ABSTRACT
The eighth century in Francia has often been seen as a crucial point in the development of medieval warfare. From the work of the great late nineteenthcentury German legal historian Heinrich Brunner, it was argued that the eighth century, and Charles Martel’s wars in particular, saw developments in the means by which aristocratic leaders rewarded their military followings. Martel, it was believed, carried out large-scale confiscations of ecclesiastical land to reward the warriors who followed him. In order to sweeten the pill for the churches, such land was then held by ‘precarial tenure’: the church retained actual ownership of the land, but the secular warrior ‘held’ it and received the usufruct of the estate. Such rewards in land, it was thought, were necessary to maintain warriors who now needed to be well-armoured horsemen rather than the footwarriors of old. The Belgian historian F.-L. Ganshof argued that a crucial stage in the development of feudalism occurred around 700, when temporary grants of land (precaria; beneficia) began to be made by lords to their retainers in return for the latter’s sworn loyalty, known as vassalage. In Ganshof ’s learned and attractively neat and clear formulation, the union of benefice with vassalage gave birth to feudalism.1 The idea was elaborated to include military technology. Mounted warriors were, it was argued, necessary because the introduction of the stirrup gave them added battlefield value and because the Arab invasions had also made cavalry more necessary.2
