Something that strikes me about all this is just how clear, though still complex, the picture becomes when you demystify this period by getting rid of these superfluous terms like "feudalism" or "vassal" and the specific associations people attach to them. In truth, many of the associations people instinctively draw upon when hearing the term feudalism are still valid. Though, everyone might stress a slightly different one owing to the muddled history of the term. Land granted in exchange for military or other service has, obviously, occurred, perhaps not infrequently during the Medieval period in Europe. How could it not! In an agricultural society that is, at least early on, short on coinage and other forms of movable wealth, it is both logical and reasonable that rulers and other parties could sometimes resort to such an arrangement. We see it all the time throughout early-modern history and in no way exclusive to Europe. It has occurred everywhere, from Lisbon to Lyuyang. The Byzantine empire has quite famously resorted to a variant of this system. Though this polity is feverously denied the branding of "feudal," supposedly in contrast to its neighbours. Though, this reader finds it hard to find such a seismic difference between it and the Early kingdom of Hungary or Anglo-Saxon England as to brand them an entirely different form of government. The same can be said of rulers and other magnates rewarding or assuring the loyalty of their subordinates via grants in land. Nor is it particularly had to imagine that those subordinates might then do such a thing with their own underlings. Or that these people might get special titles to mark their status, or that these titles might then get attached to the land. But to imagine that these policies, to which almost every polity in Eurasia, from Chinese dynasties to steppe khanates or Siberian chiefdoms has likely resorted to at some point in their history, is a result of some sort of comprehensive society-wide structure which places all its members into an easily digestible pyramid. That is also actually unique to Medieval Europe is a grave case of putting the cart before the horse. Much the same thing can be said of patron-client relationships or personal relationships crossing into and influencing the public sphere. I would go as far as to say that these are phenomena shared by all societies, including our very own. One could perhaps argue that these aspects get a unique spin and significance in certain parts of Medieval history. But to argue they are somehow the unique building bloc of "Feudal" society and no other is both naive and academic malpractice. Even the idea of a shared bond and ethos between a band of warriors and its leader, while I wouldn't go as far as to say it is entirely insignificant, is not a particularly profound discovery and certainly not what all of Medieval society is built on. As exemplified by the fact that not just warriors lived and thrived in it. Even serfdom, which for some godawful reason sometimes gets mixed in with "Feudalism" in the popular imagination is neither uniquely European nor even common to all of Medieval Europe. All of these phenomena, as well as their unique local spins and variants, did play a role in varying proportions in European societies. And there's nothing wrong with pointing it out or studying it, that's what institutional history is all about. However, to be able to truly study these quite distinct kingdoms and cultures, you have to free yourself of the tyranny of the construct and just see them for what they actually are.
Like in school, my chemistry teacher introduced us to the black, white and red balls: I learned to construct hydrocarbons with them. But then another teacher told us that atoms are not balls. The mind is always open to new insights.
The point of "Feudalism" isn't to make a caricature of the medieval era, it's to contrast with "Capitalism". The difference is that you can't sell your property in Feudalism, you can only inherit it or get it by Royal decree. Capitalism began when land became something you can buy and sell and exploit for profit.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 You could have sold your property (indeed, many distinct types of property) during the Entire Middle Ages in all of Europe. In the Late Roman Empire as well as the Frankish Kingdom that followed it and all its successor states. The distinction you purport isn't real. We know of hundreds of quite intricate land transactions among the peasants and aristocrats of the Lombard Kingdom of Italy for example.
@@user-vz1zc3fn7o The distinction is real as dirt, it repeated in hundreds of places. People sold certain types of "property" which were not Kingly fiefs. They couldn't do banking, they couldn't make a profit off the land, so there was no incentive to wall off property from the public. The transition to Capitalism is gradual, with various reforms, first property, then individual freedom to travel, contracts, banking, and all that. This transition was made in Hawaii in just a few years, and in Japan, deliberately, during the Meiji restoration. In fact, if you want to learn what the difference between "Capitalism" and "Feudalism" is, study the 20 years of the Meiji restoration, which is when a small group turned Japan (deliberately) from one form to the other.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Your defend is not valid. In Chinese or Chinese- like feudalism states like Vietnam and Korea, the people can travel around if you are wealthy enough or if you have a road- paper to identify who and where you came from. If you can't travel in feudal society, the silk road on land and sea will never exist. The lords just can forbid you to travel if you are their "property" (aka slave worker). You can also buy land, house, open shops etc... if you have the money. So your point of argue is not real.
Something im starting to note, all the stereotypes about medieval society actually apply to the modern era onwards: -huge disparities between land owning lords and the serfs -the king having absolute power -lots of plate armor, big transoceanic ships -witch hunts (common from 1450s onwards, not before, as even Thomas Aquinus negated that witches had any powers) -the inquisition increasing its hunt on heresy and jews and etc (again, way worse in the modern era) -a disdain for science between lutherans and catholics (many scientists before and after the advent of lutheranism were monks, and many were catholic and church sponsored, even secular scientists were church sponsored- Copernicus) -a strict nobility hierarchy with lots of stablished rules and titles and formalities (in portugal, the first book on rules for noble houses arms and other symbols comes in the 1500's) -the popular division of the three estates (church-nobles-peasants) becomes theorized and proeminent in political theory It seems to me, that the reason liberalism/enlightenment/other ideologies of slightly before the french revolution had this view of medieval society was because they were projecting the problems of their time into the past, with the idea that things get worse. Ironically, Marxist theorists usually say that systems usually get worse over time (slavery got worse with time, capitalism will get worse with time), but they didnt seem to apply this to "feudalism" like they did with other systems, they immediatly concieved it as an already disparate system where few peasants owned land, and it only got worse from there. So, in a bigger irony, the reality would be "more marxist" as kings and nobles had less power and control over land in the beginning, and it only got worse right before it ended with the advent of liberal revolutions.
Of course. this is because most of the misconceptions we have about the past, especially in the era of mass media, are really just us projecting our own issues backwards, without any real understanding of how people used to live. In another sense though, because of the fundamentally religious nature of Global Liberal Orthodoxy the past has to be held as inherently worse time in every way, otherwise the claim of inevitable Progress™ can't really be sustained. These twin motivations result in grotesquely distorted understanding of the past, both out of ignorance and out of deceit, that we have today.
This is a great essay that definitely deserves more views, I finally found a video that explains feudalism and the debate about it in depth. Most of the videos last 10 minutes and they explain it in a very basic and superficial way, which is obviously useful if we don't want to go too deep, but for someone more curious, your video is a great help. Keep it up and I hope you reach more people.
While I tackle Susan Reynolds's revisionist work, the debate would take another decade and a half to be settled. Stay tuned for the next video, which tackles the discussions that conclusively settled it!
I always saw a need for a channel that tackled scholarly topics in an accessible way with good presentation. We are unfortunately just hobbyists who do this in our spare time, but we value spreading this knowledge.
The good thing about my law degree was that we had to learn law history of portugal. Something that was clear from the start was that our teacher downright started "Portugal never had feudalism, because there were no vassals in portugal, the kingdom was to small and the king had centralized authority very early for it to even be considered something necessary" It was a passing remark in our first class on medieval law, in another class, he explained how the term was antiquated, but never dived in. What did explain it all, subtly, was learning about just how many legal sources there were, and the variety in medieval society. Canon law, town law, corporation (portuguese word for guild) law, civil (roman) law, jurisprudence for each type of law, royal decrees, papal bules, treaties, etc. All these were sources of law in medieval society, each own was evidence that relations in medieval society were very diverse and complex. More important, custom, tradition, common use, these were seen as super important sources of law, many times prevailing even against royal decrees. Another myth shatered is exactly that, royal decrees are general laws, every other law was special, and in legal theory and practice, even today, a special law overrruns the general law. Aka: if a town's custom dictates X, the kings law cant dictate Y, as the town custom was made exactly for that town, it has a stronger connection to the case at hand. Medieval European society should, imo, be called a "Plural Power" system, as its the only real name i can give it. There were indeed many fractured political entities with their own laws, powers, duties, etc, all living together (or struggling with one another), to call it merely "feudal" is to ignore its lack of clear trait.
Its kinda wild how, now that you point it out, obviously the popular understanding of feudalism is nonsense. Like, anyone who lives in a community has some sense of 'res publica', that isnt some distinctly roman thing, so of course it would exist in medieval europe. And like of course roman insitutions would still serve as the basis for medieval law, why would any king want to completely burn down an already accepted system of governance and try to build something entirely new
I like how sometimes history is quite simples and direct, like a show or book that has its metaphors written on its face and yelled at you all the time. As "nobles" want more power from the 12th century onwards, they build castles, a literal symbol of someone who wants power over what he thinks is "his domain". As legal issues further complicate, lawyers start to rely more and more on old roman laws and more settled jurisprudence, a process that does happen today, where case by case analysis and solutions get replaced by general solutions and authoritative laws/doctrines/jurisprudence. Seems that the true trend in history, is the cycle of centralization-decentralization-centralization-etc
This is essentially the fundamental cycle of nature, concentration and dispersion, contraction and expansion, tension and relaxation. In fact it can be likened to the simple dynamic rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.
this is an excellent, comprehensive summation on the debates over feudalism over the last few decades, and great for both dispensing with popular myths and informing about the way mediaeval society actually worked also: great videos of some beautiful castles!
I'm a low-fantasy writer, and I like to first start my worlds with a realistic foundation (and then tweak and change them to fit my story and preferences/desires). These videos are very helpful in thinking about how to structure the worlds I create. They're also very interesting, thanks for the videos!
The popular perception in Western European history is a stark jump from late antiquity to the middle ages, the "fall of Rome." Then a thousand years later, the middle ages ended dramatically with the beginning of the modern era or the "Renaissance." In truth, there was a lot diversity with each era and the transitions were gradual. In other words, society in 600 CE Italy had much more in common with Italy in 400 CE and Italy in 600CE had much less in common with Italy in 1400 CE. Moreover, Italy in 1400 CE had more in common with Italy in 1600 CE.
Wow what a wonderful vlog. A long time ago I came across a very interesting small book/pamphlet on Snailbeach in Shropshire, which also cast doubt on the feudalism model. Once again the black death (which killed off 15% of Shropshire's population) is important, as Shropshire, in common with northern England, resulted in greater bargaining power to the agricultural workers. Snailbeach grew as a haven for those fleeing the power of the manor, providing not very fertile land for these run aways. This juxtapositions with the power of the Shrewsbury wool merchants and finishers and the availability of many minerals (including coal) in shallow deposits all over Shropshire. Indeed, it was the alternative income from bell pits which made Shropshire briefly the most industrialised county in Britain.
Really glad to find a channel discussing the organization of society beyond the simple peasant-lord dynamic. Currently been collecting sources/PDFs regarding the societal organization and economic life of peasants and institutions during medieval times (usually regarding France). Have you checked out the book Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (not medieval I know but it tackles the seigneurial system) by Jeremy Hayhoe?
Thank you! And no, I haven't. I have intentionally limited my studies to Medieval times. However, we plan to eventually tackle the time period up to Napoleon (including the persistent myth that he wanted to spread Liberal reforms to the rest of Europe), and we might tackle Early Modern societal organization.
@@viatorinterra Excellent to hear! With those plans, I hope societal organization of early modern European in its colonies (such as New France) is undertaken too. Though one remark from me regarding the video-construction itself, the music gets too loud at times.
Thank you for this great and academic video. To the statement at 55.00 that women were excluded from these senior roles, Regine Pernoud in Women in the Days of the Cathedrals and the Glory of the Medieval World, give examples of women being common place those senior members involved in decision making, even at peasant levels.
I think that the specific anecdotal character of the system can vary from place to place and time to time, as well as some of the exterior cultural elements, but it seems that the very core of what we understand as feudalism is "government by private contract". That is, in both the time of Imperial rome, and of modern centralized Nation states, while there is still a lot of private interaction, governance recycling flows from one Central Authority with a high degree of uniformity, and while there may be nodes in the system there aren't really genuine competing centers of power in a formal sense. Who we consider to be the middle ages, the time of feudalism, whatever you want to call it, is basically an encapsulation of an era when this broke down and had not been rebuilt. It wasn't binary, and there was still some Central Authority but it was inherently weak, and could not enforce uniformity and universalism. While it is true that centralized, technocratic, homogenized state structures - what we may consider to be empires - have existed for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, I think in the broad sweep of human history "feudalism" is how most people have always lived.
1:21, "a king's power was not absolute", as a matter of fact, absolute royalty in Francr, was only achieved after the Capet dinasty fought the.Nobles for a 1000 years, a struggle that shaped France to this day, for example the imposotion of the French language over other dialects, french was the language of Ile de France, tje King's personal domain wich included Paris. The first real absolute monarchs star after louis le 13, that is 17th century. A High King in more feudal times was a leader among equals, chosen by the nobles to lead. But still under those nobles influence.
"No, they didn't have a monopoly on violence, they just controlled violence." "No, status was not hereditary. Status was given to the rich and powerful... who then passed their status along with their wealth power to their descendants." Overall I did find this very educational, and you showed me a lot of interesting sources. But this video could have been half as long if you didn't split hairs on things that didn't really support your point.
You think there's no difference between a mandated peerage enforced by the government over how things went before? You think regulations over the market are the same as a monopoly? You think that's just splitting hairs?
@@legatvssilanvs "Regulations" is a very polite word, you're acting as if authority was just as polite, if not more polite than it is today. But no, I do not believe there is a difference. If one man was given his status due to his family name, and another man is given status due to his family name because his ancestor was important enough for the king to recognize, and that ancestor past that status down to his children who did nothing to earn it, then what difference are we really seeing in reality? That is a rhetorical question, because I'm sure anyone could write paragraphs on what the technical differences are. In the same way that some students pan for word count in their essays. In practicality, there is no observable difference.
Regarding the first point. I hope you do understand you are actually agreeing with Reynold's point there, yes? The reasoning some historians use to deny Medieval polities statehood is flawed because full control over violence is always aspirational. For your second point. I do agree that the overwhelming focus on legalism tends to obscure issues and make distinctions where there are none. But I would still argue that a prescribed hereditary caste system where different classes are closed and have distinct rules and privileges apply to them is distinct from the more loose system where children inherit their parents' wealth and prestige but where there isn't a closed nobility caste, which allows for downward and upward mobility. The former usually describes societies where the noble class is already in decline and requires legal protection (Such as Early Modern Europe or later history of India), the latter describes almost every human society that has ever existed, including the Early Middle Ages and indeed our own society.
@@user-vz1zc3fn7o Oh yes, I completely agree with the narrative of the video. Mostly because of the sources provided, that I was able to study for myself. I don't disagree with the overall point of the video, I found it to be very educational. I just disagree with the way it was presented. Like I said in my reply, yes, the differences between a caste system and a caste-less system could fill a lot of space on paper. But in reality, the actual outcome is the same. The biggest difference would only be at the very beginning of the caste-less system, where free men are able to secure that status, regardless of family name. But after that, their status becomes hereditary and their family name monopolizes more and more shares of political power with each generation. We can actually see that development at the end of the medieval era, with the complicated family tree of hierarchy within the H.R.E. and the Hapsburgs.
@@fromD7 I agree this is broadly what happens, at the start you have a more fluid system where you have a mass of largely undifferentiated freemen, some of which are wealthier and more powerful, but there's a relatively large degree of social mobility as well, especially due to incessant warfare where lineages die out and new warriors prove themselves. Over time, however, wealth and political office is monopolised by a couple of families, these families eventually start seeing themselves as something apart, only marrying among each other and demand special treatment. By the end of this process, the old families start feeling threatened by new upstarts such as merchants or bureaucrats and codify their status as hereditary in law, preserving certain privileges, offices and exemptions for themselves (you'll note that this wouldn't have been necessary earlier because they already possessed de-facto monopoly on power, so why codify it if it wasn't challenged? This process also requires a fairly high level of societal development as all these privileges require paperwork such as noble patents and a court system that can enforce it.) This process can be observed in nearly all European states, and also elsewhere. It is obviously a sliding scale, but there are differences between these various stages that are significant enough to be pointed out. Especially since there is no such thing as a society without a ruling elite, therefore the exact functioning of the ruling elite is of supreme importance.
A minor correction though it is a key distinction, but the Marxians think of the Feudal economy as being based on landowners' exploitation of the *peasantry as a whole*, which does include but is not limited to serfs. Under the Marxian sense, China was considered feudal or semi-feudal up until the 20th century, despite abolishing serfdom far sooner. Brazil in the modern day would also be considered semi-feudal as an example. A more accurate way to describe the Marxists' conception would be to use the term peasant economy--not feudalism--but what can I say to century old political theory? Still, I kind of like this flexible definition for this time period, peasants are kind of universal for these societies, I don't think there are any without peasants. (Unless we're talking like nomads, but i dont know anything about how shepherding societies designate land ownership, maybe? I digress.)
I always use feudalism and words associated with it colloquially. I learned from a young age, watching Time Team and other history shows, that these words more often than not embodied meaning through terms that had no evidence of their fruitful existence. Went from a boy thinking on it, to coming of age and comparing lifes nuance to theirs. As time went on I never saw much evidence backing these terms. Than saw well established historians critiquing feudalism just how you are (though yours is so much more digestible😅💖). It's great this video is reaching many people. Well done👍
Excellent. Very well thought out and presented. It helped me sort out a few different things I'd contemplated previously in less than coherent ways. Likey saving me many hours of research. Staying on topic is challenging when learning for idle curiosity and constantly finding how little I really know. Much appreciated.
I would like to have a video about Asia's feudal states. Because we have a very different feudalism societies than European ones, where the states are far more centralized. All the nobles are granted by Emperors or kings. The people cannot choose their ruler but if the ruler was not capable enough to rule the country the people will revolt and overthrown the ruler. Also we have the pre-banking system. People can also trade lands with deed and the deed are granted and protected by law.
Okay. So I've heard that nowadays, "they" say the Roman Empire did not, in fact, "fall". That notion was a fantasy created by Gibbon. It just kept chugging right along all the time. And I also hear tell that those infamous "Dark Ages" we've all heard about weren't "dark" at all! They were filled with sunlight and roses! In fact, "Dark Ages" was a poetic fantasy dreamed up by Petrarch. Now, I'm hearing that this "feudalism" that's been harped on for the past 200 years is just nonsense. Poppycock! Balderdash! Then I think back to Tacitus, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero. I remember how reading them is pretty close to reading something written by an educated person in fairly modern times (more or less). And I also think back to Saxo Grammaticus and the Venerable Bede, and Froissart. Reading them is VERY VERY VERY different from ANYTHING produced by a modern person. And yet, if Rome never fell, and those Dark Ages ain't dark, and feudalism is remarkably like our current monetary/economic system, why all the fairies and giants, and devils and magic ? Why all those stark, dramatic and undeniable differences between those texts written in those times that we still as yet call "Medieval" and now, and not as much difference between those texts from the ever unfallen Roman Empire and now? I, of course, can't answer that question. I'm not a professional historian. But I do wonder how, if everything stayed the same and/or was so sophisticated, people had to rediscove human anatomy, concrete, and basic road building.
