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After the disruptions of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, western Europeans struggled to restore order to their societies. A new social order emerged, in which all members of society were tied to one another through mutual obligations. The basis for the new culture that accompanied this social system was a mixture of Germanic, Christian, and Roman traditions. Early Germanic kings struggled to bring stability to their lands with the use of written law codes. Kings also encouraged intellectual activities which flourished with their patronage and participation. In Anglo-Saxon England, the blending of customary law with the other traditions planted the seeds of a constitutional government. On the continent, under Frankish rulers, this blending of traditions met with the most success. Cooperation between church and state gave Charlemagne's dynasty great legitimacy. The peace and prosperity of these newly consolidated and centralized kingdoms was short-lived, however, as invasions of new peoples in the tenth century undermined the achievements of the preceding centuries. Learning ObjectivesIn Chapter 7, students learn about the evolution of Germanic tribal law from oral to written codes that the Germanic peoples still maintained considerable local legal autonomy despite codification of law by kings about the rise of learning in monastic centers under Alfred the Great of Wessex in England and under Charlemagne in the Frankish kingdom about the continued alliance between Frankish ruler and papacy under the rule of Charlemagne, and the advantages of this relationship for each side about the growing importance of monasteries and church hierarchy, and the reform of Benedictine monasticism led by the establishment of Cluny (910) about the importance of technical developments in handwriting about the devastation - and its political consequences - of the widespread invasions by Vikings and Magyars in the ninth and tenth centuries how feudalism evolved into a complex system based on decentralized political authority, personal ties, mutual obligations, and hierarchy about the economic self-sufficiency of manorialism about daily life among different social classes during the feudal period that vassals might hold land of different lords, leading to conflicting loyalties about the development of an un-free peasantry tied to the land |