Quote:
Originally Posted by RyanW
And while a wealthy peasant might pay rather than serve for some portion of his land, a poor peasant could serve more to make ends meet, i.e. hiring himself out to wealthier peasants or the landlord as a laborer, since his small parcel of land doesn't take up his full time and can't feed his family by itself.
Of course, it's likely almost none of these transactions are in coin. The difference in providing grain to rent land and working land in exchange for a cut of the grain is subtle.
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...and this worked all the way up, where the landlord might well be paying his own overlord (possibly the king) scutage rather than turning up for his knight service.
After a while - in agriculture and in military matters - landowners started to prefer cash to service.