Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: History & Myth

Something that came up while I was writing last week's post on the Luddites is how hard it is to imagine a world that is based on any system other than capitalism. The motive of individual profit, the majority of individuals living in cities and towns, the ability to buy things from a store, and even the idea of a company with employees are pretty central to modern life, and so they pervade even our fantasy worlds and RPG games. D&D certainly does not avoid this notion, even going as far (in some editions) as to have "magic item shops" where magic items can be bought off a shelf.

Fundamentally, this world did not exist until the 1700s. In the medieval-adjacent world of most classic fantasy realms, an entirely different system governing the economic relationships of people would have been dominant. It is against the transition from that previous system into the capitalist system that the Luddites fought against, as I described last week.

This week's post centers on what a more medieval-appropriate economic system is, what it looked like historically, and how it can influence our fantasy worlds.

The Feudal Relationship

The Feudal Pyramid

In middle school, if you learned about the Middle Ages, you might have learned about the "feudal system" or "feudalism"--the system that dominated the medieval period--as a sort of pyramid.

This is generally the notion of what medieval society looked like: a king at the top who received loyalty and soldiers from a noble, who in turn provided things like protection to a knight who actually did the fighting, and who protected peasants who actually worked and farmed. Neat, tidy, and hierarchical.

Those who play medieval video games like the Crusader Kings franchise might see this as a little too neat and tidy. After all, there are all sorts of nobles: barons, dukes, counts, marquises, and earls. Many forms of media will show that these are also neat and hierarchical: a king rules over dukes, a duke rules over several counts, and counts rule over barons.

In reality, this is essentially a completely fictional device. Everything is a whole lot messier than the neat pyramid suggests. We're going to break down a lot of pieces.

Fair warning: like everything in history, you can break every category or label down with counterexamples that no label is perfect. Even this article's deeper formulation of feudalism than the simple pyramid is going to have some generalizations, especially because the systems of the Early Medieval Period and the Late Medieval Period are pretty different.

So, what was feudalism actually?

The basic principle of feudalism was quid pro quo – I'll do something for you if you do something for me.

At the lower levels, this was the production of food. The commoners (often called peasants or serfs, though we'll get more into those labels later) would work the land, producing grain or animal products, and would give a chunk of that to their local feudal overlord--a noble--in exchange for protection. This system developed in Western Europe with the decline of the Roman Empire's authority; barbarian hordes invading meant that people would be willing to pay taxes in exchange for protection from having their land burned by some invading group.

Most people were farmers, on a scale of 90-95% of the population. The population of Europe was smaller than it had been under the peak of Roman power due to disease, famine, and violence. This meant that, while land was abundant, workers were not, and so producing enough food to maintain the population was tricky and required hard work.

Contrary to the anti-work fictionalizing of history on TikTok and Reddit, life as a medieval commoner was not filled with vacation days. Life ebbed and flowed along with the harvest, but the idea that any of your days were "vacation" days is a modern misinterpretation of what would have been many, many days of backbreaking physical labor.

At higher levels, this was oaths of fealty. A duke might rule over a pretty sizable swath of land, with a large number of peasants working their land who could act as soldiers as well. Acting independently, that duke might be a threat to their neighbor. To prevent constant war, they might both agree to serve a king, who would offer mediation between their lands in exchange for a share of the profit that they gained from their own lands or military aid. Usually, the king was the biggest duke, the largest power in a particular region who grew to become "overlord".

The exact nature of this relationship--how much you owed to a lord, or what the lord owed to the king--was not standardized. There was no general tax law saying that people who made over 12 bushels of wheat per year would owe 22% of that as a marginal tax rate. Instead, everything was worked out person-to-person. One duke might owe more in money, while another noble under the same king would pay almost nothing in money or goods but be obligated to provide a lot of soldiers if the king went to war.

When talking about soldiers, the bulk of a medieval army was infantry, drawn from the ranks of the peasantry or common folk on a noble's land. Knights, which we often see as the archetypical warrior of the Middle Ages, were somewhat rare, requiring enough wealth to be able to buy and outfit a warhorse--something expensive and out of reach for the average person.

And no, Crusader Kings fans, generally speaking, there were not nested layers of nobility. Counts did not owe fealty to dukes, creating a layered hierarchy of nobility. A count was simply a noble who also owed fealty to the same king, but who simply owned less land than their higher-ranking noble peers (usually; some powerful counts might own more land than a weak duke, but because the counts were not particular friends with the king, they had not gotten the fancier title of duke). Often, a noble might give smaller estates to a lower class of nobility for day-to-day operations of a particular manor; this class was the gentry, and often consisted of knights, for example, but by the time someone reached the title of Baron or Count, they usually owed fealty directly to the king. (Again, the historical caveat – there are always exemptions, particularly beyond the archetypical western kingdoms of England and France).

Serfs, Peasants, Commoners, and Yeomen

Just as there are a lot of noble titles, there's also a bunch of titles for normal, everyday people. We often use these terms as though they were identical, but they are not.

The broadest term for the non-noble class is "Commoner." This term is essentially anyone who is non-noble. The peasantry is a subset of commoners that are specifically agricultural workers. A commoner who lives in a city would not be a peasant; they might be a villager or a burgher, depending on country and language, but they would not be a peasant.

Within the category of peasants, there are the serfs. A serf was someone specifically bound to the land. Serfs were not allowed to leave the land, legally forced to continue to work the same acres as their parents. If the land was bought or sold, the serfs came with it; what differentiated them from slaves was that an individual serf could generally not be sold, which prevented the breakup of families that occurred regularly under slavery. Serfs could generally only marry with the local noble's permission, as marrying outside of the local serfdom could rob the noble of the birth of new serfs for their land.

