F IEFS AND V ASSALS A FTER

T WELVE Y EARS*

Susan Reynolds

T
he preoccupation with feudalism that led me to write Fiefs and Vassals
started when I read E. A. R. Brown’s article on ‘The Tyranny of a Con-
struct’ in the American Historical Review in 1974 and then Fredric L.
Cheyette’s introduction to Lordship and Community, which was published a year
later. After I met Peggy Brown in 1980 we planned for a while to write a book
together about the problem of feudalism but she had other work on hand so I
went ahead alone, though she read most, if not all, of my work in draft and made
a mass of useful criticisms. But my book in the end owed as much to Cheyette
because it may have been from his essay that I derived the idea of approaching the
subject, not through Brown’s wide look at the ideas behind the word feudalism
but through an investigation of the medieval evidence about fiefs and vassalage,
which medievalists have long taken as key institutions of what most of them
characterize as feudalism. Unfortunately, I am ashamed to say, Cheyette’s ideas
had sunk so completely into my mind that I failed to cite his essay in my book. I
have acknowledged this unconscious plagiarism since and hope my debt is now
paid, at least in part.
Concentrating on fiefs and vassals means that my book had a relatively narrow
scope: it was not intended to deal with Marxist feudalism,1 or indeed with

*
Parts of this essay repeat or paraphrase some sentences from Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval
Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) as well as later summaries of my
argument published in ‘Fiefs and Vassals in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem: A View from the West’,
Crusades, 1 (2003), 29–48, and ‘Fiefs and Vassals in Scotland: A View from Outside’, Scottish
Historical Review, 82 (2004), 176–93.
1
I make some attempt at that in ‘The Use of Feudalism in Comparative History’, in
16 Susan Reynolds

medieval society in general — kinship, religion, the economy, and so on — not

because I was not interested in any of these subjects but because the book was not
about them. One reviewer thought that this narrow focus meant that I was not a
social historian but an old-fashioned Verfassungshistorikerin, a British empiricist
uninterested in mentalities, communities, and group relations. I am certainly
British and if being an empiricist means that I try to use evidence, I can bear the
label. But so far as collective values and activities are concerned, it was, in fact,
earlier work for my book on Kingdoms and Communities that had made me think
about the way that concentration on fiefholding and vassalage seemed to obscure
the importance of lay political ideas and especially of collectivities in medieval
society.2 Fiefs and Vassals was deliberately narrow. It also became increasingly
negative as, to my increasing surprise, I gradually found how scarce was the
medieval evidence, especially before the thirteenth century, for the concepts or
phenomena that modern medievalists characterize as noble fiefholding and
vassalage.
The central argument of Fiefs and Vassals was that neither the relationship
that medieval historians call vassalage nor the kind of property that they call fiefs
took their shape from the warrior society of the earlier Middle Ages. So far as I can
see, they owed it to the more bureaucratic governments and estate administra-
tions that developed from the twelfth century, and to the arguments of the pro-
fessional and academic lawyers who appeared alongside. Of particular importance in
this context were the arguments of twelfth-century north-Italian lawyers that were
collected in what came to be called the Libri feudorum or Consuetudines feudorum.
This collection became attached to the books of Roman law so that the vocabulary
of the texts was taken up by university-trained lawyers and thus percolated through
to the profession in general in Italy, France, Germany, and I think Spain, though not
England. What about Scandinavia? When did documents here begin to use the
vocabulary of fiefs and vassals that lawyers in other north European countries picked
up from the Libri feudorum?
In so far as some of the obligations and terminology that historians associate
with fiefs are to be found in the French, German, Italian, and English sources

Explorations in Comparative History, ed. by Benjamin Z. Kedar ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University

