Fairy tales are among the most significant, influential and important pieces of literature. John Ross examines the legends of King Arthur.
Any story which is told literally millions of times, continues to exist for a long period, and circulates among enormous numbers of people, must touch something very deep in human minds, and express something very significant about a society. This is also the case with myths of other sorts, as well as great works of literature that are read and performed over long periods.
The legends of King Arthur — most recently retold in last year's John Boorman film Excalibur — must have originated some time before the earliest versions to have come down to us, which date from around the year 600 AD. The last major collection of the legends as current literature, as opposed to conscious antiquarianism, was Thomas Malory's version published by Caxton in 1485.
So these stories were repeated and developed over 900 years — significantly more than twice the time which separates us from Shakespeare, and considerably longer than the time since major bourgeois literature began with Dante in 14th century Florence. The legends also had an extensive geographical spread. Versions of the tales, with significant extensions and reworkings, come from Britain, France and Germany. Together with the not dissimilar legends of Roland and El Cid, they constitute the most widely repeated literature of feudal Europe.
The legends also changed significantly over time, from the earliest versions in which Arthur is simply a battle lord who slaughters large numbers of his enemies, to the elaborate and overtly mystical 13th century French Lancelot, the equally mystical but very different 12th and early 13th century German Parsifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach or Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, to the solid, almost 'realist' final version of Malory.
To study such a universal literature not only tells us a great deal about feudalism. It can also give us insight into many key questions for Marxism, such as the relationship between biological and social elements in human behaviour, into the idea that 'human nature cannot change', into the ways that human relations are lived in different societies, and into how objective social structures are internalised into value systems.
To understand the framework of the Arthurian legends we must consider the society in which it was produced. Feudalism was above all a militarised society. Land was distributed to lords who had the right to their own armed force — one of feudalism's unique features. Within that system, for almost its whole history, the decisive military weapon was heavy cavalry — the knight. The peasant producers, typically serfs, existed to supply the food and other needs of these forces. As the amount of land a lord possessed determined how many knights he could support, expansion of territory possessed was the key to power, and the aim of war.
Moreover, feudal Europe for most of its history was besieged by the military forces of alien social-economic formations; tribal invasions from the east, Moslem Arabs from the south, Ottoman Turks from the south east. This enhanced the military aspect of feudal society and created shock forces such as the Teutonic knights of eastern Germany, to fight against forces coming from present-day Russia, and those used in the wars to reconquer Spain from the Arabs. These social features were naturally reflected in its ideology, political theory, and its literature.
The ideological cement of this feudal society was medieval Catholic Christianity. The hierarchical pyramid of the Church reflected that of feudal society. At the top was God, below him the Pope, then the bishops, the lesser and local priests, monasteries and convents, down to the ordinary Christian people. Political and religious orders were explicitly interlinked, the Pope speaking in the name of God, and the twin pillars of Papacy and Holy Roman Empire as the dominating powers of the European feudal order. Reality, needless to say, was more complex, but this was the ideal picture of feudalism and was that expounded by its philosophers and writers.
Needless to say, any notion of popular sovereignty and democracy was not only absent but inconceivable and downright dangerous. The whole system was a well-ordered hierarchy. The two great personifications of evil in this system, as faithfully portrayed in Dante's Inferno, were therefore Judas Iscariot, who had betrayed the Son of God, and Brutus and Cassius, who had rebelled against Caesar.
Finally, and crucially, feudalism knew that it had developed out of a previous system of chaos, in the invasions following the decline of the Roman Empire. It constantly faced external military threats, as well as recurrent internal wars created by its decentralised military structure. The threat of chaos and disorder was therefore ever present and explains the great prominence in its mythology of those figures, and above all the emperor Charlemagne, who had created feudal stability out of the preceding disorder.
From this it is easy to see the first key elements of the Arthurian legends — the pulling of the sword from the stone, the sword Excalibur itself, Arthur's struggle to establish his kingdom, and the Round Table of knights. All the key figures of medieval legend were knights — the most admired military element that was the lynchpin of feudal society. Furthermore they were typically engaged in what were seen as the most decisive struggles — those against the non-Christian, and therefore non-feudal, threats to Europe.
