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There has been much interest among medievalists in the problem of the origin and development of the French nobility in the High Middle Ages. M. Bloch thought that medieval French nobles were new men stemming from knight and non-nobles who appropriated power during the ninth and tenth centuries. In the last generation or so, however, a number of historians including G. Duby, L. Génicot, and K. F. Werner asserted that those nobles were descendants of the Carolingian nobility. In either case, this question has been treated as a strict "either-or" issue: if nobles were "new", they could not be descended from the Carolingian nobility, or, conversely, if nobles had origins in the Carolingian nobility, then they could not be considered "new" nobles. C. B. Bouchard attempts to resolve this dichotomy by demonstrating the upward mobility of several French families into the ranks of the upper nobility. According to her, the nobility was not a closed caste, and an eleventh-century nobles would have had plenty of non-noble ancestors. There is a rough consensus on the position of knights. Knights emerged as a new group around the year 1000. In many ways these knights of the eleventh century were closer to peasants than to their noble lords. Many seem to have been servile, legally unfree. But in France the social status of knights and nobles drew closer together in the twelfth century, eventually forming a single group in the thirteenth century.