Translated from the Spanish. The original version of this post is available here.

In: Revista Mexicana de Sociología. Mexico City. IIS-UNAM, Year XLVIII/No. 1. January–March 1986, pp. 5–85.

“[…] like any other determinate mode of production, it presupposes, as its historical condition, a given phase of the social productive forces and of their forms of development […] (and) […] the relations of production corresponding to that specific and historically determinate mode of production […]”

Karl Marx, Capital.

I

When Marx, in his celebrated Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, sets out to make a global appraisal of the line of economic development of human societies, he tells us: “In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as progressive epochs of the economic formation of society” (cfr., Marx, 1980a:5).

The problem posed here —and one that has given rise to every kind of misinterpretation and to long-running polemics— is not the problem of the obligatory stages that humanity must, or has had to, traverse in its progressive evolution, but only —only!— that of those economic figures which, in real terms, have represented specific qualitative steps towards higher levels of development of the general economic base of society.

The idea Marx has in mind in this assertion bears on the question of how humanity creates its own economic base, that is, how it manages to develop its various economic-productive powers and capacities until it comes to dominate nature and thus forge the material base adequate to the true human world, to the true history of man, or “realm of freedom”.^[1] Hence, if in the economic sphere what is at stake is to overcome the predominance of nature and to conquer the material platform corresponding to “true social life” (Marx, 1976: vol. 1, p. 89), then all those economic forms or modes of production that involve an essential qualitative leap in human productive skills and powers will have to be conceived as “progressive stages”, as ascending steps in the process of formation of the economic base of society.

From this, evidently, no obligatory law of the concrete course of historical progress for all peoples follows. Those progressive stages are not the necessary and inescapable stages of the different human groups, but the real paths that a part of humanity —or a set abstracted from its “parts”— has been able to travel in its sustained effort to develop material forces and economic relations that are ever more empowered and complex, both in the face of nature and for men themselves. Marx is very clear on this point when, in his letter to the editorial board of the Russian journal Otiechestviennie Zapiski of late 1877, he condemns the idea that he has constructed “[…] a historico-philosophical theory of the general path to which all peoples are fatally subject, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves”, and criticizes this way of approaching history, ironizing about the use of “[…] a universal passkey of a general theory of the philosophy of history, whose greatest advantage lies precisely in the fact of being a supra-historical theory” (see the letter in Marx and Engels, 1980a:62-65).

This does not lead us, however, to deny all general sense to historical evolution. Although there is no compulsory law of the succession of stages within the concrete trajectories of human peoples, there is indeed a single general tendency that animates, on the economic plane, the diverse routes established by the peculiar march of social groups: in the sphere of the economy, every society always tends to strengthen and enrich its own productive forces —albeit with different emphases, with differentiated rhythms, with particular hierarchies— thereby increasing its means of confronting nature and of using it for its own ends. It is always a matter, then, of consolidating and broadening the strength and the impact of its own economic base in the face of the natural. But the concrete ways in which this general tendency is actualized obviously differ according to historical-geographical conditions, previous historical tradition, migrations, specific fusions and contacts, the peculiar adaptability and rhythm of development, in short, according to the historical-concrete peculiarities of each people.^[2]

That is why the opening paragraph we are commenting on here, concerning the progressive stages of the economic formation of society, far from being a general theory of the necessary stages of human evolution as a whole, is only the analytical enumeration of the peculiar and distinct modes of production which, at different historical moments, represented the great milestones of the advance of societies in the conquest of their own economic base and in the progressive development of their productive forces in general and of their material productive forces in particular.

Now then, why modes of production and not forms of society or societies in general? Because what is at issue are graduated and progressive scales in the shaping and broadening of the economic level or plane of society, and not integral social evolution itself. And also because, as is likewise argued in the Preface of 1859, during this phase of our human prehistory the economic level has, with respect to the other spheres of human social activity, a clearly established privileged or re-centering character.

Marx therefore says Asiatic, ancient, feudal or modern bourgeois mode of production, and he is thinking literally of the various ways of producing that men have, of distinct concrete forms, technical and social, of carrying out the productive act. For what, in the strict sense, is that “mode of production of material life” spoken of in the Preface just cited? Mode of production is the concrete and particular modality or manner of carrying out the activity of production, production being at one and the same time a technical-real aspect and a specific social configuration of the process of reproduction of men’s material life.

And therefore, an obligatory synthesis of two essential aspects. For if mode of production is, in general terms, identical to process of production, then it is, as we say, both a technical-real-instrumental way of appropriating nature and a socio-economic-formal configuration within which that appropriation is carried out. It is thus both the concrete figure of a given set of specific productive forces and of their peculiar mode of use and development —or, in other terms, a given figure of the labor process— and the complex unity of certain social bonds, of specific relations of production entered into by men in order to carry out productive activity and to give adequate expression to that peculiar type of labor process on which they are founded.

Here, then, very briefly and schematically, is the general content of the concept “mode of production”.^[3] What interests us in particular, however, is the analysis of the feudal mode of production. What does Marx understand by feudal mode of production? Why does he call it “feudal” and not servile mode of production or European-medieval mode of production? What technical-real mode of the labor process, or set of material productive forces, and what socio-economic forms or relations of production does this mode of production imply? And why is it one of the “progressive” stages in the formation of the economic base of society?

Without attempting to exhaust the answer to these questions in these few pages, let us look at some of the elements of their solution.

As regards above all the general significance of the feudal mode of production, Marx points out that it is not only that progressive stage of the economic formation of society which we have already explained, but, in particular, one of the principal economic phases which in Western Europe^[4] created the material premises and the general conditions for the emergence of capitalist society. It is not, then, a “universal” mode of production, a necessary and recurrent path of transit for all peoples that might seek to arrive at capitalism, but only the specifically European —and, by exception, Japanese— route by which, in certain particular human groups, the indispensable premises for engendering modern bourgeois society were created.

The feudal is, then, a mode of production basically characteristic of the European Middle Ages, where it had the classical origins that determine it in its particularity, and where it deployed all its intrinsic features and potentialities. Marx explicitly conceives it as the “Germanic epoch” of European history,^[5] as the historical period of development and refiguration of the principles and elements contributed by the Germanic peoples to the vast movement of the history of Europe. And therefore as a mode of production necessarily bound, by its very definition and content, to the history of the European continent alone, since without the Germanic presence and contribution a rigorously feudal mode of production could arise only by exception.

At the same time, and starting from the conception of feudalism as a progressive phase in the process of shaping the economic base of society, Marx and Engels underline the great material and spiritual advances the feudal world carried through, advances without which Europe could never have reached that new stage of universal history which is capitalism. Against, then, the opinion dominant in a large part of the intelligentsia contemporary with them,^[6] the founders of Marxism criticized the traditional bourgeois conception that regards the Middle Ages as an epoch of general barbarism and spiritual obscurantism, stressing instead the great advances bequeathed to nascent bourgeois society by the preceding centuries. Not only the inventions of the final period of the feudal mode of production —such as gunpowder, the printing press, the compass and the mechanical clock— are clearly identified as the feudal legacy to capitalism, but also the successive advances achieved throughout the whole medieval period, such as the slow formation of the European organism, the constitution of the nations, the unfolding of the traits of human individuality in history, or the large-scale application of water mills, among others.

And against the bourgeois position that claims to have “liberated” the worker from serfdom, turning him into a “free man”, both Marx and Engels stress the limitation and subjugation likewise inherent in the capitalist world, a world that “owes more than it thinks” to the “dark” medieval epoch it so criticizes.^[7]

Alongside this, and still with regard to the general consideration or global characterization of the feudal mode of production, Marx links his explanation to the originating act of its genesis itself, to the great historical fact that gives birth to it: the migrations of the Germanic peoples toward the ancient space of the Roman Empire. For besides being conceived as an essentially progressive form, which deploys within Western Europe the original Germanic contributions, the feudal mode of production constitutes for Marx a genuine fusion of two earlier forms of production, which are unified and combined, modifying one another so as to yield as a result a totally singular new form. The feudal way of producing arises as a result of the conquest of the ancient inhabitants of the Roman Empire by the Germanic peoples, issuing in one of the three possibilities that Marx foresees for every movement of conquest: that of the synthesis between the two modes of production in play, the alloying and admixture of the mode of production of the conquerors with the mode of production of the conquered. In this case “[…] a reciprocal action is produced from which a new form is born, a synthesis (in part, in the Germanic conquests) […]” (Marx, 1976: vol. 1, p. 18).

The feudal mode of production is, then, to an important degree, the fruit of the combination of Germanic elements and Roman elements, the synthesis on the economic plane of the material productive forces, of the types of productive activity, of the relations of production characteristic of both the Germanic peoples and the ancient Romans. Hence, “[…] feudalism did not by any means come ready-made and organized out of Germany; it had its origin, on the part of the conquerors, in the military organization the armies acquired during the conquest itself, and it developed into true feudalism only after the conquest, thanks to the action of the productive forces found in the conquered countries” (Marx and Engels, 1973a:72).

For this reason, and now more in terms of its specific internal content, the feudal mode of production also presents itself as a set of particular productive forces articulated for their use in a certain way, as well as the unity of certain relations of production that configure and give expression to those productive forces. But what are those new productive forces that make the technical-real aspect of the feudal way of producing a higher progressive mode of appropriating nature? And what are the relations of production, richer and more complex, that correspond to this higher degree of development of human productive powers? Let us look at the answer to these questions by locating both constitutive planes of the feudal mode of production in the very context of its development, in the initial period or infancy of the feudal world.^[8]

II

The principal material productive forces that constitute the technical-real aspect of the feudal mode of production develop in general within the stage of transition from antiquity to the medieval period. Their development and consolidation therefore do not present themselves simply as a linear and continuous advance of a pre-established set of productive forces, but as a complex movement of readaptations, combinations, blendings and new acquisitions of every kind. The new productive forces corresponding to the feudal stage are forged in the heat of, and within, the more general process of synthesis between Germanic peoples and Romans already noted. Hence, in part, their richness and breadth.

For in this process of the real genesis of a new mode of production, nascent Europe creates a technological equipment of such magnitude that it allows it to “take off” toward levels of economic development far above those of any other region or space on the planet. The new productive forces range from the invention of the most sophisticated type of plow created by man before the capitalist mechanical plow, to the discovery and harnessing of new forms of motive energy, natural and animal, which enhance the energy reserve available to the producers, passing through the development of the most complete possible form of crop rotation and through a new way of carrying out the reproduction of livestock, thereby creating a combined system of permanent agriculture and systematic stock-raising. This is a set of new and important human productive powers that push forward the progressive overcoming of nature and create the solid and consistent economic base of the feudal mode of production in its technical-instrumental aspect. Let us look in detail at the emergence and reassimilation of these peculiar productive forces, which are the first component of the feudal way of producing, situating their formation in the very context of their development within “[…] those great and daring migratory movements that laid the foundations of the peoples of ancient and modern Europe” (Marx and Engels, 1979:84).

The new productive forces begin to develop out of the symbiosis generated by the Germanic conquest. In this sphere, the Germanic transmigration brings into contact an essentially pastoral and stock-raising people^[9] with another people, or mass of peoples, among whom agriculture is already the activity that constitutes the center of all economic production. And although agriculture is not for the Germanic peoples an unknown activity, it is indeed a merely subsidiary and peripheral form of their mode of production. Likewise, although the Romans know cattle and pasturage, this is by no means a primordial and characteristic element of their economic base. At this point of departure of the combination of the economic formations of both peoples we are therefore faced with the encounter of two distinct masses of men whose principal productive activities are wholly diverse, and where, consequently, their synthesis becomes more complicated and difficult, but at the same time richer and more varied.

Thus, for the Germanic peoples it is above all a matter of assimilating and developing on their own account the principal and most accomplished Roman economic activity: agriculture. For if they have seized the Roman Empire and this Empire lives principally off the results of agricultural labors, it follows logically that if they wish to remain in it they must adapt to its particular conditions. Therefore, alongside their regular stock-raising and pastoral activity, they will now have to devote themselves to agricultural work as well. And all the more so as their own population, settled in the new territories, grows. For if stock-raising permits, without difficulty, a certain increase and density of population, it does so only at the cost of the ever-growing occupation of large spaces devoted to pasturage. On reaching the limit of the European territories usable for pasturage, the Germanic peoples find themselves obliged to seek other possible sources of subsistence. And for this they turn to agriculture, to the activity that the Romans teach and transmit to them and that progressively turns them into eminently agricultural and clearly peasant peoples as well. “Even after their migration into Gaul, the Franks continued to favor stock-raising over agriculture. As long as there was a sparse population in relation to the available land, there was no competition between the two regimes: the animals were in perpetual pasture. But with the growth of population, cultivation spread at the expense of the forests, marshes and meadows” (White, 1981:55). The Germanic peoples were then compelled to learn, develop and carry out agricultural activity as their principal economic labor, becoming little by little full-fledged peasants. And thus what in their old territories of Germania had been no more than a subsidiary and purely complementary activity, to which they assigned the few serfs they had, then became their fundamental productive form.

