landed property, down to the humblest serf, lived directly 
     or indirectly on the products of the soil, whether they 
     raised them by their labor, or confined themselves to 
     collecting and consuming them. Movable wealth no longer 
     played any part in economic life. (p. 7)

     Pirenne is explaining how the feudal estate structure that 
grew up after the Roman collapse was that of numerous 
“centres without margins.” By contrast, the Roman pattern 
had been centralist-bureaucratic, with much interplay between 
centre and margins. The feudal estate fits the approach to 
scripture that found the total wealth of meaning in the literal 
text as inclusive. However, the new towns and burgesses begin 
to approach that phase of “one level at a time” and of 
specialist knowledge. In the same way, as Pirenne observes, 
there was no nationalism until the fifteenth century: