"This neglect of education among the laity explains the role of the clergy both as interpreters of the ideas of the great and as depositaries of polical traditions. The princes were obliged to rely on the clerical element among their servants for services that the rest of their entourage would have been incapable of rendering. ...
It is important to realize that the decisions of the powerful of this world were somtimes suggested and always expressed by men who, whatever their national or class allegiances, none the less belonged by their whole training to a society by nature universalist and founded on spirtual things.
...Thus there came to be diffused over the documents of almost the entire feudal era that veneer of disingenuousness...
Since for a long period the writing of history itself, with accompanying value-judgments, was also in the hands of the clergy, the conventions of thought as much as the conventions of literature combined to hide the cynical reality of human motives behind a sort of veil which was only to be finally torn asunder, on the threshold of modern times, by the harsh hands of a Commynes and a Machiavelli."

Feudal Society, by Marc Bloch, section 5.3, Modes of Feeling and Thought