As every schoolboy knows, the perfect cliché for any period in history since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is the rise of the middle classes; and all orthodox histories of the French Revolution assume that this was the period when they completed their rise and finally overthrew feudalism. Behind this theory is the assumption that social history can be divided into a few large and homogeneous phases, which are repeated in the same order and the same shape by all societies. Within this general pattern, feudalism is taken to extend in European history from the early Middle Ages to its overthrow by the bourgeois revolution, which occurred in England in the seventeenth century, in France in the eighteenth, and in most of the rest of Europe in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

All this assumes, of course, that we know what we mean by feudalism. Medieval historians, who ought to be able to tell us about this, seem to have doubts. They stress the different meaning of the term in different countries, and protest against its use to describe conditions in eighteenth-century France. One of the chief authorities on feudalism enjoins us to employ the word with caution. The word féodalité, writes Professor Ganshof, ‘lends itself to confusion’. ‘Féodo-vassalique’ institutions, he says, ceased to be an historically truly essential characteristic of the political system or social structure in Western Europe from the end of the thirteenth century. By 1789, he concludes, the word had become a mere bogey, a term of abuse like ‘fanaticism’, and with as little precise content.