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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 8289619" data-attributes="member: 72555">Farmers where allowed to produce for their own consumption because the machinery of state wasn't that efficient at extracting resources from them, and the consent of the serfs was needed in order to grow the food.The Malthusian trap meant that the land was more important than the marginal productivity or more people working on it.  Those farmers would grow food and keep as much as they could to feed their families, which grew in size (over generations) until there wasn't enough.  The local government would attempt to take the food (via taxes) to feed the nobility and city folk, and be resisted as the farmers would rather feed their family than some stranger.If you can replace the farmers with constructs or undead that don't grow in numbers and don't require food themselves, you don't have serfs who every few generations require aggressive tax collection and/or thinning them out in a war.Farmers who eat 90% of the food they grow are relatively easy to compete with productivity wise to the owner of the land.</blockquote>