Feudalism in Europe evolved unevenly, according to local conditions. In Western Europe, conditions in the North were more primitive than in the romanized South, but by the 7th century, both regions shared certain fundamental features. The feudal order was a patriarchal hierarchy, ruled by military and ecclesiastical elites, who lived upon the surplus produced by non-alienated peasant and artisan labor. Most artisans were also peasants. In the towns (which were still quite small), artisans grouped themselves into protective organizations, had access to raw materials from the countryside, and controlled the production of crafted items.  

Other than the enforced appropriation of a portion of the product of this labor (through rents, tithes, corvee labor, taxes, and share cropping arrangements), the medieval peasant and artisan controlled the what and how of producing the means of life, enjoying customary feudal rights to land, tools, and habitation. It was in the lord’s feudal interest that the peasant and artisan be able, independently, to produce and reproduce themselves. Medieval society reflected the culture and skills of the peasant and artisan, even when mediated by aristocratic and priestly ideology. Both priests and aristocrats relied on the labor of the common people for their food, clothing, tools, arms, and on other myriad craftsmen involved in the construction and furnishing of churches, manors, and castles. Until the 10th century, there were few merchants anywhere in Western Europe. Even in the romanized South--by the 8th century Abbasid Islam controlled the Mediterranean and the old trade routes--most production was for immediate use, not exchange. Money hardly figured into the lives of the vast majority of people, including the elite.

Islamic control of the Western Mediterranean slackened during the 10th century and Western European towns began to revive from the collapse of the Roman system (and the advent of Islamic power in the Mediterranean), first in Italy, and then in the Netherlands. The professional merchant--Italian, Greek, Jew, Syrian, Dutch--began to re-establish himself in the reviving towns. Merchant capitalists had a traditional role in ancient society. They bought and traded the the surplus product that the elite appropriated from the peasants, or bought and traded the goods produced by independently organized artisans. In ancient society, there were large market towns controlled by wealthy merchants. With the revival of trade, merchants performed the same role under feudal conditions. In Northern Italy, merchants took advantage of the political space created by conflicts between feuding lords, and formed independent city states like Venice and Ravenna. Northern trading and manufacturing towns followed in Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. These enclaves of merchants and organized craft workers fought against and allied themselves with one noble faction or another.   

By the 14th century, powerful, semi-independent city states existed in Italy and Flanders. (England and France lagged somewhat behind.) The great merchant capitalist/bankers of Venice, Florence, Ghent or London loaned money to kings and rebellious barons who bought arms and luxuries from other merchants who circulated this money by buying surplus product from landed aristocrats, trading them on the international market in return for more arms and exotic luxury goods and domestic crafts to sell back to aristocrats, who bought them on credit from merchant bankers. The result was the accumulating riches of the merchant bankers and the piling up of debt of the nobility. This debt could only be paid on the backs of the peasantry and the artisans of lesser guilds. 

 The merchant, operating within the pores of feudal society, became “richer than a lord.” Legally, however, merchants were of the 3rd estate, along with peasants, laborers, and vagabonds. Even the most powerful merchant risked the chance of debt repudiation and of being expelled (like 2000 Jews were from England by Edward I in 1290). He might also lose his head. Within their walled cities, merchants were still the legal subjects of the ruling landed aristocracy (in the personage of the baron, king, bishop, etc.). Under the feudal regime, land and title ruled, not money: the value of money depended on the needs of the the lord, his peasants, and the guilds, not on the market. The great mass of goods were still produced for need, only the surplus going to the merchant capitalist, who produced nothing himself and had little control over labor or land or the law. The richer the merchant, the greater his risk in the dangerously paradoxical symbiosis between himself and his indebted lord. It took centuries for merchant capitalism to gain control of feudalism. First the richest merchants bought feudal titles, then  some aristocratic landowners entered the market, and, eventually, so did the king and court--against the more conservative nobility. In the process social relations came to be mediated by money rather than feudal ties and customs--and peasants and artisans progressively lost control of the means of production and of their own lives.  

England is the classic example of the dialectical process of attraction and repulsion between the bourgeois and the aristocrat that destroyed the feudal order, which resulted in the primitive accumulation of a critical mass of uprooted peasants and artisans for the earliest “satanic mills” of merchant-controlled factories and nascent industrial enterprises. We’ll take up this dialectical process in more detail in the next post.