List of maps; Foreword by T. N. Bisson; Abbreviations; 1. The survival and extinction of the slave system in the early medieval West (fourth to eleventh centuries); 2. Society and mentalities in Visigothic Spain; 3. From the Rhone to Galicia: origins and modalities of the feudal order; 4. Descriptions of fortresses in the Book of Miracles of Sainte-Foy of Conques; 5. The formation of Catalan feudalism and its early expansion (to c. 1150); 6. Feudal conventions in eleventh-century Catalonia; 7. The noble and the ignoble: a new nobility and a new servitude in Catalonia at the end of the eleventh century; 8. Rural communities in Catalonia and Valencia (from the ninth to the mid-fourteenth centuries); 9. From one servitude to another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdom at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987–1031); 10. Marc Bloch, historian of servitude: reflections on the concept of 'servile class'; Index.