Are We Becoming Feudal Again?

Draft for review — all comments welcome

There is a peculiar contradiction in the life of a reasonably well-paid professional. We enjoy a degree of material comfort, security and personal freedom that would have been unimaginable to most people throughout history. We can travel, own property, change occupations and, at least in principle, choose how we wish to live. Yet for many of us, the practical exercise of those freedoms is considerably more difficult than their legal existence might suggest.

I can only speak from my own experience and that of the generation to which I belong. We have worked, built careers, taken on responsibilities and sought to provide for our families. Our circumstances are not terrible. Far from it. Yet I sometimes wonder whether the very arrangements that have made our lives comfortable have also constrained our ability to pursue what might make them meaningful.

There is also the question of what comes next. Much of the work we undertake today is intended to secure something in the future. Retirement, certainly. But also the possibility of providing our children with opportunities and freedoms that may otherwise be difficult for them to attain. I find myself increasingly concerned about whether the economic arrangements that have supported my own generation will continue to offer the same prospects to those who follow.

There are only so many hours in a week and for most of us a substantial proportion belongs, in one form or another, to our employers. Employment is, of course, a voluntary exchange. We offer our labour, skills and judgement in return for compensation. But whatever value an individual creates, the fundamental arrangement generally involves a commitment of time. In some organisations, the expectation extends well beyond the hours stipulated in an employment contract, with success depending as much on one's willingness to devote additional time to work as on the value of the work itself.

For someone earning a reasonable income, the decision to reclaim that time is not straightforward. Reducing one's hours, changing careers or attempting to build something independently may mean placing at risk the income upon which a family, a mortgage and an established way of life depend. The freedom to make these choices exists but whether we can afford to exercise it is another matter.

Perhaps that is where the idea of dependence begins.

A Distant Mirror

Reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, I was struck by the organisation of medieval society and the relationships that bound people to land, labour and those who exercised authority over them. The fourteenth-century European peasant occupied a world profoundly different from our own. For those living under conditions of serfdom, obligations to a lord could be enforced through law and custom. Freedom of movement, access to land and the ability to dispose of one's labour were subject to restrictions that modern workers, at least in Britain, do not ordinarily face.

It would be absurd to suggest that the circumstances of a contemporary professional are equivalent to those of a medieval serf. The improvements in material wellbeing, legal rights and opportunities for social mobility are too substantial to ignore. Yet historical comparisons need not depend on equivalence to be useful. Perhaps the question is whether certain relationships of dependence persist beneath very different institutional arrangements.

Power has always been concentrated, whether exercised through violence, political authority or ownership of wealth. What changes is the form that power takes, the means by which it is maintained and the opportunities available to those subject to it.

As a side thought, there is something mildly amusing, too, in discovering how little the self-regard of powerful men (and the examples are overwhelmingly men) appears to have changed over the centuries. Tuchman's nobles could be remarkably assured of their own importance, even when their conduct suggested rather less reason for confidence. It is difficult not to recognise something of this in the powerful men of our own time, some of whom appear equally convinced that their position is the natural consequence of superior intelligence, judgement and hard work. Perhaps it is a recurring human tendency to confuse the advantages of one's circumstances with the virtues of one's character.

The medieval labourer might have been bound by obligations inherited at birth. The modern employee enters into a contract voluntarily and is free to leave. But leaving has consequences and those consequences are not distributed equally.

The Freedom to Leave

Consider two people employed by the same organisation. Both enjoy similar salaries, perform comparable work and possess precisely the same contractual rights. One has accumulated sufficient wealth to support a family without further employment, while the other depends entirely on a monthly salary. If their employer were to announce an unwelcome change in working arrangements, both could resign. Yet the first might do so with little concern for the immediate financial consequences, while the second would need to weigh the possibility of unemployment, reduced income or relocation. Although their legal freedoms are identical, the practical options available to them differ considerably.

This distinction is important because employment itself need not imply dependence. Were I to win the lottery tomorrow, I suspect I would continue working, quite possibly in a corporation. Work provides opportunities for contribution, belonging, intellectual challenge and purpose that extend beyond the salary it delivers.

