The recent trend in Anglo-Norman studies to avoid using 1066 as a sharp dividing line has made possible a much broader and more historical treatment of eleventh-century social change. This has involved a refreshing new look at feudal institutions. A long tradition dating from at least the work of Spelman in the seventeenth century to that of J.H. Round in the nineteenth has led to the dominance, first of the legal, then of the military aspect, of ‘feudalism’. This view still held the field when both Pocock and Douglas, in discussing Spelman's definitions of ‘feudal custom’ and ‘feudal law’ (Spelman never used the word ‘feudalism’), hailed him as almost modern in his approach. Pocock wrote in 1957 of eighteenth-century historiography:

In fact the undermining of the whole feudal interpretation of the Norman Conquest became apparent soon after Pocock wrote.

In the first place, historians were looking critically at the actual course of the conquest itself, and at the condition of Normandy before 1066. R.H.C. Davis, in a short and perceptive summing up of the Norman Conquest in 1966, pointed out on the military side that ‘for some time the Normans lived as an “army of occupation” based on their castles with their household knights. The date at which it would have been safe for the household knights to be enfeoffed and live on their own lands would have varied.’ D.C. Douglas, in 1964, challenged the view of Haskins that ‘Norman society in 1066 is a feudal society, and one of the most fully developed feudal societies in Europe.’On the contrary, he argued that ‘such definition as was attained in the duchy during the Conqueror's reign is recorded for the most part in Norman charters after the conquest of England.’