Thus Roland, the great vassal and hero of Charlemagne is killed in the struggle against the Arabs in Spain, Similarly El Cid is portrayed as the great knight involved in the reconquest of Spain from the same Arabs. Thus these great hero figures received both secular and religious approval — secular because they were defending Europe against non-feudal threats and religious because they were defending Christianity against the Infidel. Arthur shares similar origins. Historically he was probably a west British local Celtic warlord who defeated the pagan Saxon invaders around the beginning of the sixth century and for a period held off their incursions into England.
From this flows the central feature of the Arthur legend. He is portrayed in the earliest versions chiefly as a successful, bloodthirsty king and knight who smashed the enemies of his kingdom, which is shown as of the feudal type.
As Arthur becomes the symbolic figure of a feudal king so he must have ascribed to him all the virtues that go with the position. He becomes wise, generous to his feudal underlings, and all powerful in battle. This theme is taken up for example by Malory. Faced with the collapse of feudal stability in the civil 'Wars of the Roses' in England in the 15th century, Malory invokes the legend of Arthur as the great symbol of feudal stability — the need for a strong feudal king to restore order and tranquility.
This is also the source of the legend that Arthur will 'come again'. For a society beset with periodic tendencies to disintegration, outrageous and inept monarchs, and epochs of disorder, Arthur is the symbol that the 'good days' of feudalism will be restored. Rather as the 'second coming' of Christ is the hope of Christianity so the myth that Arthur 'is not dead' but will 'come again', which is central in all the developed versions of the legend, represents the hope of restoration of stability of the feudal order.
The knight
From this social structure comes the second great common element of the original Arthur legends and of all similar medieval heroes. Under capitalism great virtues corresponding to its competitive structures are supposed to be such things as 'rising to the top', office boys becoming millionaires, triumphant assertions of individualism, etc. Thus the announcement of capitalism in literature and art is always expressed in great affirmations of individual human power or beauty — for example the hero of such a play as Marlowe's Tamburlaine, a figure such as Michelangelo's David. Such assertions of individualism are not possible in feudalism however. Indeed they are positively dangerous to the social hierarchy and are therefore abhorrent. The great virtue in feudalism is therefore negation of individualism and above all loyalty to the king, Lord, or Pope. All the great figures of the feudal legends are therefore displayed as quite unprecedentedly loyal and self-abnegating in relation to their own king even where they possess personal pride. In addition to Roland and the Cid, Hagen in the Nibelungenlied is another example of a supremely loyal vassal. We will see the same elements in others of the Arthur legends below. In return for unswerving and uncompromising submission and loyalty, the king in turn is bountiful, generous and merciful.
Out of this system arise not merely the individual features of the Arthurian knights but the [illegible] myth of the Round Table, another common element in all major versions. Arthur is king, although not [illegible] by virtue of all recognised rights of feudal [illegible], power, and by being chosen of God. These are joined in the great symbol of his power common to all versions, and the inevitable symbol of power: in feudalism as the instrument of military might, the sword Excalibur. He draws this from a stone when no-one else can — the sign of appointment by God. He uses it in the struggle to defeat all those who dispute his claim to the title — thus establishing himself as the most suitable, because greatest, knight and military power to occupy the throne. After this however his military strength, and goodness and wisdom as a king, establishes feudal stability — with freedom from the threat of civil war. These knights are then portrayed as embodiments of different aspects of feudal virtue, including loyalty, in a series of heroic episodes.
The first part of the Arthur myths therefore portray feudalism's perfected image of itself. Out of chaos and disorder [illegible] loyalty to the ranks above them, and in return beneficient charity exist. All this is blessed by God. In all a perfected expression of the quintessence of feudalism — so perfect that it would almost be possible to 'decode' the entire nature of the society from these stories without any other knowledge of its structure.
No wonder that they provided such a common language of medieval society, a sort of common framework from which endless variations could be developed. Not through the work of any one single genius, but through repetition literally millions of times, with each retelling and subtracting elements until the final finished forms were arrived at, a society reflected in its legends a perfected image of its own structures. It is one of the most supreme examples of production of an ideology in a cultural form that can be studied.
If they remained at this level of their first nucleus however, the portrayal of perfected feudal society, the Arthur legends would probably be of little interest to us today except in an historical sense of the study of the society which produced them. But feudalism faced not only external but also internal enemies — above all the rise of capitalism. As they developed therefore, the Arthur legends, the critical literary reflection of feudalism itself, became increasingly absorbed with the struggle of feudal society to defend itself against the bourgeois order that was disintegrating it internally. From the early heroic glories of his rise the Arthur legends became increasingly absorbed with his end — the death of Arthur and the collapse of his kingdom. In these the internal representation of how feudalism conceptualised the forces destroying it comes to the fore.
