ABSTRACT
An analysis and survey of feudal society is all very well for the historian of a place and period where feudalism is not in doubt. For Professor C. W. Holister, feudalism is an organization of society ‘based on the holding of a fief, usually a unit of land, in return for a stipulated honourable service, normally military, with a relationship of homage and fealty existing between the grantee and the grantor’. Of all the elements of feudalism, vassalage has the longest pedigree, since its origins can be traced back to the private armies of late Roman magnates and/or to the comitatus or war-band of the German tribes, described by Tacitus in his Germania as early as the first century ad. This, the group of armed retainers about a war-leader, so prominent a feature of early Germanic and therefore early Frankish society, was unlikely to decline in the circumstances of the endemic civil wars of Merovingian Gaul.
