#Feudalism in the middle ages how to#

There was no standard rent in the Middle Ages, and tenant farmers had few ways to contest the rent demanded of them. The amount and type of payment was not influenced by market forces it was coercive, or forced. This could be a portion of the harvest, days of labor in the lord's own fields-called the demesne-or money. Tenant farmers-that is, people who didn't own the land they worked-owed some kind of payment to their landlords.

For our purposes, the important thing is that those lands were cultivated with a combination of free and unfree labor-let's talk about how that came to be.

#Feudalism in the middle ages how to#

Rather than diving into the arguments of how to organize this history, let's discuss some common threads about those estates. Modern historians dispute whether or not it's useful to lump together the management of these estates in that way. Medieval economies were largely based around the operations of those landed estates. Though these arrangements could range widely in style, they were lumped together under the label of feudalism, from the Medieval Latin term feudum referring to a landed estate. Seventeenth-century historians and lawyers who studied the Middle Ages decided to give a common name to the diverse landowner-tenant arrangements that existed in northwest Europe during the Middle Ages, starting with the collapse of Charlemagne's empire in the late ninth century and declining after the Black Plague and the Peasant Revolt in the fourteenth century. The term feudal is a tricky one, because few scholars can quite agree on what it means these days.