Middle Ages 11: The Pulsating Body -- The Medieval World View
Historiansplaining: A historian tells you why everything you know is wrong
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Inheritance and Power
The practice of how you divide up property among your children, even just as a peasant, is then mimicked in the way entire kingdoms or empires are divided up politically. Authority and power was personal. It was not based on impersonal, abstract principles. None of these kingdoms had an constitutions. They had inherited customs and precedents which defined what particular people could exercise what sort of powers. So so as i said, a households could be grouped into villages, a sometimes also, such as in england, into other more formally regularized units called hundreds.
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