Very interesting, you have a very pallateble lecturing style; I now have a skeletal understanding of something I knew literally nothing about prior to your lecture. Keep up the good work!
The oligarchy of billionaires and absurd distribution of national wealth we have today unfortunately brought us back to feudalism. Just we are not quite aware of that. Anyway, great lecture! Congratulations.
omg i cant believe i understand this so easily. thankyou very much sir for sharing your lecturing video. im really grateful to come across here. btw im from Malaysia. :D
This is an excellent presentation on Feudalism. The difficult aspect of feudalism is not its constituent structural elements but how feudalism developed. Or to ask more bluntly how was Western European society organisationally structured imediately before the advent of feudal society? The late Roman Empire was characterized by politically centralised Roman bureaucratic authoritative administrative control. The society had well maintained roads, armed military garrisoned troops providing security, centrally administered coinage to be universally used for commercial transactions, urbanized towns and cities utilized for the production, storage, and transport of commercially marketable goods and services. Ok, I get that. Rome had developed an advanced commercially developed society prior to it's relative period of economic decline. The problem is what the xxxx did Western Europe have to offer commercially to the more advanced societies within Asia, Africa, and the Near East in advanced Roman society? How did Western Europe acquire precious gold and silver for commercial currency development without foreign commercial demand for Western European products? In the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire monied coinage currency became increasingly more scarce and land became the only commodity of power which localized strongmen, I call them caudillos, controlled in an increasingly politically decentralised socio-economic system. Charlemagne once asked a couple of Jewish travelling traders if he could set some trading exchange with the East. The two traders had to make an effort to contain themselves from literally laughing into Charlemagne's face!!! Yeah, like what do you have to trade with in exchange for Eastern goods?
Before the fall of the Western Empire, the European provinces were mostly self-sufficient in that the majority of their goods were produced locally. Trade only really flourished in areas where places had a secure sea route to trade. Overland trade was incredibly expensive and underdeveloped by comparison. Europe had plenty of resources to trade, but lacked a practical means to make it feasible. Which is why the only resources Rome really developed in Europe were precious metals such as gold, silver, tin, copper, and iron.
@@jon00769 Thanks for replying. I remember reading Roman Imperial forces specificly attacked Dacia in order to obtain the gold and silver of Dacia's mines. I really didnt know what types of commercially marketable goods Europe had to offer other areas other than precious minerals which were universally valued at the time and still are for that matter. Was wondering if you knew how land was distributed within society before the development of feudalism? Maybe some of the Gaul and Germanic tribes lived commually? Or maybe individual nuclear families owned and worked small farms? I don't really know. I know during the Middle Ages powerful land barrons controlled lands in exchange for providing military knights for their particular king or duke or bishop as necessary when needed.
@@TonyqTNT That would really depend on which province we're talking about. Put simply, Rome had two types of provinces. Senatorial and Imperial. The later were more or less military states, where the governor had direct control of the legions stationed there and the economy was set up in such a way as to fully support those legions in food and supply. Maintaining the military was the economy. The majority of what we would consider Western Europe fell under these types of provinces, and yet the experience could still be quite different depending on whether we're talking about Gaul or Britannia. Our knowledge of the local tribes are limited because none of them had a written language to give us their perspective, so all we know about them come from the Romans or the archeological record. So the written information is often steeped in personal bias or political propaganda. Rome was big on exporting it's culture and pushing the local culture out. In new regions they would colonize the area by sending citizens and slaves to build new towns and cities with all the lavish luxuries Rome was known for. Such as temples, administrative buildings, shops, public baths, amphitheatres, etc. along with paved roads to connect them. With exception towards places that had already been urbanized long before the Romans, such as Greece or Ptolemaic Egypt, where the local culture was tolerated to some extent. In Gaul it is believed somewhere around 1 million people died as a result of the Gallic Wars. Of the remaining population about 1/3 of which were enslaved and sent off to the ends of the empire. The remaining tribes would have allied themselves with Rome. Which meant paying tribute and providing their warriors as auxilliary soldiers when called upon. The chiefton sons would be taken as hostages and sent to Rome to be educated and later incorporated into the legions. Later on these tribes would have been able to serve directly into the legions and with it eventually obtaining citizenship, land, and their own slaves to work it. So you can see over time Gallic culture was lost to Romanization. How exactly these tribes lived during the transition, I'm afraid I dont know much about. In Britannia it was much different, as the tribes there retained their Celtic culture after the fall of the Western Empire. This was because Rome was never able to fully conquer the island. Uprisings were more common and a lot of the tribes remained defiant throughout. I hope this answers your question somewhat, but really if you look at the way in which these provinces were governed, Feudalism seems like a natural progression for these particular areas after Roman collapse.
Not yet...the pandemic/quarantine will have to pass for me to have access to the digital media department to keep making these. I will be working on a monasticism and manuscript art powerpoint with voiceover in the months ahead.
Mr. brooks I'm not sure if you have written any books (if so I'm buying) ? If no do you have any plans in the near future to do so? Thank you for all these videos!
This was an amazing lecture! Do you teach medieval history? Or what is your title? Philosophy maybe? I am curious. Would love to see more interesting lectures on historical societies. I am definitely going to explore your channel some more.