Magnes Press, 2009), pp. 191–217.
2
Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe 900–1300 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984; 2nd edn with new introduction, 1997). On mentalities: ‘Social Men-
talities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser.,
1 (1991), 20–41.
FIEFS AND VASSALS AFTER TWELVE YEARS 17

from before the twelfth century that I have used, they are found chiefly in
documents that record the relations of great churches with their tenants. This
may be partly because so much of our information about the earlier period comes
from records preserved by churches, but I argued, and still believe, that the
relations of bishops or abbots with their tenants were significantly different from
relations between kings and lay nobles, or between the nobles and their own
followers. Although we have less evidence about the property of laymen apart
from what they held as tenants of churches, we have enough to show that the
rights and obligations attached to land do not seem to have generally derived from
grants of land in return for military service, while such evidence as we have of
political relations suggests that such relations were not based exclusively on
individual, interpersonal bonds. Before the twelfth century nobles and free men,
I maintain, did not generally owe military service because of the grant — or even
the supposed grant — to them or their ancestors of anything like fiefs. They seem
to have generally thought of their land, or most of it, as inherited family property
that they held with as full, permanent, and independent rights as their society
knew. Whatever service they owed to their kings or lords, they owed, not because
of individual personal contracts as vassals or tenants of a lord, but as what can
better be considered as property-owners, normally in rough proportion to their
status and wealth, because they were subjects of someone more like what in
general, non-‘feudal’ contexts might be called a ruler. The word subditus was used
more often, and vassus or vassalus much less often and less widely, in earlier
medieval texts than in modern works on medieval history.
The idea that the relations of vassalage and fiefholding dominated early
medieval politics can be traced back, not to sources from the period, but to the
academic lawyers and historians in the sixteenth century as their writings have
since been interpreted.3 Neither the great extension of knowledge nor the
elaboration of interpretations in the past two centuries seem to have led to serious
questioning of the fundamental importance of fiefholding and vassalage. As a
result, medieval historians have come to take fiefs and vassals so much for granted
that they have barely worried about the confusion of words, concepts, and
phenomena that seems to be involved in most discussions of the medieval forms
of property and political relations that the words supposedly denote. This
confusion seems sufficiently important to be discussed briefly in general terms.
The distinction between words, concepts, and phenomena has long been made by

3
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities (1997), pp. xiv–xxxv, sketches the historiography
very briefly.
18 Susan Reynolds

those who study language and meaning, as well as by at least one medieval
historian before me.4 It has sometimes been illustrated in a diagram like this:

concept or notion

word phenomenon

Different writers have used a variety of different words for the trio, but for my
limited purposes word, concept, and phenomenon seem the clearest.5 Different
languages use different words to denote the same thing, and in any one language
the same word may be used for many different things (for example, tables with
legs, tables as a way of setting out information in books) and may change its
meanings over time. To refer to ‘things’ may suggest physical objects, like tables,
but we also use words for other, more abstract entities, that I include in what I call
phenomena. By this I mean what the Oxford English Dictionary puts as its first
definition of the word phenomenon: ‘A thing that appears, or is perceived or
observed; an individual fact, occurrence, or change as perceived by any of the
senses, or by the mind: applied chiefly to a fact or occurrence, the cause or
explanation of which is in question.’6 In between the word and the phenomenon
comes something else: a concept or notion, however vague and unthought-out, that
we have in our minds when we say, write, or hear a word. A concept or notion may
remain the same irrespective of the particular word we choose but, at the same
time, different people may have rather different notions in their heads when they
use the same word or refer to the same phenomenon. Words are thus directly
related to concepts or notions, and concepts are directly related to phenomena,

4
Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand, ‘Historische Onomasiologie und Mittelalterforschung’, Früh-
mittelalterliche Studien, 9 (1975), 49–78.
5
Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: K. Paul,
Trench, Trubner, 1923), pp. 13–15; later discussions in, e.g., John Lyons, Semantics, 2 vols
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), I, 95–119, 175; Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 114–16.
6
Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, 20 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), II, 674.
FIEFS AND VASSALS AFTER TWELVE YEARS 19

