Having defined feudalism, Part II of Landscape, Wealth & Dispossession considers its inevitable decline between the Norman Conquest and the 14th century. The Norman administration enforced an ideologically pure feudalism, which, by institutionalising land-rights, engenders the commodification of land which underwrites a latent proto-capitalism generated by the woollens industry. A process accelerated by Black Death labour shortages.
However, the first edition got a bad academic review because I was not sufficiently outraged by the impact of colonialism. This, despite my founding proposition linking the Norman Conquest with British colonial exploitation in the 19th century (“The Norman Precedent”). See Norman Feudalism and the Niger Delta.
The reviewer missed my motivation, which was the terrible environmental and social impact of the oil industry that I witnessed in the Niger Delta in the 1990s. It drove me to understand and explain the causes of “This Cruel and Unjust State of Affairs”. See Shell and Terrorism.
Consequentially reviewing the first edition myself, with a hyper-critical eye, I realised that I had significantly misperceived two aspects of feudalism. First, far from being and anomaly, the Roman Occupation, had a significant influence on British history thereafter. Second, the evolution and degeneration of manorialism, especially when viewed through the lens of the manorial courts, is more significant in the commodification of land than I had initially understood. Therefore, I have withdrawn the first edition of ‘Feudalism’. Watch this page for updates on my progress through the second edition. Watch this space for progress reports!