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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 4305989" data-attributes="member: 1879">Erm. The important point had more to do with the workload. Farmworkers had to eat well, or they would die. When you're burning a few thousand calories a day in labor you need to eat at least that much or you start starving. While 'starving peasants' is one of those generic mental images of the middle ages it couldn't have been that bad all or even most of the time or there wouldn't have been any peasants after two generations. Starving women do not bear healthy babies. The urban poor were probably in a worse state. I recall the British army complaining (about the late 19th century) that as more recruits came from the cities instead of the rural farms the size, fitness, and health of the new recruits was in decline. You're completely misunderstanding what I said. A serf is not a slave, let alone a yeoman farmer or tennant. And even slaves usually owned some property. What I said was that even a peasant who had never touched a coin in his life would have received things like hard goods and cloth as his due from his lord in the two way nature of the feudal contract.Even if you take the lord out of the equation a small village would often bargin collectively for goods. If you take a look at how some of the old european villages were structured it was similar to a commune with several properties and structures being jointly owned and others being private property. The town council or village elders would bargin with traders or wandering blacksmiths for staples.</blockquote>

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