For history educators at all levels of instruction “feudalism” can be a cursed word. Some even call it the F-Word. For decades academic medievalists have been explaining how “feudalism” is not a useful term for describing medieval European society or governance1. The problem is that historiographic changes only slowly and incompletely make their way into secondary history standards and materials. “Feudalism” means different things to medievalists, teachers, historical actors, and state standards. Keeping up with the evolving understandings of the European middle ages is important an interesting, but it does not automatically make it easier to help students to work through primary and secondary sources.
Using Primary Sources
I started understanding this more than twenty years ago, about fifteen years into my teaching career, during professional development presentations by Dr. Phil Adamo, then a medievalist at Augsburg College (now Augsburg University), for social studies teachers in the school district where I was working and then for a summer institute for AP European History teachers at Augsburg. I recall Adamo undermining the idea of a “feudal system” in a few ways. First, he explained how medieval Europeans did not always represent their society as hierarchical. Sometimes they presented roles as complementary: those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. Adamo shared an image (right) that I have used with many classes and tutoring students. In encouraging students to understand medieval European society as much more than a simple pyramid, this may be the low hanging fruit. High school students can understand that people interpreted their social situations in various ways.
Similarly, students can understand the other main point that I took from Adamo’s talks: economic and political relationships described as “feudal” differed across time and space. What some textbooks still describe as a uniform “feudal system” only describes some people, in some places, some of the time. Hearing this, many students will nod with understanding. Many can even wrap their minds around the notion that within the specific parameters lord-vassal relations formed more of a web of multiple, sometimes conflicting relationships, than a clear pyramid. Even the students who struggle with this nuance still seem to understand the gist. It’s complicated, sure, they seem to be thinking.
To help students see how “feudal” most literally refers to lord-vassal relations I facilitate a close reading of one feudal document (the first in this Google Document, embedded below) with others available for enrichment.
I’ve written about how the feudal documents from Catalan can give students a peak at how archives work. They also show how feudal relationship were very local and contested. The story of Ramon and Arbert includes some drama (trial by body!) and illustrates coercion in the process of establishing hierarchy. It also contains challenging vocabulary and an unfamiliar context. Providing vocabulary support and explanation of context can help students; or, students can generate questions about the text based on their attempts to make meaning from it. I may write about this in a future post.
I recently added a primary source from Champagne, France, to the Google Document embedded and linked above. A recent episode of a newish podcast, American Medieval, that I’ve been enjoying brought it to my attention. Host Matthew Gabriele and guests often discuss the intersection of teaching and scholarship with medieval history, and The Medieval F-Word (“Feudalism”) with Ada Kuskowski, could be very helpful for high school teachers tasked with unpacking this term with history students. Kurowski recommended a Feudal Society in Medieval France: Documents from the County of Champagne, translated and edited by Theodore Evergates, which was available through a library as an ebook (thanks WorldCat!). Kurowski explained that the thirteenth-century documents in this collection demonstrate the diversity of feudal arrangements. I selected one to use with students that includes a vassal with multiple lords as an indication of a web of feudal relationships. It also contains some thorny vocabulary, and thorns can lead to cursing. Nonetheless,I’m excited to try this document with some of tutoring students in August and September when AP World and European History students briefly discuss “feudalism.”
Most high school students understand hierarchy, both the term and the concept. Images of homage or the nobilities idealization of the social order (right) illustrate hierarchical relationships. Students, especially AP World or European History, can also see how hierarchies worked in excerpts from scholarly secondary sources. I’ve used an excerpt from Judith Bennett’s A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants before the Plague that includes this:
During Cecila Penifader’s lifetime, almost all members of the feudal and ecclesiastical elite in England relied on manors and peasants for some of their support. When kings, queens, barons, ladies, bishops, monks, and nuns sat down to supper, they ate food produced by the labor of serfs on manorial demenses. When they purchased fine silks from the East, built new houses in stone, or arranged to have wine shipped from Gascony [France], they spent money accumulated from the rents, fees, and fines of the manorial tenants, free and serf.
Here, again, students bump into some specialized vocabulary (curses!). Teachers can either provide vocabulary support or guide students to deriving meaning from context.
Over the past couple of decades I have curated sources that allow students to see elements of feudal relationships in society. Students can see these elements without historically indefensible claims about a “feudal system” ordering all of society. Essentially, I am guiding students to develop meaning before applying the label “feudal relationships,” a process that I discussed here (scroll down).
What About the F-Word?
So far, so good. Other than the funny words, cursing does not seem necessary. High school students can see patterns and recognize that there were complexities that are beyond the scope of the class. This all works until a student asks, so what is “feudalism,” then? Even if no one asks, high school students in World, European, and (sometimes) US History encounter “feudalism” in a variety of sources, from state tests to class notes2 to 20th century communist primary sources to 21st century social commentary. The trouble, and accompanying cursing, lies in the wide variety of meanings that the term has across these different sources.
As teacher and now I tutor, I need to help students to understand how “feudalism” is used in sources and how it is an inadequate description of medieval European society and governance. Talking about this F-Word can create an absurd presentation, akin to abstinence-only sexual education: I’ll tell you what it is, if you promise not to use it. Many of my tutoring students need to understand the various meanings that others impute to the term, and I want them to understand its limits to “feudalism.” This educational tw0-step aims to build both familiarity with the terms of the legacy history curriculum while helping students to think beyond it.
In The Medieval F-Word (“Feudalism”) Gabrielle and Kurowski clarify why this can be difficult. They explain how feudal relationships did exist, but only for some and alongside many other legal bonds. The second part was a new insight. In a 2025 article on the misuse of “feudalism” in contemporary social analysis, historians David Addison and Merle Eisenberg provided a succinct description of the three varied meanings of the term. I use their typology with advanced students [emphasis added]:
“There are three main ways in which historians have defined feudalism that are incompatible for purposes of analysis with each other. Contemporary writers all too often merge these definitions.”
- “…world of rigid hierarchies encapsulated in the image of the ‘feudal pyramid’…overly broad and unreflective of a dynamic period in human history”
- “…legal idea expressing the mutual bonds between a ruler and their subordinate elites…restricted to a certain time (ca. 1100–1400 CE), a certain place (France and England, mostly), and certain specific individuals (elites only)”
- “feudal mode of production … classic Marxist formulation…feudal lords dominated a large mass of peasants in various states of semi-freedom and unfreedom…elites…appropriated a certain amount of the surplus and, in some cases, demanded labor service.”
After reading this, students can critically examine an image of a feudal pyramid and describe what it gets wrong.Typically, students are more likely to see “feudalism” used in the sense of #1 or, hopefully, #2, early in the course, and then #3 becomes more salient when Marxism becomes a topic later in the course. This can be confusing. History educators can help students to use context to determine which meaning of “feudalism” a particular source is using. From there, we can help students to develop the skills to think about how and why people are using the word. As is often the case, using a word with historical connotations tells us more about the present than the past.
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I have organized many of these into the Google slides embedded below:
- The foundational article, Elizabeth A. R. Brown’s “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and Historians of Medieval Europe,” was published in 1974. Brown notes that “Historians have for years harbored doubts about the term “feudalism”
and the phrase “feudal system”” and the relates a story of a nineteenth-century scholar impugning the term. ↩︎
