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It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locus
by blargey 11d ago
It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.
The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.
- aeternum 11d agoFor sure and that doesn't decrease the value of the protection. There seems to be this somewhat quaint idea that the crops belong to the peasant because he/she planted and grew them. That's a very modern concept. In the natural world they belong to whatever entity is able to take them. Life has always been about grabbing as many macronutrients as you can by whatever means possible.