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Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly

by lumost 1y ago

Curiously, medieval societies struggled with “usury”. Effectively being a wage earner was a tough game as you might owe rent, have a bad month, or end up overly indebted. Most wage earners eventually became indentured servants or worse. This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent. It’s not just that people don’t understand debt, it’s that the vast majority of people live in precarious situations which make debt a temptation. A little debt to grease transactions and buy assets is good, a lot of debt is a burning crises.

catlikesshrimp 1y ago
>"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent" There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.
- helge9210 1y ago
  Correction: slavery in Russia/Soviet Union ended in 1974 when all the rural residents got passports and with it the right to leave the collective farm and change the profession.
  - catlikesshrimp 1y ago
    Correction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 Serfdom ended in 1861.
    - kspacewalk2 1y ago
      There's a very good argument that, after being abolished in 1861, serfdom was re-introduced in the early 1930s via collectivization. Instead of private ownership of serfs, the state effectively owned the peasants who were bound to their collective farms by a system of meagre food-for-labour payments, needing permission to leave the farm/village for any reason, etc. The peasants that "came with" the collective farms were only issued internal passports in the late 1960s. Anyone who knows anything about life in the USSR understands the implications of having no internal passport. You didn't quite need one to breathe when outside your city/town/village, but just about.
      - helge9210 1y ago
        Without an internal passport a person would be detained at the first train station and, in best case, returned back to the farm.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
- Terr_ 1y ago
  > Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. A modern echo of this: Several times in the gloomy AM hours, I have worried what might happen if the current US administration tries to impose capital controls [0] like China. You might flee to Canada, only to find out that most/all of your life savings are forfeit to the tender mercies of the US government. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/investors-could-exit-tariff-purgatory-only-enter-capital-controls-inferno-2025-04-29/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/investors-could-exit-tari...
bombcar 1y ago
We’re worse off than them - usury wasn’t about high interest rates (though that obviously compounds the problem) - it was about whether interest could be charged on personally guaranteed loans at all. If all loans were required to be non-recourse they’d suddenly have to be reasonable; anyone suffering too much under them would walk away leaving the collateral. This isn’t even a death-knell for credit cards; it’d just turn them all to secured ones. But it would be deadly to allowing people to overspend and overextend.
SR2Z 1y ago
Where do you get the idea that peasants owned their land? One of the defining traits of medieval Europe was that peasants were forced into serfdom and were granted the privilege to work the land. More primitive societies banned usury because the concept of interest was seen as unfair. This held them back from investing or speculating on the future and kept them very poor.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Serfdom was not universal in Europe, not even at the time when it peaked. However, OP didn't talk about owning land but rather about "permanent land rights", which usually means the right to use land. That is, it would still be owned by the feudal, who might be able to sell it to another feudal, but the peasants that lived on it and farmed it were necessarily part of the deal and couldn't be just removed from the land at a whim. That was not an uncommon arrangement even in places that had serfdom.
  - SR2Z 1y ago
    > the peasants that lived on it and farmed it were necessarily part of the deal and couldn't be just removed from the land at a whim Is it that they COULDN'T be, or is it that there was no reason to relocate them? Serfdom might not have been universal, but it was extremely common and the predominant system in large parts of medieval Europe.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      They literally couldn't be removed at a whim, yes. That's actually what makes traditional serfdom a distinctive arrangement: serfs are tied to land and must be transferred along with it when it changes hands. This would even be codified in the legal system as a right. In some cases it would be "right to subsistence" or something like it instead, meaning that the feudal could remove the serfs from some particular plot of land, but only by providing a replacement plot for them to subsist on. Courts did, in principle, enforce those rights, although of course the feudals would have a lot more opportunities to subvert them in practice (but there are still many recorded cases of serfs granted relief by medieval courts). In Eastern Europe - and especially in Russia - serfdom began as a similar arrangement, but eventually evolved into full-fledged slavery where people could be bought and sold in and of themselves at a whim, while the original label remained for propriety reasons - basically people wanted to own slaves but didn't want to be called "slaveholders". So, a bit like "democratic people's republics" of whatever today. However, even if you take the label at face value, that arrangement still does not describe most places with serfdom.

