Quote:
Originally Posted by The Colonel
Also, just to confuse matters - and as suggested by Hal's model village - you could hold a mixture of servile and free tenancies - your net status would probably be unfree, with various consequent duties, but you might well not owe customary service for all your land.
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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.