ABSTRACT
Feudalism we have seen to be an upper-class affair, associated in particular with an upper-class tenure of land in return for military service, knight-service. Norman society itself was feudal in the mid-eleventh century cannot really be denied, though the implication is sometimes found in attempts to undermine the thesis that English feudalism is a Norman importation. Yet the reality of Norman feudalism in 1066 is not to be doubted because it had not then achieved the further stage of development largely induced by the special circumstances of the Conquest itself. The fundamentals of feudalism — the knight, vassalic commendation, the fief, the castle — are all of them absent from the indigenous society, whether Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, of pre-Conquest England, and all are increasingly manifest after 1066. The origins of English feudalism, therefore, are found in the Norman Conquest.
