Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 145

This volume consists of eleven essays based on conference papers, with an introduction. The conference, held in 2006, aimed to review early medieval aristocratic society in a comparative light, and in particular to consider the revisionist views of feudalism advanced by Susan Reynolds in a book published twelve years earlier, on which she has contributed a reflective essay. Some of the other essays discuss the institutions and social bonds found in the traditional heartland of feudalism, northern France and the Empire, but seven of them deal with the periphery: Denmark, England, the south of France, Hungary, Norway, Romania and Spain. They range over the centuries between the eighth and the thirteenth, with a tendency to congregate around the year 1000. Their approaches and conclusions differ, but most of them are in tune with Reynolds’s belief that the concepts of fiefs and vassals are not the most useful tools for analysing early medieval society. She was questioning the view of Ganshof that the key relationship among the aristocracy between the Loire and the Rhine was the performance of service in exchange for grants of land. The authors find land leased for cash rather than service, and various types of property which cannot be called tenancies at all. The terms used for conditional grants include the widespread ‘benefice’, and many local words, such as the Norwegian veitsla. Subordinates were described as ‘men’ or ‘faithful men’ more often than vassals. There were many forms of association and bonds between people, other than those based on the tenure of land in exchange for service, such as kinship, friendship and clientage. Authors find that the chronology of social development varies across the continent. Sometimes there was a period of ‘classical feudalism’, in France between 980 and 1060 according to Barthélemy, but it was not a defining or enduring feature of medieval society. Popa-Gorjano ends his contribution on Romania with sentiments that serve as a conclusion for the whole book: ‘the term [feudalism] is a hindrance rather than an aid to the historian’s work’.

The subject under discussion is potentially relevant to historians of agriculture and the countryside, because lordship over land and the tenure of land lie at the root of the aristocratic world of vassals, clients and faithful men which is the main concern of this book. But almost nothing is said about the means by which the possession of land was used to generate wealth. The existence of the peasantry is sometimes hinted at when an author explains that the Marxist concept of feudalism as a mode of production is not the concern of this book. The contribution on Denmark by Gelting is an honourable exception to the omission of the lower ranks. We do not need to be Marxists to understand that societies functioned as a whole, and the inferior 80 per cent turned land held by whatever tenure, or by none, into a productive asset.

Readers should feel grateful to a publisher prepared to devote resources to a book catering for a minority interest, and to the editors who were ready to give their time to making a collection of essays available. Their work is especially commendable when the essays were prepared for publication in English and French, which are not the native languages of the editors, yet the style of the book is fluent and readable. However, potential readers who are being asked to pay £80 for a relatively slim volume ought to be provided with information about the contributors, a conclusion, a bibliography and an index (or at least some of these). The introduction consists mainly of a summary of the papers, and should have aimed higher, either by framing the subject more thoroughly in the historiography, or by advancing some alternative to the Ganshof model.