Focusing on the likes of Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch, et al is survivors' bias. After the collapse of complex societies, the best works would be prioritized for handing down. Some examples: note how the only primary source we have for the Gallic Wars is Julius Caesar's commentaries, how we rely on only a few authors for the Late Republic, how bureaucratic records and receipts (among other ephemeral sources) only received attention in the past half century. Many more works of worse quality have been lost to time. You mention three Medieval authors from wildly different time periods, wildly different contexts, who engaged in wildly different work. So many more chronicles, diaries, and other sources survive from Medieval times than from Roman times. We now only know that the Gracchi brothers were spreading nonsense about a land crisis because of archaeological evidence showing that smallholding farms increased in their time, whereas Medieval times have so many more sources available. Romans had their fair share of fairies, giants, and magic. Yet we hear these tales from the educated class, never from common peoples' telling. The Theogony and Aeneid are glorified accounts of fairies, giants, and magic, yet written in meter instead of ordinary telling. Concrete was never lost, just the specific Roman blend. The Romans never even knew what they were doing with it, just that it could cure underwater. Medieval structures used their own blend of concrete with iron reinforcement, so that's a moot point either way. And I suggest you read up more on Medieval medicinal practices (ie www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4042035/, among some others not on the top of my head). The knowledge was lost, yet found not soon after things stabilized. Now that is why this channel exists: to bring fire from the gods. Except the fire is scholarship on niche topics, and the gods are ivory tower residents with plenty of funding from who knows what sources, yet whose publishers are too greedy to release them to the public. Scholarship moves very fast, and this channel hasn't even remotely scraped the tip of the iceberg. Also if you want a good rundown on the Collapse of Western Rome, our latest video gives a good overview.
@@viatorinterra Hmmmmm Well, when Virgil talks about his nymphs, satyrs, etc etc; I get the distinct impression that they're more literary conceit than they are "true and real things". But when I read Saxo, I don't get that impression. They're just as "real" as you or I. Concrete existed in Medieval times? Interesting. I've always heard that they had mortar, but proper concrete didn't happen again until 18th century (might have the century wrong there, but you get my point). I knew you'd think I was talking about medical stuff when I said what I said about human anatomy, but what I meant was the human form in art. I love Medieval art just as much as you do, but c'mon. You're going to tell me that they were just as knowledgeable as Phidias? I appreciate the fact that right now, as we write this, hordes of unpaid grad students are diligently sifting through reams and reams of moldy parchment, painstakingly teasing out every millimeter of information, and desperately trying to piece together a vast jigsaw puzzle with a good part of its pieces missing. Their labor is heavy and their indefatigable intellectual stamina is superhuman. But I just can't help but to see a highly complex and sophisticated society around 100 AD, and then a strangely benighted one 600 years later. Not to disparage dear Alcuin, he wasn't dumb, to be sure, but he was no Cato either.
@@johnmanno2052 It's best to expand your readings then. You keep citing a small sample of authors out of the vast number. Saxo Grammaticus was some clerk in the middle of Denmark, then a rural kingdom. Baldus de Ubalis, Henry of Segusio, Bulgarus, Irnerius, Martinus Gosia, Jacobus de Boragine, Hugo de Porta Ravenatte, must I go on? If I take some rural Mathematics primary teacher as representative of France then compare him to Terence Tao, of course France will look disgustingly bad. And why do you keep lumping 1000 years of history under the same blanket? Do you really think Italy after the Gothic Wars and the Balkans after Avar and Slavic raids are the same as 12th century kingdoms experiencing demographic and economic expansion? Will you really take Alcuin, some Anglo-Saxon court scholar for Charlemagne, as representative of the Burgundian court in the 15th century? Do you not understand that conditions change across place and time? Why did we see a real estate bubble appear in England? Do you not understand that conditions change across place and time? Starting from the 12th century, the Medievals built infrasturcture that regularly dwarfed Roman structures. Concrete is literally just water, binder, and aggregate that has cured. I don't see how not having volcanic ash makes Medieval concrete not concrete, or why volcanic ash concrete is the only concrete that should exist. Even Anglo-Saxon structures had concrete. And if you're gonna discuss anatomy, best to specify what you mean instead of intentionally or not trying to catch me off guard. By your logic anyhow, the Roman Empire never reached any artistic heights because they couldn't replicate Phidias over and over. Get some perspective. You have done nothing but cherry pick data points generated by wildly different times and places only to lump them into a horrible collage of what you think Medieval times were. Grad students don't just shift through moldy parchment, they shift through bureaucratic records, they shift through diaries, they shift through birch tree bark, they ask archaeologists what they have dug up, they ask chemists to analyze materials and artifacts.
@@viatorinterra Okay. Thank you for the reading list! I'll definitely check them out. A few minor points: I've heard that concrete is a specific thing, but that's from engineers, not historians. And yes, I shouldn't have been quite so flip about human anatomy. I was commending, not lampooning, those grad students. I know they sift through tons of different texts and archeological data. I sincerely think their efforts are indeed superhuman, given the fragmentary nature of what survives from the period. However, I cannot agree with their conclusions. I strongly suspect that this all might be a "not seeing the forest for the trees" situation. Yes. The Middle Ages wasn't as bad as people might think. Yes. There was some trade, even some long distance trade. Sure, there probably was a (rudimentary) money economy. Yeah. "Feudalism" didn't really"exist", much like when I was a kid during the Cold War "Communism" didn't really "exist". But I know what I see. I read Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus and Plutarch (cherry picking over a huge time period), then I read Alcuin, Froissart, Bede, Grammaticus, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, Procopius, and more, cherry picking once again; and I'm left with an inescapable conclusion: The Middle Ages SUCKED! Just like when I read (parts of, haven't found a full English translation yet) "The Records of the Historian" by Ssu Ma. Chien compared with "The Secret History of the Mongols". One is reflective of a highly sophisticated and advanced civilization, the other is.... interesting. Obviously written by someone who was brilliant, but it's not the product of an urbanized, erudite culture. Someone who asserts that the emperor's head detached at night and floated about the palace, straight faced, is someone who's worldview is so divergent from mine, they might as well be from another planet. Someone who wrote "The Melian Dialogue" is someone I want to hear lecture on the war in Ukraine. And this is true of every single text I've read from that 1000 year time period. Mind you, it's not that I hate reading those texts, Froissart was brilliant, the "Très Riches Heures" are simply exquisite, and I'm certain I'll enjoy reading those authors you mentioned. But life was not as we would, or even could recognize it after whatever happened to the Roman Empire happened. Sure, people built cathedrals and castles during that millennium, but aqueducts? Huge, large scale road systems? A unified system of coinage and long distance trade? Heck, in floor central heating?! That all had to wait until industrialization happened, MORE than 1000 years after the end(?) of Rome. I understand that "history" now is considered to be a "science". But I'd like to look at it as the ancients did, especially the authors from the Middle Ages, namely as a moral tale. And when I do so, the moral I take away from my readings is: Collapse SUCKS! Do everything you can to avoid it! In my opinion, despite all the many virtues of that tumultuous thousand years+ , people's lives were A LOT harder than what was experienced before it began, and that's even more true when you compare the peninsula called Europe, to the Tang , or the Abbasid empires. Economic contraction, especially when catastrophic, wrecks havoc so complete, that it takes centuries to recover.
@@johnmanno2052 Concrete is a specific thing. I have intimate knowledge of structural engineering textbooks, methods, and models like finite element analysis. The point is, concrete is just binder, aggregate, and water that's been cured. You can add eggshells into that mix, you can add carbon fiber, you can add bird feathers, it will still be concrete. You have no idea how many undergraduate structural engineering theses I've skimmed over doing the exact same thing. Pure Mathematics is a much better subject, Physics not so much. And I can assure you that Roman and Modern history is more fragmentary than it seems on the surface. It's one thing to read textbooks about WW2, it's another to go through administrative records, letters, diaries, secret orders, among other ephemeral sources. Compare Ian Kershaw's Working towards the Fuehrer with whatever nonsense is peddled in popular media and education. Compare the debate on Intentionalism vs Structuralism with mad whining in mainstream circles. Neat and orderly narratives about history are fun to read, but they often hide the nitty gritty in many instances. I loved reading how Julius Caesar actually was assassinated vs how Shakespeare and HBO's Rome portrayed it, but that involved piecing together different narratives. And there is a reason why I specifically brought up the Gracchi Brothers. It shows how warped our picture of the past can get from these neat and orderly narrative sources. The Gracchi Brothers turned out to be demagogues whipping up the Roman populace over a much more complicated problem: a general economic downturn. We know this only because of archaeology and shifting through records. I can give you another example, our knowledge of the Emperor Caligula comes from only a few people writing so many years after him. All we can do is conjecture and speculate on his actions - you might have heard of hypotheses that he ordered his soldiers to pick up sea shells as humiliation, or that he installed a horse as senator to mock the senate, and that his enemies took these in the worst light. Who knows what to believe? Neat and orderly chronicles of the past, however, are always fraught with questions that need answers. Now I've had a suspicion as to who this is, so if not, kindly indulge me when I say this. This is what Aristotle has been pointing out, which tutor doesn't seem to understand despite trying to drill in other of his trifles. The world isn't neat and tidy, there are no rules to excellence. The information we have and the stories we tell ourselves always come from somewhere. Whoever made them up in turn got them from somewhere, whether seeing them for themselves, or listening to others tell them. Fighting games are an idealized mimesis of how real combat works - the real thing is always messier and with more unexpected events. Now here are a few recommendations I give out to those who want to know more about Medieval technology. You won't find neat and tidy narratives about these, because the technology kept evolving that nobody bothered to write them down. All we have is archaeology and occasional mentions in other texts. A history of engineering in classical and medieval times by Hill, The Medieval Machine by Gimpel, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel (free on erenow). The HRE did have an expansive road network, Hindle has written about the road network in medieval England and Wales. Rome had maps of its road network, well we have the Gough map and . People not writing about these in neat and orderly narratives doesn't mean they didn't exist. Much more so if these neat and orderly narratives are popularly known and distributed. But that just begs the question: what's so good about them? Why have the implicit assumption that they're so good? Expansive road networks are good when you have large centralized empires to maintain, so that begs another question: why is it good to have large centralized empires in the first place? Where did these preferences come from? Why favor neat and orderly narratives of these times instead of ground level evidence? You have such an attachment to these neat and orderly narratives that you haven't bothered to see if there's any real truth to them. I could write a neat and orderly narrative about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but I would just be projecting my own views of the times and of the evidence, no matter how near or far I am from the actual event. And it wasn't just Gibbon, Justinian's court peddled these narratives of the Fall of Rome, all while the Ostrogoths under Theodoric did a good job restoring order for the time being. The world doesn't revolve around large scale bigger picture events written by courtiers, it revolves around institutions, how they shaped people, and how people shaped them. And that's the Historian's Craft: separate signal from noise. Signal and noise here are qualitative in most instances, but that's what Aristotle keeps pointing out: life and decision making are not like Mathematics, whether in the deductive or the computational senses. It's also the name of a good channel that you should check out, its username is @TheFallOfRome.
