ABSTRACT
The word 'feudalism' literally means a society organized as a system of fiefs, with legal and political authority widely dispersed amongst persons with economic power. The feudal mode of production is to be contrasted with the slave mode of production, where slaves belong to a lord who also owns everything they produce; and it differs from a mode of production based on the work of free peasants and free wage-labourers. The feudal institutions formed the background and starting point for any thirteenth-century man or woman thinking about social life. For centuries the cornerstone of the church's social thought had been the belief that institutions of subjection were a punishment for Adam and Eve's fall and the consequent corruption of all their offspring. This view found its full expression in the social philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, whose great work the Summa Theologica had become the official teaching of the church by the end of the thirteenth century.
