In some parts of the region (notably Britain), this is because the Roman concept of exclusive land tenure had been abandoned or was never present, leaving royal and aristocratic and peasant landholders with diff erent levels of rights in the same territories. Our evidence is poor, both elliptic and late, but what data we have indicate to us that power did not derive from large-scale landowning in any simple way.

North of the Roman world, we can be much less certain about this equation. Henceforth, large-scale landowning was the only secure path to wealth and political power, and it would remain so in the Frankish lands to 1000 and well beyond. It is only well-documented (up to the eighth century) in the Loire valley, and it seems to have produced much less tax than under the empire even there (Lot, 1928: 83–107 Goff art, 1989: 213–31 Wickham, 2005: 105–15). (A demographic decline seems to have characterised the fi ft h century in our area too.) By the sixth century, when this book begins, the political dominance of major landowners was even greater, for by then in the heartland of the Frankish kingdom – the main successor-state to the Roman empire in the North Sea area – the Roman fi scal system was weakening fast. In the fi ft h century, however, the empire was replaced in the West by several separate kingdoms as a result of the Germanic invasions, which changed the balance of power between state and aristocracy. Th e Roman empire was a tax-based state, so it also had salaried offi cials, both military and civilian but only a minority of military leaders, and almost no civilian leaders, were not rich landowners to start with.

In the Roman world, landownership was the basis of wealth, and the ownership of numerous estates was the basis of political power. Th is division is a particularly crucial one for a volume focussed on property and political relations. more At the start of the middle ages, northwestern Europe was divided in economic and social terms into two large, sharply contrasted, regions: the former Roman empire in the lands south of the Rhine, and a wide though less clearly defi ned territory to its north, inhabited by Germanic-speaking groups as far north as central-northern Norway and, in the northern British Isles, Celtic-speaking groups, unifi ed only by the fact that the Romans had never conquered them. At the start of the middle ages, northwestern Europe was divided in economic and social terms int.

Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham