ABSTRACT
In northern Europe, where the climate is more conducive and soils more fertile, arable farming predominated, although of course livestock was farmed too. Further south towards the Mediterranean, the climate is drier and more arid and soils are thinner. As the effectiveness of centralised public power declined in many parts of Western Europe at this time, local lords were steadily acquiring jurisdictional powers as well. They might monopolise certain crucial economic rights, but the exercise of justice also characterised these new lordships. In parts of Western Europe, war was becoming a business for trained professionals rather than untrained free men, and, as a result, a new land-owning military aristocracy with an enhanced consciousness of its own standing had begun to emerge, most obviously in France, by the end of the tenth century. This model would spread across Western Europe and dominate its social and political life for the rest of the Middle Ages.
