The foundations of most of the aspects of high medieval culture in France, which came to fruition in the twelfth century, were laid firmly during the more fluid era of the eleventh century, during the long reigns of Henry and Philip. Henry's and Philip's reigns, like those of Hugh Capet and Robert II before them, were in many ways an institutional continuation of the royal rule of the Carolingians, but were marked by institutional evolution as well as continuity. The eleventh-century Capetians could count on the fidelity of only a handful of the territorial princes, and not even on all of them consistently. The princes of the far south-west of the kingdom were especially far from royal authority. The eleventh century in France was in many ways a turning-point, when fundamental changes took place in social and economic structures, power structures and in the religious and intellectual life.

There is one reputedly fifth-century document of which numerous fragments survive and which purports to offer important contemporary evidence for Roman social and economic structures in this period. This is the Twelve Tables, the law-code assigned to circa 450 BC. The compilation of the Tables is attributed to two ten-man commissions (decemviri legibus scribundis) which replaced the consulship as the chief magistracy in 451 and 450 BC. To the limited extent that later writers concerned themselves with economic matters they saw early republican Rome as essentially a farming community. Early Rome practised settled agriculture based on a prevalence of comparatively small-scale, privately owned farms which provided the fundamental resource of the great majority of the citizen body. Hence not only does the primacy of the family unit reflect this pattern of economic activity but the entire structure of kin-group classification and the regulation of kin prerogatives show a pre-eminent concern with the transmission of property.