Posted on 07/20/2009 6:03:46 AM PDT by grjr21
Edited on 07/20/2009 6:29:15 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The heart of your dictionary definition is feudum. Which means “faith,” meaning trust.
Even today, land held in “fee simple” is held in fief, in feudum. “Fee” comes from feudum.
It’s the idea that you don’t own your land outright and absolutely. That’s actually still true today (eminent domain).
You have only a dictionary defintion that employs words you don’t understand. Then you read into it all the negative stereotypes you have from the movies and the Black Legend view of the “feudal dark ages.”
What I described is what historians know about how it actually functioned.
A peasant was not personally free but he could not be thrown off his land. The land belonged to his lord but not absolutely. The peasant had a right to sit on that land and farm it. He paid rent from the produce to the lord. The lord could not arbitrarily abuse the peasant—the peasant had legal recourse against it. The lord was obligated by feudum, honor, faith to defend the peasant against outside powerful lords.
Did this work perfectly? No. Plenty of lords abused their peasants. But both lord and peasant had rights enshrined in law, customary law, not whim-law created by nobles.
They had far more legal protection than Soviet citizens or German citizens had under modern bureaucratic totalitarianism. We have not yet reached that stage in this country but we no longer are governed by honorable, virtuous elites either. And the prevailing theory of law is a 100 times worse than what governed peasant-lord relations in the “feudal age” because they believed in ancient custom rooted in a God who would damn to hell those who abused trust/feudum, who abused power.
We don’t.
That is, our elites don’t
believe in such a God. And they have no sense of honor, only “what can I get away with.”
Feudum/fee in your dictionary definition is the key to all this.
But you have it in your head that the feudal system was totally arbitrary sheer naked power by nobles.
That’s garbage, historically. But you don’t know it because you only know what the MSM and the movies have to say about “feudal Dark Ages.”
Am I advocating a return to the Middle Ages? Of course not.
The American system as originally established is about as good as it gets but it depended on virtuous elites running it. It was not rule by the mob or the commmoners. It was rule by noblesse oblige gentry like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. The problem is not rule by elites. The problem is rule by power-abusing, dishonorable elites.
And that’s always been the problem, no matter what degree of kingship, nobility, market, mercantile, barter system of politics and economics prevailed. All such systems can be reasonably fair and just or horribly unjust.
And we lost our system a generation or two ago when we shifted from noblesse oblige FDR’s technocrats. Read Amity Schlaes, The Forgotten Man. If I had a choice, I’d choose medieval feudalism over what we’ve had since FDR. But I don’t have a choice, so I hope to recover the Nobles envisioned by Adams, Washington, Lincoln, men who lived by virtue and honor.
I have very little optimism that this will happen but I will continue, in faith, to hope.
Abuse.
If you knew anything about current scholarship in medieval history, you would know that the word “system” is rejected. It was not a system of government. It was a network of social structure centered on feudum. That’s a fact.
I used the word “sytem” loosely, but in the sense you are using it, it “systems” of government are modern phenomena, beginning with Hobbes or Locke or 16thc theorists. The closest one comes in the Middle Ages to “systems” is John of Salisbury or other writers who speak of “three orders.”
But all historians agree that “feudal system” ought not be used because it implies something modern. You accuse me of redefining feudalism around feudum because your “feudal system” idea is taken from MSM and movie caricatures.
Feudum was central—everything else varied immensely from place to place. So historians today say about what I said: they all assumed feudum, trust, pledge but it was not a tight system.
But you’d rather have your movie caricature because it permits you a cheap label to describe what you don’t like about our situation today.
I offered you an alternative: what you dislike about what’s happening to us is what already has happened in recent history in the USSR and China and Germany. It’s what Kafka described. It’s a merciless and abusive bureaucratic state.
Such a machinery/system of abusive government was not possible in the Middle Ages. They did not have the techniques to do it. Our problem is the triumph of technocrats over Mensch, over virtuous citizen legislators and citizen-nobles.
I offered you analytical tools better to understand our situation so you can combat it. You prefer a phantom “feudal system” to explain the present problems because it’s cheap and easy but it’s also totally useless because it’s apples to oranges.
I wonder what would have happened to the cop if this had been the mayor’s granddaughter? Why should the consequences be any different if it a regular citizen involved instead, as in this case?
“It is about a system where there is no ability for the peons to reliably address grievance.”
This shows that you do not know what you are talking about.
Medieval peasants did have a system for redress of grievances and it did function, so did nobles, so did bishops, so did kings. Peasant redress was subject to abuse just as our system of redress of grievances is subject to abuse. It is categorically different from totalitarianism (no possibility of redress—except on paper) as was typical of the USSR or Nazi Germany.
You don’t know anything about law, peasants, nobles, grievances, government in the Middle Ages except what you’ve picked up from Enlightenment and Marxist self-serving caricatures of the Middle Ages.
And when I say that the problem is abuse of power and loss of honor and virtue, I have Adams, Hamilton, Washington, de Tocqueville on my side. When you insist that a “noble system” is systemically evil (no redress of grievance) you are going against everything the American Founders believed. They understood that some systems are better than others but they understood that no system free of abuse. They rejected nobility of birth but they assumed nobility as crucial but also as subject to abuse. In common with those who believed in nobility of birth they believed that any elite, of birth or otherwise, could either act nobly or ignobly, faithfully or abusively.
Ironically, the cops are always complaining about the “no snitch” culture around Philly.
Ironically, the cops are always complaining about the “no snitch” culture around Philly.
A draw weapon? A confrontation over a very minor T/C?
What the hell is wrong with these law enforcement officers?
Then the LEOs kid assaults the female?
Good Lord!
Abuse?
That doesn’t fit the bill at all.
That is only a very small part of what MrB was trying to convey.
Try again.
She had a loaded gun shoved into her, and then was assaulted by the LEOs son...These people are completely out of control. You'd have to be ice cold not to be totally pissed off, angery and outraged over this type of dangerous behavior.
This is Murtha territory, isn't it? What else can you exdpect?
In that sewer? You gotta be kidding.
Socialism
Those terms were not defined at the time of the middle ages, the “age of nobility”, which I specifically stated to be excluded.
I have a reason for this - the terms Communism, Socialism, or Fascism are, these days, very loaded, and will just be rejected as “hate speech”.
But, if you point out the parallels to “nobility and peasants”, leftist apologists don’t dismiss your argument and actually look at what is going on.
I will respond to the first line
The heart of your dictionary definition is feudum. Which means “faith,” meaning trust.
The heart of the definition of the word is NOT ‘trust’. That is the root word. Most words roots and dictionary definitions are not in alignment.
Some people just can’t handle authority. Unbelievable.
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