Don’t worry, be feudal
Wealth, land, investment and corporations revisited
We make provision for the future our lives long. It’s like riding a pushbike up a slope. We know we have to keep turning the crank, but that every now and again, as the road flattens out a little, we may be able to freewheel for a few seconds. Eventually, however, we will need to get pushing at the pedals again. Somewhere ahead, in the dim, misty distance, we know there will come the crown of the hill. We could put in a huge effort to build up speed, but can we be sure of still cresting the summit? If only we were one of the lucky ones, setting out from the summit of a roller-coaster: whatever ups and downs came, we’d be sure always to have the momentum to reach the end of the track.
If, when we ultimately get there, we have made a surplus on our pile, it goes into probate and gets bequeathed to our “chosen people”, accompanied by a quasi-bizarre sentiment: that thereby the life of the testator continues after their death, if only in memory and as a legacy. It so happens that I believe in the afterlife; the life everlasting that comes at the end of the apostles’ creed. But, even if you don’t believe in that, there is some sense when you leave an heirloom, that that object will be cherished by the recipient post mortem, with just an element of at the going-down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember him.
East Los Angeles Crips have a life expectancy of 25 years. They don’t leave probate property. They are born, live a life of violence and drugs, and die in gangland shoot-outs. Most normal people, straights, who marry and have children and whose children have children, whom they bounce on their knees in old age, see in their grandchildren an image of themselves. Their life expectancy isn’t the 80 or 90 years told to them by their doctors; it is the lifetime of these grandchildren: something like 140 years all told. Emperors, on the third hand (plus presidents who name public institutions after themselves even during their period of office) have a life expectancy—in their minds and the minds of their followers—that is nearer to a thousand years. That’s how long those who erected Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol will have thought the memorial would be standing there—till it got torn down by those who remember the slaves he traded in more than the man who traded them.
I think that the gold given to Jesus at his birth by the First Wise Man was his financial planning. He had a destiny to fulfil when He was 30 and so He had to survive infant mortality. Aside from a windfall like that, did the people of Galilee in the first century anno Domini even know what financial planning was? Remember the well-heeled man who asked how to get into the kingdom of God, who was told by Jesus to sell his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor? Where did he get his riches from, I wonder. And who would have bought his possessions (so that he could enter the kingdom of God) who would not then be in a similar position to the rich man? If you think about it, capital gain is just a clever form of theft; and if you need to realise your gains in order to enter the kingdom of God, then as each individual enters that mindset, that’s a process that will ultimately mean returning what has been stolen to those from whom it was stolen: the poor.1
Financial planning is the prime source of our worries about tomorrow. We may be concerned about our health, or the dangers we face when we travel, or the security of our belongings, whether our kids are progressing at school, and whether dinner will be ready when we get home tonight, but finance is by far the biggest concern. Will I have enough pension? Will my current income hold out, what can I afford, what can’t I afford? How much can I sell to give the proceeds to the poor, and still have enough to meet all my contractual liabilities?
I knew for a concrete fact when I was young that I would never be wealthy. Don’t ask me how, but it came to me in a flash in my twenties: I would never be rich. Not so rich as to never have to worry about the future. But, in the same moment, I knew I would never be destitute. Whether that means I placed my trust in my wiles and ability to extricate myself from any financial stramash I got into or whether I counted on Providence to do that, I don’t know. But I had those two feelings simultaneously when I was about 28 or 29 and they’ve remained with me all my life. Me, I trust in God, and He has never let me down. But trusting in God and counting on Him are two separate things. Future financial planning is not about what you can trust, it’s about what you can count on; literally.
When England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, it abolished the routine existential security that gave ordinary people reliance in a tomorrow that would pose no greater challenges than today (bar the eventuality of an army sweeping over the hill, or a plague—neither of which has receded in the modern era). The Reformation did more than reform the church; in England it swept away the monasteries and abbeys, and it thereby reformed land tenure, and made the acquisition of land for personal gain a reality, together with the ability to bequeath it (the Wills Act 1540). Until that piece of legislation, it was not possible to leave land in a will, because there was no such thing as a will: the legacy that would pass, say, between a king and his son, had been predicated on knowing—for certain—that the son was the son of the king. That meant queens needed to give birth in the presence of ministers of state; so they knew the child was legitimate. And, even then, it didn’t always work: the dispute that led to Henry Bolingbroke usurping the crown of Richard II; the Old Pretender and the warming-pan baby; the wrangles over the succession of Mary I and William of Orange. Not plain sailing, but important, since the king was lord and monarch of all he surveyed, as well as a great deal that he didn’t. In the absence of registration of ownership back then, succession was in large measure a matter, not of title but of repute. Illegitimacy broke repute.
