Feudalism, Serfdom and Extra-Economic Surplus Extraction

chapter 3 Feudalism, Serfdom and Extra-Economic Surplus Extraction One of Marx’s most important contributions to historical materialism has been his thesis that the essential difference between different economic forms of society is the specific way in which the surplus product is extracted by the ruling class of non-producers from the producers.1 In line with Marx, Brenner characterised feudalism as a form of society or a system of social relations in which the surplus product was extracted by extra-economic coercion or, in other words, the means of extraction was political. By contrast, the extraction of the surplus in capitalism is fundamentally, although not entirely, achieved by the economic coercion of the market. In feudalism, peasant possession and peasant forms of production meant that peasants were largely shielded from the market, and so lords could only extract a surplus from the peasants and maintain themselves through political and military domination. In capitalism, wage workers are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity on the market in order to survive: political coercion is still involved, but it is fundamentally an economic, rather than an extra-economic, force that compels. In other words, it is the threat of unemployment in capitalism, in contrast to the threat of the point of the sword and legal retribution in feudalism that compels producers to submit themselves for exploitation by non-producers, whether or not they perceive it in this way. It is the social relations of serfdom (unfreedom) that provide the clearest representation of extra-economic coercion in feudalism. By the early thirteenth century in England, peasants were subjected to various dues in addition to the rent for their holdings. Those peasants who were depressed into ‘villeinage’, an English legal term for serfdom, were also entirely subjected to their lord’s jurisdiction and had no legal right to challenge their lord’s decisions against them in a higher, royal court. Many dues to which ‘villeins’ were subjected were flexible – that is, they could be imposed arbitrarily at the will of lords. These included tallage or taxation, increases in fines on servile disabilities such as on the ability to marry or move away from the manor (‘merchet’ and ‘chevage’), and increases in other fines on land transfers and seigneurial monopolies such as grain mills and bread ovens. Armed with these arbitrary powers, lords were 1 Marx 1991, p. 791. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�7��04_��5 66 chapter 3 able to increase the proportion of their income at the expense of the peasants, and this ability was backed by the threat of military force. Without this flex- ibility lords faced crisis because they would be unable to reproduce themselves in the face of inflation and the spiralling demands of political accumulation.2 Some historians have had problems with feudalism as defined by extra- economic surplus extraction and have been critical of Brenner’s application of it. This definition has led Jane Whittle to assume that Brenner equates feudalism with the social relations of serfdom. She has argued that if serfdom had largely ended in England by 1420 then so must have feudalism, full stop. Indeed, she argues further that because capitalism did not develop fully until centuries later, there could not have been a transition from feudalism to capitalism: instead there was a long gap between the end of the feudal and the beginning of the capitalist modes of production. Her solution to this problem is to reject the concept of a transition from feudalism to capitalism in England after the destruction of serfdom in the early fifteenth century, and to replace it with the concept of a peasant society and economy without serfdom ‘merging into capitalism’ at a later date.3 Aside from the lack of conceptual rigour that this thesis displays, her end date for feudalism in 1420 is achieved by failing to incorporate the broader structure of feudal social-property relations beyond the social relations of serfdom, including the continuing dominance of the feudal ruling class with its controls over landed property and its latent poten- tial to re-enserf the peasantry. This point can be developed more fully in response to Steve Rigby’s objection to Brenner’s thesis on the extra-economic character of surplus extraction in feudalism. Rigby points out that half of the peasants in medieval England were freeholders, and thus he argues that they were therefore not liable to extra-economic coercion: so feudalism in Brenner’s sense, and more broadly in the Marxist sense, only applied to a limited section of social relations in English medieval society.4 The first point to make against this objection is that, while freeholders were not subjected to certain flexible dues and the burdens that 2 For a useful introduction see Hilton 1990a. 3 Whittle 2000, pp. 10–12, 16. 4 Rigby 1995, pp. 49–52. Bruce Campbell has more recently calculated that about half of the peasants in England were freeholders by the end of the thirteenth century. This amounted to a substantial increase in the proportion between free and unfree since 1200. Peasants were given the carrot of free tenure as a means of encouraging them to clear previously marginal areas for cultivation and provide new rents for the lords in the context of a rapidly increasing population, rising demand for food and rising rents, and that accounts for the increase in freeholders. Freeholds covered substantially less than half of the acreage of available peasant landholdings however because freeholders were far more likely than unfree villeins to be .

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