Feudalism pyramid chart9/11/2023 ![]() Once you get into villages, towns, and cities the idea of it falls apart completely. The problem is that it really only resembled life in England and France, and even in those countries it was very loose.Īlso, what about people living in cities? If feudalism is supposed to so strict, then what city peasant is going to be able to grow food and provide labor to pass up the pyramid? What about merchants, and traders?įeudalism as a strict social structure only works when you look at rural communities. In this book, Barthelemy challenged the notion of Feudalism being as strict and rigid, as well as the idea that Europe somehow underwent this major transformation around the year 1000CE.Īnother problem is that Whitaker described a very strict system which was applied to all of Europe. One of the more notable works on this topic is Dominique Barthelemy’s The Serf, the Knight, and the Historian. Recent scholarship has been challenging these ideas, however. One of my favorite books from Grad School. These two books pushed this new idea into academia, which quickly caught on and never went away. In fact, the concept of a feudal society wasn’t even around until 1736, when Baronia Anglica was published 9 years after the death of Thomas Madox, its author. The word “feudalism” wasn’t invented until 1771 when Whitaker wrote The History of Manchester, where he also described that pyramid structure. It has generally been accepted as fact, and made its way into tons of modern media. You see, for more than two and a half centuries historians have described the middle ages of Europe as being “feudal,” meaning they functioned under feudalism. Why should feudalism be different? Feudalism’s Flawsīefore we go much further, we need to get one thing clear: Feudalism definitely did not exist. There’s not a lot to it.īut that’s actually a big problem - social structures are usually anything but simple. In the year 1000CE, long after Charlemagne’s death, these basic principals transformed into feudalism. He then came up with the basics of how to spread authority around. The idea is that Charlemagne united a lot of people’s under one banner, and needed to create some way of distributing authority. Which titles were higher or lower varies from country to country, and across different periods of time. ![]() Next would be high ranking clergy and royal officials, then the lesser royals whose titles might include Duke and Duchess, Lord and Lady, Count and Countess, etc. While the titles involved may differ, you would expect to see the King and Queen at the top of the pyramid. ![]() Land ownership and political authority were passed down the pyramid. Resources and are passed up the pyramid in the form of taxes, physical labor, and military service. When we think of Feudalism today, we imagine a sort of pyramid scheme with the king at the top and the peasant at the bottom. I use this image to help explain to my younger students how Feudalism “worked.”
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