the separation, in legal documents, of the peasant plot from the seigneur's demesne, the legalization of family and marital relations, etc.), serfs clearly differed from ancient slaves. The military-service nobility in the early feudal kingdoms consolidated around the royal power through the development of relations of vassalage.
The vassal contract presupposed mutual obligations of vassal and suzerain. The real content of this contract was the vassal's performance of military and administrative service in favor of the suzerain in exchange for the latter's protection. Such a system of relations already contained in embryo an element of recognition and guarantee of the personal rights of representatives of the ruling estate (something absent in Asiatic despotism, and which in ancient society had only a shaky and partial legal formalization, and only with respect to certain categories of the ruling class — for example, Roman senators). Fairly quickly this system of personal relations within the feudal class merged with the relations arising from various property grants (benefices), and the beneficiary (the recipient of a benefice) came to act simultaneously as a vassal, while the grantor acted as suzerain.
Such grants could be of a diverse property character, consisting in the grant of rights to collect revenue from some territory, or in the right to engage in some revenue-producing activity. However, since the main source of income in that historical period was land, land grants became the principal form of grant.¹ The system of vassalage gradually acquired a hierarchical structure, and from a two-tiered one (king — military-service nobility) it often acquired a multi-tiered character, as the strongest representatives of the nobility, while being vassals of the king, themselves began to accept vassal oaths and distribute grants of their own. There arises a fragmentation of ownership rights over a given territory among representatives of the various levels of the vassal hierarchy. Land grants in the form of benefices themselves served as an instrument of feudalization, since the free community members living on the granted lands
1 See: Gurevich, A. The Beginnings of Feudalism in Europe // A. Ya. Gurevich, Selected Works in 2 vols., vol. 1, Moscow; St. Petersburg: TsGNII INION RAN, 1999. Pp. 222–224.
became burdened with state obligations in favor of the beneficiary. These obligations, together with private debt relations, onerous tenancy, and the search for personal patronage and protection from powerful representatives of the military-service nobility, served as levers for turning the peasant's family-communal ownership of his plot into a conditional tenure burdened with obligations in favor of the feudal lord. Since the beneficiary economically fully appropriated the results of the community members' surplus labor (with the exception of taxes in favor of the church), and also acquired the right to exercise the full range of administrative and judicial functions on the territory of the benefice (seigneurial immunity), the consolidation of this economic and administrative independence in property relations was inevitable as well. Over time the benefice turns from a personal into a hereditary tenure (fief, feudum, patrimonial estate). It is worth noting that a similar transformation was also undergone by non-landed personal grants. A fief, for example, could be granted in the form of the office of municipal executioner or the right to conduct mining operations.¹ Seigneurial immunity — the right to exercise the full range of administrative and judicial functions on the territory [of the benefice]. However, this holding still rested on the sanction of the royal power or another suzerain, and was burdened with personal obligations of service in favor of the latter. And here, as in the relations between peasant and seigneur, land relations appear in the form of personal ones. The early feudal state system is characterized by the existence of a highly centralized royal power, resting both on a significant mass of
1 See: Gurevich, A. The Beginnings of Feudalism in Europe. Pp. 222–224. free community members and on the military-service nobility, which is dependent on the king. The enserfment of community members and the acquisition by the military-service nobility of economic and administrative independence (the transformation of personal land grants into hereditary ones, seigneurial immunity) created the preconditions for the decentralization of the state (feudal fragmentation). Certain features of early feudal society make it akin to the Asiatic one — strong centralized state power, the king as supreme owner of the land, peasant-community members as the numerically predominant social group, private land use by the ruling class in the form of personal grants for the performance of military-administrative functions. However, the fundamental differences lie in the different type of community (and accordingly, the different type of land ownership — Asiatic despotism knows nothing like the allod) on which the early feudal state and Asiatic despotism (which inherited its communal structure from the archaic formation) rest, and in the possibility, in Europe, of economically effective conduct of separate communal and demesne economy independent of state-wide economic functions. This predetermines the rapid transformation, in early feudal society, of features resembling those of Asiatic despotism, to the point of their almost complete disappearance. Peculiarities of the genesis of feudalism on the basis of early-class societies. In territories where the process of feudalization took place without a synthesis with the preceding relations of the ancient (or Asiatic) mode of production, it was characterized by a number of peculiarities.
