Feudalism is a modern word, like capitalism and communism. No one in the Middle Ages used it, or any of its related terms, such as feudal system or feudal society. Many historians today think that it is a misleading word and should be discarded. The term poses two serious problems. First, historians have used it to mean different things. Second, it implies that one way of life dominated the Middle Ages, when in fact social, political, and economic arrangements varied widely.

Consider the many different meanings that feudalism has had. Historians influenced by Karl Marx’s powerful communist theory used (and still use) the word feudalism to refer to an economic system in which a class of landowners dominated subservient peasant cultivators. When they speak of feudalism, they are speaking of manors, lords, and serfs. Other historians, however, call that system manorialism. They reserve the word feudalism for a system consisting of vassals (who did no agricultural labor but only military service), lords, and fiefs. For example, in Feudalism, an influential book written in the mid-1940s, F. L. Ganshof considered the tenth to the thirteenth centuries to be the “classical age of feudalism” because during this period lords regularly granted fiefs to their vassals, who fought on their lord’s behalf in return.

But, writing around the same time as Ganshof, Marc Bloch included in his definition of feudalism every aspect of the political and social life of the Middle Ages, including peasants, fiefs, knights, vassals, the fragmentation of royal authority, and even the survival of the state.

Today some historians argue that talking about feudalism distorts the realities of medieval life. The fief—whose Latin form, feodum, gave rise to the word feudalism—was by no means important everywhere. And even where it was important, it did not necessarily have anything to do with lords, vassals, or military obligations. For such historians, feudalism is a myth. Other historians, however, think that the term is extremely useful as long as its multiple forms are recognized. These historians are now starting to speak of “feudalisms”—in the plural.