Between the 9th and 15th centuries medieval Europe was one of the most prominent figures in the world. Within medieval Europe, England was one of the most notable places due to their interesting political, economic, and social system, feudalism. Feudalism, or a feudal system, is the system in which royal or noble families owned the land and allowed people to live on and farm the land in return for a share of the crops and their service in war. Some may disagree with this definition, seeing as the definition of feudalism is widely debated across historians; however, given the context of England, this is the most accurate definition that can be composed1. It is critical to analyze how effective feudalism was as an economic system in order to…show more content… To begin, because feudalism was lead by a noble person, that person often chose the jobs of their citizens. This was harmful to the economy because it disallowed people from taking positions that could be a more effective source of income, meaning that less money was put into the economy. A common trend of this taking place can be seen in the 13th century when many noble leaders of feudalism in England restricted many jobs to farming. Additionally, feudalism typically only allowed for their to be large portions of harvest based on the nobility. This lead to many farmers having to conserve the amount of crops they had ready to sell for when the market was readily available, being a major limitation to the economy by prohibiting the times in which there could be economic production. Lastly, feudalism limited the variety of jobs by focusing on jobs related to land like farming, landscaping, building, etc. This occurred because the general idea of feudalism is that people get land in return for their military service for the leader. When workers are required to do jobs related to land, they cannot make a salary from other types of work such as trade, creating a bottleneck on the amount of economic success there can be. In general, the peripheries between jobs that feudalism poses were harmful to the…show more content… This was a major downside of feudalism because it lacked the ability to do this, deeming feudalism as a very ineffective economic system. In the first place, feudalism has variable success rates depending on the noble person that was running it as well as the citizens and their capacity to do effective work. Basically, feudalism’s rate of economic growth was almost all dependent on the people running it. For example, in the 13th century in England, several places with feudalism implemented suffered extreme poverty due to the bad policies implemented by the noble leaders. Furthermore, feudalism failed to self-perpetuate because much of the money spent at markets failed to be reinvested into itself, but rather into people buying foreign goods. A prime example of this was towards the downfall of feudalism in the 15th century when several of the citizens part of a feudal system began to spend the money they had made on foreign products that were more affordable, pushing money out of their own economy. Finally, feudalism failed to create a self-perpetuating economy by lacking an effective system of trade. Trade is crucial to economic success because it can bring goods into a local economy for better economic productivity through access to materials. Feudalism, however, did not allow for an effective trade
