Feudal Economic System

FEUDAL ECONOMIC SYSTEM The economic portion of feudalism was centered on the lord's estates or manor, and is called manorialism. A lord's manor would include peasant villages, a church, farm land, a mill, and the lord's castle or manor house. All economic activity occurred on the manor. This meant that little to no trade occurred during this time period. Most of the peasants during the middle Ages were serfs. Serfs were generally farmers who were tied to the land. They were not slaves because they could not be bought or sold, but they could not readily leave the manor either. Serfs were given land to farm in exchange for service to their lord. This service usually involved working the lord's fields, maintaining roads and the manor, and providing military service in times of war. Serfs paid taxes to their lord in the form of crops. This is also how the paid the fee to use the manor's mill or other services. http://regentsprep.org/regents/global/themes/economic/mid.cfm Feudal land tenure, system by which land was held by tenants from lords. As developed in medieval England and France, the king was lord paramount with numerous levels of lesser lords down to the occupying tenant.
Tenures were divided into free and unfree. Of the free tenures, the first was tenure in chivalry, principally grand sergeanty and knight service. The former obliged the tenant to perform some honourable and often personal service; knight service entailed performing military duties for the king or other lord, though by the middle of the 12th century such service was usually commuted for a payment called scutage. Another type of free tenure was socage, primarily customary socage, the principal service of which was usually agricultural in nature, such as performing so many days’ plowing each year for the lord. In addition to the principal service, all these tenures were subject to a number of conditions, such as relief, the payment made on transfer of a fief to an heir, and escheat,