<P> In the 20th century, two outstanding historians offered still more widely differing perspectives . The French historian Marc Bloch, arguably the most influential 20th - century medieval historian., approached feudalism not so much from a legal and military point of view but from a sociological one, presenting in Feudal Society (1939; English 1961) a feudal order not limited solely to the nobility . It is his radical notion that peasants were part of the feudal relationship that sets Bloch apart from his peers: while the vassal performed military service in exchange for the fief, the peasant performed physical labour in return for protection--both are a form of feudal relationship . According to Bloch, other elements of society can be seen in feudal terms; all the aspects of life were centered on "lordship", and so we can speak usefully of a feudal church structure, a feudal courtly (and anti-courtly) literature, and a feudal economy . </P> <P> In contradistinction to Bloch, the Belgian historian François - Louis Ganshof defined feudalism from a narrow legal and military perspective, arguing that feudal relationships existed only within the medieval nobility itself . Ganshof articulated this concept in Qu'est - ce que la féodalité? ("What is feudalism?", 1944; translated in English as Feudalism). His classic definition of feudalism is widely accepted today among medieval scholars, though questioned both by those who view the concept in wider terms and by those who find insufficient uniformity in noble exchanges to support such a model . </P> <P> Although he was never formally a student in the circle of scholars around Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre that came to be known as the Annales School, Georges Duby was an exponent of the Annaliste tradition . In a published version of his 1952 doctoral thesis entitled La société aux XIe et XIIe siècles dans la région mâconnaise (Society in the 11th and 12th centuries in the Mâconnais region), and working from the extensive documentary sources surviving from the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, as well as the dioceses of Mâcon and Dijon, Duby excavated the complex social and economic relationships among the individuals and institutions of the Mâconnais region and charted a profound shift in the social structures of medieval society around the year 1000 . He argued that in early 11th century, governing institutions--particularly comital courts established under the Carolingian monarchy--that had represented public justice and order in Burgundy during the 9th and 10th centuries receded and gave way to a new feudal order wherein independent aristocratic knights wielded power over peasant communities through strong - arm tactics and threats of violence . </P> <P> In 1974, U.S. historian Elizabeth A.R. Brown rejected the label feudalism as an anachronism that imparts a false sense of uniformity to the concept . Having noted the current use of many, often contradictory, definitions of feudalism, she argued that the word is only a construct with no basis in medieval reality, an invention of modern historians read back "tyrannically" into the historical record . Supporters of Brown have suggested that the term should be expunged from history textbooks and lectures on medieval history entirely . In Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (1994), Susan Reynolds expanded upon Brown's original thesis . Although some contemporaries questioned Reynolds's methodology, other historians have supported it and her argument . Reynolds argues: </P>

Which is not an accurate description of serfdom in europe during the medieval period