The first thing we should recognize about the term feudalism is that it was never used during the Middle Ages. The term was first established in 16th-17th-century by intellectuals to define a political system of several hundred years earlier. This makes "feudalism" a post-medieval concept. There 's nothing inherently wrong with hypotheses. This helps us understand strange ideas in terms more familiar to our modern thought processes. The phrases "Middle Ages" and "medieval" are theories themselves. Medieval people didn 't think of themselves as living in a middle age, they thought they were living in the now, just like we do. Most historians are confident that the use of the words "middle ages" and "medieval" is to describe the period of