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Reviews 247 Hicks, Michael, Bastard Feudalism (The Medieval World), London and N e w York, L o n g m a n , 1995; paper; pp. 243; R.R.P. c.US$27.00. Professor Michael Hicks has surely drawn the hardest task in t 'Medieval World' series. Other volumes concern topics such as latemedieval English noblewomen, or the mendicant friars. Readers can at least be expected to agree that these subjects existed, however contentious or contingent their nature. But Bastard Feudalism (and Feudalism itself), as Hicks admits in his first sentence, is literally nothing but 'a label devised by historians to make sense of the past'. A s he also notes, even those medievalists who think that Bastard Feudalism was an 'objectively' identifiable phenomenon, disagree as to exactly what it was and w h e n it occurred. Other historians 'doubt that it existed at all'. This insight produces an almost insoluble quandary. O n the one hand, Hicks could have written a bracingly iconoclastic study on whether the concepts of Feudalism and its supposed derivative, Bastard Feudalism, are of any further historiographical use. D o they help us to make sense of past cultures, to highlight their historical specificities, imagine their social parameters, understand their concerns and processes? If so, how? If not (and Elizabeth Brown and Susan Reynolds incline to the view that 'Feudalism' has outlived its usefulness) w h y are w e still writing and reading books about them? O n the other, such a sophisticated historiographical approach is perhaps inappropriate to a series whose main function is to provide reliable and informative undergraduate reading on particular historical people and events. Hicks is thus forced to adopt a somewhat problematic working definition of something (not just a historians' label) called Bastard Feudalism. In view of the outstanding disagreements, he 248 Reviews is undoubtedly wise to set his definitions broadly, describing i t as 'the set of relationships with their social inferiors that provided the English aristocracy with the manpower they required'. Few could disagree that most pictures of Bastard Feudalism fall at least partially within this summary. I t also allows Hicks to subvert some false dichotomies which in the past have been constituted between the 'pure' Feudalism of Norman England as compared to i t s degeneracy in the late middle ages, or i t s disappearance under the Tudors. Furthermore, this definition opens up a rich field of relationships to survey. Hicks covers patronage, service and dependence over a very wide span of wealth and social status, from the king and his closest friends to the relatively humble level of the tenants and estate officials of any manorial lord. The resulting chapters on the variety of relationships which could comprise lordship and service and the advantages and disadvantages accruing to each party in these transactions (Chapters Two and Five) are among the most valuable, interesting and original in the book. Bwf a number of disturbing buts arise. H o w historically specific is this definition? Hicks plausibly detects Bastard Feudalism in England from the eleventh to the seventeenth century. To m y understanding, patron-client relationships were prevalent also in classical Rome, and some might argue that they continue today, embodied in executive bonuses and golden-handcuff employment packages. So all-inclusive a definition tends to eliminate, rather than illuminate, historical change, and may discourage us from seeing the real differences which contemporaries detected between different types of service relationships. One draft of Sir John Fastolf's will, for example, appeals to a nostalgic concept of a military brotherhood forged i n the retinues of the French wars thirty years before his death. This Reviews 249 emotional and enduring tie was hardly the same as Fastolfs sometimes distant, and always businesslike, relationships with reeves and bailiffs, or indeed his dealings with the 'garcii' and laundrywomen listed in his household. Contemporaries spoke of such ties using a cloud of minutely differentiated t e r m s — friendship, h o m a g e , allegiance, obedience, trust, service, neighbourliness, good lordship. Hicks acknowledges the great range of relationships, but his presuppositions allow him almost no opportunity to probe late-medieval understandings of them. Furthermore his definitions...

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