Until the break with Rome in 1532 (and, on a decreasing scale, thereafter), land was held under feudal tenure, with a series of steps in holding that began with a tenant farmer, and rose through a local squire (the lord of the manor, to whom tithes would be paid or rendered as a form of local taxation), to landed gentry, to the levels of the aristocracy, like dukes and barons, and finally the king. The feudal system was a system of land tenure coupled to service, in the form of labour on the land or in the army. It’s a word related to tenant and tenement, meaning, from Old French ce que l’on tient—that which you hold, not what you own. For the lower orders, there was no question of landed property as we now think of it: land was occupied by inferior, or vassal, holders, who owed a feu duty, or ground rent, to the dominant, or superior, demesne, all the way through the ranks right to the king. In some cases, it might take the form of a regiment of men as part of the army and indeed the whole feudal system was modelled on an army: with ranks of soldiers all the way from privates to generals and commanders, so it was on the land as it was in the armed forces. Just as no one owns an army, except the king at its head, so no one owned land, except the king, who allowed his inferiors to occupy it by his leave, the result of which became the word lease.
When the English king Charles I resisted subjection to parliament’s will, an objection that would cost him his life, he wasn’t simply asserting some kind of brute mafia force conferred by God. As head of the army, he knew he was himself subject to no one. He did know, however, that he was subject by legal fiction to God. As landlord-in-chief, he was likewise subject to no one, but to God. Just as the smallholder owed no duty beyond the ground rent paid to the lord of his manor, and the lord of the manor owed no duty beyond that owed to the duke, and so on, so the king owed no duty to any of those below him, but recognised his duty to his Lord in heaven. The lord of the manor occupied his land by the leave of the duke, and the peasant occupied the common land by the leave of the lord of the manor. Logic demanded that the king also had to occupy the land by someone’s leave, otherwise he was a self-imposed ruffian overlord, who was therefore susceptible to usurpation himself. Justification for the duties owed by the lower orders came from occupancy of the land and, in the higher orders, in terms of aristocratic lineage, from legitimacy of birth. But the king’s duty had to derive from, and be owed to, something as well, and so was conceived the divine right of kings. Their right to rule as bestowed by God flowed as a natural consequence of the duty they owed to God. Quid pro quo. Charles resisted parliament because he was defending the entire societal structure of England, from how it was defended to how it was worked, including who made the rules. It was his inability to get his head around the proposed changes to that structure that lost him it in the end.
Hence, one consequence—the main consequence—of the feudal system was that ordinary individuals could never acquire ownership of the land they lived on. They lived in a home that was tied to the estate for which they worked, and utilised land that was held with other villagers in common under the overall title of the lord of the manor. That sounds surprising to you, I’m sure. Thing is, they never needed to own land. Ground rents didn’t change from one century to the next. There were no increments in value because there were no capital markets dependent on inflation in order to realise gain.
Life was calibrated to the natural cycle of the seasons, under which crops were sown, cultivated and reaped, and wintering depended on the copiousness or otherwise of the harvest, year after year. Even time was regarded as a fellow traveller through this cycle (and not a slave master), with the hours of sunrise and sunset always being the same, the day being divided into two halves by the midday hour. It was the hours themselves that contracted and expanded, from season to season, not dawn and dusk that shifted their times across some standardised 24-hour clock. Night-time wasn’t even measured, unless by a scribe’s candle in a monastery. It was interrupted at midnight or thereabouts by a meal, by which folk broke their fast before they bedded down again until the morn. Before Henry VIII, the pace and rhythm of life was in accordance with the pace and rhythm of nature: that was a natural, healthy lifestyle, not cramming in a 40-minute work-out before catching the 6:23 commuter train. In the Middle Ages, the time of 6:23 simply did not exist. Admittedly, medicine was rudimentary, but the big killers of today were rare: road traffic accidents (obviously), diabetes and heart disease: with the population engaged in manual labour and sugar an expensive rarity, doctors and dentists were in scant demand. These were times when proverbs like make hay while the sun shines and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush came about: people lived for the present moment and took each day as it came, and left the future to Providence. And, to God: their investment was in their standing in the afterlife; not in ensuring a period of indolence in the autumn of their days. Investment is a new concept born of the industrial age. At its heart, it is a euphemism for theft. Investments and economies do not grow; they are hauled up with billhooks, shoved up on the shoulders and by the sweat of others.
My great-grandparents were tenant farmers on the home farm at Barrachan near Whithorn in Scotland, and paid feu duty to their superior demesne, the Maxwells, Earls of Monreith. They had eleven children, of whom only five were boys (they needed muscle power for the farm), one of whom died of TB at age 5, one of whom was killed in the Great War aged 23, one of whom escaped to play violin in the capital, and two of whom did actually become farmers. The daughters went into service: big houses in Glasgow and Nottingham, or working for the gentry in Lichfield. That was life for many lowly labourers as recently as my grandparents’ generation. My gran was invalided out when a huge pot of boiling water fell on her whilst she was working in a kitchen. She was cared for, but could no longer work and that was her future sealed. Luckily, by then she was married to the most marvellous man who ever lived. After his death, she lived alone in a top-floor flat in Yorkhill, until her first son died of Legionnaire’s disease, whereupon she lived out her days after 1973 with us, and at that point, for the first time in her life, she ceased paying feu duty and being a vassal.
The words feudal, feu, vassal and dominant conjure up notions of the times of Edward Colston, because, like the word slavery, they convey an image of servitude, or oppression, of an absence of free agency. My grandmother and grandfather, and all the generations that preceded them, never owned property. They knew that each day that came meant they needed enough money to pay that month’s feu duty and that, if they couldn’t raise it, then, like in the song of old, just like my old man they’d need to follow the van.
