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German Historical Institute London
Bulletin
Volume XIX, No. 2
November 1997
CONTENTS
Seminars
3
Annual Lecture
4
Review Articles
Competing Projects of 'Bürgertumsforschung'
(Ursula Vogel)
Real-Existing Socialism Through the Looking-Glass
(Richard Bessel)
5
15
Debate
Susan Reynolds responds to [ohannes Fried
30
Book Reviews
Dieter Geuenich and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds), Memoria in
der Gesellsettaft des Mittelalters (Gervase Rosser)
[an Peters (ed.), Konflikt und Kontrolle in Gutsherrschaftsgesellschaften (Thomas Robisheaux)
Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment
in Germany 1600-1987 (Dirk Blasius)
Ingeborg Cleve, Geschmack, Kunst und Konsum. Kulturpolitik als Wirtschaftspolitik in Frankreich und
Württemberg (1805-1845) (Robin Lenman)
Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer
Republik. Sozialgeschichte einer reoolutiondren Bewegung
(Eric D. Weitz)
41
45
52
59
64
cont.
(
DEBATE
Susan Reynolds responds to Johannes Fried
*
The first point I need to make in this debate is that I am honoured by
the amount of attention that Professor Fried has given to my book. A
debate need not produce blood on the floor and I have no wish to shed
Professor Fried's. On some points I think he is right, on some I have
evidently not made myself clear, and on some we interpret the sources
differently. All I ask is that my interpretations should not be condemned out of hand as wilful or the result of determinedly ignoring
other possibilities. In what follows I shall try to explain my arguments
better.
First, I am concerned that Fried should think that I propound any
concept or definition of feudalism of my own. It may be useful for those
who have not read my book to say that it was concerned only with what
in German can be usefully distinguished as Lehnswesen, rather than
with Feudalism us in general- that is, to put it in a rather over-simplified
form, with the feudalism of Mitteis and Ganshof rather than with that
of Marx.l Definitions of Lehnswesen abound and it seems to me pointless to add another, especially since I argue that it is a category created
by historians which does not correspond to what I find in medieval
sources: grants of land (even grants supposed to have happened in the
past) were less central to social relations and values that the word
suggests. When I compare the medieval evidence with what historians
call feudal (in the sense of feudo-vassalic) relations or institutions,
however, I have to use their definitions, whether explicit or implicit, for
the comparison. I looked for evidence of fiefs or vassalage in the early
Middle Ages because they seem to be generally understood as defining
characteristics of Lehnswesen. If - to my surprise - I found little
evidence of them in the sense in which they seem to be generally
understood, it was not because I was in thrall to my definition of
feudalism. The definition is not mine.
*
Susan Reynolds's book, fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted
(1996), was reviewed by Johannes Fried in the Debate section of the May
1997 issue of the Bulletin, Vol.XIX,No. 1, pp. 28-41.
Fried uses both terms in his original German text. The English translation
sometimes uses 'the feudal system' for his Lehnswesen.
30
Fiefs and Vassals
I do indeed focus on the Libri Feudorum and the use of it by later
academic and professional lawyers because I think it stood at the
beginning of a long process out of which feudalism (in all its senses)
eventually emerged as a historiographical category. But Ido not think that
medieval lawyers were talking about Lehnswesen in the sense that
historians now use the word: they were talking about law, not attempting to characterize a social system and its values. 'Feudal law' was
being interpreted more widely by the time of Spelman, but not as
widely as Pocock implies in Fried's quotation from him (p. 30).2 I think
that Professor Fried and I are agreed about the importance of the
growth of academic and professional law in the twelfth century (p. 33),
whether or not one talks in terms of feudalism.3 The rise of the jurists
was the subject on which I first profited from his work nearly twenty
years ago, and I agree that Luhmann (although I did not actually cite
him) has some good things to say on the implications of the emergence
of differentiated, professional law.4 Whether the growth of professionallaw and bureaucracy in themselves directly produced the kind
of social change that seems to be implied in the suggestion that it was
now that Lehnswesen appeared I am more doubtful. The essence of my
argument is that the appearance of new words and new rules which
historians interpret as 'feudalization' did not constitute or directly
reflect what can be called a social change. Ithink that Iwould rather see
them as an aspect of political change that was an indirect result of wider
social and economic changes, including the expansion of literacy and
academic education. Nor, though I think the ambitions of rulers and
their servants certainly promoted governmental and legal change, did
Imean to suggest that the 'feudal law' was imposed from above 'as a
2
I shall refer to Fried's review by simple page-numbers, like this, and to Fiefs
and Vassals as F. and V. with page numbers.