And with this, several of the tendencies that until then had only been hinted at within the social organization of the Germanic peoples were accelerated. On becoming agricultural peoples they became more sedentary and stable peoples, since the cultivation of the land requires more permanence upon it than simple pasturage. And with this the importance of hunting as a regular activity also declined, being relegated to second place. But hunting and semi-nomadism are inseparably bound to the warrior spirit and to war. With the decline of the former, the strength of the latter is likewise undermined. And so, “[…] occupied with the cares of a more stabilized agriculture, the common Germanic man of the age of the migrations was becoming, little by little, more peasant than warrior” (Bloch, 1979: vol. 1, p. 175).

He was becoming, then, little by little, a farmer. But not in a simple, passive and purely imitative way; rather, through important changes and modifications.

Let us see:

The Germanic peoples became, on contact with the new Empire in their charge, farmers. But there were Germanic peoples not only in the newly conquered lands of the Mediterranean world, but also throughout all of central Europe, and part of eastern Europe, previously settled by them, in the ancient lands of primitive Germania. As agriculture spread as their central activity, it had not only to be assimilated by the Germanic peoples who occupied the ancient lands of the Empire, but also developed, diffused and adapted by the Germanic peoples who had “stayed at home”, in their old dwellings of central and northern Europe. And this was not as simple as its statement, for it was not a matter of merely transferring an activity from one given region to another very similar to the first, but of beginning by creating the conditions favorable to its generalization in a region totally different as regards climate, quality and condition of the soils themselves.

And for this, the principal obstacle to be overcome was the specific structure of the basic agricultural instrument: the plow.^[10]

For the light scratch plow, characteristic of the European Mediterranean regions, was totally inadequate for the Nordic region of Europe. The light and dry soils of the Mediterranean made possible the use of a simple scratch plow, whose share does not penetrate the earth too deeply and, in acting upon it, does not turn it over but simply pierces it, marking the furrow in the earth and leaving intact the ground between one furrow and the next. Hence, in order to prevent the undue evaporation of the earth’s moisture and to maintain its fertility by bringing the minerals of the subsoil to the surface, it becomes necessary to work the already plowed land again, in a direction transverse to the first plowing, so that the work of plowing a field becomes double what would otherwise be required. “But this kind of plow and of cultivation was not at all appropriate for most of northern Europe, on account of its humid summers and hard soils […] Northern Europe had to develop a new agricultural technique and above all a new plow” (White, 1981:42). It therefore had to invent a new instrument of production, a new type of plow, in order to be able to apply itself to agriculture in a generalized and complete way. And that new plow is the heavy plow with moldboard and wheels,^[11] the fundamental instrument that constitutes the first essential result of the fusion of the Germanic and Roman peoples, and the first great contribution of feudal society in formation to the progressive development of human productive forces in history. The heavy plow with moldboard and wheels, the fruit of the specific difficulties of the climate and the soils of northern Europe, in fact constitutes the full development of the plow, its most accomplished and complete figure, up to the introduction of science into agriculture: “[…] as soon as it becomes necessary or convenient to till the same land year after year, a deeper cultivation is required in order to delay the exhaustion of the soils. Hence the fundamental invention of the plow, although its full development came about when man had to confront the clay soils of northern Europe” (italics ours, Derry and Williams, 1977:74).

This heavy plow, essentially different from its Mediterranean predecessor, presents alongside it the following figure:

But in order to understand why this new heavy plow with moldboard and wheels means the culmination of the development of this type of agricultural instrument —the central instrument of labor of all pre-capitalist societies based on agriculture— we need to observe in detail how it works and what advantages its application brings. In this respect, Lynn White Jr.’s description is of the utmost precision and transparency: “Contrary to the scratch plow, whose share digs through the sod,^[12] throwing it to both sides, the heavy plow has three functional parts. The first is a coulter or heavy knife set at the tip of the plow beam, which cuts the surface of the soil vertically. The second is a flat share placed at right angles to the coulter, which cuts the earth horizontally at the roots of the grass. The third is a moldboard designed to turn the slice of earth over either to the right or to the left, depending on how it is attacked. It is evident that this plow is a more formidable weapon against the soil than the scratch plow” (White, 1981:43).

A more formidable and more complex weapon, which entails various advantages over the old light Mediterranean plow and which therefore creates an agriculture far more productive and developed than classical Mediterranean agriculture. Advantages reflected as much in the saving of human labor power as in the greater fertility of the cultivated fields and even in the extension of land susceptible of being worked and incorporated into regular agricultural production: for the purposes of northern European agriculture, its advantages were three: “First, the heavy plow handled the clods with such violence that cross-plowing was unnecessary. This saved the peasant labor and thus increased the area of land he could cultivate. The heavy plow was an agricultural machine that replaced human energy and time with animal power.

“Second, the new plow, by eliminating cross-plowing, tended to change the shape of the fields in northern Europe from nearly square to long and narrow, with a slightly rounded vertical cross-section for each strip of furrows, producing effects beneficial to drainage in that humid climate. These furrow strips were normally plowed from right to left, with the result that over the years each strip became a long, low mound that ensured a crop on the ridge even in the wettest years, and in the depression or furrow during the dry seasons.

“The third advantage of the heavy plow derived from the first two: without such a plow it was difficult to exploit the dense, rich, alluvial lowlands which, properly managed, would give the peasant far better crops than he could obtain from the light soils of the uplands (plateaus)” (White, 1981:43).

Thus, with the massive invention and diffusion^[13] of this new plow, more complex and more perfected, the Germanic peoples inhabiting northern Europe not only assimilated agriculture as their principal economic activity, but far surpassed everything transmitted at this level by their Roman predecessors. The first fruit of the fusion between Romans and Germanic peoples was not only the extension of the importance of agricultural activity within the whole economic organization, but also, and particularly in the lands of northern Europe, the creation of a better and far superior form of cultivation, more economical as regards the human labor required, more intensive and more fertile as regards its yields, and broader and more encompassing as regards the types and conditions of land on which it could be established.

Fundamental advances which, among other factors, explain the shift of the center of gravity of Europe’s general development from the Mediterranean south toward the northern zones (cfr. in this respect, White, 1981:77-78).

But the Germanic peoples did not only develop in this epoch the more productive and fertile agriculture of northern Europe. They also took charge of the old Mediterranean agriculture, long since established in that region of the continent. And within it too they introduced important modifications. “The distribution of the lands obliges them to conform to the usages of Roman agriculture” (Pirenne, 1978:33). But not in a passive and purely receptive manner. On the contrary. The Germanic peoples who occupy the lands of the Empire likewise adapt little by little to the greater preeminence and role of agriculture, but only by introducing fundamental changes in its internal organization and by enriching it through their own original contributions.

Thus, in the first place, a systematic care and production of livestock of their own, associated with agriculture itself. For on becoming farmers the Germanic peoples did not, however, abandon the importance attributed to their old stock-raising and pastoral activity; on the contrary, they integrated, within the new agriculture developed and assimilated by their population, the systematic exercise of stock-raising activity, taking care to extend and develop the cultivation and production of the fodder that feeds this livestock, and generalizing the regular use of its dung, employed as the fundamental fertilizer of those same cultivated lands.

For the Romans, although they knew small livestock and used oxen as draft animals, had never taken up the production of livestock as a particular and systematic activity to which special attention must be devoted. They had contented themselves with letting their scarce animals wander in the woods or wild pastures, where the natural manure they produced was simply lost. But then, in order to obtain that fertilizer they had recourse to deforestation, using the burnt wood of the trees as fertilizer for the land. And they had also brought about the progressive deterioration of the forests, destroyed by the very livestock that fed upon them. But with this they had reduced the possibility of extending that same livestock. “The scarcity of livestock was therefore a characteristic of the Mediterranean economy, which was favored by the ever more marked deforestation produced precisely by the need to use the forests as a supplement for feeding the livestock. The lack of livestock implied, in turn, the want of natural fertilizer for the soil […]” (Hodggett, 1974:27).

The Germanic peoples, by contrast, as we have already seen, were specifically stock-raising peoples and therefore peoples versed in the knowledge of the needs and the care required for the regular reproduction of animals. On settling in the Empire they even preserved at first their old activity. And on becoming farmers they did not renounce it, but endowed it with a new base in agriculture itself, devoting themselves to producing grains destined especially for the rearing and maintenance of the livestock. They produced in particular fodder for feeding that livestock, creating a new balanced and regular system of both agricultural and stock-raising production, perfectly combined and clearly equilibrated. And with this they generalized the use of the scythe,^[14] the second instrument characteristic of the Roman-Germanic fusion and a new symbol of the more developed economic base just created. “The scythe is the symbol of the extension of this fusion of the Germanic pastoral economy with the Mediterranean cultivation of cereals. Indeed, although the scythe already existed among the Romans, it was so little used that there has been a great deal of doubt about its possible dating. The scythe is the typical tool for cutting hay, and, under the Franks, the use of scythes to cut fodder and feed the livestock in the stables became so common that Charlemagne attempted to change the name of the month of July to call it ‘the month of the hay harvest’” (White, 1979: 159).

A fusion, then, of stock-raising and agriculture that not only permitted the regular production of the different types of livestock, but also increased the fertility of agriculture, increasing the supply of natural fertilizers in a uniform and systematic way. The creation, then, of a far richer and more complete agrarian system which, integrating stock-raising as one of its parts, was capable not only of yielding better and more abundant crops, but also of providing more meat, dairy, hides and wool to the whole population. A new balanced system of the production of animals and cereals which explains, in part, the growing prosperity and vitality of these centuries and the solid base of the future Carolingian expansion (cfr. White, 1981:56).

A system based not only on the assimilation of stock-raising within the new economic base, but also on a central modification of the very form of cultivation and agricultural production: the passage from the biennial rotation of lands to triennial rotation. Triennial rotation, demanded in part by the very need to produce fodder for the livestock, but not limited in its explanation to that requirement,^[15] being once again the result of the general fusion of the economic forms of northern Europe with the Roman Mediterranean forms.

Roman agriculture had regularly practiced autumn sowings in order to harvest and produce its crops at the end of the following spring or the beginning of the following summer. Under the classical system of biennial rotation, the arable land was regularly divided into two parts, one of which was worked and sown, while the other was turned over, plowed and cleared so as to be left fallow during the same span in which the first was cultivated. The following year they exchanged roles, leaving fallow the part just harvested and putting into use the one that had until then been at “rest”. With this, Mediterranean agriculture produced no more than one harvest a year, making only 50% of all the worked land productive.

For their part, in the lands of the Baltic Sea a primitive agriculture had developed, limited exclusively to spring sowings, which were harvested in the summer following their sowing. Here winter crops were neither known nor practiced, just as in southern Europe these summer crops were little applied.

It is therefore quite possible that the Germanic peoples who had seized the Empire transmitted these summer crops to Mediterranean agriculture and, joining them with the winter crops customary there, created a new system of crop rotation, more productive, more frequent in its yields and based on a greater exploitation of the plowed land in each agricultural cycle. “Just as the Teuton and the Latin began to fuse their talents in the construction of a new culture, at the same time the spring planting of the North Sea and the Baltic was wedded to the autumn planting of the Mediterranean to create a new agricultural system more productive than its two progenitors” (White, 1981:71).

The offspring of this marriage was precisely the system of triennial crop rotation, a system which, out of the simple fusion or synthesis of both its predecessors, managed to constitute itself as a more progressive and complete form of exploiting the fruits of the earth and as a more rational exploitation or use of it. Now then: “How did the three-field system work in comparison with the ancient Mediterranean system of two-field rotation? […] In the two-field plan, about half the land was sown with winter grain, while the other half was left fallow. The following year the two fields simply exchanged their functions.

“In the three-field plan the arable was divided into equal thirds. One section was sown in autumn with winter wheat or rye. The following spring the second field was sown with oats, barley, peas, chickpeas, lentils, broad beans. The third field was left fallow. The next year the first field was sown with the summer crops; the second lay fallow; the third was sown with winter grains” (White, 1981:71).

This system is clearly illustrated by the following diagram:

With this cultivation, and through complex relations (which Lynn White Jr. [1981:71-72] explains in detail), the area a peasant could put under cultivation, without increasing in the least the old limits of his land, was one-eighth greater than before, while his agricultural productivity was increased by 50%. Moreover, he could now distribute the work of plowing, sowing and harvesting more evenly throughout the whole year, overcoming the old alternation of intense periods of work and of relative inactivity characteristic of the biennial system. With this he increased the very efficiency of his labor power, which he also used in a more uniform and rational way.

