Talk:Feudalism

Needs to be rewritten, terrible article lacks coherence

I came to this article wanting to learn about feudalism so I am a good test case. This article is convoluted, incoherent and repetitive. I stopped reading after several paragraphs due to its low quality of writing. It needs to be entirely scrapped and rewritten. 2600:100F:B106:490B:21A8:1AD9:E18:23F4 (talk) 20:25, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

Do you have any actual suggestions? Grayfell (talk) 06:26, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

The article has been surprisingly stable for at least 15 years with millions of readers. Your view is not a common sentiment. If you stopped reading after only "several paragraphs" it's hard to take the criticism seriously. The "repetition" is how Wikipedia works, the lead section repeats what exists further down, the lead is a summary of the important points made in the body. The writing is fine, at least not "low quality", hard to know what you are talking about. -- GreenC 13:30, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

a bit late to the party, but the IP is right. the article spends basically no time explaining how the feudal system actually worked, only some description of vassals mixed in with huge amounts of meta-study. the article on feudalism doesn't really explain feudalism. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 05:37, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, the definition and history sections.. but this is the problem because Feudalism as a distinct concept did not exist in the Middle Ages. It was a concept invented much later. And it turns out to be a shaky concept when you start looking at places beyond, say, 10th century Normandy. There is no singular "how it works". See "Examples of feudalism". At best you can give some general attributes which the article already does per Ganshof and some others. If you find feudalism a bit unclear, so does everyone else. Feudalism is one of the most controversial topics in medieval history, to the point many historians have recommended retiring it entirely from discourse, as essentially meaningless. Our article discusses all this. If you want to get into the details of how it worked you would probably expand one of the sections/articles in Examples of feudalism. -- GreenC 14:35, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree with GreenC here - as a semi-medievalist (I do not research in the field anymore but I try to stay current with the historiography/etc after leaving university where I studied medieval history), yes, there is no simple "How feudalism worked" to write about - it would be wrong to give readers the idea that the concept of feudalism isn't actually an after-medieval-period concept that fits poorly with much of the medieval European period (or in many other areas where feudalism is often claimed to have existed). The big seminal work on this is Reynolds' Fiefs and Vassals which is actually a relatively easy read for even the non-medievalist... I highly recommend it. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:57, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

okay, well, is there some orthodox view of feudalism that outlines some kind of system, even if that doesn't match up with reality? There should be some description of what feudalism as a theory actually entails, and then we can discuss criticisms and alternatives of that theory. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 19:46, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Doesn't it already discuss this? First sentence of second paragraph: "The classic definition, by François Louis Ganshof (1944)". Second paragraph of Definition section: "According to a classic definition by François Louis Ganshof (1944)," First sentence of section Classic feudalism: "The classic François Louis Ganshof version of feudalism". But like I said, this topic is so fraught that if you give too much weight to one POV, editors will cry fowl and push another different POV, there is no orthodoxy per se. -- GreenC 20:40, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

The classic definition, by François Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility and revolved around the key concepts of lords, vassals, and fiefs. That's a pretty terrible description. Feudalism#Classic feudalism does do something like what I'm looking for, yeah. It should probably be moved into the definition section and expanded on in the lead, since it actually describes what feudalism entails. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 21:47, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

No, it describes what feudalism entailed to one historian. Given the respective weighting prominence in modern reliable sources, the article would be far better served by massively increasing the focus on Elizabeth Brown's rejection of the term. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:01, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Well, Ganshof has the reputation of representing the classical "orthodox" view. He is singularly important. That is why he name checked in this article multiple times and it would be an odd article if he wasn't. Nevertheless, you can still find modern day historians who subscribed to this classical view, or the Bloch version, I'm not sure this debate has reached the point where the Brown camp has prevailed universally. -- GreenC 23:26, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

If someone wants to improve the article, the best thing to do would be throwing out the "History" section and all other parts which try to say what feudalism meant or how it worked, and refocus it entirely on the historiography. "Feudalism" means everything and nothing. Trying to address what it could mean in a Wikipedia article—you might as well link to Portal:Middle Ages. Any redevelopment of that sort, however, will require an editor who is intimately familiar with a great deal of modern research, and we'll probably be waiting a while until one appears. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:51, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

This article was originally mostly historiography, that caused a lot of kickback. Over a decade ago, there was a professional medieval historian who tried to add a history section (about origins in Germany) but the prose was so academically impenetrable it didn't stand. You should read Brown's encyclopedia entry on Feudalism (Britannica?), it's complex, and more nuanced than might expect. For general readers, this article is not bad given how difficult a topic it is for Wikipedia purposes. -- GreenC 23:28, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Feudalism

"There was no such thing as feudalism. We've known it for decades." - David M. Perry, historian.

Other than a vague allusion toward the very end of this VERY long article, there is absolutely no mention of the fact that the feudal system did not actually exist in any meaningful way anywhere in Europe, ever. Maybe lead with that?

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-f-word-feudalism-1788836 2600:1700:5AB0:BFC0:CDEF:F0C6:46A8:E905 (talk) 20:50, 3 January 2025 (UTC)