I always struggle to grasps what feudalism even means exactly. Yeah, I kinda understand how most systems in medieval Europe works with kings, nobles, peasants, landowners and taxes but what makes it so special to call it feudalism and imply it to other cultures like Japan and China? Okey, I don't really know about Chinese history but I heard that feudalism began and ended way earlier but what made it different between feudal China and afterwards really?
The point of Feudalism isn't to describe the system it was, but to contrast with what it BECAME, which is Capitalism. In Capitalism, you can buy and sell land, it's transferred by deed. In Feudalism, land is granted by a king, and it can't be subdivided or sold.
In Asian feudal states, you can actually sell the land that the emperor or king granted you. They can sell lands and the transaction are protected by deed that accepted and granted by government's officials.
@@jimmyngo2191 There are exceptions to the rule, but the general concept holds. Banking, deeds, and subdivisible property are the traits that define Capitalism.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 who said so?... nobody has actually ever properly been able to define "Capitalism" as a distinct "system"... its all just theoretical... nothing concrete. Banking, deeds, and subdivisible property are the traits of a properly develop coin based economy... I'm not seeing something new and distinct there... I wouldn't be surprised if the Romans had that stuff even before the Empire... probably not as advanced as those things are today... but who knows... they did have a type of concrete which is still way more advanced than modern concrete... I mean, they could use it underwater... even we can't do that, last time I checked at least.
@@foundationofBritain What are you talking about?? Fractional reserve banking is an invention, of around the 15th century. It means you give out loans for more money than you have in the vault, knowing all your customers aren't going to demand their money all at once. This means you can keep a reserve which gradually diminishes, and this allows the quantity of money to grow dynamically as people find new things to do with it. Because the money supply is dynamical, you have a period of growth, during which investments increase in value, all based on a similar mechanism to fractional reserve banking, you create new deeds for ventures which have value in themselves, and act as currency. This is stock and bonds, collateral, and contracts for future purchases, all of which can be traded and sold, and create a new kind of "paper money" which is independent of any government issued paper. The paper economy grows, by generating new forms of investment and paper, until there is a too-low reserve at the banks, and then there are bank runs, which lead banks to collapse, and the collapsing banks means that people suddenly (all at once) lose a gigantic chunk of their wealth, and try to convert their paper into gold. This is a bust. This mechanism is unique to a system where people can generate new "money" (meaning paper deeds which can be used for trade with a definite value in lieu and in addition to stable currency of gold or silver) from scratch. This DEFINES the Capitalist economy, when the deeds held by investors can multiply the value of investments indefinitely. This system began in the 15th century and took root in the 16th. It's a sharp break with the past, where the Church prevented even fractional reserve banking, they had religious banks which would give out loans in gold, and monitor the businesses that they helped start, and take a fraction of their profits to repay the initial loan. This type of banking does not lead to Capitalism, because you can't multiply money indefinitely. The Protestant reformation said "to heck with that! We want fractional reserve banking!" That's why the first Protestant (Calvin) was a banker in the Netherlands. You wouldn't think a religious reformation would be led by a banker.
@@jimmyngo2191Hey Jimmy, I've seen you make this comment before, and I was (have been for a while) curious about feudal society in Asia. Do you know where I could read more about that? Like books, sites or scholars
I am an economist and made myself thus due to my interest in research and models of data. One thing I learned through this journey living the last 15 years in Asia is that western historians, no matter how knowledgeable of the "data" they are, they fail in one simple way that makes many things problematic: They have no respect for those who lived before them. Western historians in general have no respect for the knowledge that ancient people had, and thence, for the deeds that brought them to the point they are. For the most part, even the least developed and most problematic places in Asia, people have mostly the culture to respect their ancestors and what they made or achieved. That is fundamental to learn history correctly. Western people have contempt to their ancestors since long time, and historians which now study historians of old already get that wrong view of history from what they find. From a long time, western society bases its research into the premisse that no matter what ancient people did, they did wrongly, inefficiently, crudely, lacking, or whatever. Simple examples of that might be found in the use of animals and plants as what we now think of "chemistry". The "clickbait" example I always use to "shock into understanding" is that we might have today an industry that prides itself in making the "perfumed potent desinfectants" like no other. And over 4000 years ago there are documents and recipes for the self same things done by feeding carnivore pets a certain diet, and getting their urine in certain herbs to rest for a while and therefore getting the exact same "compound" you use today to clear your home from the "latest scientific discoveries of the industry". The same you see on all these history documentaries in TH-cam. People base their rhetoric on the assumption that ancient peoples were crude, brutish, and all they did were insane and retrograde. Alas, someone studying our time like we do their would reach the same conclusions. Would find that certain parts of the developed World would have "sacrificial pits in which mass executions were made to a strange God in a Cross" as you can find "bodies with signs of instruments used on them pre and post mortem" among places bearing such "crosses", or that we had masses led to starvation in "reserves of poverty", like all the poor neighbourhoods we still have and neglect in most places. And probably in 1000 years, as things go, no one would find any reason to guess we had technology or fine things to our civilization, as their signs would be long gone. It is really boring that you have to dig youtube really hard to find quality information, while "rinse and repeat" documentaries like these are fed in our Recos by the algorithm because people like to watch them and feel good about themselves thinking they are "oh so advanced".
You clearly have not watched the video and have resorted to one of the stupidest spiels I have ever read I am Chinese and the narrator is Filipino. You have no power here
Göbekli Tepe survived and waited 12,000 years to be discovered, I'm fairly confident evidence of our global highly metallic and sometimes radioactive civilization will be rather hard to miss in 1000 years.
The people could rise up and overthrow their lord. Sounds better than being ruled by an untouchable, diffuse, unidentifiable ruling class. It makes sense that feudalism would be denigrated. I don’t believe it was as bad as people say. If feudalism did not exist, it might be necessary to invent it.
Whenever I hear the thing that feudalism was very specific thing, speficic only to the Middle Ages (and for some eurocentrist snobs, only a Western European thing - which is nothing less than a monument to the stupidity at tribalism of the perpetrators of such inanities. Funny, many o fthese are university professors and write acclaimed books where such nonsense gets published) ... well, all I can say is that this only goes to show how illiterate so many historians of the Middle Ages truly are. Vasselage, feudal relations, fiefs, a feudal hierarchy... all these are quite common for the historian of the ANcient World (not to mention the very few chosen ones who know their Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid history). Only when a medievalist choses to ignore everything that happens before 476 (and btw, seriously? 476 is just as broken as marker of a "significat" break between what we call NOWADAYS ancient world as opposed to the "Middle Ages" as any other such date) that she/he may imagine the beautiful delusion that is now academic dogma that there was such a thing as "feudalism" that distinguished "antiquity" form the "pre-modern" and "modern" capitalism. And here we enter another realm of insanity - the imbecile idea that capitalism is born around the 16-17th c. in Western Europe. As a funny side is no historian (not to mention economists or other theorist - their ideas are even more strange due to their profound ignorance of history) has ever noticed the "coincidence" that the so-called "birth" of capitalism in Western Europe brought back the institution of slavery on a huge scale. That is because very few people know that what happened in Amsterdam or Bordeaux or Svilla in the 17th c. was nothing but a revival of what was happening in e.g. Delos in the 2nd-1st c. BC. With al the parafernalia, except the stock exchange. To conclude: I invite my colleague medievalists to finally do their homework at ANcient History and cut the bs of feudlaism being a thing only in/of the Middle Ages. After that, a good thing would be to finally start to work on their homework as to the "birth of capitalism and the modern world". In both cases, less Weber and Annales stuff and more knowledge of the ancient world s the right path to go. The right one we use so far is wrong. PS I apologize for not taking the time to revise the grammar and spelling.
this is going to sound very mean and i'm sorry but this video is the exact type of hyper specific hair-splitting that you would be subjected to on places like /r/badhistory when one of the power users particularly feels like they want to win an argument and show the rest that the person they're arguing against is a stupid idiot that doesn't actually know anything even if what that person has originally said was only "wrong" in phrasing or in very deep detail
I'm not even believing that "capitalism" as a distinct "system"... anymore... its all just theoretical... nothing concrete. Nobody has actually ever properly been able to define it as such.
Dare i say that modern thinking is actually dominated by marxism to a larger degree than i first realized...im in economics and have recently realized that keynesian economics is actually just an evolved form of marxist economics and free markets are ironically less free in post neo liberal modern economies...
Something that strikes me about all this is just how clear, though still complex, the picture becomes when you demystify this period by getting rid of these superfluous terms like "feudalism" or "vassal" and the specific associations people attach to them.
In truth, many of the associations people instinctively draw upon when hearing the term feudalism are still valid. Though, everyone might stress a slightly different one owing to the muddled history of the term.
Land granted in exchange for military or other service has, obviously, occurred, perhaps not infrequently during the Medieval period in Europe. How could it not! In an agricultural society that is, at least early on, short on coinage and other forms of movable wealth, it is both logical and reasonable that rulers and other parties could sometimes resort to such an arrangement. We see it all the time throughout early-modern history and in no way exclusive to Europe. It has occurred everywhere, from Lisbon to Lyuyang. The Byzantine empire has quite famously resorted to a variant of this system. Though this polity is feverously denied the branding of "feudal," supposedly in contrast to its neighbours. Though, this reader finds it hard to find such a seismic difference between it and the Early kingdom of Hungary or Anglo-Saxon England as to brand them an entirely different form of government.
The same can be said of rulers and other magnates rewarding or assuring the loyalty of their subordinates via grants in land. Nor is it particularly had to imagine that those subordinates might then do such a thing with their own underlings. Or that these people might get special titles to mark their status, or that these titles might then get attached to the land.
