, and Roman elements that came to characterize medieval Latin Christendom (Perry 198).
At the same time, "Romans and Germans increasingly intermarried, the distinction between the two laws [Roman and German] blurred, and . . . disappeared" (McKay 220).
The German rulers were not able to hold the territory together under a unified law and the result of this blurring was feudal law and feudalism. Essentially feudalism resulted in countless tiny kingdoms, or lorddoms, in which lords ruled over serfs. Serfs, merchants and craftsman engaged in productive labor, while the wealthier lords spent their energies on war and war-related activities: "The feudal lord's way of life was made possible by the toil of the serfs who worked on the manors" (Perry 212).
Manorialism is differentiated from feudalism in th
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