The Crisis of European Feudalism

The view that late medieval feudalism experienced a general social crisis appears to date from Marc Bloch's French Rural History, published in 1931. Since the 1950s, economic historians have generally identified the fourteenth century as a period of feudal crisis. Indeed, most would accept the view of Michael Postan that western Europe underwent an "agricultural crisis of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."^[3] It is further agreed that this sustained crisis was preceded by a prolonged expansion of the feudal mode of production.

The basic historical sequence seems clear enough. After the year 800, European feudalism underwent a slow, sometimes sporadic, but nevertheless steady growth. In the middle of the eleventh century a sharp and qualitatively new upswing began. Bloch quite accurately described this period as the beginning of the "second feudal age."^[4] At the heart of this process of growth was horizontal expansion—the reclamation of previously uncultivated land. The period from 1150 to 1240 in particular saw a major expansion of ancient villages and the creation of new ones. Reclamation appears to have begun as a growing population pressed against the available cultivated land. This movement of reclamation and colonization began to exhaust itself in the middle of the thirteenth century. Reclamation encouraged further population growth and extended onto increasingly marginal lands. The result was a classic case of diminishing returns: as decreasingly fertile land was brought under cultivation, productivity and per capita yields fell.^[5] Eventually, the returns on the investment involved in reclamation could no longer be justified. Nonetheless, population continued to rise for a considerable period after declining productivity had put an end to reclamation. As a result, the land-

labour ratio fell as productivity slumped. The inevitable result was a crisis of subsistence.

The fourteenth century experienced a catastrophic decline in the level of the European population. Famines were legion throughout the century. Moreover, an extended period of substandard diet probably increased the susceptibility of the population to contagious disease. Certainly the dimensions of the Black Death must have been influenced by the deterioration of dietary standards. So disastrous was the rise in mortality that the population of Europe appears to have been halved between 1315 and 1380. Moreover, this was a crisis which persisted. The evidence suggests that the European economy experienced two full centuries of stagnation and decline. Stagnation set in during the middle of the thirteenth century. The crisis and decline began in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. From then on, most of Europe experienced a downward spiral until the middle of the fifteenth century. In other words, during the period from 1240 to 1440 European feudalism knew little other than stagnation and decline; and for over a century (from 1320 to 1440) it underwent a major contraction.^[6] Furthermore, so deep-rooted was this crisis of late medieval feudalism that it carried over in much of Europe into the seventeenth century (in some cases following a half century or so of recovery in the sixteenth century).

The feudal mode of production contained no self-correcting mechanisms for resolving this crisis because of the surplus-extractive relations which characterize feudalism. Feudal lords, as Robert Brenner has pointed out, did not have the option of increasing their incomes through capital investments that would raise the productivity of peasant labour and enable peasants to produce more output during their surplus labour time. Since feudal peasants possessed their own means of production, their economic reproduction was in a sense independent of the surplus-extractive demands of the lords. The production of a surplus product required extraeconomic compulsion over a labour process which the lords did not control or direct. To invest in improving the technical basis of this labour process would have been an extremely risky undertaking. Furthermore, because neither lords nor peasants depended upon access to the market for their subsistence (although they might well enter into market transactions by choice) they were under no direct economic pressure to produce competitively. As a result, the drive to innovate in order to

raise productivity was absent as a general dynamic of feudal economy; the market did not impose this necessity upon peasants or lords, and the organization of the labour process was a disincentive to innovative investments by the lords.^[7]

The pressure on seigneurial incomes created by crisis did not therefore lead to investment and development. On the contrary, the efforts of lords to raise their depressed incomes further exacerbated the crisis. They tried to increase their incomes by squeezing the living standards of their peasants, primarily through increased rents or labour services. Continual pressure from the lords tended, however, to prevent the peasants from accumulating a surplus, that is, an amount above their own subsistence needs which would be adequate to replenish the soil and maintain or improve its fertility. The response of lords to crisis thus led to a decline in the productive powers of the most basic means of production in the feudal economy—the land.

Under such circumstances the main avenue by which feudal lords could increase their incomes was distributional struggles. Since the feudal mode of production lacked a developmental dynamism of the sort which characterizes capitalism, lords did not generally have the option of raising their incomes by investments designed to increase the total social output. If a lord were to increase his distributive share, he had to do so at the expense of his peasants or of other lords (the latter redistribution of income requiring war). Crisis, which heightened the downward pressure on incomes, thus tended to unleash bitter class and intraclass struggles. As we shall see, it was the specific, historic outcome of those struggles which shaped the general direction of social and economic development in England and France. In England, the ability of a section of the peasantry to improve its situation was critical to the development of agrarian capitalism and in the long term to self-sustaining economic growth. In France, by contrast, the ability of the monarchy to build an absolutist state as the last line of defence of noble power imposed a system of surplus extraction which made sustained economic recovery virtually impossible.