Progress of agriculture contributes to the improvement of the fate of the populations on the plans legal and economic.

In XIIIe century, the serfdom, still symbolized by the silver payment of the chevage, the formariage and the mortmain, is nothing any more but residual. Freedom is obtained either by individual repurchase, or by means of collective formalities, or still at the time of the concessions of charters of clearing.  

The preference of the tenants goes to the grounds to taxable quota, whose rent, paid out of money and fixed once and for all, is devaluated regularly, whereas the price of the ground and that of cereals increases. The holders of tenures with champart (or warping, or agrière), compelled to pour a percentage of harvest (eighth with the quarter), grow rich definitely less quickly.  

Many peasants, engaged in the modernization of their exploitation, are involved in debt. The phenomenon is notable at the end of XIIe century, where the grounds are burdened with revenues. The lenders are Jewish, Lombardic, country rich person or middle-class man. The lords themselves do not hesitate to play the part of bankers. Also profits from the expansion only the alleutier or the farmer with taxable quotas, free of drudgery and revenue: these easy peasants hardly account for but approximately 2% rural mass. Much has only small tenures (less than 2 ha); others, blazing infernos or experts, have any no and are employed as days laborer.  
 

For much, the incomes decreased: the accensées grounds (i.e. taken with taxable quota) hardly any more pay and the lord endeavors from now on to develop the cereal incomes of his own field, his reserve, to reinforce the transfer taxes and to multiply the fines. But that is not always enough to preserve the balance of fortunes. Moreover, the knighthood, while amalgamating with the nobility of chalk-lining at the end of the XII E century, had brought to this one its military prestige. The movements of peace, the development of the professional army, the strengthening of the public authority tarnish, as of the XIII E century, the reputation of the fighting aristocracy.  

The ennoblement of the middle-class men
To economic impoverishment the deterioration of the social image of a nobility in full retraction is thus added. Indeed, stripped, many families seigniorial, unable to continue to live nobly, fall into the forfeiture. And the king, in France in particular, to regenerate a nobility that moreover he wants more subjected, does not hesitate, as of the end of XIIIe century, to ennoble middle-class rich person with whom it social success holds place of honor. To live nobly costs expensive. Also, many demonstrations symbolic systems of the chivalrous condition are reduced or transformed: only the oldest son is dubbed and only the oldest daughter is married. The lords do not continue any less to devote themselves to the tournaments, and they still listen to the accounts of the jugglers and the troubadours singing the courtly love in the big room of the old strong castle, whose military role is erased gradually in front of the economic power and legal of the lord.  

The place of the Church

From a world in change emerge from the new forces, whose faith is one of most dynamic. The task of the Church is thus of scale. With most quarrelsome, she preaches peace and it enough God, while she diverts energies towards the crusades against the infidels of the East and Spain and against the Slavic pagan ones (XIIe - XIIIe century).  With most peaceful, a flowering of new monastic orders offers harbors of meditation or work: thus goes from there it of the Carthusian monks of Grandmont, the abbey of Fontevraud and the 650 subsidiary companies about Cîteaux, founded in 1098 per Robert de Molesme. Saint Bernard, the renovating one of the rule bénédictine, arrived at the abbey in 1112; in 1128 it creates the rule about the temple.

On most political falls the task to disengage the Church of the laic world. The pope Gregoire VII (1073-1085) gets busy there particularly. He recalls the supremacy of spiritual on the temporal one, condemns the simony and the laic nomination of the bishops, in the twenty-seven proposals of his Dictatus papae, in 1075.  The cultural revival that the Church stimulated in the scriptoria of the monasteries and the construction of the first Romance churches from 1070 are the tangible demonstrations of a sharp piety.