What might change, however, is not simply my ability to choose how much time to devote to work, where to live or whether other pursuits deserve greater attention. The freedom that money affords might also change what I imagine is possible for myself. There may be ambitions, interests and ways of living that I have never seriously considered, simply because the economic circumstances of my life have kept them beyond the boundaries of practical consideration. A strange, blue-chip version of Stockholm Syndrome. Given the freedom to explore them, I might discover possibilities that had never previously occurred to me.

None of this would guarantee that I used those opportunities wisely, or even that I used them at all. But the possibilities themselves and perhaps my capacity to recognise them, might be greater.

Perhaps freedom is therefore less about the absence of obligations than the availability of credible alternatives. An employer may determine the terms upon which work is performed, but an employee with valuable skills and attractive alternatives retains a measure of power. The employer must consider the possibility that the employee will leave, just as the employee must consider the consequences of doing so. The relationship is not entirely one-sided and its balance depends, in part, on the options available to either party.

Labour, Capital and the Accumulation of Choice

This brings us towards a more fundamental characteristic of capitalism: the relationship between those who earn primarily through labour and those who derive income from ownership. For someone dependent on employment, income generally requires a continuing contribution of time, effort or expertise. Someone who owns productive assets may receive returns without an equivalent ongoing commitment of personal labour. This does not mean that capital is without risk, or that its owners are guaranteed a return, but ownership introduces a different possibility: capital can generate further capital and the accumulation of wealth may proceed without a proportional increase in the time its owner devotes to work.

I recall an evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during an immersion programme at MIT. We had spent the day in lectures, including one on systems dynamics which I particularly enjoyed, and had been given a tour of Harvard Business School by an alumnus. After sitting in one of its lecture theatres and wandering through its rather grand recreational rooms, three of us broke away from the larger group to find somewhere to eat.

Over dinner near Harvard Square, our conversation wandered from the possibility of living in Cambridge or Boston to property prices back home, mortgages and the difficulties of finding somewhere suitable to raise a family. One of my companions, a former professional footballer whom I had come to admire for his values and outlook on life, spoke about the challenges of finding a larger home for his growing family and the absence of financial assistance that might have made the move easier. I found myself admitting that I would almost certainly not have been able to afford my own home without help from my parents. There was a little embarrassment in acknowledging this, though I was grateful to be among friends with whom I could speak so openly.

We were all pursuing the same Executive MBA, and each had arrived there through years of work and experience. Yet our circumstances, and the opportunities available to us, had been shaped by more than our own efforts. I have long been conscious of how fortunate I have been in this respect, though the conversation brought into sharper focus the differences in opportunity that can arise between people who have worked equally hard and achieved much in their own lives. I wondered afterwards whether my friend had been thinking about fairness, although I never asked him.

A parental contribution towards a deposit can bring forward the purchase of a first home by years. While one household begins paying down a mortgage and may benefit from appreciation in the value of its property, another continues paying rent while trying to save enough to enter the same market. Over time, those differences in starting position can become differences in accumulated wealth, financial security and the opportunities available to their children.

Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the differences we discussed that evening are far from unusual. In a 2023 study of substantial financial transfers between family members, researchers found that parents accounted for 83 per cent of the value of gifts received, with more than half of that value coming from the wealthiest fifth of individuals. These transfers were found to reinforce existing differences in economic resources between young adults from different family backgrounds (Boileau and Sturrock, 2023). Perhaps the question is not simply whether we can accumulate wealth through our own efforts but how much of a head start some of us have been given before those efforts even begin.

This mechanism extends beyond housing. Ownership of a profitable business or a portfolio of investments may allow capital to generate income which can then be reinvested. For someone whose principal economic asset is their capacity to work, accumulating that initial capital requires first generating a surplus from earnings after meeting the costs of living.

I often find myself thinking about this when travelling through different towns and regions, wondering how much of the lives being lived there have been shaped by what Robert Caro called the 'tentacles of circumstance'. How much of our future is determined before we have had the opportunity to make anything of it ourselves and how much can we reasonably claim as the product of our own ambition and effort?

I suspect the distance between those who depend principally on labour and those who possess substantial capital has been growing over my lifetime. Not simply between billionaires and everyone else but across the corporate hierarchy itself, where the earnings of senior executives appear increasingly distant from those of middle management and the median worker.

