What's the difference between feudalism and caste system?

[WarKitty]

I'm working on some stuff for fantasy world generation, and I was wondering if there was a meaningful in principle difference between a feudal system and a caste system. Obviously the history worked out differently, but the system where your social rank was effectively determined by birth (and generally believed to be part of the natural order) seems to be pretty much the same.

[GloatingSwine]

I'm working on some stuff for fantasy world generation, and I was wondering if there was a meaningful in principle difference between a feudal system and a caste system. Obviously the history worked out differently, but the system where your social rank was effectively determined by birth (and generally believed to be part of the natural order) seems to be pretty much the same.

Feudalism only encompasses the relationships between kings and landed nobles.

If you didn't own land you were just a geographical feature as far as the feudal contract was concerned.

Caste systems tend to include a wider range of people and reach much further down society.

[Vinyadan]

To put it down shortly, you don't need feudalism for a caste system, and you don't need a caste system for feudalism.

Feudalism is a way to administer a territory. A fief, which literally meant "immovable good", is a piece of territory given to someone to administer. This someone, however, could give the fief to its descendants, which made him part of a caste. It's worth nothing that this didn't really need to happen - a beneficium was the same thing as a fief but it belonged to the Church instead of the temporal ruler, and it could be given to any priest; it was forbidden for a priest's son to be the later holder of the beneficium, even if this son had later become a priest (which BTW was also forbidden).

As I see it, a caste system is closed and immutable. The most extreme form I know of is with families bound to a certain profession. You aren't getting out of it, you'll be what you were born, and the same for your kids.

The feudal system was a class system more than a caste system, because there was some mobility, especially in the Church, although the difference between commoner and noble was there and usually couldn't be filled. The three classes were commoners, nobles and churchmen, also known as workers (laboratores), fighters (bellatores) and people who prayed (oratores). A class with mobility developed itself autonomously as the bourgeois, who functioned independently from the feudal system in which they lived.

[Grey Watcher]

...

The feudal system was a class system more than a caste system, because there was some mobility, especially in the Church, although the difference between commoner and noble was there and usually couldn't be filled. The three classes were commoners, nobles and churchmen, also known as workers (laboratores), fighters (bellatores) and people who prayed (oratores). A class with mobility developed itself autonomously as the bourgeois, who functioned independently from the feudal system in which they lived.

I think the difference in economic mobility is a big distinguishing feature (although if someone here has a proper academic degree in such matters, please correct me). In a caste system, it's a pretty significant taboo to have children with someone outside of your native caste, much, much moreso than merely having a child out of wedlock or sleeping with the enemy. In a feudal system, having kids with someone not of your rank is not only accepted but very common practice as a means to improve your family's fortunes (either by marrying into a family higher up on the ladder or using it as a means to annex some land you want without the expense and uncertainty of a military campaign). Plus, to the best of my knowledge, it's (nearly?) impossible to cast someone out of their caste: even if you take away all of his soldiers and land and wealth and reduce him to nothing but the tattered clothes on his back, that guy is still kshatriya caste and (assuming he can prove it) is due appropriate respect. On the other hand, if you displease your superiors in a feudal system enough, they can just say "Right, you're not the Earl of Example anymore, she is. Pack up your things and get out of my castle before I decide you're trespassing, you filthy commoner."

Of course, all of this can be modified by factors technically outside the system (money, alliances, personal friendships/enemies, etc.), but hey, that's politics.

Oh, and, to my knowledge, there's never been a caste system where you can be two castes at once, but you CAN have multiple feudal titles, even of differing rank, though your highest one generally takes precedence in terms of how you're treated.

(Again, not an expert on such things, so I accept correction from those better educated in these matters.)

[Knaight]

Land has been mentioned a few times, and it's pretty key. A feudal system is a fundamentally rural system about distributing land, then the people who own that land redistributing the land below them, so on and so forth until you eventually get to the people who work the land (who might also own it). Then the network of people who all "own" the same land to varying degrees are attached together with a set of feudal obligations, which generally go both ways with a fairly dramatic skew such that the people in more power benefit.

A caste system meanwhile doesn't need to involve land at all, and is generally defined more by breaking people into different castes who can only do certain types of work, where intercaste interactions are generally highly formalized with only a few interactions being allowed - this is generally enforced by violence, and may or may not actually be rooted in law.

[Aedilred]

Speaking with my historian hat on, I think the general academic consensus would be that the feudal system is a retrospective academic construct of limited value, and what are considered caste systems are generally misconstructions based on observations by outsiders who don't understand what they're seeing. So it's a hard to answer a question about comparisons, because both concepts are pretty nebulous and increasingly insubstantial the more closely you look at them.

However I think the gist of what has been said so far - that inasmuch as "feudalism" can be considered a singular concept it's largely about managing land, while caste systems are about managing people - is broadly speaking accurate.

I do think it's worth noting that in both systems they are in some respects less hierarchical than a superficial glance at them, like those handy pyramid drawings you get in school textbooks, can make them appear. For instance, the top-down feudal structure in England, which is often taken as a model for the feudal system as whole (because of the Anglosphere) was actually pretty unusual in the form it took, was much more heavily centralised than almost anywhere else in Europe on the same geographical scale, and the administration of it owed more to the effectively pre-feudal conventions put in place by the Anglo-Danish monarchs than to the concept of feudalism supposedly introduced by Billy the Bastard. Everywhere else, it was a lot messier, and consisted in large part of a byzantine network of written and unwritten contracts, traditions and obligations which are so far removed from modern arrangements legally, constitutionally and politically that it's actually pretty hard to get one's head around even for specialists in the field.

You had instances like that in the south of France where the county of Toulouse was part of the kingdom of France but actually vassal to the king of Aragon, who was in turn a voluntary vassal of the Pope despite being just about the most powerful king in the west at that point, but Toulouse was also functionally independent prior to the Albigensian Crusade despite all these nominal obligations. Or the Emperor owning as his personal fief a few villages in northern Italy while theoretically being the liege lord of the whole of France and Germany, or the infamous situation where the king of England owned more of France than the king of France did but was still his vassal, or where the Duke or even the Count of Burgundy was significantly more powerful than the contemporaneous king of France despite being his subject. And these situations were, despite seeming bonkers, actually pretty much the norm; full appreciation of it likely required a degree of immersion in the society and probably in some arcane situations actual legal training.

From what I understand of the Indian caste system, and my understanding of it is much more limited, that is similarly complex.