Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the stages of the argument for a "feudal revolution" around the year 1000, as its proponents present it.
- Castellans build fortifications and command their surroundings from them
- The power to command and punish passes into private hands
- Carolingian public authority ceases to function effectively
- Bishops respond with the Peace and Truce of God
- Distinctions among free peasants collapse into a common dependence
Hints
- The sequence runs from the failure of an old authority to the appearance of a new local one.
- The church’s response comes last, as a reaction to the violence the change produced.
Show the answer
- Carolingian public authority ceases to function effectively
- Castellans build fortifications and command their surroundings from them
- The power to command and punish passes into private hands
- Distinctions among free peasants collapse into a common dependence
- Bishops respond with the Peace and Truce of God
Why
Set out in order the case is coherent, which is why it held the field for a generation. The objection is not that any step is impossible but that the evidence for the suddenness is thin: Barthélemy argues the documents change form around 1000 — new kinds of charter, new scribal habits — and that historians have read a change in the record as a change in the world.
Practise Feudal Society
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