There is some evidence for this impression, although it requires careful interpretation. Research published by the High Pay Centre in 2026 found that median remuneration among FTSE 100 chief executives had reached £5.06 million, approximately 130 times the earnings of the median UK full-time worker. Executive remuneration frequently includes substantial incentive payments and share awards, complicating any simple distinction between the rewards of labour and those of ownership (High Pay Centre, 2026). The figures tell us something about the distance between the top of the corporate hierarchy and the broader workforce but considerably less about how that distance has changed across every level of employment.

That is an observation rather than an established conclusion. It requires evidence, particularly if we wish to distinguish differences in earnings from differences in wealth and access to ownership. It also raises a difficulty for the feudal analogy. If ownership and the accumulation of capital are defining characteristics of capitalism, then their existence cannot, by itself, demonstrate a return to feudalism. We may simply be observing capitalism operating according to its underlying logic.

The more interesting question may be whether the capacity to acquire ownership and with it greater economic independence, is becoming more difficult for those who begin without it. I do not yet know the answer.

The Systems We Inhabit

Our choices are not made independently of the systems in which we live. Employers establish expectations around working hours, location and performance. Individuals make decisions about housing, family, education and their desired standard of living partly in response to the income and opportunities that employment provides. Those commitments can make employment more difficult to leave. In turn, reduced mobility may weaken an employee's bargaining position, reinforcing the arrangements upon which that employee depends.

There are, however, forces working in the opposite direction. Employees can organise collectively, seek alternative employment or develop skills that strengthen their bargaining power. Employers may choose to offer greater flexibility, whether from a progressive view of management or because retaining talent requires it. The employer who insists upon increasingly restrictive conditions risks losing the very people needed to sustain the business, while the employee who has credible alternatives can exercise a degree of influence without ever needing to leave.

These opposing forces shape the relationship between employers and workers and neither operates in isolation. History offers an instructive example. The labour shortages following the Black Death altered the balance between landowners and workers in parts of medieval Europe. Labour became more valuable as its supply diminished, creating opportunities for some workers to demand better wages and conditions, even as established authorities attempted to preserve the old arrangements. The institutions were different, but the relationship between scarcity, bargaining power and economic dependence has a recognisable quality.

Something New, or Something Old?

I began with the question of whether we are becoming feudal again, though I'm no longer certain that it is quite the right question. The medieval world was structured around relationships of landholding, inherited status, customary obligation and political authority. Our own is organised around private property, markets, employment contracts and institutions that provide freedoms unknown to most medieval Europeans. To describe the two systems as equivalent would obscure more than it reveals.

Yet the comparison may still help us recognise patterns of power and dependence that would otherwise remain less visible. If wealth increasingly determines the extent to which individuals can control their time, choose where they live and decide how they contribute to society, then the distribution of ownership becomes more than a question of material inequality. It becomes a question about the distribution of practical freedom.

And this question extends beyond the individual. The desire to accumulate sufficient wealth to provide one's children with greater freedom is understandable. It may even be one of the principal motivations behind a lifetime of work. But there is something unsettling about the possibility that the freedom of one generation might increasingly depend upon the assets accumulated by the generation before it. We should not assume that this is happening without evidence, nor should we overlook the enormous improvements in prosperity and opportunity that have occurred since the medieval period. But if the capacity to choose one's future becomes increasingly dependent on inherited economic advantage, what does that mean for those who begin without it?

Perhaps history is not repeating itself. Perhaps its familiar patterns are finding expression through institutions and technologies that could scarcely have been imagined by those who came before us. And perhaps the task is not to give this emerging system an old name, but to understand what is taking shape in our own time.

References

Boileau, B. and Sturrock, D. (2023) Who gives and receives substantial financial transfers in Britain? IFS Working Paper 23/08. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. https://ifs.org.uk/publications/who-gives-and-receives-substantial-financial-transfers-britain

High Pay Centre (2026) Gap between the pay of FTSE 100 CEOs and UK workers the widest for 8 years. 24 July. https://highpaycentre.org/gap-between-the-pay-of-ftse-100-ceos-and-uk-workers-the-widest-for-8-years/

Office for National Statistics (2025) Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2020 to March 2022. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/totalwealthingreatbritain/april2020tomarch2022

Office for National Statistics (2026) Housing affordability in England and Wales: 2025. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/housingaffordabilityinenglandandwales/2025

Literary and historical works

Caro, R.A. (1982) The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Tuchman, B.W. (1978) A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.