Trevor Dumais
World history
Mrs. Donat
3/23/03

The Problems with Feudalism

The most basic problem with Feudalism that I can see is that everyone was trying to kill eachother, which could be rephrased as "various socio-economic obstacles to dying of old age".

First and foremost, it failed as a government form because the nobles were more worried about each other than they were about foreign invaders.  The foreigners were way the hell off someplace... the other nobles were right next door.  consequently, when invaders did show up, they were always walking into the middle of ongoing feuds.  If the invader was organized, like England in the movie, the nobles couldn't do squat, they got cremed.  It only worked so long as the opposition was using the same system.  



the second thing was that it divided resources too much.  When there was a famine or something in one part of the country, there was no way to compensate from other parts of the country.  kinda screwed up the concept of the government legitimizing itself by redistributing wealth to the people that needed it the most.  The nobles keeping all the tribute for themselves, instead of spreading it around for the benefit of the country, didn't sit so well with the peasants.  On a small scale, like one noble and his peasants, there was nothing to redistribute.  If the peasants were starving, the noble didn't have anything to hand out.  They couldn't buy votes, in other words. 

It was different when you had kings, and whole countries to work with.  You could tax one part of the country to save the other parts cookies, and thereby make them owe you.  The peasants didn't owe the nobles squat. Feudalism made it hard for organized government.  All feudalsim gave you was defense, and economics.  Other institutions also stayed small, small enough that one noble could support them.  That impacted lots of things, like education, technology development, manufacturing, etc.  Nothing got bigger than cottage industry.  Like the armorer was a guy and his kid, Instead of a bunch of people mining ore, smelting metal, and beating it into weapons.  The army, such as it was, had to wait forever to get their weapons.  No wonder they fought the same way for hundreds of years.

Bigger organizations led to economies of scale - the cost per unit went down as the number of units being produced went up. It worked for manufacturing, technology development, farming, education etc.  In the end, the nobles couldn't compete. It was like family farms trying to compete with giant corporate farms.

when it came down to the fight guess who lost? thats right the Nobles.  When the opposition went to the nation concept, feudalism was dead.