The English version ('But in every case ... is presented as the work of ..:)
suggests this is merely my idea, but the German ('ist in jedem Falle ... das
Produkt der') suggests that Fried agrees.
4 Reynolds, 'Law and communities in Western Christendom, c. 900-1140',
American Journal of Legal History, 25 (1981), pp. 205-24, nn. 10,48, citing
Fried, Die Entstehung des Juristenstandes im 12. Jahrhundert (Cologne and
Vienna, 1974); N. Luhmann, The differentiation of society (New York, 1982),
pp. 127-36.
3
31
Debate
matter of state policy' in the way that Pocock thought Spelman believed. Nor, again, do I consider that the new law involved anything
like a change of Kuhnian paradigms (p. 30). Although I did not cite
Kuhn I have certainly thought about his ideas, but as they fitted the
historiographical paradigm of feudalism rather than the development
of legal or political thought in the Middle Ages.
The trouble about describing these changes, or any others, in terms
of feudalism is, as I became more and more convinced as I worked on
my book, that labels like feudal and feudalism do not seem helpful to
close analysis. The same goes for words like 'ownership' and 'tenure'
(p. 32), which, asI tried to explain (F. and V.53-7,59,62), I find unhelpful
and which I thought I had generally avoided. The word property, on
the other hand, I did use. I hoped that the list of individual rights and
obligations which I constructed on the model of those made by Honore,
Becker, and Reeve (F. and V. 55) made the content of what I called
'property' clear. I should perhaps have explained more explicitly on
pp. 53-7 that I used it to mean any objects (in this context mostly
immovable), or rights over objects or people, that are generally and/
or officially considered to belong to a person or persons. Breaking up
property rights into a checklist of rights and obligations seemed to me
to provide a better way of analysing and comparing the rights attached
to different kinds of property in the Middle Ages with each other, and
indeed wi th property in other societies, than reliance on general words,
whether 'feudal' or anything else.
Professor Fried concentrates his attention primarily on my arguments about the early Middle Ages, and more specifically on my use of
the Carolingian material. That is fair enough (nearly all reviewers have
concentrated on particular parts of the book that interest them) though
I still hope to find out some time what German medievalists think
about my arguments about Germany and in particular aboutwhatIsee
as evidence of more expert (or differentiated) law there in the twelfth
century. He is absolutely right to say that I want to banish feudalism (in
the sense of Leimswesen ) from discussion of the early Middle Ages. He
is also right to say that perception of a feudal society necessitates a
theory (or perhaps rather a concept?) of feudalism (p, 32). But what is
one to do if one thinks that the evidence does not seem to conform to
the usual understanding of a feudal society? Is there not something to
be said for trying to look at it without fitting it into the feudal
32
Fiefs and Vassals
paradigm? I hope that my trial of a new interpretation did not result
from blocking out whole groups of phenomena a priori: I was, admittedly, looking only at fiefs and vassalage, but I could hardly ignore
traditional interpretations of them when I was constantly comparing
what I found with those interpretations. Many medievalists may, of
course, like Fried, find my interpretations unconvincing. They are as
open to question as anyone's - including those which have been
generally accepted in the past.
We seem to differ on the character of law before the twelfth century
and on the possibility of understanding or describing the kind of
undifferentiated, customary law that was practised before there were
academic or professional lawyers to expound it for us (pp. 33-4). Preprofessional law is a different kind of law from that which traditional
legal historians consider real law, but, with the help of analogies
provided by anthropologists, historians of the earlier Middle Ages
have written enough about the way it worked in practice, and the
norms and ideas implied in the practice, to show what can be done.ä It
is true that analogies are not evidence and that historians, like anthropologists have difficulties in studying strange societies, but I am not
sure that pre-professional law in itself poses such an insuperable
problem. Fried's claim that I do not even address these questions in
Fiefs and Vassals surprised me at first but, on second thoughts, I see that
it is not unfair, if slightly overstated. I touched on the subject of early
medieval law on pp. 57-64 and by implication wherever I mentioned
the way disputes were settled by the judgement of peers and other
5
E.g. Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900-1300
(Oxford, 1984),chap. 1; J. Weitzel, Dinggenossenschaft und Recht (Cologne
and Vienna, 1985); W. Davies and P. Fouracre (eds), The Settlement of
Disputes in early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1986);S.D. White,'"Pactum
...legem vincit...". The Settlement ofDisputes by Compromise in EleventhCentury Western France', American Journal of Legal History, 22 (1978),pp.
281-308;id. 'Proposing the Ordeal and Avoiding it', in T. Bisson (ed.),
Cultures afPower (Philadelphia, 1995),89-123;La Giustizia nell'alto medioeoo,
Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo, 44
(Spoleto,1997),though I have as yet been able to see only the papers of P.
