This book explores rural societies in western Europe from 700-1050. It focuses on the bottom of the social hierarchy, rejectingviews that see rural society exclusively through the structures of lordship and challenging the teleological idea of the residential group as the prototype of the late-medieval structured community.

Bernhard Zeller is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria; Charles West is Reader in Medieval History in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield, UK; Francesca Tinti is Ikerbasque Research Professor in the Department of Medieval, Modern and American History at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Spain; Marco Stoffella is Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor in Medieval History at the University of Verona, Italy; Nicolas Schroeder is Assistant Professor in Medieval History at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Carine van Rhijn is Lecturer in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands; Steffen Patzold is Professor of Medieval History in the Department of History at the University of Tübingen, Germany; Thomas Kohl is Acting Professor in the Department of History at the University of Tübingen, Germany; Wendy Davies is Professor Emerita of History at University College London and Associate Member in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford, UK; Miriam Czock is Senior lecturer in the History Department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

1 Questions to pursue
2 Setting the scene
3 The fabric of local societies: people, land and settlement
4 Making groups: collective action in rural settlements
5 Shepherds, uncles, owners, scribes: priests as neighbours in early medieval local societies
6 Interventions in local societies: lower office holders
7 Interventions and interactions
8 Neighbours, visitors and strangers: searching for the local
Index