Published by the Folio Society, London, 2012.
 
The book is in excellent, like new condition bound in black cloth with design, in gilt, by Adam McCaulay. A history of the people and institutions of medieval Europe from the 9th to the 13th Century. There is an illustrated frontispiece, as well as full colour plates throughout. The book sits within its plain red slip case, which is in a similar condition.
 
First published in 1961, this seminal history, Marc Bloch reveals the bonds of loyalty that held medieval society together. The medieval world was held together by ties of loyalty between individuals, which formed a chain stretching from the highest to the lowest ranks.
 
Feudalism developed towards the end of the first millennium AD, where few kings had the resources to marshal an army, hence the growth of smaller armies of knights. In the absence of law and order, peasants gifted their lands to a lord, in return for protection and sustenance. Bloch analyses every aspect of feudalism and its contexts, from religion, economy, kinship and the judiciary to the subtler ways in which it moulded the medieval mind. There were terrible penalties for disloyalty; one knight was sent to a monastery for the rest of his life having killed his lord in battle his sentence had been commuted from that of having his hands cut off. 
 
One of the foremost French historians of the 20th century, Marc Bloch was a founding member of the Annales school of history, which emphasised the deep forces of social history rather than focusing on wars and politics. He was a professor of economic history at the Sorbonne until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he joined the French Resistance. Bloch was killed by the Gestapo in June 1944.