Fouracre, H. Keller,and J. Nelson.
33
Debate
forms of collective judgement. But it is true that I did not say enough
about it or about Genoseenschaftens Looking back now, these omissions
are obvious. I do not like to think that they happened because I was
arrogantly assuming that readers of this book would have read what
I had written on those subjects before. Perhaps I had just become so
used to my conviction of the importance of collective judgement in
medieval law and politics, and with collective activity in general, that
I took them for granted as the counterpoise to the idea of the dominance of feudo-vassalic relations. I hope that I have to some extent
remedied the omission in the introduction to a new edition of my book
on Kingdoms and Communiiies? There I argue more fully than I did in
F. and V.34-8 tha t I think tha t kings and kingdoms were more important
than the model of Lehnswesen sometimes seems to imply, and that
kingdoms, like other lesser political units, were held together by bonds
of collective loyalty and obligation at least as much as they were by
interpersonal bonds. My belief that some kingdoms and other medieval polities conformed fairly well to my amended version of Weber's
definition of the state (F. and V. 26) is not shaken (even after reading
Fried's very interesting paper on 'Gens und Regnum') by the fact that
Weber's definition is a modern constructf I do not see that this must
involve an anachronistically statist view of medieval society or a
bipolar concept of the state (p. 33). It is surely fair to use our constructs
or concepts so long as we recognize them as ours and try to compare
them with the evidence both of the concepts held by people in the past
and with the phenomena of the past, however people then conceptualized them. I should probably have said more about all these subjects
in Fiefs and Vassals, but I am not worried about having offered 'some
nameless other' (p. 32) as a substitute for feudalism. All the various
ideas of feudalism are the product of a simple teleological view of
European societies which made much better sense in the eighteenth
6 Translated in Fried's review as 'corporations' (p. 33).
7 Oxford, 1997.
8 I have discussed this further in my article, 'The historiography of the
medieval state', in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London,
1997),pp.117-38.
34
Fiefs and Vassals
and nineteenth centuries than it does when set alongside the knowledge of other societies that we have today. My hope that my ideas about
political and property relations among the free and noble classes in the
Middle Ages would emerge in chapters 4-9 of my book was overoptimistic. Even if I had been more explicit, however, I would not have
wanted to offer a nameable alternative to feudalism. Medieval society,
like other human societies, was too various and complex to be encapsulated in anyone-word label.
Fried's most specific criticisms concern vassalage. Here again I
have not made myself clear. The 'wealth of divergent social relations'
(p. 32) which he thinks I suggested (F. and V. 33) lay behind the word
vassal were those I found in its use by historians, not its use in the
Middle Ages. My argument, on the contrary, is that the words vassus,
vassallus changed their meaning during the Middle Ages but that the
Carolingian meaning was fairly precise. Carolingian royal vassi, as
they appear to me in the sources of the time, were lay royal servants,
with general but primarily military duties, often in support of counts.?
Some were trusted royal servants in close contact with the king but
others were based in distant parts of the kingdom and may seldom (or
never?) have seen him. The king's vassals seem to have ranked below
counts in the royal service, not because they were of lower social origin,
but because counts had more specific and responsible duties in their
counties, in which vassals served under them. Counts were not generally, if ever, referred to as vassals, and there is no evidence that if they
had become vassals of the king that would have bound them more
closely to him than they were bound by their position as counts. I claim
no originality for any of this, for it is all based on the argument and
evidence set out by C. E. Odegaard in 1945.10 I should have emphasized my debt to Odegaard more, since his work, published at a time
which was hardly propitious for being noticed in Europe, seems to
have been little noticed and, when it was noticed, was to my mind too
easily dismissed. Ganshof and Kienast both damned it with faint and
dismissive praise. Ganshof said in 1954 that the book was important
and hinted that he might discuss it further later. In the meantime he
9
10
That is, 'earls' in the translation of Fried's review.
Not 1955, as in my bibliography.
35
Debate
agreed that vassals were generally described in official documents as
distinct from counts etc. but thought that other texts showed that more
important people were considered vassals because they had taken an
oath of fidelity.U Kienast paid more attention to Odegaard's distinction between vassi and fideles than to that between vassi and counts.
Following Ganshof, he took the holding of benefices by counts as
evidence that they had been commended and were therefore vassals,
and thought that most counts were vassals from the time of Louis the
Pious.R These objections to Odegaard's arguments seem to me to
suggest reluctance to abandon old interpretations more than a critical
assessment of all the evidence in the light of what he had said. Is it not
quite likely that all counts went through a rite (rather like that later
described as homage?) on appointment to their counties? If, as Lesne
showed, to my mind convincingly,13 counties, like bishoprics, were
regarded as royal benefices, why should references to the benefices of
counts imply they were vassals?
