Fiefs and Vassals

Download or read book Fiefs and Vassals written by Susan Reynolds and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1996 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiefs and Vassals has changed our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholarsfrom the works of medieval academic lawyers and tha they provide a bad guide to the realities of medieval society.This is a radical new examination of relations between rulers, nobles, and free men, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It has revolutionized the way we think of the Middle Ages.