A mortgage liability is a far longer prospect. It stretches into the mists of an unknown future, and one that is all the more aleatory in modern times. When I was taking the house-owning plunge, the decision was based on the prospects of my continuing to earn what I had earned up till then for the duration of the mortgage repayment plan—twenty years. I could have opted to continue paying rent, but I reckoned that, for the same amount, I could build up a capital asset, rather than ending up twenty years later with nothing more than a notice to quit. Today’s young people are so squeezed on rent that they have little free space in which to make such choices. They can’t afford a deposit, and they don’t know what their earnings will be two decades down the line. Financial planning, coupled to family planning, and the assessment of one’s future ability to cope in the stormy seas of the monetary maelstrom is in large part a gamble. How much gold did the Wise Men know to bring that would sustain the baby Jesus to adulthood without making his parents so wealthy that they’d up sticks and go on some spending spree?
What the feudal system did offer that avoided today’s fluctuating interest rates, wage freezes and tax vagaries was constancy: the knowledge that the feu landlord would be around every week asking for the same amount, year in, year out. It would never change and, as long as it was paid, occupancy could continue. Settlements knew continuity; incomers came in and people left, but the community itself was tight, which meant less crime, more mutual support. The Amish communities in North America today have no insurance. If they suffer patrimonial or personal loss, the community takes care of them, not out of charity but out of the commitment to their social contract. That’s not a sentiment that was invented by the Anabaptist communities there: they brought it with them, and it has remained to this day with them, as part and parcel of how things were done back in 17th century Europe. Anyone who was evicted for non-payment could count on the support of their neighbours; unless, that is, they had rejected them: by being a witch or heretic or vagabond. Nowadays, those evicted for non-payment of rent or mortgage instalments are at the mercy of social services; whilst that is a form of communal support, it lacks proximity, so that the evictee is simply another file number for the case worker and no one even knows the name of the person who had to do a midnight flit from next door. Feudal tenure, in its time, meant reassurance in terms of future contingency. Modern title registration promises that your home will eventually be your castle, but only if you can keep the bank at bay, and until then it subjects the borrower to twenty years of daily concern.
After Henry VIII and the break with the Church of Rome, common land and rights of use (separate from rights of property) declined, and private ownership rose. For 300 years, that was manageable, because the law limited discretionary trusts to 21 years, to avoid them amassing huge sums that could well end up challenging the financial might of the nation’s Treasury. However, in the industrial era, things changed: along came companies. It’s the ability of companies to limit their liability (and, nowadays, through infiltration into the legislative sphere, to evade it altogether), as well as to act as a stage persona for their owners, to accumulate vast wealth and to acquire the strings of government that is perhaps the first element of the industrial age that needs rethinking. They will not like it, for all they call them legal persons, just like you and me are. The ability of large-scale corporations to swallow up huge tracts of land makes them like the aristocrats of old. Except, old aristocrats relied on the system of feudal tenure to work the land, which was all that land was good for back then, bar a little tin or copper mining.
Image: the north end to Shugborough Tunnel on the London and North-Western Railway’s Trent Valley Line in Staffordshire.
It’s interesting that, with the coming of the railways, land owners initially resisted granting rights to companies to build lines across their estates: they placed a higher value on amenity than on exploitation. The Earl of Lichfield, to take one example, was far more concerned about the nuisance posed by smoky, noisy steam engines than in the potential for raking in money from the use of his land when the Colwich to Manchester line was constructed in 1846. At his insistence, decorative portals were built at the ends of the tunnel that hides the trains from view to this day, even though these entrances would only ever be seen by the trains’ crews. Nowadays, land’s surface is still a source of rent, but it is mainly sought for what lies beneath it: exploitation now by far supersedes amenity.
Corporations and freehold land tenure have knocked the relatively carefree pre-Reformation existence into a cocked hat, because the ability simply to live somewhere, perform work, and thereby be guaranteed a roof over your head for life is gone. In America, the wealthiest nation on this Earth, people who lose their jobs, and thereby their homes and livelihoods, end up living in a truck. We have learned to buy now, pay later; for many of us, that at the very least is a monthly budgeting item to be accounted for and, for others, it is a source of worry, if not financial failure. Not worrying about tomorrow is something that our capitalist societies have spoiled for us. By design.
Don’t worry, be happy? I suspect that Bobby McFerrin maybe had something else in mind, with which to ease his mind into that kind of framing.
This article is inspired by the following piece by Hans Jorgensen:
In case you missed it:
Suppose the man Jesus spoke to was worth 100. He sells his possession for 100 and goes to heaven. Bravo. But the guy who buys his possessions also needs to sell them in order to get into heaven. The market has one buyer less, so market economics determines that the price will be 99—less demand, lower price. The guy who buys that will sell for 98, and so on. Soon no one is left to buy the possessions except the poor. They have no money, so the value of these jewels and ivories becomes 1. The theft has been restored to the poor.
Being feudal was ok if you were on the upper ranks, if I remember my history lessons correctly.