Fiefs and Vassals

Fiefs and Vassals will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism and overturns centuries of misconceptions about the nature of medieval social relations.

The distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian, the book argues that our traditional understanding of the fief and the vassal is a concept constructed by post-medieval scholars from the works of medieval academic lawyers. Yet the rules of the late medieval law books did not derive from earlier relations between lords and their warriors; in so far as they derived from anything before the twelfth century it was from practices developed by great churches to safeguard their property. Both in detail and general, however, they were not a direct reflection of social values at any time. In this radical new examination of lords and their vassals, Susan Reynolds finally sets the record straight.