Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The long-term results of all this were threefold. In the first place, an ever-more complex set of laws and procedures emerged to define the relations between land givers and landholders: semisacred rituals of homage-bound people to serve and protect one another (in theory at least) and a whole raft of legally enforceable rights, obligations, payments, and taxes developed around the bonds of land grants. (If “feudalism” existed, then this is what it comprised: a complex nexus of interlocking personal relationships that, when taken as a whole, presented a haphazard but distinctive system of government.) In the second, the success of a system by which large numbers of warriors could be sustained contributed to a sense, part real and part imagined, that society in the west was becoming more violent and dangerous. And in the third, the fact that warriors were now endowed as a matter of course with estates that could support an aristocratic lifestyle helped create an upper-class consciousness that lauded—indeed, fetishized—supposedly knightly virtues. The code of conduct and honor, which eventually came to be known as chivalry, would by the end of the Middle Ages become something akin to a secular religion.