Where the first book followed the bonds of dependence, this one asks what ranks those bonds produced. Bloch's opening move is to deny that feudal Europe had a nobility at all in its first phase. A nobility, he insists, needs a legal status of its own and hereditary transmission recognised by law, and neither existed before the twelfth century, by which time fief and vassalage were already declining. The senatorial order of the late Empire and the Germanic edelinge both faded, and what replaced them were families with remarkably short pedigrees. The Welfs, the counts of Toulouse, the marquises of Ivrea, the Ludolfings and the ancestor of the Capetians all disappear into obscurity around the year 800, because standing then rested on wealth and royal service, qualifications that allowed sudden rises and equally sudden falls. Later chapters, listed in the contents but beyond the recovered text, carry this through chivalry, judicial institutions, monarchy and the comparative question of other feudalisms.