And which he now also had better protected from the risks of hunger and poor nutrition, since with the greater abundance of types of crop the energetic and physical reproduction of the whole population had notably improved, and it was less subject than before to the vicissitudes of bad weather or a bad harvest.

Finally, with this he shored up livestock production as a regular production, by securing the necessary supply of fodder and various inputs for the reproduction of the different types of livestock. And in particular, from Carolingian times onward, for the reproduction of the horse, which little by little would demonstrate its superiority as a draft animal in agriculture and would displace the ox within this sphere of production. But that only in the stage subsequent to the epoch we are now examining, when the first feudal age develops in full.

Triennial rotation was, then, with all these concomitant advantages, the third great fundamental advance resulting from the Germanic and Roman combination, the third principal conquest achieved by the new Europe in the process of constituting a new and more developed economic base of its own. An economic base which, taking up the most important features of the Germanic system of production and of the Roman economic form, is shaped little by little as a new, specific and original mode of production, which establishes itself ever more firmly as the central material support of the whole new feudal society in gestation and as the point of departure of all subsequent historical evolution. “From the fusion of these two systems of production there was finally born the one that characterizes the medieval West, and the fusion was doubtless earlier and more rapidly fruitful in the regions where a closer contact between the two civilizations obtained: in the heart of Frankish Gaul […]” (Duby, 1979:31).

An early and fruitful fusion which, synthetically, we may summarize in the following diagram:

One of the essential results of the combination and admixture of the peoples is, then, that of unleashing this series of fundamental technological advances, which come to constitute part of the new material productive forces of the nascent society in the process of gestation. With the heavy plow, the scythe and the combined system of systematic stock-raising and agriculture, Merovingian society creates for itself a productive platform far more developed and complex than that of its two immediate predecessors.

In this sense, what the Carolingian period culminates and contributes constitutes a deepening and perfecting of that new productive base, which is not only diffused and consolidated throughout Western Europe, but also enriched and brought to completion by new and important specific discoveries and advances.

Under the Carolingians, not only are the basic conquests already achieved during the process of transition itself extended and consolidated (such as the heavy plow and the systematic production of cattle), but they are enriched with new elements (such as the horseshoe, the modern harness, the stirrup or the water mill) that complete the technological equipment on which all subsequent historical evolution, and in particular the first feudal age, will rest. A renewed technological equipment which, besides once again increasing the productivity of agriculture by introducing into it a new draft animal, also modifies the possibilities of transport, the traditional sources of energy, and even the very forms of military organization.

Let us look at this in more detail.

We have already seen the profound importance and significance of the invention of the system of triennial crop rotation. On the basis of this system the systematic production of feed for livestock becomes possible, the production of fodder on a large scale for the untroubled maintenance of the animals. We also saw that the principal crop used for these ends was the cultivation of hay, the plant with which oxen are preferentially fed. Hence the use and diffusion of the scythe, likewise already noted. But alongside hay, the other great crop that can be produced in alternation with wheat and rye, and that can also be destined for the feeding of livestock, is the cultivation of oats.

Oats are the fundamental feed of the horse, just as pasture and hay are of the ox. But the horse is a far swifter, hardier and more powerful draft animal than the ox. It is therefore a far more efficient force of traction, harrowing and plowing than its bovine competitor. Why, then, had it not been used within agriculture before this epoch? For the simple reason that the minimum conditions necessary for such use did not yet exist. And those minimum material conditions are principally three: in the first place, a regular and abundant supply of oats, the best feed for horses; in the second place, the invention of the nailed horseshoe for the animal’s hooves; and lastly, the new harness or padded collar that changes the point of traction and shifts it from the neck to the shoulders of the horse. Without these three conditions, the horse is in no position to compete with the ox as a working animal in agricultural labors. But in the presence of these three elements, the horse easily and amply surpasses its former victor. Let us see why.

The first condition noted refers simply to the very possibility of the existence of horse-breeding on a large scale. Only on the basis of a regular and substantial production of oats does it become possible to count on a growing number of horses and to contemplate their greater use, not only for agriculture but also for war and transport. And this condition is satisfied precisely on the basis of the development and consolidation of the system of triennial crop rotation already explained.^[16]

The second great condition consists in the invention of the nailed horseshoe for horses’ hooves. While in general the horse is doubtless hardier for the activity than the ox, its hooves in particular are far weaker than those of the latter animal. In conditions of difficult terrain, the hooves of equines break far more frequently than those of oxen, to which must be added that in damp conditions those hooves soften, wear down more rapidly and progressively spoil very easily. An animal with damaged or destroyed hooves is practically useless. Hence, when it came to choosing, the peasants and merchants of antiquity tended predominantly to choose the ox for the various tasks of agriculture and transport. The horse’s “Achilles’ heel”, which was its weak hooves, made it of little advantage in these fields.

But with the discovery of the nailed horseshoe the horse overcame this particular deficiency with respect to its competitor. Now the shod horse could undertake longer journeys, in difficult conditions of terrain and/or dampness, without running the risk of being disabled. Long marches, at a swifter pace and over more prolonged periods, now became possible with a higher degree of safety and yield. And this then made it possible to introduce or extend the use of the horse to agriculture as well as to transport and to war. For with its nailed horseshoe, the horse could equally withstand a whole day of forced march toward the site of combat, endure the work of plowing in a rough, irregular field of damp climate, or pull any cart with a substantial load along the difficult routes and roads of northern Europe. It could thus meet the various military, agricultural or transport needs of medieval men, affording them greater speed, endurance, safety and yield than in earlier stages.

But this only in conjunction with other complementary discoveries. For a well-fed horse with good shoes on its hooves is not yet a draft animal superior to the ox. If what is at stake is to make the horse pull the plow —or, as the case may be, the cart— over a prolonged period, it is not enough to have secured the strength of its legs or its power and energy in general. It is also necessary to have an adequate hitching mechanism that allows the animal to exert the maximum of its power in the most rational way possible.

And this is precisely what is achieved with the third condition mentioned, the invention of the new harness with a padded collar, which changes the point of traction and thus makes it possible to increase the strength and the yield of the horse in agriculture and transport. Let us see in what way.^[17]

The old harness, originally devised to hitch the ox to the plow beam, is a harness that places the point of traction on the animal’s neck. But while the ox’s neck is short and thick enough for such a harness to be perfectly suited to it, the long and different neck of the horse does not adapt so easily to those same conditions. For the point of traction is the point from which the animal exerts all the force of traction and haulage of which it is capable.

And while the ox, using that old harness or yoke harness, can easily pull the beam of the plow or of the cart without doing itself any harm, and applying all its power, the horse by contrast suffers on beginning to move, since the strap applied to its neck —and which is sometimes complemented by another that encircles its belly— begins to exert pressure upon it, compressing its jugular vein and its windpipe, and provoking an acute sensation of asphyxia and an interruption of the normal circulation of blood to the head.

With this it is evident that both the strength and the yield of the horse are clearly diminished. And that is why, in using the yoke harness indiscriminately for the ox or for the horse, the superiority of the former over the latter had to be obvious to the peasants of antiquity.

Thus, it was only upon the invention of the new harness, specifically designed for the anatomy and peculiarities of the horse, that it became possible to discover all the potentialities and advantages of this animal, and the greater benefits of its use in agriculture and transport. For the new harness, now endowed with a rigid, padded collar, made the new point of traction rest no longer on the horse’s neck, but on its resistant shoulder blades, on its shoulders, whereby the earlier drawbacks disappeared. With this modern harness not only was the horse’s sensation of asphyxia eliminated, but the beast’s blood circulation and free breathing became completely normal. The following figure clearly shows the differences explained and the implications noted for the one and the other type of harness:

As can be seen, with the new harness the horse could at last contribute all its strength to the load to which it was harnessed, performing moreover without additional fatigue or extraordinary limitations, and competing at last on equal terms with its bovine equivalent.

A competition which under these conditions placed matters in a new dimension and inverted the traditional choice of the peasants, inclining it now in favor of the horse. For a horse hitched with the new rigid, padded collar harness proved capable of moving a load four or five times greater than a horse harnessed with a yoke harness. And it not only moved a heavier load than before, but moved it without tiring to the same degree as previously. It was therefore clear that the horse could now undertake, with new possibilities, the performance of the agricultural labors previously carried out by the ox.

And this is what happened. The ox began to be replaced by the horse as a draft animal within agriculture. For once armed with the nailed horseshoe and the modern padded-collar harness, equine stock was able to display its great advantages and its higher potentialities with respect to its bovine counterpart. From these inventions onward, the horse proved capable of a movement 50% faster than the ox, so that the work of plowing became one and a half times swifter than before and could consequently be completed in less time. This made it possible for the producers to have more free time at their disposal or, if they so wished and were able, to increase the extension of cultivable land in each agricultural cycle, trading that free time for a greater gross production.

A greater production, or increased quantitative wealth, which also grew through the lengthening of the daily working day. For the horse not only performed its agricultural tasks more swiftly, but daily endured a longer time of performance of them. The old working day carried out with oxen could now be increased by one or even two hours a day when carried out with horses, without harming those animals in the least. The peasant therefore again had an open option: either to increase the cultivated space —if this was possible given the available lands— now that he had a working day performed more rapidly and of greater duration, or, in the other case, to complete in less time his old labors of plowing and sowing on his same accustomed plot, thus freeing up time for other activities or simply for rest.

And what under normal conditions was already advantageous in itself was even more so in the case of the relatively difficult climate of northern Europe. We have already seen how the lands of northern Europe were far richer and more fertile for agriculture than the Mediterranean spaces. But we have seen that this greater fertility was also counterbalanced by a type of soil more difficult to plow (which favored the invention and diffusion of the heavy plow with moldboard and wheels), and by a wetter and rainier climate, of more abrupt and capricious changes than the dry Mediterranean climate. Therefore, a swifter plowing work of longer duration in each working day allowed the peasants to take much greater advantage of the favorable moments of the climate, drawing the greatest possible benefit from the climatic conditions in the situations in which these were most propitious for them. As Lynn White Jr. points out: “This greater speed and staying power of the horse is particularly important in the changeable climate of northern Europe, where the success of a harvest may depend on plowing and sowing carried out under favorable circumstances. Likewise, the speed of the horse greatly facilitates harrowing, which is much more important in the north than in the vicinity of the Mediterranean, where cross-plowing breaks up the clods well enough” (White, 1981:62). Hence, with the advantages that the use of the horse entailed, a more timely intervention by the peasants within the agricultural cycle became possible under the particular conditions of northern Europe.

With all this, it is a clear fact that peasants would tend more and more to introduce the horse into their agriculture, in substitution for the old oxen. For with this new draft animal in this specific sphere, they could carry out several of their principal labors —fundamentally plowing, but also harrowing^[18] or the simple carting of the already reaped cereals at harvest time— in a far swifter way, in more prolonged working days and in a more agile, ample and timely form than before. They could thus exploit and take advantage of the great benefits of the new figure of existence of animal energy that the horse represented.^[19]

But as we have already noted, it is not only agriculture that benefits from the invention of the nailed horseshoe and the new rigid-collar harness. Transport too began to be carried out more and more with horses, which now moved not only the plow and the harrow, but also carts of every kind.

And given that transport, like the work of plowing, was now swifter, it could then increase its radius of action. In the same time one traveled farther, which made it possible to incorporate into the commercial circuits and into the market a whole set of new products, previously too far removed from the routes of communication. Thus, when economic conditions permitted commercial exchanges to be reactivated —which in general terms occurred only in the second feudal age— that reactivation found an important support in the use of the horse, introduced centuries earlier as the new draft animal of transport.

And it was not only the transport of commodities that became virtually more agile and extensive, but also the movement and displacement of men themselves. The greater speed and cheapness of transport allowed peasants to move a little farther away from the place where their own cultivated lands lay. But why would the peasant want to move away from those lands? In order to come closer to other men and to live among them. The small agglomerations of hamlets and dwarf villages, settled at the center of the labor lands and very close to them, could now concentrate and grow in size. Instead of 30 peasant families joined in a reduced hamlet, villages of 500 families could now be constituted which, though farther from their space of work, lived instead a richer and more intense social life.

Thus, with transport faster and cheaper than before, the peasant was not overly troubled at being a little farther from his fields, provided that in exchange he obtained a far more developed and complex flow of human exchanges. As Lynn White Jr. says: “In a large village of two or three hundred families there would be not only a better defense in emergencies, but also a tavern, a fine large church, perhaps a school run by the priest in which the children could learn their first letters, and surely more suitors for one’s daughters, and no longer merely peddlers with their packs but merchants with carts and news from distant parts” (White, 1981:67). There will thus be a life more “urban”, and with it more developed and progressive as regards the elements and social determinations of men’s own life.

