ABSTRACT

According to Robert Ian Moore, the revolution he has identified involved many of the aspects we have ourselves been considering. It involved a revolution in urbanisation, which resulted in more numerous and larger towns. These made demands on the food supply, which encouraged lords to make changes in rural life by which even free peasants were reduced to serfdom, and were organised in ways which made them utterly dependent on those lords. Aristocratic society was itself transformed at the same time by the introduction of primogeniture as the manner of inheritance, which profoundly altered the structure of aristocratic families, producing a group of landless younger sons who were responsible for much of the violence that we see in medieval society. Moreover, a new court culture emerged, in which education was driven by the needs and ambitions of governments, which themselves came to be greatly influenced and changed by the participation in them of men trained in schools and universities.