A01=Niall O Suilleabhain
aristocracy
Author_Niall O Suilleabhain
Carolingian Empire
Category=KCZ
Category=NH
Category=NHDJ
church
coinage
donation charters
early medieval aristocracies
early medieval history
ecclesiastical patronage
economy
elite status
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
feudal revolution
feudal system
feudalism
forthcoming
gifts
Gregorian reform
knighthood
laity
land tenure
landholders
landholding
legitimate violence
Loire valley
lordship
medieval France
networks of patronage
obligations
patronage
Peace of God
post Carolingian France
ritual
royal court
royal office
royal patronage
Seigneurie Banale
Social elites
societas
status
taxes
tenants
violence
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9781526187185
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This book makes an important and compelling intervention in long-standing debates about social changes, the power of the aristocracy and the “Feudal Revolution” in the European central middles ages. At its core, the book asks how the élites of Europe – the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as the lay aristocrats – ‘got away with’ the extreme accumulations of wealth and power which characterised medieval society. The research adopts an innovative methodology, seeing social status not as a static position within society, but as processual, contested and in constant need of affirmation. Drawing on a case study from the Loire valley region in central France, the work argues that élite domination was neither natural nor static but was radically transformed as part of a broader re-shaping of the French economy and society in the centuries surrounding the year AD 1000.
Niall Ó Súilleabháin is a Lecturer in Medieval European History in the Department of History, King's College London
