INDIAN FEUDALISM 17 It is not necessary to posit diffusion of tribal society although this may have taken place in certain cases. Although feudalism does not seem to be as universal as tribalism, in the Old World it was undoubtedly more widespread than the slave system. The concept of peasant society is still in a nebulous state. But if peasant society means a system in which the orders of priests and warriors live on the surplus produced by peasants and augmented by the activities of the artisans, such a society existed in a good part of the Old World. Tribalism, peasant society or slave system could originate due to internal or external fcctors or due to both. Similarly it is not necessary to think in terms of the diffusion of the feudal system, although this happened in certain cases. For instance, the Norman feudalism in England was a result of the Norman conquest. The Essence of Feudalism But just as there could be enormous variations in tribal society so also there could be enormous variations in the nature of feudal societies. It is rightly stated by Marx that feudalism "assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession".3 But certain universals remain the same. This is admitted even by critics of Indian feudalism who think of the variants of feudalism.4 Feudalism has to be seen as a mode of the distribution of the means of production and of the appropriation of the surplus. It may have certain broad universal features and it may have certain traits typical of a territory. Obviously land and agricultural products play a decisive role in pre-capitalist class societies, but the specific situation about land distribution and the appropriation of agricultural products will differ from region to region. It could be nobody's argument that what developed in pre-capitalist Western Europe was found in India and elsewhere. Historical laws, as far as they are known, do not work in this manner, nor could one say that feudalism was the monopoly of Western Europe. It is not possible to have any neat, cut and dried formula about feudalism. The most one could say about the universals of feudalism could be largely on the lines of Marc Bloch and E K Kosminsky.5 Feudalism appears in a predominantly agrarian economy which is characterised by a class of landlords and a class of servile peasantry. In this system the landlords extract surplus through social, religious or political methods, which are called extra-economic. This seems to be more or less the current Marxist view of feudalism, which considers serfdom, 'scalar property' and 'parcellised sovereignty' as features of the West European version of the feudal system. The lord-peasant relationship is the core of the matter, and the exploitation of the estate by its owner, controller, enjoyer or beneficiary as its essential ingredient. With these minimum universals, feudalism may have severel variations. The particularities of the system in some W^st European countries do not apply to the various types of feudalism