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The 'Serf' column is wrong on several counts. Nobody owned the land, especially not the enserfed class. They were bound to the land--when it changed hands, they remained. Concerning the land, it was merely occupied by its tenants--lord and serf, alike--via a Roman-era legal principal called usufruct (or 'use of the fruit') which made the feudal structure communistic.
Land ownership would not emerge until the Enclosure Movement of the late 18th c. Serfs were granted protection by the nobility, who maintained a monopoly on the use of weaponry (that's why peasants used ”torches and pitchforks" instead of swords), and who extracted a heavy toll in produce and labor, called 'corvee', for their services. Serfs never saw money, so the toll was taken from the harvest which usually amounted to about 60%. So, basically, the serf was a sharecropper in a mafia-style protection racket called feudalism.
Oh, and because medieval man had no understanding of germ theory; hygiene; sanitation; separation from livestock; or adequate diets to stave off endemic diseases (let alone plagues), most people died at around 40 years old. Hell, Julius Caesar was at the top of the socio-economic heap and he was considered old at 56.
Call me super-cynical, but the feudal serf got to marry a wife who maybe, if her society had prima noctis, had had one previous partner, once. Today's wagecuck has to settle for something much worse than that, and cannot form the lifelong marriage bond that young people took for granted just a century or two ago.
Somehow, somewhere, we've taken a wrong turn.
Most won't want to admit it
The Road to Surfdom.
What serf worked 20 hours a week? This wasn’t even true in Italy.
In winter
Unless you were a serf in tsarist Russia, then you were part of someones assets.
That's a hot take, my guy.
The 'Serf' column is wrong on several counts. Nobody owned the land, especially not the enserfed class. They were bound to the land--when it changed hands, they remained. Concerning the land, it was merely occupied by its tenants--lord and serf, alike--via a Roman-era legal principal called usufruct (or 'use of the fruit') which made the feudal structure communistic.
Land ownership would not emerge until the Enclosure Movement of the late 18th c. Serfs were granted protection by the nobility, who maintained a monopoly on the use of weaponry (that's why peasants used ”torches and pitchforks" instead of swords), and who extracted a heavy toll in produce and labor, called 'corvee', for their services. Serfs never saw money, so the toll was taken from the harvest which usually amounted to about 60%. So, basically, the serf was a sharecropper in a mafia-style protection racket called feudalism.
Oh, and because medieval man had no understanding of germ theory; hygiene; sanitation; separation from livestock; or adequate diets to stave off endemic diseases (let alone plagues), most people died at around 40 years old. Hell, Julius Caesar was at the top of the socio-economic heap and he was considered old at 56.
Call me super-cynical, but the feudal serf got to marry a wife who maybe, if her society had prima noctis, had had one previous partner, once. Today's wagecuck has to settle for something much worse than that, and cannot form the lifelong marriage bond that young people took for granted just a century or two ago.