Feudal Revolution
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The Feudal Revolution was a major socio-economic and politico-military transformation of Western Europe that supposedly took place in the decades on either side of the year 1000. It is also known as the Transformation of the Year 1000, a term borrowed from the French mutation de l'an mil. The concept of the Feudal Revolution has been hotly debated in medieval studies.
In the standard account of the Feudal Revolution, the public authority of the king and his appointed officers (such as the count), which had characterized the Carolingian Empire, became fragmented in the course of the 10th century. Local lords gradually appropriated public rights, such as levying taxes, enforcing justice, demanding military service and the general right to command (ban). Castles proliferated as bases for these petty lords and the public peace of the Carolingian era was replaced by endemic violence. The result of these changes is what is known as feudalism. The Peace and Truce of God movements are often seen as responses to the Feudal Revolution. The "feudal age" was only came to an end with the emergence of strong monarchies in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The idea of the Feudal Revolution has its genesis in the work of French historian George Duby on the region of the Mâconnais between about 980 and 1030, in which period he detected "a breakdown in public law and order". A generation of French scholars following Duby documented evidence for the same processes beyond the Mâconnais and outside France. By the mid-1970s, the process was being described as a revolution. Jean-Pierre Poly and Éric Bournazel provide the first synthesis of this research in 1980 and introduced the term "mutation".
A reaction against the idea of the Feudal Revolution was apparent as early as 1985. Duby himself downplayed the notion in a 1987 book and Dominique Barthélemy rejected it in his 1988 study of the Vendômois. By the 1990s, critiques of the thesis came primarily in two kinds. Barthélemy strengthened his earlier critique by arguing that Carolingian society was as violent and oppressive as anything that came after. On his view, researchers had been misled by, among other things, the word choices of monastic cartularies. Barthélemy sees the fall of the Carolingians after 888 and the rise of urbanisation, bureaucratisation and scholasticism around 1100 as more decisive transformations than anything that took place around 1000. The other kind of critique, represented by Stephen D. White, objects to any periodisation of premodern society based on revolutions or rapid transformations.