It is around these stories that the second representative set of the Arthur legends are created — not only the famous death of Arthur himself, but the great romances of Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, and the quest for the Holy Grail (the Parsifal/Galahad legends). These provide not only [illegible] of the great love [illegible] of feudalism and capitalism but even, via William Morris and his The Defence of Guinevere, pass into a framework of thought which becomes socialist. In order to understand these legends and their significance however we have to go back and look at other features of feudal society which flowed from its basic structure — above all its portrayal of relations between men and women in its upper classes. It should be noted that this second cycle of Arthur legends only appears long after the original series — at the beginning of the great feudal crisis of the late 12th/early 13th centuries.
Sex, love and marriage in feudal society
In order to illustrate this second series of legends we will briefly outline the features of sexual love under feudalism and capitalism. The need for sexuality is obviously a biological element present in all human society. Any account of historical materialism which ignores that, and believes it is simply 'social' and 'ideological' has to explain why human society has succeeded in surviving for more than about fifty years. The forms in which this need is expressed differ immensely from society to society. The idea that there is one eternal form of human emotion expressed in 'love', leading to one man one wife plus 2.4 children and stable mortgage, can be held only by those bourgeois who have never bothered to study more than about four hundred years of west European civilisation out of the context of nearly one million years of humanity and its entire world-wide society.
The subjective living of these 'sexual' and other emotions, [illegible] the most brief, and necessarily incomplete, outline of the portrayal of these emotions and their significance in the feudal ruling classes will illustrate this point. It is also necessary for understanding the second cycle of the Arthur legends.
In their treatment of love, sex and marriage feudal and capitalist society stand in radical opposition to each other. Its precisely individual nature means that capitalism exalts as one of its supreme ideals individual 'romantic' human sexual love. This provides a crucial ideological expression of its individualist values (unashamed thirst for money scarcely being a subject to celebrate given its only too clear consequences!) Furthermore this principle of individual sexual romantic love is unique to capitalism compared to preceding societies — in slave society women were simply objects, in the most literal sense, for [illegible] and pushed out of all public life. Feudalism had different organising principles of sexual relations which we discuss below.
This value of individual romantic love is therefore advanced as a great positive theme by capitalism, one of its 'warm' 'progressive' universal values against the harshness of society, and its most frequently discussed element in literature (something not at all true for example in feudal or tribal society). Although the forms changed and developed with time (tending to become more and more unrestrained) sympathy is completely placed in favour of the individuals in love. Furthermore as it develops to its finalised and morally sanctioned form, overcoming the early tendency to unrestrained celebration of sensuality, the perfect expression of love is portrayed as consummation in marriage (prevention of this in various forms constituting a great tragedy, frustration or source of displaced inspiration). The goal of the bourgeois love form is therefore that one man loves one woman. This is expressed in sexuality and marriage, and these are portrayed as integrated in the expression of the bourgeois principle of individualism.
Feudalism's structure was necessarily totally different in both upper and lower classes — although here we can deal only with the upper. The principle of accumulation of power was possession of the largest possible landed property so as to be able to deploy the maximum possible armed force. Marriage was a crucial instrument in this. By marriage landed estate, even kingdoms, could be joined, and the loyalty of favour of those below or above secured through territory. The last thing that feudal marriage was based on therefore was emotion, or sexual attachment. It was totally irrelevant to the goal of marriage and was treated as such. Not infrequently the man and woman would not even have seen each other before the marriage, 'couples' were married before they were five years old, and grotesque disparities in age were permitted. For example in the famous case of Don Carlos, portrayed in the play of the same name by Schiller which is itself a study of the opposition of feudalism to capitalism, Elizabeth, princess of France, was engaged to the son of King Phillip II of Spain and then due to diplomatic needs was suddenly married to his father instead! Naturally except by pure chance, and therefore extremely infrequently, human emotional, sexual relations were not produced, or needed, in such a situation.
This was reinforced by the whole social system arranged around such marriages. The husband and wife in the richest layers, notably the kings and high nobility, would maintain separate households, not necessarily even geographically in the same place, and meet infrequently — the chief purpose being to ensure the production of heirs. The concepts of 'love' and 'marriage' therefore, far from being integrated as under capitalist value systems, were necessarily totally separated in feudalism.
Naturally this system did not prevent sexual attraction, and all the other elements making up an emotion of 'love'. It simply meant it was quite separate from marriage and had different forms. Therefore in feudal literature, in polar opposite to capitalism, romantic love is always portrayed as outside, and incompatible with, marriage. Marriage is made for land, and love necessarily finds its expression elsewhere.
This emotional system produced by the basic feudal structure was furthermore integrated with another element — the idea of 'courtly' (non-sexual and non-married) love. This concept, which occupies a vast range of feudal literature, cannot exist in capitalism but plays a key function for feudal ideology. At its social level a knight would take a women, normally the wife of a great lord, as his official and openly acknowledged 'inspiration'. This played an evident role as a supplementary (although probably not crucial) ideological current of a great noble tying his vassals to him. Thus for example in the Arthur legends Lancelot, who together with Tristan is portrayed as the greatest of the purely human knights of the Round Table, is both the champion (personal representative in combat) of Arthur and had as his official inspiration Guinevere, the wife of Arthur.
This whole system is of course extremely alien and appears ultra artificial, to present (capitalist) concepts. A feudal knight was integrated into three systems of relations in adulthood with women — marriage (no love and infrequent sex without passion), courtly love (love but no sex and no marriage), sexual relations (no marriage, love being optional). Although it appears strange to present day ideas, this system must not be regarded at all cynically, or concieved of as not involving deep emotions and intense human personal experiences. Ideology is not something superficial and external but experienced, lived and profoundly believed in. The emotional and ideological systems of feudalism are alien to present ideas but could be, and were, lived with the same depth and intensity as any contemporary one. Furthermore they just as much expressed, and condensed, profound elements of expression of the nature of the social structure as do present bourgeois ones.
From even this brief outline it can be seen how the feudal and bourgeois concepts of individual romantic love contradicted and confronted each other. They therefore were expressions of entire different systems of values and therefore different social structures. The celebration of individual sexual human love could be used as a great banner and expression of the bourgeois order precisely because, together of course with other things, it was totally in contradiction with the feudal order and its system of values.
It is therefore not surprising to find that each period of upsurge of nascent or developing capitalism within feudalism portrays in the forefront the individual principle of human sexual love. The first great announcement of this, although still within a feudal form, comes with the development of the Troubador movement within the highly developed area of southern France. This is the first recognisable, although not developed, embryonic bourgeois art.
Finally as each society enters its period of bourgeois employment within feudalism it announces this in an outburst of material glorifying not only the much more concrete portrayal of human beings, and the gigantic 'personalities' typical of bourgeois individualism, but also romantic love as an ideal. Thus for example the work of the first great capitalist author, Dante, is openly inspired and dominated by his love for Beatrice. Elizabethan and early Stuart England sees the open sexuality of the poetry of Donne and the most famous of all bourgeois love stories in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and in Germany the great thunderclap announcing the mass advent of bourgeois literature is Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther in which a young man kills himself for love.
What is glorified for capitalism however is anathema and must be struggled against for feudalism. This latter social system has no place within its structure for individual romantic love consummated in sexuality — it is in contradiction to its entire organising principles. What capitalism portrays as a supreme human relationship must be rooted out by feudalism as an embodiment of the ultimate sin of individualism.
Within this framework we can see the ambiguities and tensions of the feudal concept of courtly love — the key to the later development of the Arthur legend. According to this system the knight was allowed to develop and express the most extreme sentiments of romantic love towards his 'lady'. Accounts of knights dying in combat, undertaking tasks of extreme arduousness and anger for love of their chivalrous female object, are frequent and there is no reason whatever to doubt the intensity of the sentiments — as we said ideology is always internalised and lived with real and not imaginery passion. Despite the [illegible] permitted, and even required for an effective ideological bond to the lord, actual sexual relations were absolutely excluded. These would have totally disorganised and disrupted the system — as always the goal of the family is to maintain the preservation of property and supply heirs which embody it. Sexual relations (for the women) outside marriage were incompatible with this need and with the stability of feudal values. The system was thus in total contradiction to bourgeois concepts in which the drive of individual romantic sexual love finds its goal and logical culmination in real sexual relations and marriage based on emotion. In the fields of its emotional and sexual relations and values the principles of capitalism and feudalism therefore stand in complete opposition to each other and as bearers of quite different systems of social relations. They can be, and therefore are used to express, the conflicts of the entire value systems of society.
