this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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That's a silly thing to say.
Peasants have land.
"Peasant" was basically a farmer. Some peasants had land, many didn't. If you were a tenant farmer not only did you not own the land, in many cases the land owned you. In many cases you were born on the land and you "rented" it from the manor lord. That meant that you were allowed to grow crops on that land, but you owed the lord for letting you use his land. You'd pay that back with shares of your crop and/or labour on his crops. In return, he was responsible for defending you... but that meant he'd conscript you into his army and you'd fight the invaders.
If you didn't like that deal, too bad, if you were a villein you couldn't leave the land without the lord's permission. You weren't a slave exactly, but you weren't free to go find work elsewhere.
There were peasants who did own land, but it wasn't common. The equivalent today would be if you rented from a landlord, but you had to use a uber-jobs app that required you to do odd jobs for your landlord for free for 1-2 days a week.
Yeah, there was nothing good about it. My great great grandfather was a serf as a kid until it ended at the end of the 1840s. Almost all of the food they produced was taken by their lord. The little bit his family was allowed to keep wasn't enough to stop them from being sickly from hunger. They lived in a tiny cabin, and slept on what effectively were picnic table benches - two people per bench with their arms and legs hanging down to the floor from each side. There were just a couple differences between that and being slaves. Slaves were legally considered dead, serfs were not. Serfs were bound to the land, slaves were not. That meant a serf could only be bought and sold with the land, and serf families could not be split apart. It also meant they could not legally be murdered or raped. But they were expected to work for and give almost everything they produced to the lord, and they were not paid. They could not leave because they were bound to the land.
A lot of rich capitalist billionaires really would like to bring that back.
Yeah, a lot of people bitch about capitalism without realizing that capitalism was a significant step up from feudalism / manorialism for most people. When they bitch about capitalism, a lot of what they hate is evidence it's actually drifting back towards feudalism. Renting instead of owning, for example. Or monopolies in control of things instead of there being healthy competition.
I'm all for the Star Trek future, which shares a lot in common with communism. But, it's a future where there is no scarcity. In the present where scarcity is a real issue, communism always seems to quickly become an elite ruling over a population that can't vote them out. Unless someone can prove that there's a system better than capitalism that we can actually get to from here, I'd rather focus on trying to fix capitalism than overthrow it and inevitably end up with something worse.
Pretty sure they usually worked/lived on the land owned by lords, no?
That would be serf, right?
Serfs were a subset of peasants from what i understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant
and those are a type of government surveillance drone if i understand ornithology correctly, which i don't
Mmmm tasty government surveillance drones
And when in your entire area almost all the peasants were serfs serving mostly foreign lords for several centuries, you kinda forget other types of peasants existed.
But they'd work a couple days out of the year and their lord was expected to fight to protect his people and land
The dependency of manoralism and vassalage is a little more complex.
Working for the lord was often a necessity if your land alone couldn't feed your family. Sharecroppers would get (as the name implies) a share of the crops they harvest. Other forms of labour might be paid in kind (food, resources) or in money (which might also be required to pay taxes).
The lord was expected to help out in times of crisis. If the harvest sucked, he would have been able to procure surplus food from elsewhere and help you out (putting you in his debt, of course). If there was danger from a belligerent neighbour, he would have been able to call on his liege to defend his holdings.
That in turn came with the expectation that, should your lord call on you to help, you would oblige. Your town might be expected to supply a few men, for instance, who would fight with that lord. That lord might in turn be answering the summons of his liege to defend some other lord's lands, or wage some other war for some other nobles wealth and glory
So the lord wouldn't fight alone, but use his own relationships to secure help for you, in exchange for your own service to him. In theory, that's a mutually beneficial arrangement. In practice, you didn't get much choice about arranging it.
And the peasants who leased the land were his foot soldiers
No they don't. They're landless labourers.
There's nuance here: a peasant may have owned some land, but often not enough to live off of, which made them dependent on additional labour on the land of some landlord to supplement their own land's harvest.
I recommend reading this historian's analysis of life as a peasant.
Thanks for the recommendation but I'm pretty sure peasants still exist.
As I understand the term, it generally refers to the agricultural class in pre-industrial societies. I thought it obvious that this was the comparison made by the post. I'm not aware of any more modern application of the term aside from using it as an insult.
https://magazines.odisha.gov.in/Orissareview/2021/August/engpdf/page-56-60.pdf
Okay, fair point, my use of the term is very eurocentric. I'll concede my ignorance on the social structures in other parts of the world where the term may still apply.
As I read this:
That seems to include marrginal farmers, i.e. those with barely enough land to sustain their family, if that much. We're back to my point: Peasants may have land, but not enough to qualify as landholders. The criterion is not whether they have any, but whether they have too little, which includes having none at all.
Often not enough to sustain their family, which means they had to supplement it by working for some landlord.
I recommend reading this historian's analysis of life as a peasant.