At the top of the church, you had the Bishop of Rome, also known as the pope, and you had their bishops in significant regions. You also had monastic orders, where you might have an abbot who is the head of a monastery, where you have monks who, as part of that monastery, are praying, they might be farming, they might be copying texts, and there was also power dynamics between these, and as we're about to see, you can even have these non-religious figures pledging fealty to religious figures. So just to get a sense of what these pledges of fealty were like, you have a vassal in this homage ceremony, homage, or sometimes said homage, and it really comes from the French word homme, which refers to man, so he is pledging to be his lord's man. So this would be the lord right over here, and this is an actual pledge given by Bernard Aton, Viscount of Carcassonne, in the year 1110 in France. In the name of the lord I, Bernard Aton, and I apologize for my pronunciation, Viscount of Carcassonne, in the presence of my sons, and he goes on and lists his sons, nobles, and of many other honorable men who have come to the monastery of Saint-Marie of Grasse, since Lord Leo, abbot of the said monastery, has asked me, in the presence of all those above mentioned, to acknowledge to him the fealty and homage, or homage, for the castles, manors, and places which the patrons, my ancestors, held from him and his predecessors, and from the said monastery as a fief, and which I ought to hold as they held. I have made to the lord, abbot, Leo, acknowledgement and homage as I ought to do. So in this case, the lord is an abbot, is a religious figure, is the head of a monastery, and the vassal is a viscount.