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Comment by cheaprentalyeti | Hacker News Reader

I briefly skimmed and they started talking about manorial systems and vassalage.

I think we tend to shoot ourselves in the foot with definitions and whatnot whenever we try to talk about Feudalism, especially when we concentrate on the dark ages and the middle ages and the lack of a functioning state.

My suspicion is: Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages.

It started with the predecessor systems to vassalage in the Roman Empire, when there was a very functioning state with a system of vassalage and hierarchy already in place and roots going back to the pre-Empire times of the Republic. It was made worse by Diocletian and noone after Diocletian was either willing or able to fix things.

View on HN

It's worth reading in a little more detail.

One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".

I don't think so. In the context of tech feudalism maps really well. People cannot protect their own forums/communities running on their own hardware from attack and/or futureshock from rapid change in underlying libs. So everyone depends on single entities with enough resources to keep community software running.

The argument isn't that "feudalism" maps poorly onto modern concepts, it's that "feudalism" is a modern concept that doesn't exist as such historically. It seems to map well onto modern forms of oppression because the word is essentially synonymous with oppressive behavior.

My suggestion: use the term "Patron/Client" instead of feudalism and you'll be able to see/show all the cruddy political effects without having to map everything in Techbroland to the legalities of grazing sheep.

It's a lazy pejorative, like "fascist".

> Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages.

There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes.

As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed).

For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down.

[1] https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-c...

[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache

[3] http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm

In France they might have been called villas, but in most of the rest of the Roman world they were called latifundia.

(But I didn't come back to do more "Um, Achtually" about Feudalism. I found the links, now where should I put them?)

They were called villa in latin. The latifundium was the whole domain, whereas the villa was the owning family main living building.

I would avoid the use of the term "Dark Ages". It has always been a loaded term (popular with those who had or have an ax to grind against the Church, like Protestants and Enlightenment propagandists) and characterizes our own ignorance better than the time period itself. The Renaissance itself is better understood as a development of the Middle Ages. The continuity and interplay of cultural currents during the Middle Ages/Renaissance are far more interesting than the simplistic, boring, and tendentious presentation we're often taught in school (Middle Ages = bad, backwards, ignorant; Renaissance = good, progressive, enlightened). For example, while empirical science saw a development during the Renaissance, it depended on prior intellectual of the Scholastic period, itself marked by a good deal of philosophical rigor, for lack of a better term (a rigor unjustly mocked by Protestants, surviving to this day in expressions involving the number of angels on the head of a pin). Whatever the merits of the Renaissance and faults of the Middle Ages, philosophically, the Renaissance falls short of the Middle Ages.

The Dark Ages is called that because it refers to the power vacuum left behind in the wake of the Western Roman Empire's fall. The regional power that maintained law and order was no more and it was now every man for himself. Economies and cultures can't flourish and will recede when everyone is busy murdering and backstabbing each other, thus called the Dark Ages.

It wasn't until Charlemagne united most of Gaul and created the Frankish Kingdom that some semblance of peace was restored, ushering in the Middle Ages and the return of economic growth and cultural development.

As an aside, everything I read and was taught about the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the Renaissance back in my day was deeply intriguing and rich in wisdom and knowledge. It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.

It's called that pejoratively against the post-roman era because petrarch was, in the fad of his time, a classical antiquity fetishist and considered the romans the "light" against which the darkness was compared.

It isn't used by modern historians because that concept and the light-vs-dark dichotomy isn't useful, as a historical practice. The idea that all local order collapsed with the roman empire is simply mythology, anachronistic veneration of a hierarchical system of power.

The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.

The facts of history may not change, but our understanding of it develops like any other academic discipline. Maybe don't reject a generation's worth of development in a complex field because your surface-level appraisal makes you sad.

> Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.

> The romans were at least as violent as anything that came after. The idea that they provided unique stability in exchange for that violence is the roman justification for it. Vestigial propaganda from 2000 years ago. We are not obligated to accept it and in fact modern historians typically do not.

Did they not reduce the amount of fighting? Was Pax Romana a myth? There would be less fighting between regions since most of the regions are already under the control of the regional superpower. Those that haven't been annexed would be wise to conserve their strength if they wish to maintain their independence.

These are the sorts of questions historians address, yes. The answers to them aren't simple or settled even now within that discipline.

> The majority of modern scholars avoid the term [Dark Ages] altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

It's named the Dark Ages because 11th century scholars wanted to feel like their time period was enlightened and great compared to the past, not because there was some deep, thoughtful analysis.

> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.

It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.

> Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.

And because medievalists are personally invested in pushing the relativist notion that the early medieval period was just as sophisticated as the Roman Empire that preceded it.

The Dark Ages were dark for a segment of Europe. The Roman Empire was still going strong in the east. The Bronze Age Collapse happened across a much larger area.

You seem to be confused. The Bronze Age Collapse refers to events mostly centered in the Eastern Mediterranean, even though there were impacts elsewhere. The Dark Ages refers to events mostly centered in the Western Mediterranean as well as Western Europe, even though there were impacts elsewhere.

Bronze Age Collapse includes the Near East all the way to the Caucasus.

Roughly the area of the Bronze Age Collapse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#/medi...

Roughly the area of the Dark Ages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period#/media/File:I...

If anything, the area of the Dark Ages looks to be larger than that of the Bronze Age Collapse. But either way, they're both referring to events that happened within a specific geographic area.

Well, the Assyrian Empire was doing better than ever after the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

yes and.. you are looking at the top.. nice views! but the mass of people, their entire lives, were not at the top. Serfs, peasants, vassels, indentured servants , slave markets -- look there, at the labor force, and compare the herding of cattle to no-rights people, for comparison to intelligent, able, digital serfs.

<< digital serfs.

There is a difference. 'No-rights' people were corralled and restrained, by force when necessary. Where is the violence today? At best, there is a threat that you will lose your job ( it is not insignificant, but it is not your life ). Can reddit put you in acid mines? No. Can they fire you? Well, the mods there are volunteers. Their status indicates how quickly they could pick up and their toys and move. There is only one thing that makes them digital serfs. Inertia.

( yes, I am aware how difficult it is to have a website these days that scales, but the only thing that is really stopping people from doing things is that doing things is hard; it is easier to do what you did yesterday )

I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as an "acid mine"?

Based on their other comment they are just using it as an exaggeration. But it did make me interested enough to look it up.

Apparently there are some inorganic solid acids, they look to mostly be oxides, I have no idea if they exist in high enough concentrations to be mined.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_acid

My secondary joke reference is asbestos factory ( also technically not existing, but the concept is the same -- highly dangerous environment ). Obviously, I exaggerated a little bit.

the nature of the fences and punishment, have changed.. agree

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