I'm listening to The History of England, a podcast by David Crowther, Episode 20, in which he describes late Anglo-Saxon England in contrast to the more widespread, continental, fuedal political tradition about to overtake it by way of the Norman conquest. At 13:23-14:01 he describes feudalism in part as a system in which a king isn't just one political leader who demands the loyalty of other, less powerful leaders, but who in some sense owns his entire kingdom and provides his vassals with their land. Yet at an earlier point in the same episode (4:14-5:00) he claims that in most of Europe the nobility had been stripping legal power away from their respective monarchs, which I've heard of before. These trends seem at odds.
Am I wrong in associating the nobility-empowering and monarchy-justifying aspects of wider European influence on England at this time? Is this a trade-off between de jure power (for the monarch) and de facto power (for the nobility)? Or wha'twas' up?
I am going to bang this drum hard again here: this is precisely why 'feudalism' as a concept is utterly useless for historical analysis. For background consult the FAQ which contains some discussions we've had here.
There is an assumption that somehow both British and continental 'states' had 'systems' which could be neatly fit into and against 'feudalism', and that William the Conqueror brought with him a 'system'. These are all anachronistic descriptions which do not in any way reflect how contemporaries themselves thought of politics and power at the time. And the anachronisms clearly show themselves as contradictory when Crowther tries to make them all fit together. They contradict one another because feudalism is an ideal system, one created by legal scholars who cherry picked exempla of socio-political relations in the 13th century (and only in jurisprudence and not an actual fact) and then repackaged whole by 17th century legal academics seeking to justify their then-current monarchical and baronial property relations.
Neither 'nobility empowerment' nor 'monarchy justifying' theories were prevalent at the time at all in any formal sense, neither politically nor theoretically, except in broad divine rights of kingship. The assertions and competitions of aristocratic and monarchal power were entirely about what warrior classes were prepared to fight for in a trade off of various economic rights and powers. William no more represented 'French' (let alone 'continental') conceptions of political power because there was no such thing at the time. The contemporaries used language of the avatars of political power: race, class, tradition. If you had asked anyone in year 1066 in what is now Germany, France, Spain, Italy, what was going on with William's invasion, no one would have responded 'oh my, there's going to be a conflict of governmental systems here.'
Casting William, the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons as a contest of systems representing broader political thought distorts the history; these were contests of acquisitive warrior classes with their own local customary laws of mid-11th century. Contemporary debate about it (and most evidence of debate we have is from ecclesiastics, mind you) was cast in terms of 'rightness', of divine kingship, and of race.
Sorry if this comes across as harshly worded, but I think it's important to be emphatic about it so that we are challenged to rethink our conceptual models that can distort the stories of the past.