And although this concentration and greater development of the medieval urban agglomerations will occur only toward the second feudal age, it is interesting to observe that this process will have one of its important supports in this quickening and perfecting of transport, derived from the large-scale introduction of the horse as the new motive force of that activity.^[20]

The combination of the nailed horseshoe with the new padded-collar harness brought about, as we see, very important changes in agriculture and transport. Those changes increased the productivity and the yield of human efforts in two fields directly bound to the economy of men. It was therefore an important advance of human productive powers or forces.

An advance that bore above all on the exploitation and utilization of a new form of animal energy, greater in quantity and in duration; more intense or condensed at the critical moments of production, more economical as regards its obtaining, and swifter and safer in its use.

But the medieval world did not know only this change as regards the forms of energy employed. Alongside the generalized use of horses, there also developed a new form of exploiting inanimate natural energy sources: the use of water currents by means of water mills.

Water mills, perfected and extended to the whole European space from Carolingian times onward^[21] and throughout the entire feudal stage, are precisely another of the most important technological advances achieved in the process of constructing and rounding out the new productive forces we are analyzing. With their adoption and diffusion on a social scale, the Carolingian period laid the last main stone of the material and technological foundations upon which the whole vast feudal construction has been built. Let us see what its importance has been.^[22]

The water mill was invented back in classical antiquity, although its true use and mass construction in fact belong only to the Middle Ages. “There is no need, indeed, to deceive oneself: an ancient invention, the water mill is medieval from the point of view of its effective diffusion” (Bloch, 1974:83). For as we know, the society of Greco-Latin antiquity was a society that at the moment of its greatest expansion and economic development —in the stage of the late Roman Empire— found itself resting upon slavery. And the cheapness of the slave was so great, and the logic of “developing the productivity and the yield of labor” so thoroughly marginal, that the application and exploitation of a large part of technological discoveries and advances was in fact blocked, among them the water mill.^[23]

Hence, although both the Greeks and the Romans knew two specific types of water mill, they came to use them only in a scarce and sporadic way. They preferred to go on using enslaved human energy, so abundant and so little prized by them in this epoch, rather than to replace it with the newly controlled natural energy. They confined themselves to exploiting their invention only in exceptional cases, bequeathing its true productive utilization to the later societies that would succeed them.^[24]

A bequest whose historical-universal importance lies in the fact that it represents, as a conquered principle, the first material figure of machinery in history, the first concrete form of appearance of an instrument of labor that no longer confines itself to serving as an auxiliary or complement of human action —that does not, then, act as a tool— but that replaces the worker’s powers by its own movement, freeing man from his old exertions and execution. As Marx says: “With the water mill, the Roman Empire had bequeathed to us the elementary form of all machinery” (Marx, 1981: vol. 1, bk. 2, p. 424). And with it there had been bequeathed to us not only the element (machinery) but also the set of mechanical principles and the logic of the technological development of the last ten centuries down to the present. From the last stage of the Middle Ages until our own day, the sense that the development of the material productive forces has had has been none other than that of reducing the role and importance of the human factor within labor, in order to replace it with the various machines and inanimate mechanisms that today have such explosive diffusion. With machinery, man can be reduced to the mere function of supervisor and overseer of the labor act, which then becomes a quasi-objective process and grants man the free time necessary for his true social development. Machinery is, then, the first objective condition for the true liberation of men with respect to the activity of labor. And the first machinery that man has invented in history is precisely the water-driven mill. Let us look then more closely at what the appearance of this invention entails, and above all at the use that medieval society made of it.

Antiquity had known two fundamental forms of the water mill: the mill called of the “Greek or Scandinavian” type, from its supposed almost simultaneous invention in Asia Minor and in Jutland around the first century BC, and the mill of the “Roman” type described by Vitruvius in the epoch of the Roman Empire, in the first century AD (Cfr. on this point the extracts of Marx [1984:88] from Poppe’s work).

The mill of the Greek type was a mechanism whose water wheel was placed horizontally, wholly submerged in the water, and which, through a simple and fixed axle, without gearing of any kind, transmitted its movement directly to the millstone. With its appearance there had already been conquered the first efficacious way of replacing, in the essential, human strength and skill by mechanical movement and the impelling action of objective elements, giving way to the development of machinery within the human labor process.

And although very imperfect in its design and very limited in its possibilities, this first figure of machinery meant, as we have said, a whole new line of evolution in the progress of the material productive forces, and a fundamental milestone in the process of “formation of the economic base of society”. For despite its simplicity and its not very wide application, this type of mill already presented the basic functional parts of all machinery and the use of new motive forces for its own movement. Let us look at this more closely.

The mill of the Greek or Scandinavian type was already a mechanism moved by water currents, that is, by an inanimate natural force —neither human nor animal— which, acting as impelling motive energy, produced a mechanical movement that set the instrument of labor working and made it possible to obtain the desired product. With this a form of energy had been obtained that was completely mechanical, not subject to the vicissitudes and problems of animals, where the “will” and the possibility of “free” movement of the beasts function as an obstacle and a permanent source of errors. Moreover, it was a free source of energy, one that did not involve the costs of reproducing itself, as in the case of livestock. Hence Marx says (1980b:78), “In any case, it is evident that the use of the force of water to set a mechanism in motion was of great importance as a particular principle”. An importance that lies in the fact of harnessing the forces of nature as such in order to move the various machines and mechanisms of production, perfecting the form of the movement produced and reducing the failures and imperfections of its earlier modalities. Creating, then, the first form of productive exploitation of a mechanical natural force that sets in operation the motive mechanism of the newly invented machinery.

For as we have already said, and as Marx also points out (1980b: 80-81), “The mill […] may be considered the first instrument of labor to which the principle of the machine is applied”, thus making it the first concrete figure of machinery. A figure which, as such, already presents, in a rudimentary and coarse way, the three basic functional parts of all machinery: the motive mechanism —here represented by the horizontal water wheel—, the transmission mechanism —constituted by the fixed, simple axle that joins the wheel to the millstone— and the machine-tool or working machine —which here is simply and fundamentally the grinding stone or millstone (Cfr. in this respect Marx, 1981: vol. I, bk. 2, pp. 463-464). These functional parts can be understood far more clearly by observing the figures presented further on.

This mill of the Greek or Scandinavian type is, then, the first form of hydraulic machinery bequeathed by antiquity. Easy to build and to use, requiring no specialization whatsoever, and of relatively low cost, the Greek mill attained a certain important diffusion in the period of the Merovingian kingdoms mentioned earlier. But this diffusion, though of some breadth, was never comparable to that achieved by the mill of the Roman type, which in the following period ended by displacing its Greek or Scandinavian predecessor, taking possession of the whole territory of Western Europe.

For despite its general-historical significance already set out, the Greek mill presented a series of limitations owing to the rustic simplicity of its design. In the first place, the fact that its speed depended directly on the speed of the water current that moved it, varying with it immediately and proportionally. For since the transmission mechanism was a simple, fixed axle, the speed of the millstone’s movement was always the same as the speed of the water wheel. And the latter varied according to the intensity and magnitude of the flow of the river in which it was immersed.

But the rivers of southern Europe are rivers whose hydraulic flow is particularly irregular, frequently alternating the magnitude of their copious movements and their speeds: “The irregularity of the ebb proper to the water courses of this climate does not in fact seem to predestine it for the function of motive force” (Bloch, 1974:77).^[25] A function which, being carried out in spite of everything by the Greek mill, aggravated the noted drawback of its rigidity as regards the transmission and control of movement.

Alongside this, the mill of the Greek type had the drawback that it did not allow the exploitation of all the energy deployed by the moving water. Since the motive mechanism or water wheel was completely submerged within the current, a part of the energy was wasted in overcoming the resistance that the current itself exerted against the movement of the wheel. And although the escape point of the blades impelled and permitted the rotary movement of the wheel in one of the directions, it nevertheless expended part of the river’s force without any benefit whatsoever.^[26]

Lastly, the way this mill worked meant that breakdowns in the horizontal water wheel or in the axle were more frequent than in the case of the Roman mill, and moreover more difficult to remedy. To repair a damaged wheel it had to be completely dismantled and brought to the surface, just as to mend the axle it would often be necessary to take apart almost the whole mill. The very direct and rigid connection of all the parts of this mill complicated its proper maintenance to a greater degree. It was evident, from the noted limitations of the Scandinavian or Greek mill, that “[…] in the times when the first water mills were built, nobody worried about whether it was more advantageous to direct the water more exactly or to build the wheels more efficiently” (Marx, 1984:91).

These imperfections of the Greek or Scandinavian mill were overcome in the mill of the “Roman” type, a mechanism more complex than the first and with far greater possibilities of application and exploitation. The Roman mill is the second modality or figure of machinery that antiquity bequeathed to the feudal world, and the form that began to spread far more widely in Europe from Carolingian times onward.

Unlike its predecessor, this mill has a water wheel placed vertically, a wheel that receives the impact of the water current from below or from above, and which, through a set of various gears, transforms that movement into horizontal movement, transmitting it then to the millstone. These differences are clearly illustrated in the following drawings:

Both the spatial position of the motive mechanism and the character of the transmission mechanism have therefore changed. And with this the drawbacks of the earlier form of the water mill have been suppressed. For with the vertical water wheel only that part of the motive mechanism which receives the impact and impulse of the current is in contact with the flow of the river, thus eliminating the effect of resistance that the water itself previously imposed on the turning of the wheel. And given that the resistance of air is notoriously less than that of moving water, the utilization of hydraulic energy is also clearly superior. Moreover, in the case where the water wheel receives the current from above, the force of gravity obtained by the fall of the water onto the wheel is added to the impulse of the moving water, thus multiplying the motive force harnessed by this new type of mechanism.

Alongside this, the fact that the transmission of that energy is now carried out through several cogwheels or gears makes it possible to regulate the speed of the millstone’s movement, obtaining a uniform and more controlled functioning of the machine-tool or working machine. For from the set of gears one obtains not only the conversion of a vertical movement into a horizontal one, but also the ability to graduate at will the rapidity of that movement, on the basis of the diameter and the measure of the circumference of the cogwheels used in that set. With this, the irregularity of the currents of the rivers that flow into the Mediterranean is controlled and overcome as a barrier to the use of the newly conquered mechanical hydraulic energy. Furthermore, with the new gearing mechanism and with the vertical water wheel, the rigidity and immediate interconnection of all the pieces of the mill disappears, whereby its repair and maintenance are greatly simplified. It is now easier and more practical to mend the breakdowns of any of the parts of the general mechanism, which have become more flexible and independent.

Therefore, the mill of the Roman type is not only functionally superior to that of the Greek or Scandinavian type, but also represents a more complex and developed figure of machinery itself. To the various advantages of the Greek mill already noted, the Roman mill adds the fact that it constitutes a whole complete system of mechanical movement, which carries implicit within it several of the central and general principles of the development of all machinery subsequently developed. As Marx affirms (1980b: 81): “With the construction of the water mill a mechanical principle was in fact realized (the employment of mechanical motive force and its transformation by means of mechanical apparatus), because the wheel onto which the water falls and the axle that transmits the movement to the millstone, through a system of cogwheels and gears, constituted a complete system of mechanical movement”.

A complete system of mechanical movement, or first historical-universal figure of machinery —in its second modality— which moves practically by itself, and where man has only the function of “feeding” the machinery and of supervising or sporadically assisting its regular and proper movement. A machine-like mechanism which, besides developing for the first time the basic functional parts of all machinery, also implies the application of essential principles characteristic of the design of such machinery, such as the principle of the conversion of one type of movement into another and that of the regulation of the speed of that same movement for various ends. Elements and principles of machine construction, present in these first water mills, which allow Marx to affirm that “From this point of view one can therefore study the history of mechanics precisely through the history of the mill” (Marx, 1980b:81).^[27]

Here, then, are the principal implications of the generalization of water mills from Carolingian times onward.^[28] With the diffusion and reassimilation of these mills, bequeathed by antiquity, the basic technological equipment of the material productive forces developed and/or brought up to date by the movement of transition from classical antiquity to feudalism is practically completed. With the single important exception of windmills, feudal society will rest its economic development and its various social, juridical and political relations on the set of new productive forces reviewed thus far. And if, as Marx says, all economy reduces to being an economy of free time for men, then “economic” progress, so interpreted, developed on the basis of this whole set of new and important material productive forces and of their specific use, must here be measured with far-reaching parameters. The profound empowerment and the qualitative advance, so important, of human powers in the face of nature, generated as the technical-real aspect of the process of production corresponding to feudalism, is what explains the fact that the feudal mode of production represents a mode of production superior to the ancient-classical mode —including its decomposition under the slave forms of production— and a higher rung within the progressive series of the stages of formation of the economic base of society.

