Society was held together by intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations, and quasi-dependencies. These personal loyalties were not the same as the legal bondage of the unfree; they were not like the explicit subjection of the landless; and they were not even precise reproductions of the many subserviencies of patronage-ridden England. Still, these personal relationships were forms of paternalism, dependence, and subordination—vague and subtle as they often may have been.