but word and phenomenon are related only through concepts — what the people
using, hearing, or reading the word understand by them.
Historians who discuss what they call ‘the concept [or Begriff, concetto, etc.] of
the fief [or Lehen, feudo, etc.]’ often start by discussing the history of the words
feudum, feodum, fevum, etc., which are the Latin forms of the word generally
rendered in English as fief — except, paradoxically, in discussions of English law
and history, where fee is confusingly traditional. The words we translate as fief,
Lehen, feudo, etc. were used in a variety of contexts and senses in the Middle Ages,
so that they seem to relate to rather different phenomena — that is, to different
kinds of property entailing different rights and obligations. They therefore pre-
sumably reflected a variety of concepts or notions in the minds of those who used
them. None of these need have been the same as the notions in the minds of
historians who use the word now. The historian’s ‘concept of the fief’ as discussed
in modern works of history is a set of notions or theories about the essential
attributes of pieces of property that historians have defined as fiefs, though some
of them do not appear in the sources under any of the words that we translate as
fief. There is nothing wrong with starting from our own concept or notion, any
more than there is anything wrong with using our own words. It is, however, vital
to notice whether we are talking about our concept or theirs, or whether we are
really talking not about a concept at all, but about phenomena — that is, the
rights and obligations attached to what historians call fiefs. Even if one is
primarily interested in concepts or phenomena, it is vital to start by noticing the
words used, or not used, in the sources.
To make sense of the kind of property that historians call fiefs I decided that
I needed to compare its rights and obligations with the rights and obligations
attached to other property in the same society at the same time and also to
property in other societies, including our own. The word property is used here to
cover any objects (in this context mostly immovable) that are generally and/or
officially considered in a given society to belong to a person or persons. More
recent works about property in general and in different societies suggest that in
every society it carries some obligations, while rights in it are limited, if only by the
existence of some kind of legal system to define them and processes to adjudicate
about them. Rights in land are often shared and can be envisaged as coming in
layers — as do the rights in my apartment in London. In Fiefs and Vassals, rather
than relying on distinctions between words like ownership and tenure, allods and
fiefs, I therefore made a checklist of rights and obligations to avoid falling into the
trap of concentrating on one sort of right, such as inheritance, when looking at
20 Susan Reynolds

one sort of property and one sort of obligation, like liability to a particular sort of
service, when looking at another.7
What emerged was that, from the twelfth century on, the various forms of the
word fief seem to have come to be generally used for the property of nobles (except
in England, where it covered all free heritable property, including that of some
peasants). This use of the word was, so far as I could see, new. It did not, however,
to my surprise, apparently bring with it any general diminution of rights. It is true
that obligations, as distinct from rights, were being increased at much the same
time, since government was becoming more systematic and demanding, but, so far
as I could see, that does not seem to have been generally connected with a
deliberate change of categories. So far as military obligations are concerned, any
association with fiefs seems to have been at this stage vestigial. In France noble
fiefholders had no fixed obligations until military service to the crown was
formally imposed on them in the late thirteenth century. Even in England, from
which the model of feudal knight-service seems to have been derived, the word
feodum on its own had no connotation of military service: hence the expressions
feodum militis or feodum militare. Only in England and Sicily, of the areas
discussed in Fiefs and Vassals, did what the English call tenants in chief owe reliefs
and only in England did they owe what are called ‘feudal aids’. Reliefs, aids, and
other casualties or ‘feudal incidents’ seem to have been the product of increasingly
systematic government rather than survivals of an archaic vassalic bond.
As for vassalage, the word vassus or vassallus was used in the Carolingian
empire for lay servants of kings, lords, or churches, who served in armies and local
government, and might or might not hold bits of their lords’ lands. Neither then
nor in the next few centuries do great lords seem to have been called the king’s
vassals. In the quite rare references to vassals in eleventh- and twelfth-century
Latin sources from north of the Alps, the word does not generally seem to denote
fiefholders. By the twelfth century, however, it had come into use in French
vernacular literature to denote a warrior or valiant man, generally with no impli-
cations of relation to a lord.8 By the thirteenth century it was creeping back into
legal use in France to mean fiefholder, as a result of its use in that sense in some of
the mini-treatises that went to make up the twelfth-century Libri feudorum. Even

