this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
847 points (99.4% liked)
People Twitter
9988 readers
1008 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician. Archive.is the best way.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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