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Serfs OWNED and TRADED like PROPERTY 😊
(thelemmy.club)
Took me a second to realize the woman on the right does not, in fact, have a wooden leg.
Is that a hoe? (The tool, not the woman…)
Looks like it, one for making mounds of dirt to put seeds in.
Serfs were considered part of the land. If you owned the land you owned all it's resources. Forests, mines, farmland and the serfs that worked that land.
Individual rights didn't start popping up until the black plague wiped out a third of Europe. Displaced serfs were able to go to other towns to sell their labor since there was a lack of people to do the work.
While true, it was next to impossible to keep track of people - there were no borders or division.
If a lord was offering a better deal (or their old Lord was too despotic), serfs could and would pack up and leave and there wasn't much their old lord could do about it.
The other part of people moving to the towns was inventions of new tools such as better looms and improvements in metallurgy to make more precise tools.
You might be surprised! Records-keeping in the high medieval period, when feudalism is most 'defined', can be frighteningly rigorous, and runaway serfs were regularly retrieved even at some distance from their land.
All the same, in support of your argument, there's a reason why the "year-and-a-day" was a common legal standard for shedding serfdom by residence in a city - after a certain amount of time lapses, it does become increasingly difficult for institutions with pre-modern communications and government institutions to keep trying to search for and punish folk for running off - and increasingly inconvenient to have some local lord's thugs nosing around one's employees!
You're right, as the medieval period progressed a lot changed. Those 1000 years were very different across space as well as time.
The conversation has also not been distinct with serf vs. peasant, which is an important distinction in conversations like this.
Thank you for the extra details and pointing out there Lords did still work to retrieve serfs.
"You criticize feudalism, yet you partake in it!"
Is there people who really say things like these or is this just a strawman?
Replace 'feudalism' with any modern economic ideology, and yes, there really are people who say shit like this.
Syndicalist Exclusionary Radical Feudalists?
More like one of the peasants becomes one of the lords by selling other peasants overpriced supplements, then when someone calls them a traitor to the revolt, they reply with memes like this.
Sadly/Unsurprisingly no-one goes from peasant to lord, short of being family of Jean of Arc.
I don't think there's another case of peasant to upper nobility in a single generation.
There are many such cases under capitalism, which this meme is meant to be satirizing
Well post 1893, sure.
But even today, until we had a new class of mega-rich, let's call them Billionaires - the nuevo-riche were always quick to be thrown under the bus by old money.
Now the power dynamic has shifted, but the billies will still, and do, chuck millionaire cronies to the crowds if it means avoiding responsibility and comeuppance.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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