There’s 2 parts here that I think you’re tying together. They happened together, I don’t believe they’re causally linked. First: feudalism was a system that ca

There’s 2 parts here that I think you’re tying together. They happened together, I don’t believe they’re causally linked. First: feudalism was a system that came into existence in response to circumstances after the Roman Empire fell. In exchange for binding themselves to lords, serfs were promised physical protection in a world that was getting more dangerous. The negative sides of this arrangement became intolerable once serfs no longer needed to depend on lords for physical safety. The other half is that serfs worked less than modern workers. But that’s not because they’re serfs, it’s because that in a world without refrigeration, you have a limited ability to over work, since your primary product (food) will spoil if you over produce it. Serfs didn’t work less because they were serfs, they worked less because once enough food had been collected then there was no more work to be done.