Glad you liked it. I am a medieval historian, but I teach in a humanities department so I do a lot of Plato and art and stuff. The lectures you will find on nature philosophy, Pythagoras, the mystical number "7" all stem from my other field: history of science and technology. I am hoping to get some Aristotle and then some Scientific Revolution lectures done in the next year. Cheers!
Bravo Mr. Brooks. However, I would very much like to hear a current summary of the State/Feudal relationship as it currently stands where we are being coerced back into a hybrid version of the Feudal System. And the Obvious influence and Direct Control of the International Bankers and their ilk. A 5 minute synapsis from Mr, Brook would be very welcomed. He reminds me of a Business Professor I had back in the late 60s/early 70s. Both excellent presenters of knowledge.
Glad you liked it. I try to create lectures that mostly focus on historical realities, and at the most suggest some ways to see it from a modern perspective--after that, it is up to students to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions.
Thank you for the lecture! I was wondering, the lord did have his (always his? maybe ladies could advance as well, or could they not?) serfs as well -- how did these serfs fare vis-a-vis the vassals? For example, if a vassal rapes a woman that is in the protection of the lord, there would be consequences for said vassal? Or, if the rape would go the "women are inherently evil" way, what about a vassal beating up a peasant in the lord's protection? I realize that this might be a tricky question - so referring me to a decent literature on feudalism would work beautifully. (Which was my secret intent on this too)
Hi. Been catching up on comments recently. You are right that the status of the person holds much, if not more, sway than gender. A nobleman could rape a peasant woman and have minor consequences, if any. A peasant that dared to assault a woman of higher status--he'd be tortured and executed. The academic literature on feudalism is immense--anything written in the last 30 years from a university publisher will be worth your time. You might want to start with a general medieval history book and read the chapters of interest. I use "A short history of medieval Europe" by C. Warren Hollister/Judith Bennett for my undergraduate students.
I would disagree that the paleolithic people were mainly feudal. But rather a form of primitive communism. We can agree there was so state then, but I would say there was largely no class, or class as we might define it. So it being a stateless and classes society that makes it communist.
This partially explains why Africa still has ways to go politically, we are many fiefdoms bunched together as countries, without a traditionally unifying narrative.
i understand that the serfs, and peasents would pay in "naturalia". but would u say that peasents who where free peasents, payed in coin? specialy the church in 1/10? i guess they where forced to interact with the local marked? or was there a marked?
It is important to remember that the "Middle Ages" were a thousand years that were not all the same. Early medieval peasants were semi-free, bound to the soil, and paid their dues in farm produce. By the "High Middle Ages" they had much more "agency" (as we would say today) and found themselves in a position to bargain against a cash-strapped aristocracy, paying coin earned in the emerging capitalist systems and merchant economy booming all around them in exchange for extended rights and privileges to continue making more money which benefited them and their lords until the breaking point when they no longer had to be subservient to those lords. They were already doing pretty well by the 13th-century, but after the Black Death of the 14th-century, those who survived found their labor to be a highly prized commodity and were able to negotiate and play off different landlords against each other for maximum wages. They were so successful that the landed and politically powerful in England pushed a legal move to return wages to the pre-plague levels by force of law, which only prompted the "Peasants Revolt" of 1381. After that, modern labor movements would slowly and painfully push its way into the modern world.
Many scholars have made the connection between medieval feudal organizational systems and modern industries (and bemoan the loss of most family-owned and run craft shops. The monastic system is perhaps an even closer fit--Lewis Mumford, among others, explored that idea.
Of course students reach their own opinions--that is the very purpose of college. My job is to provide the facts and suggest possible interpretations. You only watched the background lecture--the class discussion that follows is where the ideas are explored and students wrestle with them.
What? Feudal societies ARE states, you pay your fief for protection i.e. Taxes for services....... The concept of states don't have anything about equality before the law. That's just the idea of how MODERN DEMOCRACIES work. Many public services and public buildings were provided for privately. Heck, you mentioned Nero's fire service. Rome definitely did not have equality before the law. There were plenty of people who could not get the grievances settled before the law. They had slavery...... This State/Feudalism is a 100% false dichotomy, feudalism is just a primitive form of a state. And the American republican party is not feudalistic..... Been watching your other videos on religion. They are really good and I was impressed with Brooks being able to explain them with a pretty open mind and fairly. But here your political preferences have really skewed your perspective.
You have missed the point in two basic ways: 1. I never claimed that states have equality as opposed to feudal systems. I said that in a state you have at least the possibility of more enfranchisement in society and more possibility to seek redress of your grievances under the law. But a state is an abstraction that only works as well as the people in it force it to, and it is always evolving, as I think I make pretty clear. 2. You present your objections as if this is MY theory--it is not. Like most things I teach, I am distilling and shaping material I learned in graduate school and from continued reading in order to make it understandable and hopefully relevant and interesting to a college sophomore audience. Although I trained as a medievalist, a scholar can only be a real expert in a narrow field in which he or she has the ability to study all the evidence and essential prior scholarship--so, if you want to talk about medieval industrial technology, I can throw down with anyone because that is what I am an expert in. I have and can defend MY OPINIONS on why watermills evolved into a family of industrial machinery in the Middle Ages because I wrote a dissertation on the subject. For most other subjects, I am just teaching the best stuff I have studied about the subject from other scholars who wrote their dissertations on it. For this particular topic, I refer you to The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, by Colin McEvedy, who writes a very insightful introduction on what happened to the Roman state as it became feudal Europe as the ancient world became medieval. On page 9 you will see the diagram I borrowed for this lecture.
If you are going to object to what you have seen, then perhaps you can actually convey WHY you think this is incorrect--provide a complete and coherent response, or don't bother at all.
@BurglaaR Tv Incorrect. About 93% of college professors are liberal and vote democrat, not because of any ideological test, but because the more educated you become, the less likely you are to believe Republican nonsense. A lot of us are not super-enthusiastic about most democrats, but it often comes down to voting for the lesser of two evils. And four women came forward with allegations against Kavanaugh, but the Republican controlled senate, hellbent on ramming their right wing candidate into the Supreme Court, refused to hear the other three.
@BurglaaR Tv Well, that's a lot more than I have time to respond to--I'll make just a couple of comments (and then I have papers to grade). I agree with your last statement, most career politicians become corrupted by a system that forces them to spend most of their time chasing donation money to get reelected than actually doing the work of governing, and they often end up representing the interests of donors than the people who voted for them. Professors are not, in my opinion, indoctrinated by anything except the belief that critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning are the best paths to improving human life and creating functioning governments. If you happen to watch my videos on Plato, there is a point where I make a connection between the ideas of America's founders with Platonic Ideal concepts, as enshrined in the preamble to the Constitution...the point being that we are not a nation founded on or justified by military conquest or religious zealotry, but in concepts like "justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty"--for centuries societies around the globe have practiced slavery, disenfranchised most of their citizens, and treated women horribly. We still have problems in the West, because individual humans are often horrible creatures, but our SYSTEM of government has managed to abolish slavery, give women the right to vote, and striven for a better society for all people...more so than in many other parts of the world. Why did this happen? I would argue that the founders, living in the Enlightenment, with the memories of the wars of religion still fresh, realized that rational analysis of societies and governments throughout history shows that tyrants and zealots invariably destroy their own people...and this is the result of critical thinking about history and drawing evidence-based conclusions, also called inductive thinking (as opposed to deductive logic which holds an unquestioned principle and then attempts to force it upon reality despite evidence to the contrary--like "trickle down theory"--a Reagan era concept that Republicans have pushed ever since and which has ZERO evidence of it ever having worked). I don't think the republicans are consciously trying to go back to the Middle Ages--they would have to be well-versed in history to even comprehend that, and they aren't. Most politicians have degrees in business or law, unlike our founders who could read Latin and knew the classics and history and philosophy. What I argue is that business-minded Republicans, beholden to the corporate sponsors who contribute to their campaigns, push policies that allow already rich people to take more money from the economy through tax breaks which only help them, not all the other people who work to produce the wealth of the economy, which has the long term affect of concentrating wealth at the top and leaving the majority of citizens hoping some benefits will trickle down to them...thereby recreating a dysfunctional economic system that mirrors what was wrong with the medieval economy. Dang it, I knew I would end up taking too much time on this.
@BurglaaR Tv Well I don't think we are going to reach any agreement, so I'll end the discussion with a few observations. You seem thoroughly convinced of your position, but in arguing for it, you subtly distort the facts and employ language that attempts to bolster your position. For example, the senate did not "slow walk" Merrick Garland's nomination...Mitch McConnell absolutely refused to do his job and ignored his constitutional mandate--he is a traitor to the constitution he swore to uphold, but the Founders believed that people in office would be gentlemen seeking the higher good of the nation and had not counted on a crass little power-monger like Mitch and so they didn't build any consequences into the document...he should have been removed from office for failure to do his job. Kavanaugh did not rape that woman, he assaulted her, allegedly, although it stopped short of rape. (Not sure why you put an LOL after that...seems inappropriate). But you conveniently ignore the actual point I made, which is that four women came forward with similar claims of improper conduct, but the Mitch McConnell controlled senate refused to hear the others ones. They made of show of listening to one woman, voted against her anyway, and ignored the rest hoping that Americans would have too short a memory to punish them for it at the next election (which is sadly often true). It is popular among right-wingers today to say that all media is biased, but it isn't the same. I will hear commentators on CNN, MSNBC, etc. criticize people from both parties when merited...but when is the last time you heard a major Fox news anchor say anything negative about Republicans, or anything positive about a Democrat. It never happened during Bush 43, and the only reason it is just barely starting to happen with a couple now, like Ann Coulter, is that Trump is so manifestly awful and such a serial liar that they perceive a post-Trump world and want to stake out territory in it. If the other news networks seem to be more negative about Republicans than Democrats, I think it is because an objective person who employs evidence-based reasoning has to come to the conclusion that Republicans are much worse for the average American. The economy crashed under Reagan and Bush, then it rebounded under Clinton, it crashed again into Recession under Bush 43, then Obama cleaned it up and we had 71 straight months of economic growth, and now Trump