What is feudalism? (need a short paragraph)

There is no commonly accepted modern definition of feudalism, at least among scholars. The adjective feudal was coined in the 17th century, and the noun feudalism, often used in a political and propaganda context, was not coined until the 19th century, from the French féodalité (feudality), itself an 18th-century creation.

According to a classic definition by François-Louis Ganshof (1944), feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations which existed among the warrior nobility and revolved around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs, though Ganshof himself noted that his treatment was only related to the "narrow, technical, legal sense of the word".

A broader definition, as described in Marc Bloch's Feudal Society (1939), includes not only the obligations of the warrior nobility but the obligations of all three estates of the realm: the nobility, the clergy, and those who lived off their labor, most directly the peasantry which was bound by a system of manorialism; this order is often referred to as a "feudal society", echoing Bloch's usage.

Outside its European context, the concept of feudalism is often used by analogy, most often in discussions of feudal Japan under the shōguns, and sometimes in discussions of the Zagwe dynasty in medieval Ethiopia, which had some feudal characteristics (sometimes called "semifeudal"). Some have taken the feudalism analogy further, seeing feudalism (or traces of it) in places as diverse as China during the Spring and Autumn period, ancient Egypt, the Parthian empire, the Indian subcontinent and the Antebellum and Jim Crow American South. Wu Ta-k'un argued that China's fengjian, being kinship-based and tied to land which was controlled by a king, was entirely distinct from feudalism. This despite the fact that in translation fengjian is frequently paired in both directions with feudal.