Past & Present

The nature of production under feudalism was, according to Maurice Dobb, 'petty'. The basic social relation, again to follow Dobb—as numerous other Marxist commentators and historians—rested upon the extraction of the surplus production of these petty producers, an extraction achieved by extra-economic compulsion. That extra-economic compulsion varied according to the type of feudal rent levied.¹

Rodney Hilton, a key player in that first generation of British Marxists which included Dobb, tested these fundamental relations of production throughout his work as a historian and recognized, as a Marxist, that, since 'variations in the incomes of the landed ruling class and its state . . . were crucial', it was the nature of that income and the principal factor(s) in its fluctuation which determined that nature of production, that is the mode of production. Identification of the nature of the relationship of lord and tenant, 'a crucial element in determining the level of rent', was of signal importance in discussing the transition from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production.² To quote Dobb once more, who cited Hilton's work in making the assertion: 'it is upon . . . revolt among the petty producers that we must fix our attention in seeking to explain the dissolution and decline of feudal exploitation. This rather than vague concepts like "the widening of the market" or "rise of money economy"'.³

The transition from feudalism to capitalism, as an historical and observable phenomenon, dominated Hilton's early contributions to medieval [End Page 53] history, as it did the work of all Marxist historians operating in the 1940s and 1950s. While the transition debate, a debate that involved only Marxists and was characterized by a deliberate and inevitable combination of close theoretical reading and empirical research, lost ground to other Marxist (socialist-humanist approaches epitomized by 'history from below') and non-Marxist (new social history, cultural history, etc.) approaches to the past from the 1960s, it had encouraged a close engagement with issues of long-term change and their explanation which have not been forsaken by economic historians, and perhaps especially medievalists.

Hilton was both too good a historian and too good a Marxist to employ either a cavalier approach to his sources or a vulgarity to his theory. While Hilton was keen to stress, throughout his long publishing career, that it was the relationship of lord and tenant that was paramount, he was very much aware of the additional factors that played upon the peasant economy and, in some measure, stood as challenges to the characterization of the feudal mode of production. There is, in Hilton's work, the not infrequent warning to the unwary lest they be deceived into treating certain types of relation as of greater significance than they actually were, and certainly as of greater significance than that of the lord-tenant relationship, a political relationship founded on non-economic compulsion.⁴ This insistence upon the primacy of a particular political relationship and the reduction of others to a secondary level of importance reflects, as previously, Hilton's grounding in the historiography and theory of transition. What interested Hilton there, as he had articulated in 'Capitalism—What's in a Name?', later published as 'further material' to the 'transition debate', was the extent to which the historian could identify the predominant methods and relations of production in any period.⁵ While we should attempt to identify process and progress, Hilton argues that the 'history of trade alone will not tell us how and when the characteristic relations of feudalism gave place to those of capitalism, how peasant agriculture and artisan industry gave place to large concentrations of capital and of wage labourers . . . . Political conditions need closer attention'.⁶ Hilton quotes Marx in distinguishing between modes of production and noting that the capitalist mode of production could not establish itself [End Page 54] while the 'solidity and internal articulation' of feudalism remained sufficient to prevent it. Thus, to follow Hilton further, again in paraphrasing Marx:

since men make their own history, the historian must know what part the...