6) Feudal state formation in England

England after the Norman Conquest, in striking contrast to France, constituted a uniquely centralized, internally organized and socially homogenous feudal state. The specific cohesion of medieval England was the direct result of the rapid imposition of Norman rule upon Anglo-Saxon England, replicating the feudal system of ducal Normandy (Brenner, 1985b).

Within two decades, the Anglo-Saxon landholding class was dispossessed and killed, its lands redistributed by William the Conqueror amongst his leading warriors – the barons. The sweeping nature of the Conquest resulted in the imposition of Norman dominion over England.

In terms of the ownership, size and constitutional status of lordships, a revolution in land tenure steamrolled the country. Lords came to hold their estates ‘of the king’, in possession and hereditary in character, but not as private patrimonies. The king remained the supreme landowner of the entire territory.

7) France: from feudalism to absolutism

The onset of the general crisis there was a gradual decline in the French lords’ capacity for surplus extraction, caught between peasant resistance and royal support for petty peasant property. When the demographic crisis struck the French countryside, the lords’ reaction failed due to the persistence of the pattern of peasant resistance and kingly protection of peasant freehold. As an alternative, lords turned against each other to recover income and increasingly took up offices in the ‘state’ during and after the Hundred Years War. Private property in the state’s extractive apparatus in the form of venal offices, that is, offices of state sold to the nobility, provided new income opportunities for an increasingly de­feudalized nobility.

The old sword-carrying nobility (noblesse d’e´pe´e) based on control of land and a dependent peasantry turned gradually into the new office nobility (noblesse de robe) based on service to the state. The result was the consolidation of petty peasant property, now taxed by a centrally organized noblesse de robe rather than owing rents to the local lord. The absolutist state now revolved around the kingly court as the centre of intrigue, faction and inter-noble rivalries. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century France saw the growing consolidation of the absolutist tax/office state, notwithstanding sporadic waves of noble resistance. The general crisis had accelerated the transformation of a feudal lord–peasant rent regime into an absolutist king–peasant tax regime.

8) England: from feudalism to capitalism

When the general crisis struck England after the Black Death (1348), lords tried to recuperate falling income by trying to increase rents despite a fall in the population. However, this failed due to a long period of peasant resistance (Hilton, 1988). The English peasantry removed many of the feudal controls and gained full freedom. However, rather than gaining property rights to their plots (freeholds) as in France, the English peasantry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was gradually evicted from its customary lands by landlords.

Landlords drove peasants from their lands, consolidated and enclosed their holdings, and leased these out to large capitalist tenants who engaged in commercial farming by employing wage labour (Brenner, 1985a/b). In this process, English peasants were not protected by the monarchy, and the French pattern of a peasant–king alliance did not arise, derailing the establishment of absolutism in the form of the tax/office state. The result was the destruction of the old lordly powers of political surplus extraction.