7
For my checklist: Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, pp. 53–57, and works about ideas of property
cited there.
8
Theo Venckeleer, ‘Faut-il traduire vassal par vassal?’, in Mélanges de linguistique, de
littérature et de philologie médiévales, offerts à J. R . Smeets (photog. typescript, Leiden, 1982),
pp. 303–16.
FIEFS AND VASSALS AFTER TWELVE YEARS 21

in the thirteenth century, however, it is modern historians, not contemporaries,

who use the terms les grands fiefs and les grands vassaux for the great lordships and
lords of the kingdom.9
Apart from the word, the concept of vassalage as a close affective relationship
between lord and man that bound medieval society together seems less prominent
in medieval sources than in the writings of medieval historians. My suspicions
about what seemed an overemphasis on what historians call vassalage were
strengthened by further work on it after the publication of Fiefs and Vassals. In a
new introduction to the second edition of my earlier book on collective activity
I argued that the idea of the supreme importance of the essentially interpersonal,
affective, dyadic bonds between lord and vassal originated not in the Middle Ages
nor in the early modern study of the Law of Fiefs, but in the age of Romanticism.10
That does not mean that I deny that great men had followers who were bound
closely to them. Warfare must often have created strong bonds between those who
fought together, but medieval sources do not suggest that the interpersonal,
dyadic relation between lord and vassal was the main bond of lay society. On the
contrary, leaving aside kinship and family, which I deliberately excluded from
both my books, partly because so much attention had been devoted to them by
others, there is a good deal of evidence that other collective bonds and feelings of
community were taken for granted, even if, as always, some people offended
against the norms of solidarity and public spirit.11
This further argument about the late appearance of the idea of vassalage as a
vital interpersonal relationship filled one gap in Fiefs and Vassals, and so did
another look at the oath of fidelity imposed by Charlemagne in 802 and at Le
Goff’s essay on ‘Le Rituel symbolique de la vassalité’.12 I have also extended my

9
As pointed out by Jean Richard, Saint Louis: Roi d’une France féodale, soutien de la Terre
sainte (Paris: Fayard, 1983), p. 62.
10
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities (1997), pp. xvi–xxx.
11
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities (1997), pp. xlv–lvi, et passim; Reynolds, Fiefs and
Vassals, pp. 17–47, 124–33, 189–92, 199–201, 331–33, 403–15.
12
Susan Reynolds, ‘Afterthoughts on Fiefs and Vassals’, Haskins Society Journal, 9 (2001),
1–15 (also published in Italian as ‘Ancora su feudi e vassalli’, Scienza e Politica, 22 (2000), 3–21).
I also clarified a few points in a response to a review by Johannes Fried, German Historical
Institute London: Bulletin, 19.1 (1997), 28–41; 19.2 (1997), 30–40, and made a small comment
on Carolingian counts as vassals in ‘Carolingian Elopements as a Sidelight on Counts and Vassals’,
in The Man of Many Devices […] Festschrift in Honor of János M. Bak, ed. by Balázs Nagy and
Marcell Sebök (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999), pp. 340–46.
22 Susan Reynolds

argument to the kingdom of Jerusalem and to Scotland.13 I am still prepared to

maintain the general line of my argument. Some reviewers were more or less
convinced by it, some rejected it entirely, while most approved of bits but
rejected others. Altogether I have been gratified by the amount of attention,
favourable or hostile, that the book has received. Even if a few reviewers seem
not to have read much of it, their reviews may have stimulated others to think
about the subject, which is what I wanted. There are certainly many points that
need to be corrected but so far the only significant revision has been made by
Fredric Cheyette, who has shown that my suggestion that the first fiefs de reprise
were recorded in early twelfth-century Montpellier was wrong.14 I was able to
acknowledge and correct this, I hope adequately, along with some smaller points,
in the Italian translation of my book that appeared in 2004.15
There are many other parts of my argument that need to be discussed by those
who know the relevant material better than I do. I still hope, for instance, that at
some time more historians of medieval France may consider — whether to
approve or reject — my questioning of Duby’s arguments about the eleventh-
century Mâconnais (which Cheyette’s review, alone among those I have seen,
noticed); that historians of England may consider my suggestions about the effect
of the arrangement of Domesday Book on the idea of a hierarchy of property
rights and about seigniorial jurisdiction in the early twelfth century; and that
those of Germany may look at what I said about apparent changes in the rights of
benefices in the twelfth century and the possibility of influence from Italy, and
about the signs of increasing professionalization of law in the Sachsenspiegel. If I
am wrong about any or all of these points then showing that I am would advance
knowledge.
Above all, I hope that the book may gradually stimulate more medieval
historians to think more critically about some of the assumptions about medieval
society that are implied in the way so many of them use the words vassal and fief.
A good starting point might be to restrict their use to times when they are used
in the sources. Words are only words, but these two carry many connotations
that may imply, or allow readers to infer, assumptions about political and social
relationships that, I suggest, need to be questioned, and then either confirmed or