But to imagine that these policies, to which almost every polity in Eurasia, from Chinese dynasties to steppe khanates or Siberian chiefdoms has likely resorted to at some point in their history, is a result of some sort of comprehensive society-wide structure which places all its members into an easily digestible pyramid. That is also actually unique to Medieval Europe is a grave case of putting the cart before the horse.
Much the same thing can be said of patron-client relationships or personal relationships crossing into and influencing the public sphere. I would go as far as to say that these are phenomena shared by all societies, including our very own. One could perhaps argue that these aspects get a unique spin and significance in certain parts of Medieval history. But to argue they are somehow the unique building bloc of "Feudal" society and no other is both naive and academic malpractice.
Even the idea of a shared bond and ethos between a band of warriors and its leader, while I wouldn't go as far as to say it is entirely insignificant, is not a particularly profound discovery and certainly not what all of Medieval society is built on. As exemplified by the fact that not just warriors lived and thrived in it.
Even serfdom, which for some godawful reason sometimes gets mixed in with "Feudalism" in the popular imagination is neither uniquely European nor even common to all of Medieval Europe.
All of these phenomena, as well as their unique local spins and variants, did play a role in varying proportions in European societies. And there's nothing wrong with pointing it out or studying it, that's what institutional history is all about. However, to be able to truly study these quite distinct kingdoms and cultures, you have to free yourself of the tyranny of the construct and just see them for what they actually are.
Like in school, my chemistry teacher introduced us to the black, white and red balls: I learned to construct hydrocarbons with them. But then another teacher told us that atoms are not balls.
The mind is always open to new insights.
The point of "Feudalism" isn't to make a caricature of the medieval era, it's to contrast with "Capitalism". The difference is that you can't sell your property in Feudalism, you can only inherit it or get it by Royal decree. Capitalism began when land became something you can buy and sell and exploit for profit.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 You could have sold your property (indeed, many distinct types of property) during the Entire Middle Ages in all of Europe. In the Late Roman Empire as well as the Frankish Kingdom that followed it and all its successor states. The distinction you purport isn't real. We know of hundreds of quite intricate land transactions among the peasants and aristocrats of the Lombard Kingdom of Italy for example.
@@user-vz1zc3fn7o The distinction is real as dirt, it repeated in hundreds of places. People sold certain types of "property" which were not Kingly fiefs. They couldn't do banking, they couldn't make a profit off the land, so there was no incentive to wall off property from the public. The transition to Capitalism is gradual, with various reforms, first property, then individual freedom to travel, contracts, banking, and all that. This transition was made in Hawaii in just a few years, and in Japan, deliberately, during the Meiji restoration. In fact, if you want to learn what the difference between "Capitalism" and "Feudalism" is, study the 20 years of the Meiji restoration, which is when a small group turned Japan (deliberately) from one form to the other.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Your defend is not valid. In Chinese or Chinese- like feudalism states like Vietnam and Korea, the people can travel around if you are wealthy enough or if you have a road- paper to identify who and where you came from. If you can't travel in feudal society, the silk road on land and sea will never exist. The lords just can forbid you to travel if you are their "property" (aka slave worker). You can also buy land, house, open shops etc... if you have the money. So your point of argue is not real.
I don't know what youtube did to the algorithm but the fact it recommends me these really obscure videos is awesome!
All hail the Algorithm
It did it to me too
Do you have a functional life??
Something im starting to note, all the stereotypes about medieval society actually apply to the modern era onwards:
-huge disparities between land owning lords and the serfs
-the king having absolute power
-lots of plate armor, big transoceanic ships
-witch hunts (common from 1450s onwards, not before, as even Thomas Aquinus negated that witches had any powers)
-the inquisition increasing its hunt on heresy and jews and etc (again, way worse in the modern era)
-a disdain for science between lutherans and catholics (many scientists before and after the advent of lutheranism were monks, and many were catholic and church sponsored, even secular scientists were church sponsored- Copernicus)
-a strict nobility hierarchy with lots of stablished rules and titles and formalities (in portugal, the first book on rules for noble houses arms and other symbols comes in the 1500's)
-the popular division of the three estates (church-nobles-peasants) becomes theorized and proeminent in political theory
It seems to me, that the reason liberalism/enlightenment/other ideologies of slightly before the french revolution had this view of medieval society was because they were projecting the problems of their time into the past, with the idea that things get worse.
Ironically, Marxist theorists usually say that systems usually get worse over time (slavery got worse with time, capitalism will get worse with time), but they didnt seem to apply this to "feudalism" like they did with other systems, they immediatly concieved it as an already disparate system where few peasants owned land, and it only got worse from there.
So, in a bigger irony, the reality would be "more marxist" as kings and nobles had less power and control over land in the beginning, and it only got worse right before it ended with the advent of liberal revolutions.
There were rules way way before they where written down. Unwriten older laws go before newer writen ones in many countries even today.
Of course. this is because most of the misconceptions we have about the past, especially in the era of mass media, are really just us projecting our own issues backwards, without any real understanding of how people used to live.
In another sense though, because of the fundamentally religious nature of Global Liberal Orthodoxy the past has to be held as inherently worse time in every way, otherwise the claim of inevitable Progress™ can't really be sustained. These twin motivations result in grotesquely distorted understanding of the past, both out of ignorance and out of deceit, that we have today.
This is a great essay that definitely deserves more views, I finally found a video that explains feudalism and the debate about it in depth. Most of the videos last 10 minutes and they explain it in a very basic and superficial way, which is obviously useful if we don't want to go too deep, but for someone more curious, your video is a great help. Keep it up and I hope you reach more people.
While I tackle Susan Reynolds's revisionist work, the debate would take another decade and a half to be settled.
Stay tuned for the next video, which tackles the discussions that conclusively settled it!
Wait only 303 views? I feel like I just watched a high quality video from a 500k subscriber channel! This is madness! Definitely subbed
I always saw a need for a channel that tackled scholarly topics in an accessible way with good presentation. We are unfortunately just hobbyists who do this in our spare time, but we value spreading this knowledge.
The good thing about my law degree was that we had to learn law history of portugal. Something that was clear from the start was that our teacher downright started "Portugal never had feudalism, because there were no vassals in portugal, the kingdom was to small and the king had centralized authority very early for it to even be considered something necessary"
It was a passing remark in our first class on medieval law, in another class, he explained how the term was antiquated, but never dived in.
What did explain it all, subtly, was learning about just how many legal sources there were, and the variety in medieval society.
Canon law, town law, corporation (portuguese word for guild) law, civil (roman) law, jurisprudence for each type of law, royal decrees, papal bules, treaties, etc. All these were sources of law in medieval society, each own was evidence that relations in medieval society were very diverse and complex.
More important, custom, tradition, common use, these were seen as super important sources of law, many times prevailing even against royal decrees.
Another myth shatered is exactly that, royal decrees are general laws, every other law was special, and in legal theory and practice, even today, a special law overrruns the general law.
Aka: if a town's custom dictates X, the kings law cant dictate Y, as the town custom was made exactly for that town, it has a stronger connection to the case at hand.
Medieval European society should, imo, be called a "Plural Power" system, as its the only real name i can give it. There were indeed many fractured political entities with their own laws, powers, duties, etc, all living together (or struggling with one another), to call it merely "feudal" is to ignore its lack of clear trait.
Watch our video on Medieval Statehood - we actually touch on plural power ("polycentrism")!
Its kinda wild how, now that you point it out, obviously the popular understanding of feudalism is nonsense. Like, anyone who lives in a community has some sense of 'res publica', that isnt some distinctly roman thing, so of course it would exist in medieval europe. And like of course roman insitutions would still serve as the basis for medieval law, why would any king want to completely burn down an already accepted system of governance and try to build something entirely new
I like how sometimes history is quite simples and direct, like a show or book that has its metaphors written on its face and yelled at you all the time.
As "nobles" want more power from the 12th century onwards, they build castles, a literal symbol of someone who wants power over what he thinks is "his domain".
As legal issues further complicate, lawyers start to rely more and more on old roman laws and more settled jurisprudence, a process that does happen today, where case by case analysis and solutions get replaced by general solutions and authoritative laws/doctrines/jurisprudence.
Seems that the true trend in history, is the cycle of centralization-decentralization-centralization-etc
This is essentially the fundamental cycle of nature, concentration and dispersion, contraction and expansion, tension and relaxation. In fact it can be likened to the simple dynamic rhythm of breathing in and breathing out.
this is an excellent, comprehensive summation on the debates over feudalism over the last few decades, and great for both dispensing with popular myths and informing about the way mediaeval society actually worked
also: great videos of some beautiful castles!
credit for the castle videos goes to public German television, as well as some other sources
I've only started this video and mean the following entirely as a joke: real feudalism has never been tried.
I'm a low-fantasy writer, and I like to first start my worlds with a realistic foundation (and then tweak and change them to fit my story and preferences/desires). These videos are very helpful in thinking about how to structure the worlds I create. They're also very interesting, thanks for the videos!
The popular perception in Western European history is a stark jump from late antiquity to the middle ages, the "fall of Rome." Then a thousand years later, the middle ages ended dramatically with the beginning of the modern era or the "Renaissance." In truth, there was a lot diversity with each era and the transitions were gradual. In other words, society in 600 CE Italy had much more in common with Italy in 400 CE and Italy in 600CE had much less in common with Italy in 1400 CE. Moreover, Italy in 1400 CE had more in common with Italy in 1600 CE.
im so happy i found this video, amazing job!
p.s. choice of music is amazing
Great video! I’ll definitely be watching many more 👍
Wow what a wonderful vlog. A long time ago I came across a very interesting small book/pamphlet on Snailbeach in Shropshire, which also cast doubt on the feudalism model. Once again the black death (which killed off 15% of Shropshire's population) is important, as Shropshire, in common with northern England, resulted in greater bargaining power to the agricultural workers. Snailbeach grew as a haven for those fleeing the power of the manor, providing not very fertile land for these run aways.
