For several years C. Warren Hollister has been picking his way through the “treacherous bog” of Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman military institutions. Out of that bog he has brought medievalists fresh knowledge of the nature of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, the relation of fyrd-service to knight's service, the importance before and after 1066 of mercenary troops, to name only a few of the questions he has touched on. As a result of his work, in fact (along with that of Eric John and Michael Powicke), the Berkshire customal in Domesday Book threatens to become as written about as the final clauses of the Statute of York. But inevitably the presentday medievalist decides to emerge from his dusty inquests and cartularies, to step boldly out from behind his philological barricade and survey the surrounding landscape, to extract more from his laconic charters than a few plausible conclusions about some minor issues. Old-fashioned self-inhumation in the details of local antiquities is no longer for him, nor Bury's sanguine belief that if each historian adds his little stone to the dry wall of History, some future age may finally be able to see its shape. Thus the historian's growing concern with his generalizations. Thus especially the recent debates about the proper definition and delimitation of “feudalism.” Thus Hollister, after ducking the general issue of “feudalism” in his Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions, recently on these pages decided to attack it head on.