III

Here, then, are the principal specific productive forces that make up the technical-real side of the feudal mode of production. Those productive forces constitute the particular skeleton of the feudal modality of the labor process. But this concrete labor process does not exist except within a given economic-formal configuration, within a determinate set of relations of production which are the other constitutive aspect of the feudal way of producing. And as in the case of the productive forces, these relations of production derive, to an important degree, from the same movement of synthesis between the Germanic and the Roman figures.

What are these relations that form the economic structure of the feudal mode of production? In the first place, the feudal relation itself, which constitutes the central bond that structures the internal cohesion of the feudal ruling class; in the second place, the relation of serfdom, which is the primordial economic relation and which prefigures the mode of exploitation of labor within this specific medieval society; lastly, the relations of personal dependence, which, besides being present as features of the two preceding ones, impregnate with their content every essential human relation developed in this feudal epoch. Basic relations which, as a whole, make up the economic-formal aspect corresponding to the feudal mode of production, the socio-economic side of the new and more progressive system of production.

A system of production which therefore not only develops or generalizes new instruments of labor, forms of crop rotation, new combined forms of different economic activities or new sources of motive energy, but which also creates, diffuses and consolidates new economic relations, old forms of bonding among men and economic features characteristic of their immediate predecessors. For at the same time as the newly created heavy plow with moldboard and wheels or the water mill, the relation of economic serfdom incipiently developed among both peoples will be diffused and consolidated; alongside the regular combination of agriculture and stock-raising, the relations of personal dependence will expand simultaneously; and parallel to the extension of a more productive and uniform agriculture based in part on the new productive use of the horse, there will also advance the shaping of the new self-sufficient economic units which, concentrating within themselves the economic whole of the new society, will constitute themselves as the elementary cells of the mode of production in the process of formation. Alongside the new material productive forces conquered and recaptured, then, there will develop the new relations of production within which the former will have to move. Let us look at this in more detail.

The material advances resulting from the productive forces already explained have engendered an economic foundation far more productive, ample and diversified than that of all previous productive forms. And with this they have permitted the creation of economic units which, strengthened and consolidated by this technical-real advance, can now be practically self-sufficient in productive terms and constitute themselves as the new “economic whole” characteristic of feudal society. These new units are none other than the fiefs.^[29]

For we had noted that the Germanic features occupied, within the process of admixture we are now analyzing, the dominant role, the principal position. And one of these central features is precisely the self-sufficiency and isolation of the individual Germanic household, the elementary economic cell in which the principal economic relations of the Germanic community are exhausted, and which is thus set up as the “economic whole” of this social form. As the feudal mode of production settles upon the new material conquests created, the Germanic peoples reproduce once again, but on a more complex basis, that same earlier form of organization of theirs, their old characteristic features. The self-sufficiency and isolation of the individual Germanic household now becomes the self-sufficiency and autonomization of the fief, posited as the primary economic cell of the new social order. But now in a far more solid and secure way, for by encompassing within itself an agriculture improved by the new forms of cultivation and the new agricultural instruments, and its regular combination with stock-raising activity, the fief guarantees its self-reproduction and self-subsistence for a long time. Now it alone can once again impel and develop the growth of the population, the extension and diffusion of various non-economic activities —though this, above all, for the ruling classes— and the propagation and success of the new social relations.

But what, more particularly, is this new economic cell called the fief? On what relation does its general functioning rest? What connection does it have with the feudal relation and with the relations of personal dependence typical of this historical period of European life? Let us see.

The fief is, as we have already mentioned, a material counterpart in lands and in the men who work them. But that counterpart is nothing other than a new figure of the old ephemeral wealth donated by the Germanic war chiefs to their followers —within the typical relation of the “comitatus” of the Germanic commune— now transformed on the basis of the new conditions prevailing within the feudal world. A new material figure of wealth by means of which the feudal lord secures for himself the fidelity and devotion of his vassals.

Thus, if the Germanic war chief has given way to the feudal lord, and his old gisind or comes —companions in arms, in Old High German and in Latin respectively— have become vassals, so too the material recompense of the latter has passed from its original ephemeral and movable form —horses, spears, rings, banquets, weapons— to another that is permanent and immovable, to the endowment of productive territories and of the men who make them produce.

And this because the new forms of presentation of material wealth have modified the very basis of the old bonds among men. The old relation of personal dependence^[30] characteristic of the Germanic peoples is reproduced anew within the classical feudal relation,^[31] but now in a far more rigorous and regular manner, with a more formal ritual and with far greater force and importance. By encompassing at its base a more solid economic aspect, the bond between the two parties also becomes a more durable and indestructible bond and a social tie that now moves to the foreground of the whole economic structure, providing the new order with the specific forms of its social cohesion.

Personal dependence thus reappears as an essential constitutive feature of the feudal bond, in an enriched and more complex form. The old Germanic chief of arms is now the feudal lord surrounded by a substantial body of vassals, subsumed under his protection, benevolence and command. And although the principal demand upon those vassals continues to be that of unrestricted military and warlike support, the feudal lord may require of his subordinates counsel in the face of problems, material aid to defray various ceremonies or social occasions, lodging and maintenance in the vassal’s house when he is on an expedition or passing through, and even presence and assistance in the administration of justice and in the application of the laws. He may then demand reciprocity from his vassals for the most diverse ends, because the personal dependence they have voluntarily contracted toward him is no longer exhausted only in the moments and acts of war, but has taken hold, becoming regularized and extending to the most varied fields of social life.

And it has taken hold in this way because the counterpart received by the vassals has, as we have already said, also changed. From the simple handing over of ephemeral gifts obtained from war booty, one has now passed to the donation of lands and of the men who work them, to the gift of regular rents derived from those lands, or to maintenance —now regular, abundant and secure— within the lord’s court. Thus, if as Montesquieu says “among the Germans there were vassals, but there were no fiefs; and there were no fiefs because the princes had no lands to give” (Montesquieu, 1973:382), now, by contrast, there began to be fiefs, because the princes did have lands to distribute, because material wealth had mutated its figures and because the new agriculture, improved and more developed, had moved to the foreground of economic life. The fief was then the new reward given by the lord in payment for the vassal’s fidelity and attachment.

With this, the relation of personal dependence established between lord and vassal acquires a fundamental economic character which, although in a certain sense it strengthens it, at the same time strips it of its earlier primitive and ingenuous structure, making it more vulnerable to interests of an equally economic type.^[32]

In this way, the old personal dependence of the Germanic community acquires its privileged form of reproduction in the feudal relation, but is not limited to it; rather, it propagates and extends itself as a basic feature or as the central content of the principal relations —economic, but also social in general— that hold sway within the society characteristic of the whole European Middle Ages.^[33] And from being a simple relation between the Germanic war chief and his court of companions, it becomes little by little the most widespread and general modality of social interlacement of the whole of feudal society.

The feudal relation thus appears as the variant par excellence that reproduces, in a more complex and enriched way, the old personal dependence typical of Germanic military organization, a dependence which, being prefigured around the new forms of material wealth, creates the most characteristic and important bond of the feudal ruling class, the essential tie that concentrates and holds together its internal unity, both in the face of the world outside Europe and against the class of the serfs. “The first thing the Frankish king did on becoming, from a simple supreme military chief, a true prince, was to transform those properties of the people into royal domains, to steal them from the people and to donate them or grant them in fief to the persons of his retinue. This retinue, originally formed by his personal military guard and by the rest of the subaltern commanders, was soon reinforced not only with Romans (that is, with Romanized Gauls) who very quickly became indispensable on account of their education and their knowledge of writing and of vulgar and literary Latin, as well as of the law of the country, but also with slaves, serfs and freedmen, who constituted his court and from among whom he chose his favorites. To most of these people plots of the people’s land were at first donated; later they were granted to them in the form of benefices, granted in the earliest times, most often, for as long as that king lived. Thus was laid the basis of a new nobility at the expense of the people” (Engels, n.d.a.: 175). Fiefs were therefore introduced between the chief and his retinue, whereby the earlier relation of mutual dependence and of protection-subordination was consolidated as one of the principal relations of the new economic form and as the central nexus of the new feudal nobility.

But not in a sudden and immediate way. In the turbulent times when the Germanic conquest is barely taking hold, and when the fusion of the peoples is produced only gradually, the war chiefs of the Germanic peoples —increasingly turned into lords— do not yet wish to part completely with their court of companions in arms —increasingly transformed into vassals—, since war and military confrontation are still the order of the day. And they know well that by granting fiefs to those companions they incite them to occupy themselves with them, to reside in them and to immerse themselves ever more in sedentary and agricultural life, abandoning their warlike spirit and initiative. Hence they retain with them a part of the vassals, to whom they give maintenance, shelter and protection, and who, alongside the lord, remain always ready for combat and military struggle. To others they grant, for their sustenance, the rents derived from a determinate land, without directly handing over its usufruct. To others, finally, they donate the fief in a conditional or temporary way, under the known form of benefice or of precarium. But little by little, the more the new order of society is stabilized and the more the synthesis of the different peoples is completed, the more there tends to prevail the unrestricted and lifelong donation of the land itself, the handing over of the fief in its most classical and complete form,^[34] as the counterpart of the vassal’s services and fidelity:

“[…] To the head of a group of vassals, as to any patron, the general conditions of the economy left no choice but between two systems of remuneration. He could retain the man in his dwelling, feed him, clothe him and equip him at his own expense. Or else, by allotting him a land or at least some fixed rents drawn from the soil, leave him to his own devices: what was called chaser in the French-speaking countries, that is, to endow him with his own particular dwelling (casa)” (Bloch, 1979: vol. I, pp. 188 and 189). The new forms of wealth therefore imposed only these few possibilities for maintaining the bond of dependence and vassalage. And although during the first centuries of the feudal mode of production all of them really occur, the general movement shifts only in the direction of consolidating and generalizing ever more the form of the fief as landed possession, a form in which the bond from lord to vassal becomes stronger and more permanent —for a directly economic interest is now involved— but in which that same tie loses its old intimacy and spontaneity, becoming more distant and self-interested. On becoming institutionalized as a general social bond, the tie of personal dependence that is now realized through the fief can be erected as one of the fundamental social relations of the new social form only at the price of divesting itself of its primitive ingenuous and radical character, of its aura of intimate devotion and friendship. Hence the following assertion by A. Thierry is clear: “Among those vassals or leudes, the most devoted, the most useful, as it was then said, were those who, living near the king and forming around his person a permanent guard, had as their wage a life in common at his table or a levy upon the fruits of his domain. Less could be counted on the fidelity of those who, domiciled far away and living in their own houses, enjoyed by royal concession the fief or wage in lands” (Thierry, 1946:63). Thus were being shaped and consolidated, step by step, those “motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’” (Marx and Engels, 1970:33), which were expanding ever more as the dominant forms of bonding among men.

But this only as regards the feudal relation, the relation within which the fief was the counterpart of the vassalage and the service of another man. It was not the same within the fief itself. As we have said, that fief consisted of lands and of the men who worked them, that is, of serfs subjected to productive labor within the feudal unit. The feudal relation therefore rested on the internal relation of serfdom that sustained and shored up the existence of the fief itself. And this servile relation was also, with the dimensions and importance it acquired at this moment, a result of the new material advances we have seen and of the successive advances of the fusion between the peoples.

For serfdom was not a new fact either for the Germanic peoples or for the Romans. Among the former it had existed, as can be seen in Tacitus, in an incipient and marginal way, associated with agriculture, which was likewise barely beginning to emerge within the economic activities of the Germanic peoples. Reduced in this epoch to a simple tribute handed over by the serf to his Germanic lord, it nevertheless left a wide margin to the various activities and needs of the former. For their part, the Romans had also known in the times of the Empire a form of production based on serfdom, the form of the colonate. As is well known, this form bound the tenant-colonus to the land and by this route to the lord. He could not separate himself from it and was obliged, for its usufruct, to hand over a fixed rent to the proprietor and lord of that land. But it too was of secondary importance in the face of the relation of slavery, which functioned as the true general basis of social production.^[35]

Now, by contrast, this serfdom begins to extend and spread as the most important relation of the new production. With the development of the new agriculture, surpassed and improved by all the Roman and Germanic contributions and by their results, there also develops the serfdom bound to it in the old Germanic structure and, feeding on the similar servile relations existing incipiently among the Romans, it propagates itself little by little as the new dominant form of social labor, as the characteristic modality of the new world in formation. And with this it then annuls the necessity and possibility of slave labor, an inferior form of exploitation of the worker and one wholly at odds with the new material advances of the productive base that had been created.

For the slave had been for the Romans not a man but an object, an “instrument that speaks”. A being therefore without will or any responsibility, without recognized interests of his own and without specific relevance within Roman society, which, while resting upon him, nevertheless degraded him to the lowest possible condition.^[36] The slave was not a man, but one more of the means necessary for Roman production and economy. And as long as he was abundant, and even superabundant, the slave could effectively be treated as a mere instrument, as an object of use employed as readily for productive labor as for domestic whims or for various feasts and ceremonies.

