Aware of the many flaws in the idea of a sudden “feudal mutation” around the turn of the millennium, Thomas Bisson proposed instead a “crisis of lordship.” The diffi-culty is that his crisis lasted for some 350 years, too long a time for the idea of “crisis” to be meaningful. What if we spoke instead of the “problem” of lordship? This might be more useful, because it calls attention to the very issue that critics of a “feudal mutation” have insisted on: most of the developments adduced as signs of a muta-tion in the decades surrounding the millennium actually appeared well before 900. That is when we find increasing evidence of the powerful controlling the labour of depen-dent peasants on estates in ways so systematic that in aggregate it constitutes a new mode of production. It is when we begin to find fortifications constructed not by kings against Viking raiders but as military structures built by the locally powerful to hold territory against rivals. The garrisons manning those castles and the military expe-ditions launched from them required provisions; so this was also the time when we find references to “customs” that were really exactions for military requisitions levied in excess from peasants. In other words, the second half of the ninth century saw the creation of the foundations of what we think of as “lordship.” It was also when, out of the many Carolingian usages of “peace,” Hincmar of Reims seized on one called “the peace of the army” that pro-hibited unlawful military requisitions. Hincmar described such requisitions as acts of violentia, depraedatio, raptio— the very language that would later be applied by the Peace of God to very similar actions. The reason historians can argue that the Peace of God was essentially Carolingian is because the kind of lordship addressed by the Peace was, in its fundamental structures, a development of the late Carolingian period in the West Frankish kingdom.

It was also in the later ninth century and in the same kingdom that we begin to find a propensity to the fragmen-tation of political authority. At first, this did not pose a prob-lem locally, since the great princes were able to maintain order within their territories. By the later tenth century that was no longer the case.