What was feudalism and how was it overthrown?

Peasants revolting against the feudal lords in 1381

For hundreds of years, feudalism was dominant in Europe. The period was marked by revolts and uprisings that are still remembered and celebrated. But what was feudalism and what happened to it?

In the 10th century, society was made up of villages. People generally bartered the goods they produced.

Peasant families worked a plot of land, but also had to provide unpaid labour on their lord’s estate. The Church also grabbed 10 percent of what the peasants grew in a tax called tithes.

Life was gruelling. Peasants lived in tiny, freezing houses and faced starvation if crops failed. They could be punished for minor crimes with torture such as being scalded with boiling water.

The peasants were bound to their lord’s land as serfs, so the theft of their labour was undisguised.

The lords were driven by personal consumption—what they needed to fund their lifestyles. There was no competitive pressure to invest to raise productivity.

But feudal society was not stagnant. Between the 10th and 14th centuries, improvements in agriculture —crop rotation and the use of manure as fertiliser—led to increases in production.

Aristocratic demand for luxury products such as ceramics, glass, clothing and wine generated new industries.

By the 13th century, more people could live from the surplus produced on the land. Towns grew and became centres of commodity production where goods were produced for sale.

Such emerging industries required labourers who worked for wages and could be taken on and laid off as the market dictated.

These changes led to a shift in the balance between classes in the early 14th century.

This was massively increased by the Black Death pandemic, which killed about half of the population.

By then, up to half of the English population were involved in some form of waged work.

From the 14th to the 16th centuries, feudalism was in a prolonged crisis. Agricultural production grew but was outpaced by the demands of the aristocracy. By the 16th century, population levels had recovered from the Black Death and were now growing.

Peasants and the urban poor began to reject the religious dogmas that justified inequality. They launched revolts across Europe, including the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in England. Lords defended their power with the utmost brutality, imposing further restrictions on peasants.

The only available solution to this crisis was to further develop new methods of production. More agricultural produce was sold on the market. Production organised along capitalist lines developed in industries such as printing, papermaking and coal mining.

These industries demanded a workforce that was dependent on a wage. Peasants were cleared off, priced out or chose to abandon their land.

The capitalists developed their wealth and power within feudal society. These incremental changes inspired a new wave of struggles by the poorest sections of society.

One of the most significant was the German Peasants’ War of 1525. These revolts challenged the rights of kings and bishops, but they did not have the capacity to establish a different society.

The ruling classes were divided between those who wanted to cling to their old privileges at any cost and those who wanted limited change.

During the 17th century the continent plunged into a series of horrific wars. In the Thirty Years War, from 1618-1648, as many as eight million died in central Europe.

While the existing order won across most of Europe, the Netherlands and England broke from the old society.

Rebels in the Netherlands, threw off the Spanish empire and established a republic based on capitalist production methods. The English revolution abolished feudal tenures in 1646, executing King Charles I in 1649.

Feudal structures holding back capitalism had been breached—though serfdom existed in Russia until 1861.

It would take further revolutions, in the US and France in the 18th century, to finally overthrow feudalism.