Lancelot and Guinevere
Within this framework the nature of the core elements of the second cycle of Arthur legends can be understood. Its key episode is the love and sexual relation of Lancelot and Arthur's wife Guinevere. This is the nucleus around which all the other episodes are organised and which precipitates the downfall of Arthur's kingdom and his own end.
In order to understand the significance of this romance it is necessary to grasp that Lancelot and Tristan, who is the bearer of a parallel myth, are portrayed as the greatest embodiments of feudal virtue. Thus for example in his version Malory has Merlin prophesy the prospect of 'the greatest battle betwixt two knights that ever was or ever shall be ... And there Merlin wrote their names upon the tomb with letters of gold that should fight in that place, whose names were Launcelot de Lake, and Tristram.' Furthermore Lancelot's, which is the core legend, is at the centre of the entire feudal system in his portrayed position. He is the greatest knight, the appointed champion of his King Arthur, and his lady is Guinevere, the wife of the king. In relations Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere is therefore portrayed the core elements of feudal society. Lancelot's and Guinevere's love breaking out of the bounds of purely chivalrous love, and [illegible] unleashes civil war, culminates in the [illegible] Arthur and the destruction of his kingdom.
The symbolic nature of this history, the counterpositions of feudal and individualist forms of love, first makes its appearance in the 11th century — the earliest surviving version being that of Chretien de Troves in his Lancelot. From this point on it is developed at enormous length in the Arthur legends — in the final versions, such as the French prose Lancelot, enormously surpassing in length the original stories of Arthur himself. Parallel with this development, and necessarily so, the struggle of feudalism to defend itself, and to maintain its values against the totally different value system represented by the relation of Lancelot and Guinevere becomes more and more extremely expressed. By the time of the French prose Lancelot of the 13th century, it becomes completely tedious from a purely literary point of view. Virtually every five pages in the Queste del Saint Grale some ascetic hermit or other pops up to explain at extreme length, and with extreme violence, the virtues of chastity, and the need to reject sexuality in all forms.
This story of the decline of the feudal virtues in Lancelot and Guinevere (the 'negative' version) therefore also begets its inverse (the 'positive' one) in the search for the Holy Grail — the cup from which Christ drank at the last supper. This incorporates the supreme affirmed virtues of feudalism in loyalty, honour, and service to God in an even stronger form than the original Arthur legends. Not surprisingly therefore, the price for achieving this quest is the renunciation of sexuality (the capitalist principle and virtue) and the essential requirement for the knight who achieves this supreme task of feudalism is therefore chastity. Indeed, where the early histories of this legend, for example Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal, show a figure of considerable psychological interest, the final versions, where the hero becomes Sir Galahad, portray a figure of such sublime purity and inhuman character that he appears tedious even for the authors who in fact simply leave him out of most of the story.
This conflict also explains why in the successive versions of the legends interest is increasingly displaced from Arthur himself, or Galahad, on to the knights — and in particular Lancelot and Tristan. Arthur himself is a relatively static symbol (of feudal perfection), as is Galahad (of Christian purity). Lancelot and Tristan however, wracked by the contradictions of different social and emotional principles and systems, undergo immense developments and are of enormous psychological interest. It is also for the same reason that Morris could choose as his early poem collection title 'The Defence of Guinevere' — a defence of the principle of human emotion and love against the austere features and rules of feudalism and also in his interpretation of capitalism.
Finally, we can clearly see why it is precisely the love of Guinevere and Lancelot, a theme introduced only in the second phase of development of the Arthur legends, that provides the key link in feudalism's vision of its own destruction. The perfect feudal kingdom is overthrown not by external destruction but by the development of forces internally dissolving its principles — the principles of individualism and its supreme manifestation in individual human love. It is this which creates the great cataclysm of La Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur). The supremely powerful feudal order, impervious to external attack, is destroyed by forces developing in its own very core.
No wonder the frenzy of the hermits preaching the need for chastity to maintain the ordered hierarchy and values of feudalism in a final effort to hold off the dissolving order! No story for children this, but a social order's vision of its own destruction.
It can therefore be seen how the Arthur legends, starting with the most primitive versions of stories, are built to organise around the key common elements of their legends the entire history of a society, not merely its birth and flowering but also its end — and finally of course the pathetic hope that it will one day 'rise again' in Arthur himself. Little wonder these stories could dominate literature for 900 years and give rise to an endless variety of development, ornamentation and extension.
