ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to this survey we looked briefly at the Brunner thesis, which gave the firm impression that Charles Martel was the harbinger of widespread social, political and economic change to Francia. It is now time to look more carefully at the issues raised by this idea. 'Harbinger’ (one who announces the approach of something) is a rather appropriate term to use in this context, for it is derived from two ancient German elements heri and berg which together referred to someone sent to find lodgings for an army. It was the need to find resources for his army which, according to the Brunner thesis, lay behind the changes that Charles Martel introduced in Francia. Brunner, remember, postulated that Charles systematically made use of church lands to reward his followers, hence his later reputation as a de spoiler of the church. In the short term, it was argued, the appropriation of ecclesiastical land provided Charles with the mounted warriors he needed to defeat his many enemies, including the Arabs. In the longer term new social relations arose as it became usual for land to be held in return for military services, and as the landholders developed into a class of nobles who held local power in each region, and who took firm hold of the local peasantry which supplied them with the wherewithal to perform those milit ary services. This so-called 'feudal system’, whereby land was held in return for service, and in which each person in society owed loyalty and service to those above them, used to be a cornerstone of textbook descriptions of medieval society, and indeed the model, represented as a pyramid of loyal ties and services, is still to be found in some textbooks used in the early years of secondary schooling. In this modern account of the early Middle Ages, those who held the land from superior lords are termed their 'vassals’; the lands they held are known as 'fiefs’, and the loyalty they expressed to superiors in return for 'fief-holding’ is called 'homage’. And all of this is
ultimately traced back to Charles Martel’s need to raise armies composed of mounted warriors. Today this model is generally seen as much too simp listic, and many would argue that it in effect invented its own terminology by drawing selected terms from different times and different places and using them as if they could be applied everywhere, at all times, even when they do not appear in the sources.1 One historian, for instance, recently termed the missionary Willibrord a Vassal’ of the Carolingians, although this term was never used of him in any contemporary source.