by lumost 1y ago

catlikesshrimp 1y ago

>"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent" There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.

helge9210 1y ago
Correction: slavery in Russia/Soviet Union ended in 1974 when all the rural residents got passports and with it the right to leave the collective farm and change the profession.
- catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Correction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861 Serfdom ended in 1861.
  - kspacewalk2 1y ago
    There's a very good argument that, after being abolished in 1861, serfdom was re-introduced in the early 1930s via collectivization. Instead of private ownership of serfs, the state effectively owned the peasants who were bound to their collective farms by a system of meagre food-for-labour payments, needing permission to leave the farm/village for any reason, etc. The peasants that "came with" the collective farms were only issued internal passports in the late 1960s. Anyone who knows anything about life in the USSR understands the implications of having no internal passport. You didn't quite need one to breathe when outside your city/town/village, but just about.
    - helge9210 1y ago
      Without an internal passport a person would be detained at the first train station and, in best case, returned back to the farm.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
Terr_ 1y ago
> Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him. A modern echo of this: Several times in the gloomy AM hours, I have worried what might happen if the current US administration tries to impose capital controls [0] like China. You might flee to Canada, only to find out that most/all of your life savings are forfeit to the tender mercies of the US government. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/investors-could-exit-tariff-purgatory-only-enter-capital-controls-inferno-2025-04-29/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/investors-could-exit-tari...

bombcar 1y ago

We’re worse off than them - usury wasn’t about high interest rates (though that obviously compounds the problem) - it was about whether interest could be charged on personally guaranteed loans at all. If all loans were required to be non-recourse they’d suddenly have to be reasonable; anyone suffering too much under them would walk away leaving the collateral. This isn’t even a death-knell for credit cards; it’d just turn them all to secured ones. But it would be deadly to allowing people to overspend and overextend.

SR2Z 1y ago

Where do you get the idea that peasants owned their land? One of the defining traits of medieval Europe was that peasants were forced into serfdom and were granted the privilege to work the land. More primitive societies banned usury because the concept of interest was seen as unfair. This held them back from investing or speculating on the future and kept them very poor.

int_19h 1y ago
Serfdom was not universal in Europe, not even at the time when it peaked. However, OP didn't talk about owning land but rather about "permanent land rights", which usually means the right to use land. That is, it would still be owned by the feudal, who might be able to sell it to another feudal, but the peasants that lived on it and farmed it were necessarily part of the deal and couldn't be just removed from the land at a whim. That was not an uncommon arrangement even in places that had serfdom.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  > the peasants that lived on it and farmed it were necessarily part of the deal and couldn't be just removed from the land at a whim Is it that they COULDN'T be, or is it that there was no reason to relocate them? Serfdom might not have been universal, but it was extremely common and the predominant system in large parts of medieval Europe.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    They literally couldn't be removed at a whim, yes. That's actually what makes traditional serfdom a distinctive arrangement: serfs are tied to land and must be transferred along with it when it changes hands. This would even be codified in the legal system as a right. In some cases it would be "right to subsistence" or something like it instead, meaning that the feudal could remove the serfs from some particular plot of land, but only by providing a replacement plot for them to subsist on. Courts did, in principle, enforce those rights, although of course the feudals would have a lot more opportunities to subvert them in practice (but there are still many recorded cases of serfs granted relief by medieval courts). In Eastern Europe - and especially in Russia - serfdom began as a similar arrangement, but eventually evolved into full-fledged slavery where people could be bought and sold in and of themselves at a whim, while the original label remained for propriety reasons - basically people wanted to own slaves but didn't want to be called "slaveholders". So, a bit like "democratic people's republics" of whatever today. However, even if you take the label at face value, that arrangement still does not describe most places with serfdom.