With the collapse of Carolingian government these obligations might be directed to a lord rather than a king--to some extent they always had been--and allods might come to be regarded as fiefs, lands held upon condition of performing certain services. Hence there was great variety of tenures.
This very variety accounts for the wide range of senses in which the social and political structure of this period has or has not been defined as 'feudal'. Even within a broad definition of the term which views feudalism as the association of the obligations owed by a vassal to his lord with the lord's grant of a fief to him it is impossible to accept that relations between lords and vassals were wholly feudal. Men could take lords by an act of homage without accepting that their lands thus became fiefs, and men could receive fiefs without accepting that this placed them under an enduring obligation to their lords. Relations between lords and vassals were feudal in the sense that lords came to assert that their vassals held their land as fiefs, and that they must therefore render military service, attend their courts, pay them dues, and accept their judgement over the succession to their lands. These assertions were not invariably accepted by the vassals themselves; instead they often gave rise to bitter and violent dispute. This was a direct consequence of ambiguities in the nature of lordship itself. Rights delegated to the magnates by the Carolingians were not greatly different from those which lords now demanded from their vassals. It was thus unclear how far the rights of magnates and the obligations due to them derived from the public authority which had been delegated or usurped or from the act of homage. The result was a fusion of obligations and a highly varied, frequently turbulent, pattern of relations between lords and vassals.
The dynastic disputes between the descendants of Charlemagne and the Viking and Saracen attacks of the ninth century had been an essential catalyst for the development of systems of vassalage and tenure, and Magyar attacks ranging across much of Germany and France during the first half of the tenth century provided a similar stimulus. Even so the development of lordship continued well into the eleventh
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