13
See above, *.
14
Fredric L. Cheyette, review in Speculum, 71 (1996), 998–1006, and ‘On the fief de reprise’,
in Les Sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal: Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, ed. by Hélène Débax
(Toulouse: CNRS, Presse Universitaire de Mirail, 1999), pp. 319–24.
15
Feudi e vassalli, trans. by Sara Menzinger (Rome: Jouvence, 2004).
FIEFS AND VASSALS AFTER TWELVE YEARS 23

abandoned, rather than assumed. When historians refer to witnesses to lords’

charters in eleventh-century France as the vassals of those lords even when the
word is not used in the charter, what do they think the word would have meant
in that context if it had been used? Is the historian using it in the Carolingian
sense (a lay servant with military and governmental duties); in the vernacular
French sense that we know from a little later (a soldier or valiant man, with no
implication of relationship or service); in the later legal sense derived from the
Libri feudorum (a fiefholder); or in the sense developed by nineteenth-century
post-Romantic historians of someone bound to his lord by the strongest bond of
medieval society? The same questions arise when the sources refer to kings or
other lords campaigning cum suis and historians render this as ‘with their vassals’.
Were their armies composed of people who were vassals in any of these senses and,
if so, which? Historians who use the word vassal when it is not in the sources risk
creating two troubles for their readers. First, a reader may assume that the word
is in the source. Second, if it is not in the source, it implies that the historians
using it think that they are so sure that vassalage was such a strong and universal
bond in medieval society that they can read it into sources that do not refer to it.
Similar questions are raised by referring to nobles’ lands as fiefs or Lehen when
they are not so described in the sources, or indeed by assuming, when they are so
described, that the word implied more or less the same rights and obligations
everywhere. The use of these two words by many medieval historians invites the
question whether feudal structures exist rather in twentieth- or twenty-first-
century minds than in eleventh- and twelfth-century society.
A fair number of medievalists say that they no longer use the word feudalism.
Nevertheless, so long as they go on assuming, for instance, that noble property was
in general derived from individual grants by kings or lords on clear-cut conditions,
generally of military service, counsel, and subjection to jurisdiction, then they are
still cherishing the concept without using the word. If it is even partly right that
this general picture derives from post-medieval law and historiography and is hard
to substantiate from the medieval sources, then whether it is called feudalism
(féodalité, feudalesimo, Lehnswesen, etc.) or merely has the adjective feudal at-
tached to it is unimportant. The question I want considered is whether the
phenomena of medieval political and social relationships, rights and obligations
corresponded to the historians’ concept of non-Marxist feudalism, whether or not
the word is used. Is it right to think of medieval feudalism as a single, general
phenomenon? The best evidence of a king granting out land on a large scale comes
from England after 1066, though even there the evidence that it was at first
granted in return for specified military service is weak. The idea that individual
24 Susan Reynolds

