ABSTRACT
The feudal mode of production that emerged in Western Europe was characterized by a complex unity. The immediate producer - the peasant - was united to the means of production - the soil - by a specific social relationship. Three structural specificities of Western feudalism followed, all of fundamental importance for its dynamic. Firstly, the survival of communal village lands and peasant allods from pre-feudal modes of production, was not incompatible with it either. Secondly, the feudal parcellization of sovereignties produced the phenomenon of the mediaeval town in Western Europe. Thirdly, there was an inherent ambiguity or oscillation at the vertex of the whole hierarchy of feudal dependencies. This chapter discusses the genesis of feudalism in Western Europe as a synthesis of elements released by the concurrent dissolution of primitive-communal and slave modes of production. It shows briefly how the inherent nature of this synthesis produced a variegated typology of social formations in the mediaeval epoch.