is so amazingly terrible at business that he seems on schedule to crash the economy again in only one term (not surprising for a supposed businessman who has declared bankruptcy four times and lost money owning a casino!). So, do you see a pattern here? When Republicans are in charge, money is funneled to the wealthy and business tycoons, and regular people have less, which crashes the economy; then Democrats take over and fix the problem, but Americans buy into a bunch of political rhetoric, forget who fixed the economy, and vote the idiots back in. This is objective economic data...but when it gets pointed out, you want to claim that it is just liberal bias. Well, in the words of Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." And finally, you have bought into the misleading argument that Democrats are really not concerned with minorities because most of them voted against the Civil Rights Act and Republicans voted for it. This is true, but not the whole story. In fact, the Republicans used to be the liberal party, up until Eisenhower (the last good Republican president), and the Democrats, earlier in the 20th-century, were the party of the South and of blue-collar workers, which included a lot of racists. But things switched over the course of the 20th-century. FDR began the process of bringing the Democrats into more liberal economic thinking after the Great Depression, and then JFK and LBJ completed the process with the focus on civil rights. Then in 1968, Nixon returned to politics and ran on the "Southern Strategy" which was to reach out to the racist south with subtly coded language and lure them into the Republican party that took up the cause of the distressed white man. In other words, 60 years ago I would have been voting for Eisenhower and been a Republican, but the values of the Republican party in the 1950s no longer exists in the Republican party of today--the Democrats, since the 1960s have taken up that mantle. It took me along time to come to these conclusions. I was a young man during the 80s, and at the time was very enthusiastic about Reagan...he just gave such great speeches and made people feel good. It would take a long time following politics and studying history and thinking about causes and consequences before I came to understand what an awful person Reagan was, and how he began the process of dismantling the robust society created under FDR. The Republican plan, consistent since Reagan, has been to divert money to the already wealthy under the ridiculous pretext of "trickle down theory" (again, zero evidence this has ever worked), and consequently starve the government of funds for school, social security, etc., and then claim that we need to cut "entitlements" for the good of the economy, which they wrecked in the first place. You can see this, or you can choose not to see this.
@BurglaaR Tv Ha! Just can't help yourself, eh? I would rephrase that and say I advocate for a government that collects taxes and provides the services that create civilization, rather than extract a society's wealth and funnel it to plutocrats. Your implied syllogistic argument is that "Nazis wanted centralized government; Brooks wants centralized government; So, Brooks is like the Nazis." This is called the fallacy of the unbounded middle, a failure of logical reasoning. It is like saying, "Firetrucks are red; Strawberries are red; So, Strawberries are like firetrucks."
What do you mean by "leftist crap" ? Just parroting insults you learned from right-wing pundits is not a meaningful reply. If you are going to make a comment, make an intelligent comment that addresses the ideas and/or the evidence. Society needs roads. How do roads get built? You either pay taxes to fund infrastructure, or you are commanded by some "lord" to do it, or sometimes a wealthy person can fund it and then charge whatever tolls they want for you to use it. The first method is how a modern "state" gets it done, the second is how a feudal system or dictatorship gets it done, the last one is how a plutocracy does it. Which do you prefer?
@@georgebrooks7775 I never said that taxes in itself are crap. It’s the leftist policies my tax money is wasted on that I hate. Only few conservatives are against all or most taxes, but it’s the pork that has nothing to do with a bill that is despised. Also, taxes don’t buy civilization. Civility is something the Dems no nothing about anymore. You also talk about a Supreme Court nominee being held to a different standard of justice than the rest of us. That is absolutely laughable because he was accused by someone who couldn’t get any testimonial support from her friends. She had material facts wrong or didn’t remember certain particular facts. So a very weak testimony should ruin the career of a stellar judge in your ideal civilization? I wonder what you think of Governor Cuomo and all the accusations against him? Btw, I think you are a excellent teacher who is easy to listen to, even for me as an uneducated Dutchman. I just wish that you didn’t use this platform to mix your person political beliefs in your otherwise great teaching.
Very interesting, you have a very pallateble lecturing style; I now have a skeletal understanding of something I knew literally nothing about prior to your lecture. Keep up the good work!
I am very glad I came across your video lectures. They are excellent. Thank you!
Very happy to have found this lecture, and your channel as well. God bless.
This is an excellent lecture. Wide ranging in scope, yet all in aid of explaining a specific topic. Thanks! Subscribed.
Amazing lecture, mister Brooks! Greetings from Poland.
The oligarchy of billionaires and absurd distribution of national wealth we have today unfortunately brought us back to feudalism. Just we are not quite aware of that. Anyway, great lecture! Congratulations.
I am from India, thanks for easy and nice explanation. Carry on Brooks
Great....
I wonder if George Brooks writes books on history? His style is brilliant!
please write a book on medieval world
Clearly a simple lecture about feudalism, great work indeed.
omg i cant believe i understand this so easily. thankyou very much sir for sharing your lecturing video. im really grateful to come across here. btw im from Malaysia. :D
Another great lecture!
Amazing lecture professor, thanks from india ❤️
This is an excellent presentation on Feudalism. The difficult aspect of feudalism is not its constituent structural elements but how feudalism developed. Or to ask more bluntly how was Western European society organisationally structured imediately before the advent of feudal society? The late Roman Empire was characterized by politically centralised Roman bureaucratic authoritative administrative control. The society had well maintained roads, armed military garrisoned troops providing security, centrally administered coinage to be universally used for commercial transactions, urbanized towns and cities utilized for the production, storage, and transport of commercially marketable goods and services.
Ok, I get that. Rome had developed an advanced commercially developed society prior to it's relative period of economic decline. The problem is what the xxxx did Western Europe have to offer commercially to the more advanced societies within Asia, Africa, and the Near East in advanced Roman society? How did Western Europe acquire precious gold and silver for commercial currency development without foreign commercial demand for Western European products? In the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire monied coinage currency became increasingly more scarce and land became the only commodity of power which localized strongmen, I call them caudillos, controlled in an increasingly politically decentralised socio-economic system. Charlemagne once asked a couple of Jewish travelling traders if he could set some trading exchange with the East. The two traders had to make an effort to contain themselves from literally laughing into Charlemagne's face!!! Yeah, like what do you have to trade with in exchange for Eastern goods?
Before the fall of the Western Empire, the European provinces were mostly self-sufficient in that the majority of their goods were produced locally. Trade only really flourished in areas where places had a secure sea route to trade. Overland trade was incredibly expensive and underdeveloped by comparison. Europe had plenty of resources to trade, but lacked a practical means to make it feasible. Which is why the only resources Rome really developed in Europe were precious metals such as gold, silver, tin, copper, and iron.
@@jon00769 Thanks for replying. I remember reading Roman Imperial forces specificly attacked Dacia in order to obtain the gold and silver of Dacia's mines. I really didnt know what types of commercially marketable goods Europe had to offer other areas other than precious minerals which were universally valued at the time and still are for that matter.
Was wondering if you knew how land was distributed within society before the development of feudalism? Maybe some of the Gaul and Germanic tribes lived commually? Or maybe individual nuclear families owned and worked small farms? I don't really know.
I know during the Middle Ages powerful land barrons controlled lands in exchange for providing military knights for their particular king or duke or bishop as necessary when needed.
@@TonyqTNT That would really depend on which province we're talking about. Put simply, Rome had two types of provinces. Senatorial and Imperial. The later were more or less military states, where the governor had direct control of the legions stationed there and the economy was set up in such a way as to fully support those legions in food and supply. Maintaining the military was the economy. The majority of what we would consider Western Europe fell under these types of provinces, and yet the experience could still be quite different depending on whether we're talking about Gaul or Britannia. Our knowledge of the local tribes are limited because none of them had a written language to give us their perspective, so all we know about them come from the Romans or the archeological record. So the written information is often steeped in personal bias or political propaganda.
Rome was big on exporting it's culture and pushing the local culture out. In new regions they would colonize the area by sending citizens and slaves to build new towns and cities with all the lavish luxuries Rome was known for. Such as temples, administrative buildings, shops, public baths, amphitheatres, etc. along with paved roads to connect them. With exception towards places that had already been urbanized long before the Romans, such as Greece or Ptolemaic Egypt, where the local culture was tolerated to some extent. In Gaul it is believed somewhere around 1 million people died as a result of the Gallic Wars. Of the remaining population about 1/3 of which were enslaved and sent off to the ends of the empire. The remaining tribes would have allied themselves with Rome. Which meant paying tribute and providing their warriors as auxilliary soldiers when called upon. The chiefton sons would be taken as hostages and sent to Rome to be educated and later incorporated into the legions. Later on these tribes would have been able to serve directly into the legions and with it eventually obtaining citizenship, land, and their own slaves to work it. So you can see over time Gallic culture was lost to Romanization. How exactly these tribes lived during the transition, I'm afraid I dont know much about.
In Britannia it was much different, as the tribes there retained their Celtic culture after the fall of the Western Empire. This was because Rome was never able to fully conquer the island. Uprisings were more common and a lot of the tribes remained defiant throughout.
I hope this answers your question somewhat, but really if you look at the way in which these provinces were governed, Feudalism seems like a natural progression for these particular areas after Roman collapse.
a very nice way indeed keep it up
Great lecture! Do you have any footage on lectures on the medieval clergy and their monasteries, etc?
Not yet...the pandemic/quarantine will have to pass for me to have access to the digital media department to keep making these. I will be working on a monasticism and manuscript art powerpoint with voiceover in the months ahead.
Great lecture! I hope this means there are plenty more to come.
Mr. brooks I'm not sure if you have written any books (if so I'm buying) ? If no do you have any plans in the near future to do so? Thank you for all these videos!
I mostly publish academic essays on medieval technology--I just make these videos for online classes and to save F2F class time. Glad you like them!
Thank you so much for your lectures, they're fascinating, I hope that there are more to come.
This was an amazing lecture! Do you teach medieval history? Or what is your title? Philosophy maybe? I am curious. Would love to see more interesting lectures on historical societies. I am definitely going to explore your channel some more.
Glad you liked it. I am a medieval historian, but I teach in a humanities department so I do a lot of Plato and art and stuff. The lectures you will find on nature philosophy, Pythagoras, the mystical number "7" all stem from my other field: history of science and technology. I am hoping to get some Aristotle and then some Scientific Revolution lectures done in the next year. Cheers!
Marvellous teacher at building foundations to study more or less.
Hahaha first! I think it will be a great lecture as the others. Great work!
Winner!
@@georgebrooks7775 :D thank you, may God bless you
VERY GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bravo Mr. Brooks. However, I would very much like to hear a current summary of the State/Feudal relationship as it currently stands where we are being coerced back into a hybrid version of the Feudal System. And the Obvious influence and Direct Control of the International Bankers and their ilk. A 5 minute synapsis from Mr, Brook would be very welcomed. He reminds me of a Business Professor I had back in the late 60s/early 70s. Both excellent presenters of knowledge.
Glad you liked it. I try to create lectures that mostly focus on historical realities, and at the most suggest some ways to see it from a modern perspective--after that, it is up to students to make their own connections and draw their own conclusions.
@@georgebrooks7775
Thank you.
Thank you for the lecture! I was wondering, the lord did have his (always his? maybe ladies could advance as well, or could they not?) serfs as well -- how did these serfs fare vis-a-vis the vassals? For example, if a vassal rapes a woman that is in the protection of the lord, there would be consequences for said vassal? Or, if the rape would go the "women are inherently evil" way, what about a vassal beating up a peasant in the lord's protection?
I realize that this might be a tricky question - so referring me to a decent literature on feudalism would work beautifully. (Which was my secret intent on this too)
Hi. Been catching up on comments recently. You are right that the status of the person holds much, if not more, sway than gender. A nobleman could rape a peasant woman and have minor consequences, if any. A peasant that dared to assault a woman of higher status--he'd be tortured and executed. The academic literature on feudalism is immense--anything written in the last 30 years from a university publisher will be worth your time. You might want to start with a general medieval history book and read the chapters of interest. I use "A short history of medieval Europe" by C. Warren Hollister/Judith Bennett for my undergraduate students.
BRAVISSIMO!!
I would disagree that the paleolithic people were mainly feudal. But rather a form of primitive communism. We can agree there was so state then, but I would say there was largely no class, or class as we might define it. So it being a stateless and classes society that makes it communist.
Hats off to Joe
This partially explains why Africa still has ways to go politically, we are many fiefdoms bunched together as countries, without a traditionally unifying narrative.
Love joe s mop of hair 😊
i understand that the serfs, and peasents would pay in "naturalia". but would u say that peasents who where free peasents, payed in coin? specialy the church in 1/10? i guess they where forced to interact with the local marked? or was there a marked?
It is important to remember that the "Middle Ages" were a thousand years that were not all the same. Early medieval peasants were semi-free, bound to the soil, and paid their dues in farm produce. By the "High Middle Ages" they had much more "agency" (as we would say today) and found themselves in a position to bargain against a cash-strapped aristocracy, paying coin earned in the emerging capitalist systems and merchant economy booming all around them in exchange for extended rights and privileges to continue making more money which benefited them and their lords until the breaking point when they no longer had to be subservient to those lords. They were already doing pretty well by the 13th-century, but after the Black Death of the 14th-century, those who survived found their labor to be a highly prized commodity and were able to negotiate and play off different landlords against each other for maximum wages. They were so successful that the landed and politically powerful in England pushed a legal move to return wages to the pre-plague levels by force of law, which only prompted the "Peasants Revolt" of 1381. After that, modern labor movements would slowly and painfully push its way into the modern world.
@@georgebrooks7775 thank u for the answer! :D
W vid
i wish i was on ur class
Subtle reference to our current Feudalism aka preditory capitalism.
Vote blue!
This video gave me aneurysm.
It sounds like a company, you have a director, .......
Many scholars have made the connection between medieval feudal organizational systems and modern industries (and bemoan the loss of most family-owned and run craft shops. The monastic system is perhaps an even closer fit--Lewis Mumford, among others, explored that idea.
35:19 Anyone else notice the naked old man in the manuscript drawing just casually sticking his finger up his bum like it's normal?
The Goodly Dragon 😆
Just couldn't resist throwing in contemporary politics, huh?
why did you feel compelled to leave out your opinion? let your students reach their own conclusions.
Of course students reach their own opinions--that is the very purpose of college. My job is to provide the facts and suggest possible interpretations. You only watched the background lecture--the class discussion that follows is where the ideas are explored and students wrestle with them.
What? Feudal societies ARE states, you pay your fief for protection i.e. Taxes for services.......
The concept of states don't have anything about equality before the law. That's just the idea of how MODERN DEMOCRACIES work. Many public services and public buildings were provided for privately. Heck, you mentioned Nero's fire service. Rome definitely did not have equality before the law. There were plenty of people who could not get the grievances settled before the law. They had slavery......
This State/Feudalism is a 100% false dichotomy, feudalism is just a primitive form of a state.
And the American republican party is not feudalistic.....
Been watching your other videos on religion. They are really good and I was impressed with Brooks being able to explain them with a pretty open mind and fairly. But here your political preferences have really skewed your perspective.
You have missed the point in two basic ways: 1. I never claimed that states have equality as opposed to feudal systems. I said that in a state you have at least the possibility of more enfranchisement in society and more possibility to seek redress of your grievances under the law. But a state is an abstraction that only works as well as the people in it force it to, and it is always evolving, as I think I make pretty clear. 2. You present your objections as if this is MY theory--it is not. Like most things I teach, I am distilling and shaping material I learned in graduate school and from continued reading in order to make it understandable and hopefully relevant and interesting to a college sophomore audience. Although I trained as a medievalist, a scholar can only be a real expert in a narrow field in which he or she has the ability to study all the evidence and essential prior scholarship--so, if you want to talk about medieval industrial technology, I can throw down with anyone because that is what I am an expert in. I have and can defend MY OPINIONS on why watermills evolved into a family of industrial machinery in the Middle Ages because I wrote a dissertation on the subject. For most other subjects, I am just teaching the best stuff I have studied about the subject from other scholars who wrote their dissertations on it. For this particular topic, I refer you to The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, by Colin McEvedy, who writes a very insightful introduction on what happened to the Roman state as it became feudal Europe as the ancient world became medieval. On page 9 you will see the diagram I borrowed for this lecture.
Yeesh, great video right up to the last couple of minutes. Shut up and pay your taxes, oh and be thankful for it. Bahahaha some clown language there.
Roads don't pay for themselves.
This is in my option a false account of history,
If you are going to object to what you have seen, then perhaps you can actually convey WHY you think this is incorrect--provide a complete and coherent response, or don't bother at all.
Lol not a Kavanaugh fan ?
Was I less than subtle?
@BurglaaR Tv Incorrect. About 93% of college professors are liberal and vote democrat, not because of any ideological test, but because the more educated you become, the less likely you are to believe Republican nonsense. A lot of us are not super-enthusiastic about most democrats, but it often comes down to voting for the lesser of two evils. And four women came forward with allegations against Kavanaugh, but the Republican controlled senate, hellbent on ramming their right wing candidate into the Supreme Court, refused to hear the other three.
@BurglaaR Tv Well, that's a lot more than I have time to respond to--I'll make just a couple of comments (and then I have papers to grade). I agree with your last statement, most career politicians become corrupted by a system that forces them to spend most of their time chasing donation money to get reelected than actually doing the work of governing, and they often end up representing the interests of donors than the people who voted for them. Professors are not, in my opinion, indoctrinated by anything except the belief that critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning are the best paths to improving human life and creating functioning governments. If you happen to watch my videos on Plato, there is a point where I make a connection between the ideas of America's founders with Platonic Ideal concepts, as enshrined in the preamble to the Constitution...the point being that we are not a nation founded on or justified by military conquest or religious zealotry, but in concepts like "justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty"--for centuries societies around the globe have practiced slavery, disenfranchised most of their citizens, and treated women horribly. We still have problems in the West, because individual humans are often horrible creatures, but our SYSTEM of government has managed to abolish slavery, give women the right to vote, and striven for a better society for all people...more so than in many other parts of the world. Why did this happen? I would argue that the founders, living in the Enlightenment, with the memories of the wars of religion still fresh, realized that rational analysis of societies and governments throughout history shows that tyrants and zealots invariably destroy their own people...and this is the result of critical thinking about history and drawing evidence-based conclusions, also called inductive thinking (as opposed to deductive logic which holds an unquestioned principle and then attempts to force it upon reality despite evidence to the contrary--like "trickle down theory"--a Reagan era concept that Republicans have pushed ever since and which has ZERO evidence of it ever having worked). I don't think the republicans are consciously trying to go back to the Middle Ages--they would have to be well-versed in history to even comprehend that, and they aren't. Most politicians have degrees in business or law, unlike our founders who could read Latin and knew the classics and history and philosophy. What I argue is that business-minded Republicans, beholden to the corporate sponsors who contribute to their campaigns, push policies that allow already rich people to take more money from the economy through tax breaks which only help them, not all the other people who work to produce the wealth of the economy, which has the long term affect of concentrating wealth at the top and leaving the majority of citizens hoping some benefits will trickle down to them...thereby recreating a dysfunctional economic system that mirrors what was wrong with the medieval economy. Dang it, I knew I would end up taking too much time on this.
