Calvin Plummer
Vital Football Legend
Saxons had their own version of it- a kind of serfdom you could join and leave at will- some people used to become serfs when they needed a Thane's protection in the winter and then bugger off to live in the forests in the spring/summer. In the Danelaw... Well, Normans were just Danes anyway really.
You can't underestimate the brutality of the regime the Normans brought in though. It was a massive shock to the system and made lives a misery. The Saxon societal system was actually pretty good.
A little example; a Saxon married couple could get divorced. If the woman was leaving the man, she got all her pre marriage property back or half of everything. The assumption was that if a woman was leaving the protection of her husband, there must be something seriously wrong in the domestic violence sort of way.
If he left her, then the wife gets all her property and half of his- the assumption being that he has run off with a younger model and his now abandoned wife is going to need more property to survive (as well as giving him good reason not to look elsewhere).
Normans came in and scrapped all that. Everything was mysogeny and primogeniture from thereon in, which is where our current aristocracy comes from; the current "elite" would not have happened under the Saxons, who divided property equally(ish) among sons (and sometimes daughters). Funnily enough, they did not bring salic law; that may have come later in France, I can't rememebr
I think you're swapping one form of shit for another. While I don't disagree on some of your points you're happy to overlook advantages: architecture, the economy through developing ports etc, land ownership is actually the first step towards parliamentary democracy and preventing power from being consolidated in the hands of just a few, reformation of the church, a code of law including murder etc.
And abolishing slavery.