ABSTRACT
One can appreciate the train of thought, for assuredly the fee or fief is a fundamental of feudalism. But the fundamental, archetypal fief which we must have in order to be feudal is the knight’s fee, the feudum militis, the fief de haubert, and to pursue this in splendid isolation from any serious concern for the presence or absence of the knight is to put the cart before the horse and lose touch with reality, for in the real world of the early Middle Ages the knight is of necessity anterior to the fee. The absence of cavalry in pre-Conquest English armies is a telling point against the notion of pre-Conquest English feudalism, one almost sufficient to bear the whole weight of the argument by itself, for without cavalry there can have been no knights, and without knights there can have been no feudalism.
