Medieval Serfs: Life, Labour, and Landownership

During the middle ages, medieval communities consisted of numerous types of labourers, mostly comprising of peasants and serfs. Serfs were labourer farmers who worked on their lord’s property in return for being able to use (not own) a section of the property in order to produce food for themselves. Males as well as females could be serfs and have work on the land, however, the females tended to do the household work whereas the males generally worked on the land. A medieval serf’s life was not easy considering that they were not given the land which they used for free and in order to use it, they had to work on that land for the land owner. It was expected of a medieval serf to work roughly 3 days a week on the lord’s property in order to

use his lord’s property and a serf had to work on the same land even if the owner changed. Serfs had to do things such as cultivating as well as harvesting, sometimes medieval serfs were assigned extra work (this was all dependant on what the land owner wanted to have done on the land in exchange for a serf to use it. Alongside working hard on the land, serfs were required to pay specific costs, which could be any valid form currency such as coinage or produce.
Considering that serfs were considered slaves, they did not have many rights however, a serf in the Middle Ages did have independence to a certain extent.

It was said that the only thing a serf actually owned was his ability to eat this is because everything, even his own garments were not his property. A male serf’s clothes were actually the possessions of his master therefore meaning that a serf’s main right was the ability borrow a small section of his master’s land in exchange for hard work and currency. It was quite rare for a serf in the middle ages to earn enough money to buy his own private land and gain and ultimately become richer than a regular free man, however, this did happen sometimes during the medieval period. In some cases, a medieval serf could also gather enough money to buy his way to freedom (his was also a very uncommonly rare thing to occur).

Another right that medieval serfs had was that they could harvest, grow & sell whatever they desired on the portion of land that they could use. This was also a very important right that serfs had since this allowed them to make more money and have the right crops which suited the current season. A male serf had only one other right, which was that his master/property-owner was not allowed to deprive his serfs unless he had a legitimate reason to do so and therefore was expected to protect the serfs from attacks as well as provide support for them during

scarcity.