Everyone learns in school that feudalism was a brutal system that produced terrible human misery. And it’s true. Lords and nobles controlled the land, and the people who lived on it – serfs – were forced to render tribute to them in the form of rents, taxes, tithes and unpaid labour. But contrary to our dominant narratives, it wasn’t the rise of capitalism that put an end to this system. That victory belongs, remarkably enough, to a courageous struggle fought by a long tradition of everyday revolutionaries who have for some reason been almost entirely forgotten.
