A majority of Europeans were forced to renounce personal and economic freedom as the price of survival. Peasants who had formerly been free, slave, or coloni shared a common servility. The impact of this change on everyday life should not be exaggerated. The correlation between personal freedom and political or social influence has always been inexact. The free Anglo-Saxon or Frankish peasant had often been subordinated as effectively by debt and by the threat of personal force as his descendants were by the custom of the manor, and he was subjected to taxes and demands for military service that could be as onerous as the feudal dues of a later period. Women had never been free in the sense that they remained the legal subjects of their fathers or husbands.

Moreover, the world that emerged from the aftermath of the great raids retained many distinctions of wealth and status, even among peasants. Servility was not incompatible with a secure and even comfortable life, while freedom could mean a hardscrabble existence on marginal lands. Those who remained free often did so because they inhabited malarial swamps or mountain crags unwanted by either knights or Vikings.

The conversion to feudal and manorial tenures seems more dramatic when seen in relation to its effect on social institutions and attitudes--the ties that bound society together. After the great raids, the gap between the vast majority of the population and the aristocracy that ruled them widened perceptibly. Social mobility was not only difficult to achieve but also generally condemned. Chivalric and ecclesiastical writers maintained that people should not attempt to rise above their class. Permanence and stability were valued by a society that had just emerged from two centuries of near -anarchy, but the longevity of feudal institutions was based only in part on the conservatism of those who had suffered much.

The apparent success of heavy cavalry in dealing with the crises of the ninth and tenth centuries had created a powerful myth of class superiority. The medieval knight believed in it and made it the basis of an entire way of life. His education, leisure activities, and ultimately the moral and aesthetic values of his class were grounded in the perception of himself as the armed and mounted protector of society--a perception that also gave him his chief claim to social privilege. By the end of the tenth century the conditions that created the knights had largely disappeared, but the knights were now in possession of the bulk of society's resources and could be neither displaced nor effectively controlled. Class divisions would henceforth widen and acquire a more elaborate ideological basis than they had formerly possessed. A system of military tactics that was not suitable for all occasions would be preserved until long after it had outlived its usefulness. Above all, the creation of a dominant social class whose power was based upon widely scattered estates would perpetuate the decentralization of political authority for centuries to come. . .

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