> Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), i

> Feudalism didn't start with manorialism in the dark ages. There is a hint of that in the excellent Histoire de la France rurale (History of Rural France), in the first [1] of the three volumes. As far as I remember by the late 200s - going into the 300s present-day Île-de-France was littered with Roman villas which were, in effect, very similar to the future manors. Any one of those villas was headed by the pater familias, followed by his close relatives and by the villa's dependents, who dependants nowadays someone might call "serfs" and "oppressed" (like the author of the article does when talking about the dependants of the féodalité), but who were, most probably, neither of that (meaning they were not real serfs/slaves and they were not that oppressed). For those interested, Roger Agache [2] has done an excellent job of documenting the existence on the ground of those villas/manors based on aerial archeology. This page [3] does a good job at presenting some of Agache's work (including some photos), the French Ministry of Culture used to have a page dedicated to aerial archeology but, unfortunately, I now see that it has been taken down. [1] https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-collectif/9782757873779 https://www.seuil.com/ouvrage/histoire-de-la-france-rurale-c... [2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Agache [3] http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm http://sehet.andre.free.fr/dedetextes/photosrogeragache.htm