Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted

Fiefs and Vassals sets out to change our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholars from the works of medieval academic lawyers and that they provide a bad guide to the realities of medieval society. The rules of the late medieval law-books did not derive from earlier relations between lords and their warriors; in so far as they derived from anything before the twelfth century it was from practices developed by great churches to safeguard their property. Both in detail and in general, however, they were not a direct reflection of social values at any time.

This is a radical new examination of social relations within the noble class and between lords and their vassals, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages.