Bloch opens by asking where the word itself came from. 'Feudal' began as lawyers' jargon for whatever pertained to a fief; it was Boulainvilliers, and after him Montesquieu, who stretched it to name a whole state of society, and the revolutionary decree abolishing the feudal regime fixed it in the languages of Europe for good.

He thinks the label badly chosen. Not every manor was a fief, not every fief a principality, and no complex social order is well described by singling out one form of property right. But worn coins still circulate, and the historian may use the term so long as he defines what he means by it.

The inquiry is deliberately bounded: western and central Europe, the mid-ninth century through to the opening decades of the thirteenth. Whether societies elsewhere deserve the name is postponed to the end of the book.