holdings. Charlemagne demanded that less prosperous freemen 
merge their private farms to equip a single knight for the wars. 
The pressure of the new war technology gradually developed 
classes and an economic system that could provide numerous 
cavaliers in heavy armor. By about the year 1000 A.D. the old 
word miles  had changed from “soldier” to “knight.”

     Lynn White has much to say, also, about horseshoes and 
horsecollars as revolutionary technology that increased the 
power and extended the range and speed of human action in 
the early Middle Ages. He is sensitive to the psychic and social 
implications of each technological extension of man, showing 
how the heavy wheel-plow brought about a new order in the 
field system, as well as in the diet of that age. “The Middle Ages 
were literally full of beans.”