This juxtapositions with the power of the Shrewsbury wool merchants and finishers and the availability of many minerals (including coal) in shallow deposits all over Shropshire. Indeed, it was the alternative income from bell pits which made Shropshire briefly the most industrialised county in Britain.
Really glad to find a channel discussing the organization of society beyond the simple peasant-lord dynamic. Currently been collecting sources/PDFs regarding the societal organization and economic life of peasants and institutions during medieval times (usually regarding France).
Have you checked out the book Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (not medieval I know but it tackles the seigneurial system) by Jeremy Hayhoe?
Thank you! And no, I haven't. I have intentionally limited my studies to Medieval times. However, we plan to eventually tackle the time period up to Napoleon (including the persistent myth that he wanted to spread Liberal reforms to the rest of Europe), and we might tackle Early Modern societal organization.
@@viatorinterra Excellent to hear! With those plans, I hope societal organization of early modern European in its colonies (such as New France) is undertaken too. Though one remark from me regarding the video-construction itself, the music gets too loud at times.
the vast majority of medieval misconceptions can be explained by the rather dimwitted view most have that feudal society was some sort of cast system.
52:38 Behind the king you see the Keeper of the Royal Wi-Fi Signal.
Thank you for this great and academic video.
To the statement at 55.00 that women were excluded from these senior roles, Regine Pernoud in Women in the Days of the Cathedrals and the Glory of the Medieval World, give examples of women being common place those senior members involved in decision making, even at peasant levels.
I think that the specific anecdotal character of the system can vary from place to place and time to time, as well as some of the exterior cultural elements, but it seems that the very core of what we understand as feudalism is "government by private contract".
That is, in both the time of Imperial rome, and of modern centralized Nation states, while there is still a lot of private interaction, governance recycling flows from one Central Authority with a high degree of uniformity, and while there may be nodes in the system there aren't really genuine competing centers of power in a formal sense.
Who we consider to be the middle ages, the time of feudalism, whatever you want to call it, is basically an encapsulation of an era when this broke down and had not been rebuilt. It wasn't binary, and there was still some Central Authority but it was inherently weak, and could not enforce uniformity and universalism.
While it is true that centralized, technocratic, homogenized state structures - what we may consider to be empires - have existed for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years, I think in the broad sweep of human history "feudalism" is how most people have always lived.
1:21, "a king's power was not absolute", as a matter of fact, absolute royalty in Francr, was only achieved after the Capet dinasty fought the.Nobles for a 1000 years, a struggle that shaped France to this day, for example the imposotion of the French language over other dialects, french was the language of Ile de France, tje King's personal domain wich included Paris.
The first real absolute monarchs star after louis le 13, that is 17th century.
A High King in more feudal times was a leader among equals, chosen by the nobles to lead. But still under those nobles influence.
Sorry for the bad english writting. Third language typed from a tiny cell phone.
"No, they didn't have a monopoly on violence, they just controlled violence."
"No, status was not hereditary. Status was given to the rich and powerful... who then passed their status along with their wealth power to their descendants."
Overall I did find this very educational, and you showed me a lot of interesting sources. But this video could have been half as long if you didn't split hairs on things that didn't really support your point.
You think there's no difference between a mandated peerage enforced by the government over how things went before? You think regulations over the market are the same as a monopoly? You think that's just splitting hairs?
@@legatvssilanvs "Regulations" is a very polite word, you're acting as if authority was just as polite, if not more polite than it is today.
But no, I do not believe there is a difference. If one man was given his status due to his family name, and another man is given status due to his family name because his ancestor was important enough for the king to recognize, and that ancestor past that status down to his children who did nothing to earn it, then what difference are we really seeing in reality? That is a rhetorical question, because I'm sure anyone could write paragraphs on what the technical differences are. In the same way that some students pan for word count in their essays. In practicality, there is no observable difference.
Regarding the first point. I hope you do understand you are actually agreeing with Reynold's point there, yes? The reasoning some historians use to deny Medieval polities statehood is flawed because full control over violence is always aspirational.
For your second point. I do agree that the overwhelming focus on legalism tends to obscure issues and make distinctions where there are none. But I would still argue that a prescribed hereditary caste system where different classes are closed and have distinct rules and privileges apply to them is distinct from the more loose system where children inherit their parents' wealth and prestige but where there isn't a closed nobility caste, which allows for downward and upward mobility. The former usually describes societies where the noble class is already in decline and requires legal protection (Such as Early Modern Europe or later history of India), the latter describes almost every human society that has ever existed, including the Early Middle Ages and indeed our own society.
@@user-vz1zc3fn7o Oh yes, I completely agree with the narrative of the video. Mostly because of the sources provided, that I was able to study for myself. I don't disagree with the overall point of the video, I found it to be very educational. I just disagree with the way it was presented. Like I said in my reply, yes, the differences between a caste system and a caste-less system could fill a lot of space on paper. But in reality, the actual outcome is the same. The biggest difference would only be at the very beginning of the caste-less system, where free men are able to secure that status, regardless of family name. But after that, their status becomes hereditary and their family name monopolizes more and more shares of political power with each generation. We can actually see that development at the end of the medieval era, with the complicated family tree of hierarchy within the H.R.E. and the Hapsburgs.
@@fromD7 I agree this is broadly what happens, at the start you have a more fluid system where you have a mass of largely undifferentiated freemen, some of which are wealthier and more powerful, but there's a relatively large degree of social mobility as well, especially due to incessant warfare where lineages die out and new warriors prove themselves. Over time, however, wealth and political office is monopolised by a couple of families, these families eventually start seeing themselves as something apart, only marrying among each other and demand special treatment. By the end of this process, the old families start feeling threatened by new upstarts such as merchants or bureaucrats and codify their status as hereditary in law, preserving certain privileges, offices and exemptions for themselves (you'll note that this wouldn't have been necessary earlier because they already possessed de-facto monopoly on power, so why codify it if it wasn't challenged? This process also requires a fairly high level of societal development as all these privileges require paperwork such as noble patents and a court system that can enforce it.) This process can be observed in nearly all European states, and also elsewhere.
It is obviously a sliding scale, but there are differences between these various stages that are significant enough to be pointed out. Especially since there is no such thing as a society without a ruling elite, therefore the exact functioning of the ruling elite is of supreme importance.
A minor correction though it is a key distinction, but the Marxians think of the Feudal economy as being based on landowners' exploitation of the *peasantry as a whole*, which does include but is not limited to serfs. Under the Marxian sense, China was considered feudal or semi-feudal up until the 20th century, despite abolishing serfdom far sooner.
Brazil in the modern day would also be considered semi-feudal as an example.
A more accurate way to describe the Marxists' conception would be to use the term peasant economy--not feudalism--but what can I say to century old political theory? Still, I kind of like this flexible definition for this time period, peasants are kind of universal for these societies, I don't think there are any without peasants.
(Unless we're talking like nomads, but i dont know anything about how shepherding societies designate land ownership, maybe? I digress.)
I always use feudalism and words associated with it colloquially. I learned from a young age, watching Time Team and other history shows, that these words more often than not embodied meaning through terms that had no evidence of their fruitful existence. Went from a boy thinking on it, to coming of age and comparing lifes nuance to theirs. As time went on I never saw much evidence backing these terms. Than saw well established historians critiquing feudalism just how you are (though yours is so much more digestible😅💖). It's great this video is reaching many people. Well done👍
Nuance seems to have been largely replaced with expedience.
I'll need to return to this when I'm ready to concentrate.
I'm not used to TH-cam material being so advanced.
Yeah I tried listening to while doing things but wasn't hearing any of it really.
Saving to watch later but I’ll subscribe, why not
Excellent. Very well thought out and presented. It helped me sort out a few different things I'd contemplated previously in less than coherent ways. Likey saving me many hours of research. Staying on topic is challenging when learning for idle curiosity and constantly finding how little I really know. Much appreciated.
My good man its a valuable thing you are doing here. Congratulations and continue creating please and i mean please this is fantastic.
Amazing video! new subscriber
Are you finnish? Nice Video, looking forward for more
I would like to have a video about Asia's feudal states. Because we have a very different feudalism societies than European ones, where the states are far more centralized. All the nobles are granted by Emperors or kings. The people cannot choose their ruler but if the ruler was not capable enough to rule the country the people will revolt and overthrown the ruler. Also we have the pre-banking system. People can also trade lands with deed and the deed are granted and protected by law.
Okay.
So I've heard that nowadays, "they" say the Roman Empire did not, in fact, "fall". That notion was a fantasy created by Gibbon. It just kept chugging right along all the time.
And I also hear tell that those infamous "Dark Ages" we've all heard about weren't "dark" at all! They were filled with sunlight and roses! In fact, "Dark Ages" was a poetic fantasy dreamed up by Petrarch.
Now, I'm hearing that this "feudalism" that's been harped on for the past 200 years is just nonsense. Poppycock! Balderdash!
Then I think back to Tacitus, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero. I remember how reading them is pretty close to reading something written by an educated person in fairly modern times (more or less). And I also think back to Saxo Grammaticus and the Venerable Bede, and Froissart. Reading them is VERY VERY VERY different from ANYTHING produced by a modern person.
And yet, if Rome never fell, and those Dark Ages ain't dark, and feudalism is remarkably like our current monetary/economic system, why all the fairies and giants, and devils and magic ? Why all those stark, dramatic and undeniable differences between those texts written in those times that we still as yet call "Medieval" and now, and not as much difference between those texts from the ever unfallen Roman Empire and now?
I, of course, can't answer that question. I'm not a professional historian. But I do wonder how, if everything stayed the same and/or was so sophisticated, people had to rediscove human anatomy, concrete, and basic road building.
Focusing on the likes of Tacitus, Seneca, Plutarch, et al is survivors' bias. After the collapse of complex societies, the best works would be prioritized for handing down. Some examples: note how the only primary source we have for the Gallic Wars is Julius Caesar's commentaries, how we rely on only a few authors for the Late Republic, how bureaucratic records and receipts (among other ephemeral sources) only received attention in the past half century. Many more works of worse quality have been lost to time. You mention three Medieval authors from wildly different time periods, wildly different contexts, who engaged in wildly different work. So many more chronicles, diaries, and other sources survive from Medieval times than from Roman times. We now only know that the Gracchi brothers were spreading nonsense about a land crisis because of archaeological evidence showing that smallholding farms increased in their time, whereas Medieval times have so many more sources available.