But the fusion of Romans and Germanic peoples had widened the space of history; it had opened the territory of the whole of Europe to the new economic forms. Alongside the scarcity of slaves characteristic of the last times of the Roman Empire, this widening of the territory of the new historical form made working men ever more valuable, since in relation to the available land they were harder to retain and to obtain. Slavery could not once again be the mainstay of social production at a moment when labor power was becoming scarce and difficult to retain.

Moreover, we are, as we saw, faced with enormous advances of the productive forces. A more regular and intensive agriculture, greater in yields and completely integrated with livestock production, required a labor power that would not be indifferent and even hostile to labor, but that would exert itself in it with a certain responsibility and interest of its own. One that, consciously taking advantage of the recent material advances, would have a certain diligence and dedication toward productive activity. But that labor power could not exist so long as men were treated like cattle, like a mere herd of productive means.

Lastly, slavery as such had not been known to the primitive Germanic peoples.^[37] And insofar as they were the conquerors, they would tend from the outset to reproduce their own forms of organization and of production rather than to assimilate those of others. The incipient form they had developed, alongside and for an agriculture that was likewise only budding, was the serfdom of men subjected only as regards a tribute, but fairly free as regards their manner, rhythm and forms of labor, and as regards the use of their remaining time. Hence this too worked against the old slave basis of Roman agriculture.

Everything therefore tended to suppress slavery and to replace it with serfdom, with this new form of exploitation which, raising the worker to the condition of man (a subjected man, but equally human, and no longer a mere instrumentum vocale, a mere thing), delegated to him greater autonomy, more responsibility and freedom in labor, and a wider margin of development and of diverse capacities. It thus replaced the old form of slave labor with a more developed and complex situation and status of the worker, with a higher historical-progressive economic form of labor which, still moving within class antagonisms, corresponded adequately to the new and important advances of the new productive forces.^[38] Thus the serf, unlike the slave, will then be able to develop that greater disposition and interest in labor, being more independent as an individual, more secure as a worker and firmer as the productive mainstay of society: “Since his regime of life is now better, his stock is perpetuated with greater security; upon the fields that have been ceded to him, his labor will be of better quality; since the rents, willingly or unwillingly, have to be paid, it will be on his own labor that the surplus of products —on which his life depended— will depend”. This serf “handed over to the master only a part of the products obtained by his labor; he handed over only a part of his time […] since he had to live and to pay his rents, it was plainly imperative that the corvées should not take up his whole working day. He did not live all the time under the orders of another man; he had his own household and himself directed the cultivation of his fields; if he showed himself more skillful and more active than his neighbor at work, he would feed himself better than the latter and, wherever such a thing existed, he could sell his products at the market” (Bloch, 1980:166, 167). He therefore had greater autonomy, initiative, freedom and breadth of outlook than the slave. He could consequently, and in accordance with the Germanic spirit, develop the various features of his own individuality in a far deeper and more extensive way than the previous exploited working social classes.

Serfdom therefore imposed itself as the general form of labor in all the spheres of economic production. Slaves were manumitted at an accelerated rate and endowed with land of their own to cultivate, in exchange for the rendering of services on the lords’ land and for certain handings over of products to them. They were thus manumitted with obedience (manumissio cum obsequio) in large proportions: “[…] manumissions had been very numerous in the epoch of the barbarian kingdoms and had been granted to very broad groups; at least, that is what the texts say, despite their terrible gaps” (Bloch, 1980:170). For their part, the Germanic peoples also extended in their old territories the form of labor based on serfdom, which, together with agriculture, spread here ever more as the new basis of production. All the currents which, in the new situation, tended once again to stabilize production, joined in a single tide that propagated throughout Europe the relation of serfdom and lordship, servile labor: “[…] In both parts, the evolution during the first feudal age was to be oriented in one and the same direction, tending, in a uniform manner, toward an increasing imposition of lordships” (Bloch, 1979: vol. I, p. 280).

There was therefore a general movement of leveling of all the men subjected or formerly exploited in different ways toward the general and single form of serfdom, toward this form which, recognizing the similar human condition of the man placed as hierarchically inferior, imposed upon him the payment of a tribute or the performance of a determinate service or duty in payment for the responsibility and dominion the lord assumed over this subjected individual. For by multiple routes there was being consolidated what Marx considers one of the central features of the servile relation: the appropriation by the new or the old lords of the individual will of the new serfs subordinated to them. “The appropriation of an alien will is a presupposition of the relation of lordship” (Marx, 1976: vol. I, p. 462). And that appropriation was created by raising the slave to the condition of man, manumitting him and making him render various services in the lord’s house as a domestic serf, or emancipating him from his previous status and endowing him with land of his own, in exchange for his working a certain time on the lord’s land and periodically handing over a certain type and quantity of products.

Or again, that appropriation of another will was generalized when the old personal service performed by the free Germanic man to defray the common expenses of the community became an obligation imposed and coercive by the old chiefs who, usurping their communal offices, became in the wake of the conquest lords of their former companions of the commune.

Thus was consolidated, step by step, the very essence of the relation of serfdom: a relation in which one man subjects another to his dominion and, appropriating his individual will, obliges him to perform for him various services in labor or personal services of any kind, or to hand over to him various products or fruits of his labor, and in which, in exchange, and as a function of that same dominion and lordship exercised over the man placed in the servile condition, the lord assumes a certain responsibility of respect for property, of protection, of maintenance or of donation of lands to the serf, whether, as we say, by protecting his previous production, or by obliging him to work the land and support himself, or by obliging him to perform another type of activity, endowing him with the means necessary to carry out such tasks, both in various means of labor and of subsistence and directly in cultivable lands.^[39] Which may be schematized graphically as follows:

A broad relation with various possible variants, which explains the fact that its varied figures and particular combinations may be found the length and breadth of the whole planet, in the most diverse historical periods and within the most differentiated social structures.

Figures and combinations rich in their determinate concreteness, which also explain the traditional confusion that “finds” feudalisms in the histories of all peoples, on the basis of identifying one or another particular modality of economic serfdom, one or another manifestation of the essence of this relation as we have defined it here.

An essence that therefore constitutes serfdom as a polyvalent and almost universal relation of production, a relation that is present alike when a conqueror seizes a former farmer and, subjecting him, imposes on him a tribute in exchange for respecting his previous production and labor; when a former communal chief usurps his office and transforms the old personal services of the members of the community into obligatory and coercive servile burdens;^[40] or when the former master carries out the manumission of his old slaves and, raising them to the condition of human beings, endows them with land of their own and imposes on them in exchange a certain rendering of personal services and a determinate rent in products. An essence that Engels too perceives clearly when he says: “It is certain that serfdom and the rendering of services are not a form exclusive to the feudal Middle Ages; we find them in all or almost all places where the conquerors make the former inhabitants cultivate the land (for example, in Thessaly, in remote antiquity). This fact has led me and many others into error as regards serfdom in the Middle Ages; one was too inclined to found it simply upon conquest, which made everything so clear and easy”. See, among others, Thierry (Marx and Engels, 1973b: vol. II, pp. 427-428).

A relation of serfdom, then, which here shows us only one of its possible modalities, but which equally exists, universally, the length and breadth of the different histories of human peoples —a universality on which is founded the error of conceiving feudalism, which rests upon it, as equally universal, which is a gross error. A relation of serfdom which therefore, as Engels makes clear, does not have its origin directly and simply in the Germanic conquest, but is constituted through a complex combination of the manumissions of former Roman slaves, of extensions —modified on the new productive base— of the incipient serfdom present in the Germanic commune, and of the resumption and recasting of the servile form of the Roman colonate that had appeared before the migrations of the peoples. A complicated serfdom which, synthesizing all these antecedents, makes uniform the mode of relation with the direct workers and provides the necessary infrastructure for the new feudal society.^[41] A serfdom which, although it also occasionally remains domestic serfdom —emancipating slaves without endowing them with land and making them serve in the house of the former master in exchange for their maintenance— tends in general terms to become ever more serfdom of the glebe, a relation of lordship in which the serf is the possessor of a piece of land in exchange for a previously specified personal service: “Therefore, relations of personal dependence are necessary, the absence of personal freedom, whatever its degree, and being bound to the land as an accessory of it, serfdom of the glebe [Hörigkeit] in the proper sense of the term” (Marx, 1981: vol. III, p. 1006). For in these difficult times, when labor power has become particularly scarce, it becomes ever more necessary to retain it, to bind it to the land itself and, by this route, to chain it to the service of and submission to the lord who has endowed it with such land. And thus, in this multivarious movement of making uniform the old forms of exploitation, all the lines always issue in this binding of the serf to the land, in this constitution of the man laden with servile ties into a mere accessory of the land, into a piece indissolubly welded to the seigneurial domain, into a man subjected by and for agricultural labor.^[42]

The serf is, then, ever more posited as a mere accessory of the land, as a part of it. Not as an object or as a speaking instrument like the slave, but as a subjected man who is nevertheless, ever more, only a constitutive part of the seigneurial domain itself, of the very territory of the fief. And with this the feudal lord completely integrates serfdom as the infrastructure of the fief, as the material support of the feudal relation itself. For in placing the man subjected to serfdom as a mere accessory of the land of which he is the proprietor, what he does is to integrate the relation of serfdom as a mere moment of the feudal relation itself, as the material support —fundamental but subordinate— of the specific and characteristic feudal structure of production. And thus he can then reconcile a particular modality of the quasi-universal servile relation with the peculiar and specifically European form of medieval feudal organization, based on personal dependence and on the old Germanic forms, modified and refigured by the Roman contributions. He can then make serfdom only one of the constitutive elements of the feudal mode of production, defined by many other economic and productive features. Thus Marx says clearly: “The relation of the retainer to his territorial lord, or the personal service, is essentially different. For at bottom it represents only a mode of existence of the landed proprietor himself, who no longer works, but whose property includes among the conditions of production the workers themselves as serfs, etc.” (Marx, 1976: vol. I, p. 462). The feudal proprietor has therefore been emancipated from the labor of the land by virtue of the relation of serfdom internal to the fief itself. But the feudal character of his production does not depend on this servile relation; rather, it includes it as its presupposition.

Serfdom, in its turn, does no more than guarantee the internal production of the fief, supply the labor of reproduction of the feudal entity, previously constituted and independently generated. It does no more, then, than posit itself as a lever or means of the reproduction and consolidation of the feudal relation which, integrating it, transcends it and even refigures it in accordance with its own needs and determinations. For the very historical particularity that serfdom presents in this epoch is given to it precisely by its insertion within the feudal relation, by the characteristic features of the latter: the specific serfdom of the feudal world is a serfdom tinged, to a greater or lesser degree, by the personal dependence characteristic of the feudal relation, by the bond of protection and devotion we explained a little earlier.

For in this society in gestation, where the principal social bond men tend to establish is that of personal dependence, its limits are not very clear. And although its finished and complete form occurs principally among the upper strata of society, its essence propagates itself throughout the whole social pyramid, reproducing itself more or less imperfectly in every place where two men enter into a durable and important social relation with each other. Serfdom then acquires, alongside its general features, a particular character as a relation that is also an immediate one of a certain personal dependence, reproducing in some way the absolute devotion and submission of the serf and the patriarchal protection and support of the lord: “To be the man of another man: in the whole feudal vocabulary there is no combination of words more widespread than this, nor of fuller meaning. Common to the Romance and Germanic languages, it served to express personal dependence, whatever the exact juridical nature of the bond, and without any distinction of class standing in the way. The count was the man of the king, as the serf was that of his rural lord” (Bloch, 1979: vol. I, p. 167). All the men of this feudal society in formation were therefore bound to others by a bond of personal dependence.^[43] With more or less perfection and more or less adequacy, that bond permeated every relation among men and therefore that of serfdom as well.^[44] Only a feudal serf could say that he was “the man” of his rural lord, something that would not be said by a serf subjected by a foreign conqueror, nor by a peasant whose land had been usurped in order to subject him to the servile condition. For only specifically feudal serfdom, tinged by the features of personal dependence, could reach such modalities of the nexus among the component members of the lordship and produce such conceptions among men. Beneath this veil of personal dependence between rural lord and serf was hidden the economic exploitation of the latter by the former, mystifying its true primordial meaning. But in the absence of other forms of social bonding among persons —such as the communal relation, gentile blood ties, the relation of membership in the urban entity or city, and so on— the ties of personal dependence, in their multiple figures, were to acquire a particularly broad force and extension.

The specifically feudal modality of serfdom consists, then, as much in its centralized character with respect to its form as serfdom of the glebe —that is, where the serf is considered an accessory of the land and establishes through it his serfdom with respect to the lord— as in its particular character as a servile relation clothed as a relation of personal dependence between serf and lord.^[45] The generality and universality of the bond between lordship and serfdom is here particularized on the basis of one of the defining and essential features of the classically feudal relation, on the basis of that personal dependence, thus acquiring its particular European-medieval figure.

