Was feudalism real, or did later historians invent it?

It depends what you mean, and historians still argue about it. The people of the Middle Ages used the Latin word feudum, meaning a fief, but they did not think of themselves as living under a "feudal system". That label came later, from writers in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since the 1970s, historians have debated, with no settled answer, whether "feudalism" is a useful construct for understanding medieval society.

The classic definition, by the Belgian medievalist François Louis Ganshof, describes reciprocal legal and military obligations of the warrior nobility around lords, vassals and fiefs, though Ganshof himself noted it was only the narrow, technical, legal sense of the word. A broader definition by Marc Bloch includes all three estates: the nobility, the clergy and the peasantry bound by manorialism.

Then came the challengers. In 1974 the American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown argued that feudalism was a construct with no basis in medieval reality, an invention of modern historians read back "tyrannically" into the record. In 1994 Susan Reynolds expanded on her thesis in Fiefs and Vassals. Some contemporaries questioned Reynolds's methodology, but others supported her.

The result is a quiet shift: textbooks now shy away from the term, as Richard Abels notes. What is in dispute is the single label, and whether it hides more than it reveals.