Romans had their fair share of fairies, giants, and magic. Yet we hear these tales from the educated class, never from common peoples' telling. The Theogony and Aeneid are glorified accounts of fairies, giants, and magic, yet written in meter instead of ordinary telling.
Concrete was never lost, just the specific Roman blend. The Romans never even knew what they were doing with it, just that it could cure underwater. Medieval structures used their own blend of concrete with iron reinforcement, so that's a moot point either way. And I suggest you read up more on Medieval medicinal practices (ie www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4042035/, among some others not on the top of my head). The knowledge was lost, yet found not soon after things stabilized.
Now that is why this channel exists: to bring fire from the gods. Except the fire is scholarship on niche topics, and the gods are ivory tower residents with plenty of funding from who knows what sources, yet whose publishers are too greedy to release them to the public. Scholarship moves very fast, and this channel hasn't even remotely scraped the tip of the iceberg.
Also if you want a good rundown on the Collapse of Western Rome, our latest video gives a good overview.
@@viatorinterra Hmmmmm
Well, when Virgil talks about his nymphs, satyrs, etc etc; I get the distinct impression that they're more literary conceit than they are "true and real things". But when I read Saxo, I don't get that impression. They're just as "real" as you or I.
Concrete existed in Medieval times? Interesting. I've always heard that they had mortar, but proper concrete didn't happen again until 18th century (might have the century wrong there, but you get my point).
I knew you'd think I was talking about medical stuff when I said what I said about human anatomy, but what I meant was the human form in art. I love Medieval art just as much as you do, but c'mon. You're going to tell me that they were just as knowledgeable as Phidias?
I appreciate the fact that right now, as we write this, hordes of unpaid grad students are diligently sifting through reams and reams of moldy parchment, painstakingly teasing out every millimeter of information, and desperately trying to piece together a vast jigsaw puzzle with a good part of its pieces missing. Their labor is heavy and their indefatigable intellectual stamina is superhuman.
But I just can't help but to see a highly complex and sophisticated society around 100 AD, and then a strangely benighted one 600 years later. Not to disparage dear Alcuin, he wasn't dumb, to be sure, but he was no Cato either.
@@johnmanno2052 It's best to expand your readings then. You keep citing a small sample of authors out of the vast number. Saxo Grammaticus was some clerk in the middle of Denmark, then a rural kingdom. Baldus de Ubalis, Henry of Segusio, Bulgarus, Irnerius, Martinus Gosia, Jacobus de Boragine, Hugo de Porta Ravenatte, must I go on? If I take some rural Mathematics primary teacher as representative of France then compare him to Terence Tao, of course France will look disgustingly bad.
And why do you keep lumping 1000 years of history under the same blanket? Do you really think Italy after the Gothic Wars and the Balkans after Avar and Slavic raids are the same as 12th century kingdoms experiencing demographic and economic expansion? Will you really take Alcuin, some Anglo-Saxon court scholar for Charlemagne, as representative of the Burgundian court in the 15th century? Do you not understand that conditions change across place and time? Why did we see a real estate bubble appear in England? Do you not understand that conditions change across place and time?
Starting from the 12th century, the Medievals built infrasturcture that regularly dwarfed Roman structures. Concrete is literally just water, binder, and aggregate that has cured. I don't see how not having volcanic ash makes Medieval concrete not concrete, or why volcanic ash concrete is the only concrete that should exist. Even Anglo-Saxon structures had concrete. And if you're gonna discuss anatomy, best to specify what you mean instead of intentionally or not trying to catch me off guard. By your logic anyhow, the Roman Empire never reached any artistic heights because they couldn't replicate Phidias over and over.
Get some perspective. You have done nothing but cherry pick data points generated by wildly different times and places only to lump them into a horrible collage of what you think Medieval times were. Grad students don't just shift through moldy parchment, they shift through bureaucratic records, they shift through diaries, they shift through birch tree bark, they ask archaeologists what they have dug up, they ask chemists to analyze materials and artifacts.
@@viatorinterra Okay. Thank you for the reading list! I'll definitely check them out.
A few minor points: I've heard that concrete is a specific thing, but that's from engineers, not historians. And yes, I shouldn't have been quite so flip about human anatomy. I was commending, not lampooning, those grad students. I know they sift through tons of different texts and archeological data. I sincerely think their efforts are indeed superhuman, given the fragmentary nature of what survives from the period.
However, I cannot agree with their conclusions.
I strongly suspect that this all might be a "not seeing the forest for the trees" situation. Yes. The Middle Ages wasn't as bad as people might think. Yes. There was some trade, even some long distance trade. Sure, there probably was a (rudimentary) money economy. Yeah. "Feudalism" didn't really"exist", much like when I was a kid during the Cold War "Communism" didn't really "exist".
But I know what I see. I read Thucydides, Polybius, Tacitus and Plutarch (cherry picking over a huge time period), then I read Alcuin, Froissart, Bede, Grammaticus, the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, Procopius, and more, cherry picking once again; and I'm left with an inescapable conclusion:
The Middle Ages SUCKED!
Just like when I read (parts of, haven't found a full English translation yet) "The Records of the Historian" by Ssu Ma. Chien compared with "The Secret History of the Mongols". One is reflective of a highly sophisticated and advanced civilization, the other is.... interesting. Obviously written by someone who was brilliant, but it's not the product of an urbanized, erudite culture.
Someone who asserts that the emperor's head detached at night and floated about the palace, straight faced, is someone who's worldview is so divergent from mine, they might as well be from another planet. Someone who wrote "The Melian Dialogue" is someone I want to hear lecture on the war in Ukraine. And this is true of every single text I've read from that 1000 year time period. Mind you, it's not that I hate reading those texts, Froissart was brilliant, the "Très Riches Heures" are simply exquisite, and I'm certain I'll enjoy reading those authors you mentioned.
But life was not as we would, or even could recognize it after whatever happened to the Roman Empire happened. Sure, people built cathedrals and castles during that millennium, but aqueducts? Huge, large scale road systems? A unified system of coinage and long distance trade? Heck, in floor central heating?! That all had to wait until industrialization happened, MORE than 1000 years after the end(?) of Rome.
I understand that "history" now is considered to be a "science". But I'd like to look at it as the ancients did, especially the authors from the Middle Ages, namely as a moral tale. And when I do so, the moral I take away from my readings is:
Collapse SUCKS! Do everything you can to avoid it!
In my opinion, despite all the many virtues of that tumultuous thousand years+ , people's lives were A LOT harder than what was experienced before it began, and that's even more true when you compare the peninsula called Europe, to the Tang , or the Abbasid empires. Economic contraction, especially when catastrophic, wrecks havoc so complete, that it takes centuries to recover.
@@johnmanno2052 Concrete is a specific thing. I have intimate knowledge of structural engineering textbooks, methods, and models like finite element analysis. The point is, concrete is just binder, aggregate, and water that's been cured. You can add eggshells into that mix, you can add carbon fiber, you can add bird feathers, it will still be concrete. You have no idea how many undergraduate structural engineering theses I've skimmed over doing the exact same thing. Pure Mathematics is a much better subject, Physics not so much.
And I can assure you that Roman and Modern history is more fragmentary than it seems on the surface. It's one thing to read textbooks about WW2, it's another to go through administrative records, letters, diaries, secret orders, among other ephemeral sources. Compare Ian Kershaw's Working towards the Fuehrer with whatever nonsense is peddled in popular media and education. Compare the debate on Intentionalism vs Structuralism with mad whining in mainstream circles. Neat and orderly narratives about history are fun to read, but they often hide the nitty gritty in many instances. I loved reading how Julius Caesar actually was assassinated vs how Shakespeare and HBO's Rome portrayed it, but that involved piecing together different narratives.
And there is a reason why I specifically brought up the Gracchi Brothers. It shows how warped our picture of the past can get from these neat and orderly narrative sources. The Gracchi Brothers turned out to be demagogues whipping up the Roman populace over a much more complicated problem: a general economic downturn. We know this only because of archaeology and shifting through records. I can give you another example, our knowledge of the Emperor Caligula comes from only a few people writing so many years after him. All we can do is conjecture and speculate on his actions - you might have heard of hypotheses that he ordered his soldiers to pick up sea shells as humiliation, or that he installed a horse as senator to mock the senate, and that his enemies took these in the worst light. Who knows what to believe? Neat and orderly chronicles of the past, however, are always fraught with questions that need answers.
Now I've had a suspicion as to who this is, so if not, kindly indulge me when I say this. This is what Aristotle has been pointing out, which tutor doesn't seem to understand despite trying to drill in other of his trifles. The world isn't neat and tidy, there are no rules to excellence. The information we have and the stories we tell ourselves always come from somewhere. Whoever made them up in turn got them from somewhere, whether seeing them for themselves, or listening to others tell them. Fighting games are an idealized mimesis of how real combat works - the real thing is always messier and with more unexpected events.
Now here are a few recommendations I give out to those who want to know more about Medieval technology. You won't find neat and tidy narratives about these, because the technology kept evolving that nobody bothered to write them down. All we have is archaeology and occasional mentions in other texts. A history of engineering in classical and medieval times by Hill, The Medieval Machine by Gimpel,
Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel (free on erenow). The HRE did have an expansive road network, Hindle has written about the road network in medieval England and Wales. Rome had maps of its road network, well we have the Gough map and . People not writing about these in neat and orderly narratives doesn't mean they didn't exist. Much more so if these neat and orderly narratives are popularly known and distributed.