Here, then, are the principal relations of production characteristic of the feudal mode of production, the principal elements of its economic-formal side.

IV

These are, briefly set out, the two constitutive or defining aspects of the feudal mode of production. For Marx, to recognize the exclusively European —and exceptionally Japanese— character of the development of this way of producing does not, however, imply denying either its specificity —which we have tried to develop here— or, above all, its profound historical-universal significance, its historically progressive character within the general process of formation of the economic base of society.

For, as we have seen, the development of the productive forces attained in this stage is of such dimensions that it allows Europe to “take off”, as regards levels of progress, with respect to the whole of the rest of the planet. If at the beginning of the High Middle Ages China is still the most complex and developed civilization in the world, with Europe following closely on its heels, at the end of the medieval period, by contrast, it is already the “European region” of our globe that stands at the head of the “race” or general march of humanity, and moreover with a lead that is by then appreciably considerable. And it is therefore on the basis of the technology, the productivity and the material progress attained in the “dark” Middle Ages that Europe can project itself across all the seas and continents of the earth, conquering them, subjecting them and subordinating them to the dynamic of its own evolution, the dynamic of the constitution of the new capitalist mode of production.^[46] As we have seen, it is on the basis of the new technological equipment corresponding to the feudal mode of production that Europe accelerates its development in unheard-of fashion, creating the fundamental premises for the opening of that “new historical epoch” inaugurated by modern bourgeois society.

A bourgeois society that likewise owes much to the advances attained on the other plane of the mode of production, to the advances in the basic economic relations developed during this period. For it is also on the basis of the relation of feudal serfdom that the new forms of economic exploitation of labor that will hold sway in the capitalist form are prepared. “Free” labor, which is the fundamental precondition of the world of capital, rests to a certain degree on the important development of the men exploited within serfdom and within the various relations marked by the personal dependence explained earlier. The human revaluation that the Middle Ages effects of the man placed as serf, and his direct insertion within varied direct relations of personal dependence, develop in him a series of capacities and possibilities of self-perception which, in the course of time, will facilitate his separation from the means of production and his conversion into mere potential labor power, into a wage worker for capital.

Hence the adequate study and comprehension of the feudal mode of production is not a mere intellectual exercise or an erudite pastime. It is rather the effort to understand, in the concreteness of a particular historical case, the historically progressive sense of human evolution, the real paths of the formation, step by step, of the true economic base of the future free society of men. It is also the attempt to put to the test, in the light of ancient and contemporary historical knowledge, the validity of a specific conception of “the historical”, of the materialist conception of history. And it is, lastly, the possibility of corroborating, in the concrete analysis of a given society, the force, the reach and the potentialities opened up by a worldview that still stamps with its full seal the intellectual atmosphere of our own day.

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* The main body of this article consists of parts of chapters IV and V of the book Las luminosas edades oscuras. La concepción marxista sobre la transición de la antigüedad al feudalismo, forthcoming. We have added some introductory considerations on the concept of the feudal mode of production and on its connotation within the materialist conception of history, as well as generally retouching the present presentation.

[1] Recall Marx’s thesis —present alike in Capital and in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, as well as in The German Ideology and in the Grundrisse— to the effect that we live still within human prehistory, within the realm of necessity. Marked by the legacy of the predominance of nature over man, all societies up to the present have lived centered on the development of activities that are predetermined and externally imposed —such as the activity of production— and within relations “necessary and independent of their will”. By contrast, “Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, as their own communal relations, are already subordinated to their own communal control, are not a product of nature but of history” (Marx, 1976: vol. I, pp. 89-90), and they will exist only beyond the capitalist mode of production, really inaugurating human history.

[2] A separate problem is the question of why it has been one particular region of the planet (Europe) that has been able to develop most of those progressive stages of the process of formation of the economic base of society. Some elements toward a solution of this point are contributed here only marginally.

[3] It is interesting to note that in his work Marx speaks not only of the modes of production mentioned in the Preface, but also, for example, of the mode of production of small parcel property (Marx, 1981: vol. 3, bk. 8, pp. 1021-1034) or of the mode of production characteristic of the medieval guild-corporate organization (Marx, 1976: vol. 1, pp. 433-477). These references reinforce us in the idea that the concept mode of production is practically the same as that of process of production. Thus, although the two cases mentioned are real variants or concrete forms of productive processes —and therefore diverse modes of production— they do not, however, represent progressive stages in the process of formation of the economic base of society. That is why they are not included in Marx’s enumeration. Another point worth highlighting is that Marx does not designate the modes of production on the basis of the central economic relations they imply, but by some geographical (Asiatic), temporal (ancient) or particular (modern bourgeois) feature that immediately singularizes and situates them. In the case that concerns us, we think it possible that Marx calls it the feudal mode of production because it is centered around the fief —its basic economic unit— and around the feudal relation, so characteristic of the West European Middle Ages.

[4] From the principal texts and assertions of Marx and Engels there seems to follow the idea that the feudal mode of production is exclusively European and, by exception, Japanese (Cfr. for example, Marx, 1981: vol. I, bk. I, p. 172 and bk. 3, p. 897.) Feudalism would therefore be something restricted only to Europe and Japan, while serfdom, which underlies it as one of its fundamental bases, would by contrast be a quasi-universal relation of development. Hence the confusion and the polemic about the universality or exclusivity of feudalism as a social system. As regards this discussion —one of the most important and most typical concerning feudalism— which is inaugurated with the texts of Voltaire and Montesquieu, see for example: Boutruche (1973: Introduction and pp. 125-267); Bloch (1979: bk. 2, pp. 187-202); Colliva (1981); Udatzova and Gutnova (1980); Vilar and others (1976: pp. 205-341). On the particular case of Japan cfr. K. Takahashi, “La place de la Revolution de Meiji dans L’histoire agraire du Japon”, and his contributions to the debate in Du feodalisme au capitalisme: problemes de la transition, vol. I, pp. 95-141 and vol. 2, pp. 23-81).

[5] Thus he says: “[…] the Middle Ages (Germanic epoch) arises from the land as the seat of history […]” (Marx, 1976, vol. 1: 442). This idea comes from Hegel, who in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History treats the Middle Ages as one of the periods of the “economic world”.

[6] To cite only two examples close to Marx himself, cfr. the opinion of Voltaire (1959: 245-246) or Thierry (1875). For both, European society becomes barbarized in the Middle Ages, regressing with respect to the achievements of Roman antiquity. Even at the beginning of this century this conception has been upheld, for example, by Lot (1956:353) or by Pirenne (1981:24, 27 and 29; 1978:190-191; 1941:11-12; 1980: 21-37).

[7] Engels says (1969a:644), for example: “The Middle Ages were regarded as a simple interruption of history by a thousand-year state of general barbarism; the great advances of the Middle Ages, the expansion of the European cultural field, the great viable nations that had been forming alongside one another during this period and, finally, the enormous technical advances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: none of this was seen”. See also Engels (1981c), Marx (1980b and 1981). For the rest, in this vindication of the progressive sense of the Middle Ages too, Marx and Engels followed Hegel closely, who declares emphatically that “humanity became free not so much from serfdom as through serfdom” (Hegel, 1974: 655).

[8] We are speaking, in chronological terms, of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, of the fifth to the ninth centuries of our era. It is almost what in certain traditional periodizations is known as the High Middle Ages. In this respect, cfr. Hegel’s periodization (1974: 571-573).

[9] For a general characterization of the mode of production and of the society corresponding to the Germanic commune before the invasions, one should consult above all Tacitus, in his celebrated text on Germania (De origine et moribus germanorum). One may also see Julius Caesar, who in his Commentaries on the Gallic War speaks of the character and customs of the Germanic peoples a century and a half before Tacitus (cfr. Book VI, chs. XI-XXVIII). Very important is Marx’s characterization in his “Pre-capitalist Economic Formations” (Marx, 1976: vol. I, 433-477). One may also consult Engels (1969c); Engels (n.d.); Dopsch (1951); or Brunner (1936), to cite only some of the most important.

[10] Let us recall here, only in passing, Marx’s idea: “What distinguishes one epoch from another is not what is made, but how, with what instruments of labor it is made” (Marx, 1981: vol. 1, bk. 1, p. 218). This is exactly what is at issue here. It was not so important what was going to be done —that is, to spread agriculture massively to the north of Europe— but how it was going to be done, through what instruments of labor it was going to be carried out. And in this context, the invention of the heavy plow with moldboard and wheels marks an important point within the general progress of the productive forces and symbolizes the shaping and unity of the entity Europe upon an agricultural base more developed and progressive than that of all previous stages.

[11] On the differences between this heavy plow and the old light plow one may consult the important and well-documented work of Haudricourt and Brunhes (1955). Although we do not entirely agree with their theses, it is a work that cannot be omitted with regard to this problem. Also in relation to the importance and implications of the invention of this new plow, see Slicher (1978:90-92), Forbes (1958: 120-121), Bernal (1972: 351), Duby (1979: 20), Oakley (1980: 103). Abundant engravings and illustrations of that plow and of its various variants may be seen in the cited work of Haudricourt and Delamarre, in the text of Pounds (1981: 224) and in Crombie (1979: 237). More detailed references and developments are found in Hodgget (1974: 24-31) and Bloch (1978:210-212). But without any doubt the most complete, precise and important exposition is in the already cited book by White (1981). We have based the whole treatment of the problem carried out here on that excellent text. Further on we shall use it again for other decisive points.

[12] Sod: a piece of earth covered with grass and tightly bound together by the roots of that grass.

[13] There is still polemic about the moment when this heavy plow with moldboard and wheels was invented. However, what is an accepted fact is that its generalized diffusion and existence come about only from the conversion of the lands of northern Europe into lands destined fundamentally to agriculture. And this is what is really important for our argument.

[14] The scythe, with a handle much longer than the sickle’s, makes it possible to cut or mow hay flush with the ground, whereby the plant destined for fodder is used completely. Wheat, by contrast, does not need to be cut flush with the ground; it is reaped only from where the ear begins, leaving the stalks as fertilizer for the land or as feed for the animals. Hence, before the regular production of fodder for systematic stock-raising, the scythe was an exceptional instrument as against the sickle, which was far more widespread and habitual.

[15] References to triennial rotation and its role in this epoch may be seen in Bloch (1978:128-134), Slicher (1978:85-89), Forbes (1958:121-122), Bernal (1972: 351), Crombie (1979:174-175), Derry and Williams (1977:41), Bloch (1974:208), Oakley (1980:104), Hodggett (1974:27-29), Pounds (1981:222-227), Kula (1978:66-67). The best exposition is, however, once again that of Lynn White Jr.

[16] According to Lynn White Jr. it would even be the relatively late extension and consolidation of this system of triennial rotation that would also explain why the substitution of the horse for the ox in various activities occurred only in the Carolingian period and at the beginning of the first feudal age, despite the fact that the other two conditions were chronologically prior to that system. Although the point of the historical dating of these advances is still polemical, what is essential for us is rather their specific connection with one another and with the rest of the economic relations we are analyzing. For the following exposition of several of the Carolingian technological advances we have also followed this author very closely (Cfr. his bibliography at the end of this article).

[17] On this point one may consult not only Lynn White Jr. (1981: 59-69), but also Usher (1941:113-119 and 131-133), Haudricourt and Delamarre (1955: ch. IX, pp. 155-190) and Gille (1962: 443-445). However, the common source of all of them and the most important work on this is that of Lefevre.

[18] The work of harrowing is that of leveling and flattening the earth after the plowing work.

[19] In this way it is clear that the substitution of the horse for the ox in agriculture represents the introduction of a new instrument of labor within it, and in particular of an instrument bound to the source of energy used within the whole process. Marx says of this: “The animal is, grosso modo, only man’s oldest instrument, as Turgot has shown” (Marx, 1980: 80). In the same place, Marx describes the animals used by man in productive processes as “living locomotives”, where their function as forms of motive energy stands out. In this sense one may also take up Lynn White Jr.’s assertion when he says that the generalized introduction of the horse into agriculture “marks an epoch in the application of energy to agriculture” (White, 1981:63).

[20] In this way, this advance as regards medieval means of transport, virtually conquered already in the period we are analyzing, will be a support of some weight for the subsequent evolution of the Middle Ages, “whose later development then turns into an opposition between town and country”, as Marx says (Marx, 1976: bk. 1, p. 442). But this only in conjunction with many other causes, which determine, toward the end of the first feudal age, the birth and generalized development of the medieval city.

[21] Equally polemical is the dating of the moment when water mills began to spread massively throughout Europe. From our point of view this is not so important. Even if the generalized diffusion of this important technical advance is placed a couple of centuries after Charlemagne, what is really important is the fact that with these water mills —and a little later with windmills, which in their development and progress follow almost the same steps as water mills— the characteristic technological equipment corresponding to the feudal mode of production as such is in general outline completed. After the large-scale adoption and socialization of these water mills —and by extension of windmills too— feudal society will no longer make any very significant advances in the sphere of the material productive forces. It will not be until the twilight of that feudal form, and already once again in the transition toward the following form, that the subsequent “wave” of inventions and technological advances will be unleashed, upon which nascent capitalist society will be raised. As we see, it is particularly in the periods of transition that the important and progressive development of the material productive forces is concentrated by preference. (Cfr. in this respect the “Preface” to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.)

[22] For the following exposition we have relied above all on Usher (1941: 121-141) and Bloch (1974:73-110). Also essential are the comments of Marx (1980b and 1984) which we shall cite later. Other important references to the point may be seen in White (1981:80-89), Deshayes (1962:463-469) and Mumford (1982:132-137). In any other history of technology (cfr. the bibliography at the end) this discovery is always mentioned, though without appraising in every case its profound significance. On the other hand, the theses and assertions of Dockes (1984:201-202 and 208-238) on the water mill seem to us wholly disputable. It is clearly a case of an overpoliticization of the problem, so characteristic of the current to which he belongs. His “relativization” of the technical progress of Western Europe in the fourth to ninth centuries (ibid: 197-208) also seems to us open to criticism and completely feeble. After what has been developed here we do not think it necessary to enter into a detailed critique of his arguments and assertions.

[23] Cfr. in this respect “Innovación técnica y progreso económico en el mundo antiguo” in La Grecia antigua by M. I. Finley.

[24] Here is a clear example that warns us against a simplistic view of the role of technical progress within historical evolution. The development of the productive forces doubtless has a cumulative and progressive tendency, and an essential role within the different human social formations, but its specific effectiveness and its way of influencing the different planes of the social totality is something extremely complex, and in no way linear, mechanical or uniform. The step that leads from scientific invention or discovery to technological innovation —or the empirical application of that invention— and to its generalized diffusion —or the socialization of that innovation— is not accomplished automatically, but is influenced by specific social conditions and by the “historical milieu” of which Marx spoke (cfr. Letter to the editorial board of Otiechestviennie Zapiski of late 1877). For the particular example of technical progress in antiquity, see M. I. Finley, Economía de la Antigüedad, pp. 101, 114-116, 156-160 and 204-208. For the medieval period cfr. the interesting article by Lynn White Jr., “Cultural climates and technological advance in the middle ages”, in Medieval religion and technology, pp. 217-253.

[25] And if, in spite of everything, it is here that water mills were first built and used —at least simultaneously with the Scandinavian mills, and undergoing in the Mediterranean a greater development and complexification— that is due only to the fact that, despite their irregularity, the rivers do not freeze in this Mediterranean zone, whereas in northern Europe such freezing renders water mills useless for substantial periods of the year. (In this respect cfr. likewise M. Bloch’s article “Avvento e conquiste del molino ad acqua”, already cited.)

[26] In this sense we may take up the extract made by Marx (1984:91) when he says: “Little concern was given to building machines with low friction that could work with the least possible motive force. Everything was entrusted, and entrusted solely, to the [external] motive force. This had to overcome the resistances presented to it and to surmount all the errors of the machine”.

[27] Very interesting are the developments and hypotheses with which Marx illustrates this last idea cited. They are included in the mentioned text of Capital and Technology. Here we had to confine ourselves only to those referring to water mills in particular.

[28] We do not enter here into an explanation of the significance and importance of water mills during the first and second feudal ages. Let it suffice to point out that those mills were one of the principal motives of the social and political class struggle throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, and one of the important supports of the development of the medieval industries, both the textile and the iron industries and those of tanning and woodworking, among others.

[29] The fief, defined in accordance with its classical, complete and most accomplished figure, is a determinate quantity of lands and of subjected men or serfs who work them, which are handed over by the feudal lord in a lifelong and unconditional manner and as the material counterpart of the fundamentally military services received from the vassal. It is therefore the material or economic component of the feudal relation as such. In this respect cfr. Bloch (1979: vol. I, book II, part 2) and the articles “European feudalism” and “Les formes de la rupture de l’hommage dans l’ancien droit feodal” in Bloch (1983: vol. I).

[30] We understand the relation of personal dependence as a direct and immediate relation entered into between two persons on the basis of the recognition and assumption of certain personal qualities and attributes of the members who enter into it. A twofold relation which is on the one hand devotion and recognition on the part of one of the persons, and on the other backing and protection, uniting both persons deeply as persons and making them interdependent in an immediate way. Personal dependence may obviously have various forms of manifestation, according to the context and moment in which it appears. It presents itself as a basic and central relation within the Germanic community, from which it is transmitted and diffused to the European Middle Ages.

[31] The classical feudal relation is therefore a relation of direct personal dependence, contracted freely and voluntarily between two men, and whose essential end is a military end —although the economic component is also very important, but not the fundamental one—; a relation in which the man placed in the superior position or feudal lord receives from the subordinate or vassal fundamentally military services and support, granting in exchange lifelong property over a determinate land and command over the men or serfs who work it, that is, granting in exchange the fief. In this sense, the feudal relation is the principal relation of internal cohesion of the feudal ruling class, its basic mechanism of unity. Hence its economic content, though important, is not the central one of this relation, since it is a nexus established between members who are a priori men with economic power and an integral part of the class that economically exploits others.

[32] Hence it will be precisely economic causes, the moving to the foreground of the economic features of the feudal relation, that will end by dissolving it (Cfr. Bloch 1979: vol. I, pp. 245-276).

[33] To the point that Marx can tell us: “The gloomy European Middle Ages. Instead of the independent man, we find here that everyone is bound by ties of dependence: serfs of the glebe and landowners, vassals and great lords, laymen and clerics. Personal dependence characterizes both the social relations in which material production takes place and the other spheres of life structured upon that production” (Marx, 1981: vol. I, bk. I, p. 94). Personal dependence would therefore seem to be the bond or feature characteristic of every possible social relation within this order.

[34] The fief that consists of lands and serfs, and that is the lifelong counter-performance for warlike support and services, is therefore, as we mentioned, the accomplished, classical and characteristic form of the fief as such. But alongside it there exist other forms, derived from or prefiguring this classical form —such as the benefice and the precarium already noted— which are also designated or conceived under the broad name of the fief. Nevertheless, their placement, explanation and intrinsic sense are comprehensible only on the basis of its most developed and classical figure, already explained.

[35] Exaggerating, A. Thierry (1947:34) has pointed to this existence of serfdom among the Romans before the invasions: “serfdom of the glebe, by whatever name it was called, was on Gallic soil prior to the conquest of the barbarians; that conquest could aggravate it, but it sank into the night of the centuries and had its root in an epoch inaccessible even to the erudition of our own day”. A point of view entirely explicable in a bourgeois historian, for whom the principal enemy is still the feudal and medieval specter, with its whole train of servile relations and of personal dependence.

[36] On this Montesquieu says clearly (1973:160): “Slavery properly so called is the institution of a right that makes one man the absolute owner of another man, or makes the latter the property of the former, who disposes of his goods and even of his life.”

[37] Despite its being a polemical point, our opinion is that slavery did not exist within the Germanic commune. The “slaves” of whom Tacitus speaks are explained by his point of view, permeated by the very conceptions of the world in which he lived, since the situation he describes seems to correspond, as can be seen in his Germania —and as Marx also conceives it— rather to an incipient form of serfdom than to a form of slavery as such. Serfdom was a relation more in keeping with the Germanic form, where one of its classical antecedents existed: the personal service of the members of the commune.

[38] See in this respect the assertion of J. Kuczynski (1974). Cited there too is J. Stalin’s idea, taken from his text On Dialectical and Historical Materialism. (Cfr., pp. 116-117).

[39] As can be seen, we conceive serfdom as a broad and flexible relation which, in its various variants and possibilities, presents itself as an almost universal form of the relations of production. This seems to be how Marx conceives it (1976: vol. 1, pp. 462-463) throughout the whole argument of “Pre-capitalist Economic Formations”, for example when he says: “From what we have seen it follows that the relation of lordship and the relation of serfdom correspond equally to this form of the appropriation of the instruments of production and constitute a necessary ferment of the development and of the decline of ALL the ORIGINAL relations of property and of production, at the same time as they also express its limited character” (small capitals ours). That is to say, serfdom is one possible route of dissolution of all the original forms, of any of them. It can therefore take on multiple forms ranging from serfdom of the glebe in its most classical and accomplished form to the simple obligation of a tribute: “Moreover, it is clear that in all the forms in which the direct worker remains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence and his conditions of labor, the property relation must appear at the same time as a direct relation of domination and servitude, so that the direct producer will appear as lacking freedom; a lack of freedom which may be attenuated FROM serfdom [Leibeigenschaft] with personal services TO the mere tributary obligation” (small capitals and italics ours, Marx, 1981: vol. III, bk. 8, pp. 1005-1006).

[40] A case that has been clearly pointed out by Marx. Thus, if he first defines the labor of personal service for the community and says: “[…] The small communities may vegetate independently side by side, and within them the individual works independently, with his family, on the plot assigned to him (a determinate labor for collective reserves, so to speak for insurance, on the one hand, and to defray the expenses of the communal entity as such, that is, for war, for divine service, and so on); seigneurial dominion in its most original sense is found first of all here, for example in the Slavic communities, in the Romanian ones, etc. Here the transition to personal service occurs” (Marx, 1976: vol. I, pp. 435-436), he then clearly points out the usurpation of that service and the consequent genesis of the lord-landowner and of the serf subjected to that servile service: “One part of the soil belongs to the individual peasants, who cultivate it autonomously. Another portion is cultivated collectively and creates a surplus product that serves in part to defray communal expenses, in part as a reserve for cases of bad harvests, etc. These last two parts of the surplus product, and finally the whole surplus product together with the soil on which it grew, are usurped little by little by state functionaries and by private persons, and the originally free peasant proprietors, whose obligation to cultivate that soil in common remains standing, are thus transformed into persons obliged to render personal services or to pay rent in products, while the usurpers of the common lands are transformed into the landowners not only of the usurped communal land but also of the peasant properties themselves” (Marx, 1981: vol. III, bk. 8, p. 1022; cfr. also Marx, 1980c:216-218). For the rest, the difference and relation between serfdom, communal personal service, servile personal service, and so on, and the detailed typology of the different modalities of serfdom, can be carried out only on the basis of their accomplished forms, present in this case only from the first feudal age onward. Here we allude to them only implicitly and to the extent necessary to clarify our more general argument, since here we are dealing only with their most generic and global conceptualization.

[41] The multiple sources that medieval serfdom has had are clearly perceived by Montesquieu, who points to its development out of the antecedents prior to the fusion, out of the conquest itself —which is also one of its levers— and out of its propagation. (Cfr. Montesquieu, 1973:385-387).

[42] This diverse movement of making uniform toward serfdom, and of binding the serf to the land, is pointed out by Bloch (1979: vol. I, pp. 295-296). Kuczynski (1974:116), Duby (1979:41) and Hodggett (1974:37) also allude to it. It had likewise been clearly pointed out by Engels (n.d.: 176-177).

[43] Recall once again Marx’s characterization (1981: vol. I, bk. 1, p. 94) of the Middle Ages as a society based, in general, on various “ties of personal dependence”.

[44] This breadth and propagation of the relation of personal dependence is clear to Hegel (1974:609), who says: “Thus there arose a graduated series of dependencies, running from the serf up to the minister and vassal”. Guizot too has pointed to the clothing of serfdom in the form of personal dependence, and reproved it: “There is no doubt that after some time there were formed, between the coloni and the feudal lord, certain moral relations, certain affectionate customs. But this occurred in spite of their reciprocal situation and in no way through its influence. Considered in itself, the situation was radically vicious. Morally, nothing existed in common between the holder of the fief and his coloni; these form part of his domain, they are his property” (Guizot, 1972:99). Allusions to these same ideas of serfdom tinged with dependence may be seen in Pirenne (1981:52-53) and Boutruche (1978: vol. 1, p. 143).

[45] In reality, feudal-medieval serfdom follows a clear curve of development that runs from the clear predominance of the feature of personal dependence, in its first stages, to the predominance of the land as the obligatory mediation of the relation and the consolidation of the serf’s condition as a simple accessory of it, in the final stages. But both are figures corresponding to the feudal way of producing. In this respect cfr. the article “Serf de la glebe. Histoire d’une expression toute faite”, in Bloch (1983: vol. I).

[46] On this idea one may consult Braudel (1974 and 1978). Likewise in White (1979). As we have already mentioned, this is also the idea of Marx and Engels with reference to the significance and contributions of feudalism within the general historical process.