Feudalism for D&D; Part 2

Sword of Spirit said:

This is really good to know. I had a breakthrough with that in connection with Gygax's inspiration coming from frontier America. Basically estates are going to have to make money somehow (unless the lord has other income) but they don't necessarily need tenant farmers.

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Keep in mind that tenant farmers don't have to be serfs or slaves either, and there is plenty of mid-ground between small independent farms and a feudal system. Tenant farming is a recent enough thing, that my grandfather did tenant farming some years, and my own mother dragged cotton bags through the fields as a small girl to help make the family payments when grandfather was sick. I'm one generation removed from sharecroppers, which is in many ways only a small removal from feudalism and serfdom. So there may well be plenty of places in your world where serfdom is no longer a legal institution, or no longer a common institution, but there are still large landowners whose farms are rented out to tenants in exchange for a share of the profits. Indeed, it's implied that Bilbo and Frodo are both landlords of this sort, whose neighbors don't own the land they farm, but are renting it from the Baggins. (And it's implied that Bilbo was a much kinder landlord after his experiences in the Hobbit than he was back when he was giving "Good mornings" to Gandalf at the beginning of the story.)

In my campaign world, there is a large central civilized area that is organized very closely around medieval feudal ideas. The civilized area is a small remnant of a once huge empire that collapsed leading to massive depopulation (and plenty of ancient ruins outside the core civilized area). Of course the depopulated lands are hostile, filled with monsters, fey and uncivilized tribes (both of human and nonhuman variety). Naturally, almost all adventuring happens in the border between the civilized center and the depopulated/hostile surroundings.

Basically it's post-Roman dark ages demographics but the center has High Middle Ages political institutions.

This scratched my itch about how to have a believably realistic medieval/feudal world that still allowed for D&D style adventuring.