ABSTRACT
The 'feudalism', meaning either a period or a regime dominated by lords, or domination by people who possess financial or social power and prestige, is a relatively late arrival. A common term used by British historians to describe a peculiar aspect of English politics and local social organization in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is 'Bastard Feudalism'. A second version of 'feudalism' is that of a social economy in which landed lords dominate a subject, servile peasantry from whom they demand rents, labour services, and over whom they exercise justice. The term feudalism is thoroughly contaminated by the political-ideological polemics of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that first inserted the term into public discourse. The principal contribution of the French Revolution to the invention of feudalism was to fix at its core the sharp distinction between public power and private, when the Assembly abolished the régime féodale.