But that just begs the question: what's so good about them? Why have the implicit assumption that they're so good? Expansive road networks are good when you have large centralized empires to maintain, so that begs another question: why is it good to have large centralized empires in the first place? Where did these preferences come from? Why favor neat and orderly narratives of these times instead of ground level evidence? You have such an attachment to these neat and orderly narratives that you haven't bothered to see if there's any real truth to them. I could write a neat and orderly narrative about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but I would just be projecting my own views of the times and of the evidence, no matter how near or far I am from the actual event. And it wasn't just Gibbon, Justinian's court peddled these narratives of the Fall of Rome, all while the Ostrogoths under Theodoric did a good job restoring order for the time being. The world doesn't revolve around large scale bigger picture events written by courtiers, it revolves around institutions, how they shaped people, and how people shaped them. And that's the Historian's Craft: separate signal from noise. Signal and noise here are qualitative in most instances, but that's what Aristotle keeps pointing out: life and decision making are not like Mathematics, whether in the deductive or the computational senses.
It's also the name of a good channel that you should check out, its username is @TheFallOfRome.
great video
Great video !
I'll have to watch this later but thanks for this.
I always struggle to grasps what feudalism even means exactly. Yeah, I kinda understand how most systems in medieval Europe works with kings, nobles, peasants, landowners and taxes but what makes it so special to call it feudalism and imply it to other cultures like Japan and China? Okey, I don't really know about Chinese history but I heard that feudalism began and ended way earlier but what made it different between feudal China and afterwards really?
Superb!
This is just what I was looking for! I've always wanted to be that guy that says something like: "Erm, akshually, feudalism never existed 🤓"
The point of Feudalism isn't to describe the system it was, but to contrast with what it BECAME, which is Capitalism. In Capitalism, you can buy and sell land, it's transferred by deed. In Feudalism, land is granted by a king, and it can't be subdivided or sold.
In Asian feudal states, you can actually sell the land that the emperor or king granted you. They can sell lands and the transaction are protected by deed that accepted and granted by government's officials.
@@jimmyngo2191 There are exceptions to the rule, but the general concept holds. Banking, deeds, and subdivisible property are the traits that define Capitalism.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 who said so?... nobody has actually ever properly been able to define "Capitalism" as a distinct "system"... its all just theoretical... nothing concrete. Banking, deeds, and subdivisible property are the traits of a properly develop coin based economy... I'm not seeing something new and distinct there... I wouldn't be surprised if the Romans had that stuff even before the Empire... probably not as advanced as those things are today... but who knows... they did have a type of concrete which is still way more advanced than modern concrete... I mean, they could use it underwater... even we can't do that, last time I checked at least.
@@foundationofBritain What are you talking about?? Fractional reserve banking is an invention, of around the 15th century. It means you give out loans for more money than you have in the vault, knowing all your customers aren't going to demand their money all at once. This means you can keep a reserve which gradually diminishes, and this allows the quantity of money to grow dynamically as people find new things to do with it. Because the money supply is dynamical, you have a period of growth, during which investments increase in value, all based on a similar mechanism to fractional reserve banking, you create new deeds for ventures which have value in themselves, and act as currency. This is stock and bonds, collateral, and contracts for future purchases, all of which can be traded and sold, and create a new kind of "paper money" which is independent of any government issued paper.
The paper economy grows, by generating new forms of investment and paper, until there is a too-low reserve at the banks, and then there are bank runs, which lead banks to collapse, and the collapsing banks means that people suddenly (all at once) lose a gigantic chunk of their wealth, and try to convert their paper into gold. This is a bust.
This mechanism is unique to a system where people can generate new "money" (meaning paper deeds which can be used for trade with a definite value in lieu and in addition to stable currency of gold or silver) from scratch. This DEFINES the Capitalist economy, when the deeds held by investors can multiply the value of investments indefinitely.
This system began in the 15th century and took root in the 16th. It's a sharp break with the past, where the Church prevented even fractional reserve banking, they had religious banks which would give out loans in gold, and monitor the businesses that they helped start, and take a fraction of their profits to repay the initial loan. This type of banking does not lead to Capitalism, because you can't multiply money indefinitely.
The Protestant reformation said "to heck with that! We want fractional reserve banking!" That's why the first Protestant (Calvin) was a banker in the Netherlands. You wouldn't think a religious reformation would be led by a banker.
@@jimmyngo2191Hey Jimmy, I've seen you make this comment before, and I was (have been for a while) curious about feudal society in Asia. Do you know where I could read more about that? Like books, sites or scholars
Command economies in the fashion of adam smith!!!XD XD
I am an economist and made myself thus due to my interest in research and models of data. One thing I learned through this journey living the last 15 years in Asia is that western historians, no matter how knowledgeable of the "data" they are, they fail in one simple way that makes many things problematic: They have no respect for those who lived before them.
Western historians in general have no respect for the knowledge that ancient people had, and thence, for the deeds that brought them to the point they are. For the most part, even the least developed and most problematic places in Asia, people have mostly the culture to respect their ancestors and what they made or achieved. That is fundamental to learn history correctly. Western people have contempt to their ancestors since long time, and historians which now study historians of old already get that wrong view of history from what they find. From a long time, western society bases its research into the premisse that no matter what ancient people did, they did wrongly, inefficiently, crudely, lacking, or whatever.
Simple examples of that might be found in the use of animals and plants as what we now think of "chemistry". The "clickbait" example I always use to "shock into understanding" is that we might have today an industry that prides itself in making the "perfumed potent desinfectants" like no other. And over 4000 years ago there are documents and recipes for the self same things done by feeding carnivore pets a certain diet, and getting their urine in certain herbs to rest for a while and therefore getting the exact same "compound" you use today to clear your home from the "latest scientific discoveries of the industry".
The same you see on all these history documentaries in TH-cam. People base their rhetoric on the assumption that ancient peoples were crude, brutish, and all they did were insane and retrograde. Alas, someone studying our time like we do their would reach the same conclusions. Would find that certain parts of the developed World would have "sacrificial pits in which mass executions were made to a strange God in a Cross" as you can find "bodies with signs of instruments used on them pre and post mortem" among places bearing such "crosses", or that we had masses led to starvation in "reserves of poverty", like all the poor neighbourhoods we still have and neglect in most places. And probably in 1000 years, as things go, no one would find any reason to guess we had technology or fine things to our civilization, as their signs would be long gone.
It is really boring that you have to dig youtube really hard to find quality information, while "rinse and repeat" documentaries like these are fed in our Recos by the algorithm because people like to watch them and feel good about themselves thinking they are "oh so advanced".
You clearly have not watched the video and have resorted to one of the stupidest spiels I have ever read
I am Chinese and the narrator is Filipino. You have no power here
Göbekli Tepe survived and waited 12,000 years to be discovered, I'm fairly confident evidence of our global highly metallic and sometimes radioactive civilization will be rather hard to miss in 1000 years.
? Did I miss something?….the economist was complimenting the video and Asia’s respect for the past
@@viatorinterra You clearly have not read his comment and have resorted to one of the stupidest answers I have ever read
Did you take business economy classes, perchance?
When did Knighthood become formal?.
The people could rise up and overthrow their lord. Sounds better than being ruled by an untouchable, diffuse, unidentifiable ruling class. It makes sense that feudalism would be denigrated. I don’t believe it was as bad as people say. If feudalism did not exist, it might be necessary to invent it.
That accent..are you from where I think you're from?
Whenever I hear the thing that feudalism was very specific thing, speficic only to the Middle Ages (and for some eurocentrist snobs, only a Western European thing - which is nothing less than a monument to the stupidity at tribalism of the perpetrators of such inanities. Funny, many o fthese are university professors and write acclaimed books where such nonsense gets published) ... well, all I can say is that this only goes to show how illiterate so many historians of the Middle Ages truly are. Vasselage, feudal relations, fiefs, a feudal hierarchy... all these are quite common for the historian of the ANcient World (not to mention the very few chosen ones who know their Achaemenid, Arsacid and Sassanid history). Only when a medievalist choses to ignore everything that happens before 476 (and btw, seriously? 476 is just as broken as marker of a "significat" break between what we call NOWADAYS ancient world as opposed to the "Middle Ages" as any other such date) that she/he may imagine the beautiful delusion that is now academic dogma that there was such a thing as "feudalism" that distinguished "antiquity" form the "pre-modern" and "modern" capitalism. And here we enter another realm of insanity - the imbecile idea that capitalism is born around the 16-17th c. in Western Europe. As a funny side is no historian (not to mention economists or other theorist - their ideas are even more strange due to their profound ignorance of history) has ever noticed the "coincidence" that the so-called "birth" of capitalism in Western Europe brought back the institution of slavery on a huge scale. That is because very few people know that what happened in Amsterdam or Bordeaux or Svilla in the 17th c. was nothing but a revival of what was happening in e.g. Delos in the 2nd-1st c. BC. With al the parafernalia, except the stock exchange. To conclude: I invite my colleague medievalists to finally do their homework at ANcient History and cut the bs of feudlaism being a thing only in/of the Middle Ages. After that, a good thing would be to finally start to work on their homework as to the "birth of capitalism and the modern world". In both cases, less Weber and Annales stuff and more knowledge of the ancient world s the right path to go. The right one we use so far is wrong. PS I apologize for not taking the time to revise the grammar and spelling.
Big if true
The chance will come. Me ladosa
this is going to sound very mean and i'm sorry but this video is the exact type of hyper specific hair-splitting that you would be subjected to on places like /r/badhistory when one of the power users particularly feels like they want to win an argument and show the rest that the person they're arguing against is a stupid idiot that doesn't actually know anything even if what that person has originally said was only "wrong" in phrasing or in very deep detail
Also capitalism is just a bunch of separate contracts. All of it, however, has been extortion since it came from the plains of Siberia,
I'm not even believing that "capitalism" as a distinct "system"... anymore... its all just theoretical... nothing concrete.
Nobody has actually ever properly been able to define it as such.
Dare i say that modern thinking is actually dominated by marxism to a larger degree than i first realized...im in economics and have recently realized that keynesian economics is actually just an evolved form of marxist economics and free markets are ironically less free in post neo liberal modern economies...
Yes,feudalism never existed for the Rich. 🤣
or for the poor.
@@foundationofBritain Typical contradictory statement & telling too..cognitive dissonance in effect