relations between lords and their men (or vassals) outweighed any obligations to
kings comes from the nineteenth-century picture of ‘feudal anarchy’ in post-
Carolingian France, fortified by an argument put forward by the learned
thirteenth-century lawyer, Jean de Blanot, on behalf of his client. The quite dif-
ferent evidence from the kingdoms of England and France was then combined
and elaborated until it dominated representations of the Middle Ages. Historians
of other areas then either interpreted their sources (or filled in gaps in their
sources) to fit this framework of feudalism, or maintained that their areas did
not fit and were therefore not ‘feudal’. But what sense does that make if the
framework does not fit what we now know about either of the two areas for
which it was devised? Envisaging it as a Weberian ideal type that need not fit
exactly is not enough if the ideal type is a mere bundle of characteristics that do
not seem to belong together in any coherent way, especially if the evidence for
some of them anywhere is weak.
However many mistakes and misunderstandings there are in Fiefs and Vassals,
however overstated its arguments may be, and however flawed its use of evidence,
I still maintain that the non-Marxist idea of feudalism has produced a distorted
view of the Middle Ages. Its concentration on the upper classes, largely ignor-
ing at least nine-tenths of the population, distorts even the view of the upper
classes themselves by making the line between them and the rest too hard. Its
concentration on dyadic, interpersonal relations, and especially on relations
between lords and their followers, has distracted attention from the strong
collectivist ideas that informed secular society and politics, the emphasis on
government by consultation and consensus, on collective judgements, and the
belief in peoples as natural, given units of society and politics bound together by
descent, law, and customs. To those who have rightly pointed out that Fiefs and
Vassals was a very negative book and have asked where I want us to go from there,
I suggest that we go to the kind of collective ideas and activity that I tried to
sketch — over an equally rash range of territory and evidence — in Kingdoms and
Communities.
All that I have read suggests to me that the idea of natural peoples which ought
to be ruled through consultation and custom was so widespread as to be largely
assumed rather than argued. It seems to underlie references to all units of govern-
ment, from towns and villages, through lordships and provinces, up to kingdoms,
but was most explicitly applied to kingdoms. It has been suggested that I may lay
too much stress on kingdoms because I was brought up on English history, with
its strong emphasis on centralization under Strong Kings, and that may well be
true. All the same, medieval sources (including medieval stories) seem to me to
FIEFS AND VASSALS AFTER TWELVE YEARS 25

treat kingdoms as the archetypes of political units and kings as the archetypes of
rulers. Why else did kingdoms survive depositions and periods of more or less
ineffective royal control? Why else did magnates, however troublesome to their
kings, so seldom claim formal independence outside the kingdom against whose
ruler they rebelled?16
I am not for a moment arguing that all kingdoms were the same, let alone that
the most centralized and apparently peaceful were the best. Nor do I argue that
ideas of collective, consultative government, whether of kingdoms or lesser units,
were always put into practice and produced happy harmony, just government, and
contented subjects. But I suggest that recognizing the prevalence of these ideas
and norms about consultation and consent may illuminate medieval life rather
more than does exclusive stress on interpersonal, contractual relations among the
upper classes. In particular I suggest that more attention needs to be paid to early
medieval law and custom and to the way it worked before there were professional
lawyers. With relatively ineffective enforcement and no systematic records and
argument, it may not look to modern lawyers or historians like real law, but what
records we have suggest that there were very general norms that it followed — or
was meant to follow — and that formed the foundation for the professional law
of the high and later Middle Ages. But though I think one can detect old norms
under the new professional law I also suggest that the coming of professionalism
makes a very big change in the history of any form of law.17 It is therefore, I
suggest, safer to detect old norms surviving in the new law than to read details of
the new law back into the earlier period. I still maintain that the ‘feudal law’ of the
later Middle Ages was the creation of the professional government and law of the
later Middle Ages, not of the social and political relations of the earlier. The
customary law of the earlier Middle Ages needs to be investigated from the sources
of that time, without interpreting them through late medieval professional law,
or through the interpretations of early modern feudists and antiquaries or of

16
Susan Reynolds, ‘The Idea of the Nation as a Political Community’, in Power and the
Nation in European History, ed. by Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), pp. 54–66, and ‘Power and Authority in the Middle Ages’, in Power and
Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. by Huw Pryce and John Watts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 11–22.
17
Susan Reynolds, ‘The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century’, Law
and History Review, 21 (2003), 347–66; Reynolds, ‘Variations in Professionalism’ (response to
three commentators), Law and History Review, 21 (2003), 389–91, and more summarily in
‘Medieval Law’, in The Medieval World, ed. by Peter Linehan and Janet L. Nelson (London:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 485–502.
26 Susan Reynolds

historians and literary scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The result may be quite different from what I have argued but in so far as I
have stimulated others to look at the subject again after examining their own
assumptions about fiefs and vassals, that is fine. Of course I should be glad if my
findings were confirmed but if they are not, then I and maybe others will have
learned something useful.