In conclusion:
In the space available here we have only been able to touch on a tiny part of the wealth of the Arthur stories — some of those that reflect essentially specific elements of feudalism itself and its contrast to our present values in capitalism. There are, as with all great works of art, innumerable more layers than this however. For example while distinctly different to our present family the feudal order precisely did have as one of its constitutive elements a family. Therefore a whole series of other elements of the legends are concerned with this — stories and themes that are common to all class society and some of which are explored in Freudian psycho-analysis, and the Oedipal complex. Thus a whole series of the heroes — Arthur himself, Lancelot, Tristan — are precisely without fathers and from this derives their supreme fearlessness and power. A whole series of other themes derive from the conflict in all society to the present between the social duty and emotional needs of the figures and individuals in it — a theme beautifully dealt with by Boorman in his film in Guinevere's parting words to Arthur: 'I loved you always as King and sometimes as husband' — and the great inner struggle of Lancelot between his honour as a knight and his love for Guinevere. But to explore these themes would take another long article of its own.
One thing however we hope to convey here. Next time you see a representation of Arthur and his knights on the television, see a film on them, or pick up a book pay a little more respect and perhaps interest. These are no silly stories of 'knights in armour'. They are one of the great creations of world culture. A literature in its own way every much as deep, even if very different, to anything produced by our own age. In the story of the boy who pulled the sword from the stone is the birth, life and death of a whole society and the immense human passion and struggle that went with it. No wonder those legends lived for so long and still exercise a fascination, even if harder to understand today: a story of infinite fascination for Marxists.
JOHN ROSS is a leading member of the Fourth International, currently working on a book on the Tory Party for Pluto Press.
1 See Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment — The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Penguin Books, London, 1979.
2 For an extremely interesting and classic study of myths see Abraham; Dreams and Myths, Maresfield Reprints, London, 1979.
3 For an account of the origins of the Arthur legends see for example Cavendish; King Arthur and the Grail, Paladin, London, 1980.
4 The classic analysis of feudalism is Bloch; Feudal Society, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1978. For a recent theoretical study see Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State, New Left Books, London, 1974.
5 See for example Barber; The Knight and Chivalry, Cardinal, London, 1974.
6 See for example Ullmann; Medieval Political Thought, Penguin, London, 1970.
7 Thus Engels notes in the Chanson de Roland 'the portrayal of, "the unity of France, represented in the person of Charlemagne, an imaginary, ideal feudal monarchy, is celebrated in this chanson."' Marx and Engels: On Literature and Art, Progress publishers, Moscow, 1976, p231.
8 In the words ascribed to his tomb 'Rex quondam Rexque futurus' — the 'once and future king'. It is a theme incidently given an interesting twist later under capitalism when it became distorted to that Arthur will come again when Britain has need of him. Here however a profound piece of feudal mythology has been transformed into a vulgar chauvinist piece of idiocy.
9 This point incidently is rather worth making against the sillier types of so-called Freudian interpretations. Evidently a sword is a phallic symbol but have you ever tried waging a medieval war with a short, round, unpointed sword? Far more important in certain key symbols is their social nature and function — which does not of course prevent them being combined with various other psychological symbolisms.
10 This relation between conscious medievalism and early socialism is of course brilliantly explored in EP Thompson's entire William Morris, Merlin, London, 1976.
11 The 'lower orders' needless to say do not enter into the story in the legends of feudalism. However sex, love and marriage were equally experienced very differently among the rest of the population in feudalism than in capitalism. See for a survey of this M Anderson; Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500-1914, MacMillan, London, 1980.
12 This is of course a key point explored correctly by Kollontai and others. Unfortunately her best writings on this are not available in English but see Kollontai; Conferences sur la Liberation des Femmes, La Breche, Paris, 1979.
13 Anyone who does not understand that should firstly consider the depth of their own emotions in purely bourgeois concepts of 'love', and consider not how merely the working class but tens of thousands of sons of the bourgeoisie advanced armed with pathetic weapons to 'die for their country' in a conflict such as the First World War.
14 It is furthermore no accident that the French name for the perfected bourgeois literary form the novel ('roman'), derives from the same root as 'romantic' and begins to develop out of the sexualisation of the stories of feudalism during the 12th century.