I do not see why the list of bishops, abbots, counts, and royal vassals
in the Annals of Saint-Bertin for 837 should imply that counts were
vassals or were being assimilated to them. Beneficia habentes surely
11 'L'Origine des rapports feodo-vassaliques', Seitimane, 1 (1954), pp. 27-69,
nn. 103, 124 and pp. 65-6; he cited this paper and its notes in 'Das
Lehnswesen im fränkischen Reich', Vorträge und Forschungen, 5 (1960), pp.
37-49, when his opinion seems to have hardened against Odegaard's
arguments.
12 Diefränkische Vasallität (Frankfurt, 1990), pp. 126-8, and e.g. pp. 172, 174,
368. D. Bullough, 'Albuinus deliciosus Karoli regis', in lnstituiionen, Kultur
und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Festschrift für J. Fleckenstein, ed. by Lutz
Fenske, Werner Rösener, and Thomas Zotz (Sigmaringen, 1984), pp. 73-92,
at p. 86, alluded to Odegaard's book, dismissing his arguments about
Tassilo as naive. Since then T. Reuter has cited it and also pointed to doubts
about counts as vassals in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, vi
(fase. 35, 1993), pp. 644-8. M. Becher, Eid und Herrschaft: Untersuchen zum
Herrscherethos Karls des Grossen (Sigmaringen, 1993), pp. 37, 158, and P.
Depreux,'Tassilon
III et le roi des Francs: examen d'une vassalite
controversee', Revue hisiorique, 593 (1995), pp. 27-73, at p. 28, both mention
Odegaard's book but do not refer to his general argument about vassals.
13 Cited F. and V. 93.
36
Fiefs and Vassals
qualifies the vassals, since it would be tautological to refer to counts
and bishops as having benefices. The mention of benefices is clearly
significant, as Fried says, but it does not define everyone as vassals or
even mean that great men were treated like them. On the contrary, since
not all vassals had benefices, those who did have them - and had them
in the area Louis was transferring to his son's care - were on this
occasion singled out to be treated like the counts and bishops of that
area. Perhaps receiving a benefice made it more likely that a royal
vassal would then (apart from what happened on this particular
occasion) go through a rite in the emperor's presence, like what was
later called homage. Is it not, however, worth wondering how practicable this would be? The royal vassals whose names Kienast could find
must have been a very small fraction of the total number. How far are
we still looking at the Carolingian evidence in the light of the later use
of vassalli for benefice- or fiefholders and of the rites those later vassalli
were supposed to undergo?
I do not find Paschasius very compelling as evidence that Carolingian
counts and other great men were regarded as vassals (p. 38). My
explanation (F. and V. 86), following Odegaard, of Paschasius' (and
perhaps Louis') reference to the sons of Louis the Pious as the emperor's vassals, still seems to me not unreasonable.l+ Paschasius' later
remark about primi et eximii palatii does not seem to me, in its polemical
context, to add much more, since it is rather loosely connected to the
vasalli of the previous remark attributed to the emperor. As for the other
two cases mentioned by Fried (p. 38-9), I wonder whether Adalbert, as
count of the palace, was not in a slightly different (and perhaps lower?)
position from the count of a county. Borgolte's argument that Ruadbert,
the early ninth-century count in Alemannia, was the same as the royal
vassal in the same area at the same period is careful and cautious, but
his conclusion that he probably was may gain part of its force from an
assumption that the two descriptions were normally compatible. Perhaps the count and vassal were one man. If so, I concede him - but still
14 Odegaard,
Vassi and Fideles, pp. 43-7, with better references than mine (F.
and V. 86 n. 42), which I also failed to put into my bibliography.
37
Debate
think that, on the evidence, this seems exceptional. That a count might
start as a vassal before being promoted seems possible, even likely, but
unambiguous evidence of cases seems hard to find.15 The reference I
made to an abbot as a vassal (F. and V. 190; cf. Fried, p. 37) may have been
wrong: the editor of the Placiti suggests that vassus was probably
written in the eleventh-century text for missus.16
The submission of Tassilo of Bavaria to Pippin in 857 still seems to
me poor evidence either that great men were normally vassals or that
a similar rite was undergone by normal vassals (pp. 35, 38). Both
Classen (whose paper on this I had not seen but should have) and
Becher (whose book came out too late to be cited in fiefs and Vassals)
argue that the account of 757 was tendentious and written later, after
Tassilo's trial and deposition. If Tassilo did indeed put himself in
vasatico in the way the Annales Regni Franeorum says, may it not have
been because, as Odegaard put it, he was being 'forced to undergo
humiliation by declaring himself a dependentoflower rank'?17 Whether
more Francico in the revised annals was intended to imply that all
vassals of the Frankish king went through such a rite, rather than that
being a vassal was Frankish, I still think that it is hard to believe that
they did (F. and V. 86-7). Becher, incidentally, also thinks that the
procedure may have been unusual.
