Given the generosity of ‘Closure Theory and Medieval England’, Scott Waugh’s review of my English Society in the Later Middle Ages, it may seem churlish to quarrel with some of his specific comments.footnote1 Many of the criticisms which he makes of my work are extremely valid but I was less happy with his general characterization of the relationship between the Weberian ‘closure theory’ used in my book and Marxist social theory. Since this is the issue raised in Waugh’s review which is perhaps of most interest to readers of this journal, I will offer a brief reply to his comments.

Following the neo-Weberian social theory developed by Runciman and by Parkin,footnote2 my book attempted to analyze medieval English society in terms of its specific social ‘systacts’ (categories of persons who, by virtue of their roles, share a common endowment or lack of economic, coercive or ideological power) and the relations of social exclusion (the process by which a group obtains a privileged position for itself through the creation of a group of inferiors) and social usur-pation (the attempt by the inferiors to bite into the privileges of their social superiors) which existed between them. As Scott Waugh points out,footnote3 my aims in analyzing later medieval English society were to establish the particular systacts created by the historically specific forms of social exclusion to be found in late medieval England; to assess the extent of the usurpationary closure mounted against such exclusion; to consider the extent of change in the forms of such exclusion during the late medieval period; and to offer an explanation of such change, including an assessment of the role of usurpationary closure in bringing it about.footnote4 For Waugh, this approach, along with my conclusion that social conflict was ‘a crucial determinant of social change’ in the later middle agesfootnote5 is ‘simply Marxist analysis in different clothing’ so that ‘It is not clear what, precisely, social closure explains about society and social change that cannot be discovered using Marxist analysis’. Thus, whilst it is ‘important to be sensitive’ to the problems and shortcomings of Marxism, ‘very little is gained by abandoning it’ in favour of the terminology of closure theory.footnote6

The problem here is that, far from advocating that Marxist class analysis be abandoned, Part I of English Society is actually devoted to an account of medieval society in which class relations are defined in terms of the Marxist typology developed by G.A. Cohen.footnote7 Far from seeking to abandon Marxism, my book explicitly claimed that Marx’s approach to class relations ‘can be subsumed into closure theory’.footnote8 It then goes on to offer an explicit defence of Robert Brenner’s Marxist critique of population-based accounts of late medieval social change and of his claim that demographic change acquired its significance for socio-economic development ‘only in connection with specific, historically developed systems of social-property relations and given balances of class forces’.footnote9 Thus, whilst I accept Professor Waugh’s extremely perceptive comment that my analysis tends, in general, to focus attention on conflict between social groups, ‘begging the question of how groups achieve internal coherence’,footnote10 this focus actually flowed from an acceptance of Marx and Engels’s claim that members of any particular social group are often ‘on hostile terms with each other as competitors’—a point which Waugh accepts for the nobilityfootnote11—and that they ‘form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class’.footnote12 Indeed, it might be noted that a Marxist analysis of the kind which I offered in Part I of English Society, in which classes are defined in terms of their relationship to society’s productive forces and to the product of social labour, might not be entirely compatible with Professor Waugh’s own claim that it was ‘military experience’, with its ‘emphasis on valour and martial ability’, which ‘decisively set apart’ the medieval English nobility and gentry from other social groups.footnote13