This book makes an important and compelling intervention in long-standing debates about social changes, the power of the aristocracy and the "Feudal Revolution" in the European central middles ages. At its core, the book asks how the élites of Europe - the ecclesiastical hierarchy as well as the lay aristocrats - 'got away with' the extreme accumulations of wealth and power which characterised medieval society. The research adopts an innovative methodology, seeing social status not as a static position within society, but as processual, contested and in constant need of affirmation. Drawing on a case study from the Loire valley region in central France, the work argues that élite domination was neither natural nor static but was radically transformed as part of a broader re-shaping of the French economy and society in the centuries surrounding the year AD 1000.