@BurglaaR Tv Well I don't think we are going to reach any agreement, so I'll end the discussion with a few observations. You seem thoroughly convinced of your position, but in arguing for it, you subtly distort the facts and employ language that attempts to bolster your position. For example, the senate did not "slow walk" Merrick Garland's nomination...Mitch McConnell absolutely refused to do his job and ignored his constitutional mandate--he is a traitor to the constitution he swore to uphold, but the Founders believed that people in office would be gentlemen seeking the higher good of the nation and had not counted on a crass little power-monger like Mitch and so they didn't build any consequences into the document...he should have been removed from office for failure to do his job. Kavanaugh did not rape that woman, he assaulted her, allegedly, although it stopped short of rape. (Not sure why you put an LOL after that...seems inappropriate). But you conveniently ignore the actual point I made, which is that four women came forward with similar claims of improper conduct, but the Mitch McConnell controlled senate refused to hear the others ones. They made of show of listening to one woman, voted against her anyway, and ignored the rest hoping that Americans would have too short a memory to punish them for it at the next election (which is sadly often true). It is popular among right-wingers today to say that all media is biased, but it isn't the same. I will hear commentators on CNN, MSNBC, etc. criticize people from both parties when merited...but when is the last time you heard a major Fox news anchor say anything negative about Republicans, or anything positive about a Democrat. It never happened during Bush 43, and the only reason it is just barely starting to happen with a couple now, like Ann Coulter, is that Trump is so manifestly awful and such a serial liar that they perceive a post-Trump world and want to stake out territory in it. If the other news networks seem to be more negative about Republicans than Democrats, I think it is because an objective person who employs evidence-based reasoning has to come to the conclusion that Republicans are much worse for the average American. The economy crashed under Reagan and Bush, then it rebounded under Clinton, it crashed again into Recession under Bush 43, then Obama cleaned it up and we had 71 straight months of economic growth, and now Trump is so amazingly terrible at business that he seems on schedule to crash the economy again in only one term (not surprising for a supposed businessman who has declared bankruptcy four times and lost money owning a casino!). So, do you see a pattern here? When Republicans are in charge, money is funneled to the wealthy and business tycoons, and regular people have less, which crashes the economy; then Democrats take over and fix the problem, but Americans buy into a bunch of political rhetoric, forget who fixed the economy, and vote the idiots back in. This is objective economic data...but when it gets pointed out, you want to claim that it is just liberal bias. Well, in the words of Stephen Colbert, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." And finally, you have bought into the misleading argument that Democrats are really not concerned with minorities because most of them voted against the Civil Rights Act and Republicans voted for it. This is true, but not the whole story. In fact, the Republicans used to be the liberal party, up until Eisenhower (the last good Republican president), and the Democrats, earlier in the 20th-century, were the party of the South and of blue-collar workers, which included a lot of racists. But things switched over the course of the 20th-century. FDR began the process of bringing the Democrats into more liberal economic thinking after the Great Depression, and then JFK and LBJ completed the process with the focus on civil rights. Then in 1968, Nixon returned to politics and ran on the "Southern Strategy" which was to reach out to the racist south with subtly coded language and lure them into the Republican party that took up the cause of the distressed white man. In other words, 60 years ago I would have been voting for Eisenhower and been a Republican, but the values of the Republican party in the 1950s no longer exists in the Republican party of today--the Democrats, since the 1960s have taken up that mantle. It took me along time to come to these conclusions. I was a young man during the 80s, and at the time was very enthusiastic about Reagan...he just gave such great speeches and made people feel good. It would take a long time following politics and studying history and thinking about causes and consequences before I came to understand what an awful person Reagan was, and how he began the process of dismantling the robust society created under FDR. The Republican plan, consistent since Reagan, has been to divert money to the already wealthy under the ridiculous pretext of "trickle down theory" (again, zero evidence this has ever worked), and consequently starve the government of funds for school, social security, etc., and then claim that we need to cut "entitlements" for the good of the economy, which they wrecked in the first place. You can see this, or you can choose not to see this.
@BurglaaR Tv Ha! Just can't help yourself, eh? I would rephrase that and say I advocate for a government that collects taxes and provides the services that create civilization, rather than extract a society's wealth and funnel it to plutocrats. Your implied syllogistic argument is that "Nazis wanted centralized government; Brooks wants centralized government; So, Brooks is like the Nazis." This is called the fallacy of the unbounded middle, a failure of logical reasoning. It is like saying, "Firetrucks are red; Strawberries are red; So, Strawberries are like firetrucks."
I loved it until the last bit about taxes and the leftist crap that came with it.
What do you mean by "leftist crap" ? Just parroting insults you learned from right-wing pundits is not a meaningful reply. If you are going to make a comment, make an intelligent comment that addresses the ideas and/or the evidence. Society needs roads. How do roads get built? You either pay taxes to fund infrastructure, or you are commanded by some "lord" to do it, or sometimes a wealthy person can fund it and then charge whatever tolls they want for you to use it. The first method is how a modern "state" gets it done, the second is how a feudal system or dictatorship gets it done, the last one is how a plutocracy does it. Which do you prefer?
@@georgebrooks7775 I never said that taxes in itself are crap. It’s the leftist policies my tax money is wasted on that I hate. Only few conservatives are against all or most taxes, but it’s the pork that has nothing to do with a bill that is despised. Also, taxes don’t buy civilization. Civility is something the Dems no nothing about anymore. You also talk about a Supreme Court nominee being held to a different standard of justice than the rest of us. That is absolutely laughable because he was accused by someone who couldn’t get any testimonial support from her friends. She had material facts wrong or didn’t remember certain particular facts. So a very weak testimony should ruin the career of a stellar judge in your ideal civilization? I wonder what you think of Governor Cuomo and all the accusations against him?
Btw, I think you are a excellent teacher who is easy to listen to, even for me as an uneducated Dutchman. I just wish that you didn’t use this platform to mix your person political beliefs in your otherwise great teaching.