The study of medieval households requires the use of scattered, diverse, and usually difficult sources, but even out of them a coherent picture emerges. The end of slavery and the insistence of the Church on both monogamy and exogamy reduced the range of variation that had marked households in ancient societies. No longer could a rich senator call hundreds of slaves into his personal service; nor could a barbarian chief gather in numerous wives and concubines, to the deprivation of less privileged males. This is not to suggest that Roman and barbarian households were similar. The importance of large kindreds among the barbarians, the Sippe, obscured the division among households, and the Sippe themselves differed greatly in numbers, wealth, and prestige. The classical Mediterranean world did not know, or had long since lost, such kindreds. But neither Romans nor barbarians possessed a symmetrical household system-symmetrical in the simple sense that the rich lived with their wives and children in a manner comparable to the poor. A great social achievement of the early Middle Ages was the imposition of the same rules of sexual and domestic conduct on both rich and poor. The king in his palace, the peasant in his hovel: neither one was exempt. Cheating might have been easier for the mighty, but they could not claim women or slaves as a right. Poor men’s chances of gaining a wife and producing progeny were enhanced. It is very likely that the fairer distribution of women across society helped reduce abductions and rapes and levels of violence generally, in the early Middle Ages.