Above all, it should be noted that this path of the emergence of feudalism was determined by objective (natural-climatic) constraints on the development of the productive forces, which hindered the effective production of surplus product on the basis of ancient or Asiatic relations of production. Only the systematic production and improvement of iron tools, and the accumulation of skills in agriculture and animal husbandry in the forest belt of the temperate zone (outside the subtropics and the regions adjoining them), made possible the systematic production of surplus product and the formation of class society. This production developed on the basis of the Germanic or Slavic type of community, which presupposed a high degree of private-economic separateness of production on the family plot. In addition, in these territories, owing to the high degree of territorial separateness of both family farms and communities (which hindered the effective defense of territory by an army consisting only of a popular militia), the military-service nobility (professional retainers and their leaders — princes) acquired an especially high social status, already rapidly displacing other strata of the tribal nobility under conditions of early-class society. Therefore the formation of class society here proceeded directly along the feudal type, bypassing the ancient and the Asiatic. However, this process in these territories was quite drawn out in time and was characterized by the long-term preservation of significant elements of early-class socio-economic relations (a high proportion of free community members, the preservation of archaic features of communal landholding, the presence of patriarchal slavery, the weakness of large landholding, a preponderance of state elements over private-patrimonial ones in landed property). Whereas on post-ancient territory the process of the formation of feudalism was characterized by a more or less synchronous development of the aforementioned aspects of feudalization, in the genesis of feudalism out of early-class societies the elements of this process turned out to be separated in time and characterized by a prolonged and noticeable hypertrophy of one or another of them.
In a number of societies (the north and east of Eurasia — Norway, Iceland, Northern Rus, Siberia, with the exception of part of its southern reaches) objective constraints on the development of the productive forces long prevented the formation of the feudal mode of production, which had already emerged or developed among their neighbors, or it arose only as a mode of production within an early-class society. Peculiarities of Eastern feudalism. The peculiarities of Eastern feudalism are determined by the fact that it arises on the basis of a transition not from the ancient but from the Asiatic mode of production, or from early-class societies, including those of the nomadic type. This predetermined the slow pace of feudalization, either owing to the slow pace of the disintegration of the Asiatic community, or owing to the slow and fragmentary formation of the preconditions for class society among nomadic peoples (Arabs, Mongols, a number of Turkic tribes).
The development of Eastern feudalism is characterized by:
• the preservation of a significant role for state-communal landed property and the collective exploitation of the communal peasantry by the ruling class through the collection of rent-tax, corresponding to which is the length of time required for the formation of private serfdom of the peasants;
• the formation of private serfdom of the peasants without this transition being mediated by the formation of alienable family-communal ownership of the peasants' plots, but instead through the direct evolution of state dependency into private dependency;
• a protracted struggle between state-communal and private feudal landholding, with a slow and inconsistent tendency toward the predominance of the latter;
• the protracted nature of the process of consolidating the hereditary character of private landholding, and the long existence of personal grants for service (of the type of the West European benefices, the Russian pomestie, or the Indian iqta); • the weak development of vassal relations and the great importance of service relations among the ruling class, and the corresponding limitation on the establishment of the personal rights of the ruling estate; • the absence of the phenomenon of free cities (and of corporate bodies of the free population — guilds, gilds, universities). The persistence over time of elements of the Asiatic mode of production in Eastern feudalism is ultimately determined by the preservation, in the structure of the productive forces, of those features which had in their time predetermined the formation of the Asiatic mode of production itself — the dependency of agricultural production on state patronage (whether in the form of systematic military defense or of the organization of large-scale irrigation works). In social relations this corresponds to the establishment of the unity of scattered communities through the sacralized person of the sovereign. The durable historical tradition, formed in the Asiatic despotisms, of the all-pervading role of the centralized state, is also of substantial importance.
The slowness of the transition from the Asiatic mode of production to the feudal one does not at all mean that this transition did not have the character of a social revolution. The qualitative leap from one mode of production to another here took the form of an entire series of social upheavals (external conquests, dynastic coups, the disintegration and, conversely, the merging of states, peasant revolts, and so on), including regressive movements (sometimes repeated ones). The synthesis of feudal relations and relations of the Asiatic mode of production is a characteristic feature not only of "Eastern feudalism," but of a number of other societies as well — Byzantium, Ancient Rus'. In Ancient Rus', features of the Asiatic mode of production owe their existence more to geographical and superstructural factors (the latter, however, are rooted in certain peculiarities of economic life). This is the need for significant state centralization for the defense of scattered communities colonizing vast forest and forest-steppe expanses under conditions of a constant military threat from the nomadic peoples of the steppe. In connection with this stands the hypertrophied role of the military-service estate, whose relations with the sovereign (prince, tsar) were characterized not so much by the principles of vassalage as by the principles of state service, which found reflection in the significant and prolonged spread of the pomestie alongside the votchina. The pomestie (in Rus') — a land grant to a nobleman by place of service (hence the name). It was of a personal character, could not be sold, passed on by inheritance, and so on, which brought it close to the West European benefice. Only in the 17th century did the difference between pomestie and votchina landholding begin to blur, and later disappear entirely.
The votchina (in Rus') — a hereditary land grant on condition of service. The initial period of feudalism in Rus' was characterized by the fairly rapid formation of hereditary landholding (votchina) on the basis of service tenure, to a certain extent analogous to the West European fief. On this basis, feudal fragmentation formed in Rus' even before the wide spread of personal conditional tenure (pomestie). Only later, after the Mongol conquest and the overcoming of feudal fragmentation on the extra-economic basis of the struggle against the Tatar-Mongol yoke, did the development of Rus' along the path of external expansion (colonization) cause a slowdown in the process of feudalization. This colonization was characterized by an enhanced role for state landed property and pomestie landholding, by the long persistence of communal land use and a free peasantry, and subsequently led to the growth of harsh forms of personal (serf) dependency, approaching a semi-slave condition, aimed at preventing peasants from fleeing to the free borderlands. Only in the 16th–17th centuries, after the merging of the status of votchina and pomestie landholding, did hereditary private landholding become dominant. So-called nomadic feudalism has peculiarities arising from the character of the productive activity of nomadic pastoral peoples. Among nomads there exists private (family) ownership of herds and communal ownership of pasture lands and water sources.
The basis for the formation of feudal relations among nomadic peoples is property differentiation, expressed in the varying amounts of livestock held in family ownership, and the actual usurpation by the tribal aristocracy of the right to control pastures and water sources. Patriarchal slavery, and at times the slave trade, was fairly widespread among nomadic peoples. States formed on the basis of "nomadic feudalism" often conquered vast agricultural regions (the empire of Genghis Khan, the empire of Timur, the state of the Seljuk Turks). Most often, however, given the more backward character of socio-economic relations among nomadic peoples compared with the conquered agricultural population, such "nomadic empires" fell apart. The Ottoman Turkish empire proved more stable precisely because the ruling people shifted to a settled way of life. "Nomadic feudalism" has not yet been sufficiently studied. Questions remain disputed regarding the comparative role of ownership of livestock versus pastures, the existence and nature of serf dependency in nomadic societies, and the possibility of nomadic societies moving beyond early feudalism. It is likely that a purely nomadic basis can give rise only to early class societies and, at best, early feudal societies. Their further development is inevitably tied to the possibility of a transition to a settled way of life.
Часть 1 Chapter 6. The Economic Social Formation: The Asiatic, Ancient, and Feudal Modes of Production
Часть 2 - Chapter 6. The Economic Social Formation: The Asiatic, Ancient,
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