On bishop Fulbert's letter (39-40), I did not see any point in rehearsing a feudo-vassalic interpretation of it when this had been done so
often before, but, once again, that does not mean that I refused to
consider such interpretations. Icould not fail to notice them and had to
think about them in order to construct an alternative interpretation
15 Baldwin of Flanders may be one example: I suspect that he was a vassal
before his marriage, that (despite the pope's letter: MGH Epist. vi. 273-4)he
was dismissed immediately after he eloped with the emperor's daughter,
and that (despite Hincmar 's reference: Annales de Saint-Bertin, ed. F. Grat
and others (Paris, 1964), pp. 87-8) he was made a count only after their
reconciliation. This may be wrong but the assumption that he was both
vassal and count at once seems unjustified.
16 Though Regesta Chartarum Pisioriensium, ii (Pistoia, 1973), no. 30, prints
vassus without comment.
17 Odegaard, Vassi and Fideles, p. 29.
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Fiefs and Vassals
that seemed to me to fit the letter and its original context. Vassals are
not mentioned at all in the letter and only rarely in other French sources
of the time. Various sorts of people in eleventh-century France, however, were described as fideles of others with whom they were in
various sorts of relations and are sometimes known to have taken oaths
to them (F. and V. 128-30). It seemed therefore not unreasonable to
suggest that Fulbert may have been thinking in these wider terms. The
fidelity he was concerned with did not seem to me unambiguously
based on the grant of a casamentum or benefice (F. and V. 20). As I read
the letter, it might perhaps mean that afidelis who did all that Fulbert
prescribed might seem to be worthy of a benefice: in other words, a
casamentum or benefice was a reward for some fideles, just as a benefice
had been a reward for some Carolingian vassi. On the issue of censure
or punishment, Fried is quite right (p. 40). Fulbert did not mention
punishment and I did not mean to imply (F. and V. 38) that he did, but
rather to compare what he said about censure with the likely sanctions
against both parties in the real eleventh-century world. But, as Fried
says, I was wrong to make Fulbert warn the lord against bad faith and
perfidy (F. and V. 20). It was only bad faith.
In his conclusion Fried, while agreeing that Charlemagne, Louis the
Pious, Otto I, and Hugh Capet did not work within any systematic
category of Lehnswesen, points out that they nevertheless granted Lehen
(or fiefs: p. 41) to their 'vassals' (his quotation marks), had homagium
performed, expected a specific fidelity, and demanded the services
associated with fiefs. But this is to use terminology that risks assimilating their worlds to the world of later law - perhaps even more, because
it works so insidiously, than does talk of feudalism or Lehnswesen as an
abstract system. Three hundred years of interpretation have created a
powerful paradigm. My belief that it is no longer useful most emphatically does not mean that I think that all the historians who used it were
naive victims of 'the tyranny of a construct' or that it did not serve them
well in their day. Many of those who have talked about fiefs and vassals
in ways that I now reject were, in my view, great historians. Most were
interested - to our great benefit - more in the details of medieval
history than in fitting them into a general picture. The general pictures
available to them were, naturally, those of their time. Natural scientists
do not respect Newton or Planck any less because physics has advanced since their days. I for one do not respect Montesquieu, Marx, or
Maitland any less because they worked within paradigms that no
39
Debate
longer seem adequate. Good history is still being written within the
feudal paradigm. Though I think we could do better without it, that
does not mean that I reject everything written within it or that I think
that I have got it all right.
I recognize that what I am arguing is bound, as [ohannes Fried says,
to provoke contradiction. He is generous in suggesting that this may in
itself be useful, whatever the result of the arguments. I am grateful to
him for pointing out some of the places where I was unclear or made
mistakes. I hope that our debate clarifies some of the points at issue and
pushes the discussion further in a constructive way.
SUSAN REYNOLDS is Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her publications include Kingdoms and Communities in Western
Europe, 900-1300 (1984; 2nd edn. with new introduction, 1997), and a
collection of earlier articles, Ideas and Solidarities of the Medieval Laity:
England and Western Europe (1995). She is currently working on medieval and modern ideas about states and nations.
40