ABSTRACT
Verriest Leo's family fits Georges Duby's model, and the findings of those sympathetic to Duby who have emphasized clerical and lay antagonisms. Whether Leo hastened from Italy because he hankered to get on with his ambitious reform agenda, or because he was impelled by the suspiciously short pontificates of his two German predecessors, cannot be said. According to this view, patrilineal lordships based on castles had grown up largely at the expense of royal authority and the defenseless, the peasants and monks. Count Eberhard, who administered a powerful lordship encompassing northern Alsace and northeast Burgundy, reportedly had used Lure to stable his horses and kennel his hunting dogs. If the successes of the Eberhards can help us understand the processes by which a family might readapt its lordship around the millennium, the fate of the other Etichonid line, the Liutfrids, allows us to see what might happen when a family failed to make adjustments.