A common synonym for serf, particularly used in early medieval England, was "villein," from which we get the modern term villain, and which derives from the same Latin root as "villa"–the home base of a rich person, like a noble, upon whose land the villein would be working.

A "free tenant" (sometimes called a "yeoman" in the later Middle Ages, though the term yeoman also has a few more specific implications) is the last group of peasant agricultural laborers. Free tenants had more rights than serfs; they were not bound to the land, they could usually marry as they wished, and they often paid less in rent or taxes. The exact rights and obligations of a free tenant varied from location to location and from era to era, making it hard to pin down exactly what this term means. The feudal contract, just as it might vary from noble to noble, would likewise vary from free tenant to free tenant.

The City

This whole system of feudalism--often called manorialism, because life was structured around the lord's manor and the surrounding farms--is contrasted with life in a city.

People in cities were not serfs. As a result, a city usually did not have a lord ruling over it; instead, the residents of the city would get to elect a mayor from their own number. The lords in a city would be residents, often with fancy city houses, but would essentially be visitors from their nearby country manors, the root of their wealth. As the Middle Ages progressed, more nobles might flock to a capital city, rarely if ever visiting their country estates, but the root of their economic power still rested in the country rather than ruling over any sizable city.

Cities were typically given a charter by the king, granting them special rights. For example, a city might be given the right to elect a mayor, erect walls, and levy its own taxes to pay for the upkeep of a fire-fighting brigade, constable, or other social services. Just as with all our feudal contracts, the rights of any individual city might vary wildly–a city's charter would spell out what it could do and was typically a product of negotiation rather than something standardized across a whole kingdom.

Some of the biggest cities, like London, had privileges that predate a formal charter. One of our earliest sources on London references only "the ancient privileges of the City of London," not granted by any monarch but dating back presumably to Roman times. These privileges were tightly defended by the city and were often a source of conflict (sometimes armed conflict) with the monarch. There's a reason that the king's palaces were usually technically in the city of Westminster (now just a part of greater London), rather than the City of London itself.

Implications for Fantasy RPGs

Setting

When creating the setting for your fantasy, think about empty space. There was a large amount of territory in Western Europe that simply was unoccupied and did not generate any resources. Territory was unmapped, even just in the space between two towns that did not follow the road. This is a great space for monsters to be located, something that I particularly appreciated about D&D 4e's Points of Light setting description. Going outside of the established parts of civilization was entering the unknown wilderness.

When thinking about the average village, there likely would not be a mayor of somewhere small. Private land ownership also likely would not exist (as everything belongs to the local noble lord), nor much in the way of structured industry. Almost everyone on a feudal manor would be a farmer, with other produce being made as a supplement. Instead of a dedicated town potter, think about which farmer produces pottery in their off-time.

Think also about what the different social classes are in the manor village. Who is a serf and bound to the land? Who are the free tenants? Is there conflict between those two social groups about the different privileges that they have?

Particularly in an early medieval setting, the average village is likely going to be pretty small: a noble's manor and the surrounding farms. Everybody knows everybody. Money is likely not super relevant, as people pay taxes and one another "in-kind" (paying in goods that they produce; for example, the local flour miller would be paid simply by getting to keep a portion of the flour that they mill, even though they did not grow the grain).

This sets up a nice contrast when your players reach something that might be considered a city. People there are not bound to any land, produce non-agricultural goods as their primary job rather than a byproduct (meaning way more availability) and likely rely far more on currency than on in-kind barter. The culture there should feel very different; not everyone knows everyone, and the shift to currency should feel significant. I might go as far as to make gold harvested from dungeons only useable in cities, with the party needing to trade more tangible goods if they are only in a small village owned by a lord, as a way to make these feel even more distinct.

Nobles

Give your nobles titles and estates! Even urban nobles should have some sort of country region that they own and which generates their income in taxes and rent, even if they do not care to visit their rustic manor. Nobles go by their primary title (their highest rank) but should own several manors generating wealth.

With nobles particularly, it is important to remember that they are the root of power in the country. A regular person owes far more loyalty to their local noble, who protects them and gets their taxes, than to the abstract notion of a king or country. Part of the reason that there were so many rebellions in the medieval period was that the common person did not really care who the monarch was. If one monarch is overthrown but your local noble does not get replaced, your life likely does not change much. If France conquers you but your local noble does not change, it doesn't matter that you have come from being English to being French; your day-to-day life likely has not shifted, and you would not lose some sense of English identity. That sort of nationalism has not developed yet.

When developing noble NPCs, think also about what feudal dues they are giving to the king. Money? Armies? Do they have a particularly sweet deal making them loyal, or are they burdened under a heavy obligation that breeds resentment? These can coexist in a realm: one noble may view the king as tyrannical because their feudal obligations were recently increased, and their village has accordingly been whipped into an anti-royal fervor; while in the next village over, the king may be beloved because of relatively light feudal dues, as that noble and the king are good friends. That sort of disparity should be extremely commonplace.

Conclusion

Truly understanding and conceptualizing feudalism is hard for people in the modern, industrial, capitalist world because so much is fundamentally different about the way people work. Yet I think more accurately depicting feudal life can enrich the tone of a game set in the classic, medieval-adjacent fantasy world that is so archetypical for a lot of RPGs, particularly D&D.

There's a whole bunch of nuances that we simply don't have the space to go into. The role of the Church in the feudal and manorial structure, for example, which acted as a noble in some instances and a source for resistance to noble rule in others, probably deserves an entire blog post of its own. The difference between Western and Eastern European feudalism, too, could be an entire post, as could the role of disease in the ultimate end of serfdom and the resultant breakdown of the feudal structure.

I hope this post serves as a basic primer on the complexities and irregularities of feudalism, from which we can explore more specific societal aspects of medieval life in future posts.