[killjoywashere]

Recommend James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State" to learn more about the evolution of property valuation and rights. The systems of land rights in up to the 1500s-1800s were quite complex. The modern state imposed a uniform system of free-hold tenure which shifted the complexity to the downstream consequences.

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...

[thaumasiotes]

I was making a comment about radical change in the meaning of "renting" and "ownership". Did you have anything specific in mind?

(I've read the book; it didn't strike me as related to this topic.)

[killjoywashere]

The concept of freehold tenure is pretty central to the book. Not sure you could get any more on-point for the general reader looking for a book recommendation.

But since you ask: the peasant's rights to land were exquisitely bespoke. No tax collector could figure out how much one family owed versus another in another county. The rules in one prefecture of one county may have been completely unresolvable with the rules of a county a hundred miles north. Everything was negotiated family to family over generations, with rights in one place having no corollary whatsoever with the rights in another area, making the tax man's duty a fool's errand.

So, I don't your first statement "European peasants "renting" the land they farmed had much stronger ownership rights than Americans who "own" land do today." is really meaningful. Because no generalization can be made about the rights of a European peasant. That problem is the whole reason for the systems of freehold tenure that prevail today: making the territory "seeable" by the state.

[thaumasiotes]

You're talking about something entirely different. The typical case for the renting medieval peasant is that the rent on a given plot of land is set by custom, the nominal amount has been the same for centuries, and it can never be changed for any reason. No administrative task could ever be simpler than collecting the rent.

Landowners responded to that by adjusting the size of the units in which land rents were due, which is why a major demand of peasant movements was for standardized units.

The fact that rents were absolutely nonnegotiable led to other developments, such as the lord being so indifferent as to exactly who was renting from him that the renter was free to leave his status to whoever he chose in his will.

[pqtyw]

> amount has been the same for centuries, and it can never be changed for any reason

That's only true in a narrow and a relatively obtuse way. For starters that varied to a huge degree between regions and types of contracts.

e.g. in England freeholds were indeterminate and or more or less worked the way you are saying.

However most peasants didn't have those, before the plague the overwhelming majority of peasants were villeins (i.e. serfs), inheritance was customary and lords were not legally obliged to pass it to the serf's descendants (also there were all kinds of fees, fines and stuff besides the fact that they weren't legally free and there was no legal system to protect your rights).

Leaseholds and copyholds became much more common due to labour shortages after the plague. leaseholds were not inherited and market price based. Copyholds were inherited and rents customary fixes (but again lords could and would impose all kinds of arbitrary fees to get their cut).

Then you had the enclosures starting the 1400s (a lot of the land peasants relied on was common)

[killjoywashere]

Again, you're generalizing. To say that doesn't work in medieval Europe is probably itself a generalization. But if you read the book, I don't think this would be a point you'd be arguing.