to move off the estate their forebears had worked.2 The laborers who were the key to economic production lived a constrained existence, in semibond-age to a landowner. Most remained close to home; 80 percent of Europe’s population never went more than twenty miles from their place of birth.3
Above them, the nobility had their own form of subordination. The most powerful nobles received homage from lesser nobles, who became their vassals and were invested with a fief (feodum), a piece of land, which over time became hereditary. The vassal could lease parts of the fief to his dependents, both noble and common. A vassal pledged allegiance to his lord and usually was obligated to provide military service.4 Loyalty to one’s immediate lord was the central organizing principle of society. “I will love what thou lovest; I will hate what thou hatest,” ran an Anglo-Saxon oath of commendation.5
Feudalism favored inheritors of the largest estates and the greatest nobles, who constructed castles to enhance and display their power. The system provided a measure of order and security in the chaos left behind by the breakdown of imperial or royal administration. For the most part, people were expected to stay in their hereditary station of life. No matter how capable an individual might be, the stigma of low birth was difficult if not impossible to shake off.
The prevailing model of society consisted of three kinds of people: “those who prayed, those who fought and those who labored”6 As monarchies grew stronger, John of Salisbury, writing in 1180, portrayed an ideal political order in this organic image: “The King corresponds to the head, the clergy to heart and soul, the nobility to arms, the peasants to the feet.”7
For the peasants who labored in the fields, and even for the warrior nobility, literacy was considered unnecessary, and it had become mostly a monopoly of the clergy. The Catholic Church had considerable control over what was deemed correct thinking on religious and moral questions, and it claimed a universal authority—although its reach into the homes of the masses was limited, and many pagan and folk beliefs persisted through the centuries. Still, the church’s teachings helped maintain the hierarchical order of feudal society.
In medieval Christian doctrine, the world we grasp with our senses is ephemeral, while the spiritual world is more real, and union with God is the supreme end. St. Augustine’s view of the secular world as inherently hostile to the City of God took hold widely; man’s relationship to God was all-important. Between the sixth and tenth centuries, 26,000 lives of saints were written, but little new in the way of historical or scientific works. Everything—philosophy, painting, literature, politics—was built around a spiritual ideal, and the great buildings of the age represented the “Bible in stone.”8 The emphasis on a future life over the present world diminished the passionate commitment to the res publica and family that had shaped classical civilization. Commerce was regarded as essentially immoral, and wealth derived primarily from inherited agricultural estates worked by serfs.9
Christianity advanced a doctrine of spiritual equality among all people, but the conditions of life in this world were seen as much less important than the life to come. By urging the lower classes to accept their place in this world in exchange for the promise of something better in the hereafter, the church may have been simply reflecting the common understanding of earthly reality, and religious organizations were the most likely source of succor, both material and spiritual, for the ubiquitous poor. But while high-ranking clerics often enjoyed their comfortable status as essentially a branch of the aristocracy, the medieval church’s teaching did not encourage the hope of general uplift for the masses.
Making the Case for Feudalism
In the medieval worldview, society was held together by bonds of mutual obligation. At the top, there were bonds within the clergy and the nobility, and bonds between the two, in a kind of mutual aid society. Then there were the obligations of common people to their superiors. Finally, the church provided a floor, a kind of early welfare state for the poor.10 Individualism was rejected in favor of the nobler concept of an interdependent commonwealth in a spiritually unified Christendom, but with strongly local social structures and loyalties. Even today, some regard this model of society as superior to the liberal capitalist form.11
The ideal of an interdependent, ordered society gained new currency in the nineteenth century, partly as a reaction to the social upheaval and physical pollution of the early industrial revolution. Many in the Romantic movement saw much to admire in medieval civilization, as shown in the writings of John Keats, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Anthony Trollope, and later in Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Stefan George, and Thomas Mann. These writers attacked what they saw as the “bourgeois philistinism and social leveling” inherent in capitalist societies. Many of them saw “stupidity” in the middle class, and believed that artists and writers could best address the needs of the proletariat.12
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels conceded that the medieval guilds and localized markets as well as custom had provided artisans and peasants with a modicum of security, which had largely been lost under the pressure of the capitalist market system.13 Engels even suggested that the Saxon serf in the twelfth century was no worse off than the workers of his own time, who could no longer count on custom and tradition to protect them.14
Some enlightened capitalists and aristocrats in the mid-nineteenth century supported steps to offer what Marx called a “proletarian alms bag” to keep the masses from both destitution and rebellion.15 Similarly, some progressively inclined billionaires today have embraced the ideas of guaranteed minimum income, housing subsidies, and other transfer payments to keep the potentially restive masses from destitution or rebellion.
In the later nineteenth century, some British conservatives advocated something like a “capitalist feudalism,” where relations between employer and worker would regain the mutuality believed to have existed in pre-industrial times.16 Alternatively, a concept of “feudal socialism” would became known, in less provocative terms, as Tory Democracy.17
In Russia, where a liberal system never truly emerged, romantics like Tolstoy, as well as right-wing Slavophiles and social revolutionaries, rejected the liberal capitalism of the West and instead evoked a return to the mir, a form of community ownership left over from the days of serfdom. “Light and salvation will come from below,” wrote Dostoyevsky. The key to social reform would be the muzhik, the devout, ill-educated, impoverished peasant—not the sophisticated, Europeanized intellectuals and rising capitalists of the big cities.18
Many powerful right-wing movements of the early twentieth century—National Socialism, Fascism, and their imitators elsewhere—also expressed a nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The Italian poet and futurist Gabriele D’Annunzio epoused a “socialist romanticism” that helped lay the foundations of the Fascist corporate state.19 In France, the leaders of Action Française sought to bring about a “counter-Renaissance” and reimpose the hierarchical corporative structure of the ancien régime.20 In England, Fascist sympathizers like Oswald Mosley lamented the passing of “Merrie old England,” swept away by the competitive reality of ethnically mixed modern cities. Even today, some on the European far right see in the Middle Ages an affirmation of traditional Christian values, and find inspiration in the Crusader response to assaults from Islamic aggression.22
Contemporary Neo-medievalism
In ways that few could have expected three decades ago, a reaction against liberal ideals has been gaining force in many countries. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has found inspiration in its czarist past, a time of vigorous imperial expansion. Perhaps more remarkably, the Russian Orthodox Church, which was marginalized and often persecuted by the Soviet authorities, has gained moral authority under Vladimir Putin. The Russian regime has even harked back to the period of Mongol domination as a way of tying the state to Central and East Asia.23
China’s Communist leaders, while officially genuflecting to Maoist ideology, are finding something of value in folk religion and even Confucianism—so reviled by the founders of the People’s Republic. It turns out that old virtues like honesty,