Instead, as we noted in our first part, the average size of peasant landholdings was extremely small. Typical Roman landholdings were around 5-10 iugera (3.12-6.23 acres), in wheat-farming pre-Han northern China roughly 100 mu (4.764 acres), in Ptolemaic Egypt (for the indigenous, non-elite population) probably 5-10 aroura (3.4-6.8 acres) and so on.6 In Saint-Thibery in Languedoc, the average (mean) farm size was about 24 setérée (~14.5 acres) but the more useful median farm size was just five setérée (~3 acres); the average is obviously quite distorted by the handful of households with hundreds of setérée of land.

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Instead the core problem is that our peasant households are much too large as units of labor for the farmland they own. When we say that, what we mean is that given these households are both units of consumption (they have to provide for their members) and units of production (they are essentially agricultural small businesses), an efficient allocation of them would basically have each household on something like 30 acres of farmland, farming all of it (and thus using most of their labor) and selling the excess. But the lack of economically sustainable social niches – that is, jobs that provide a reliable steady income to enable someone to obtain subsistence – means that these families are very reluctant to leave members without any land at all, so the holdings ‘fractionalize’ down to these tiny units, essentially the smallest units that could conceivably support one family (and sometimes not even that).

I’ve already seen folks in the comments realizing almost immediately why these conditions might make conquest or resettlement into areas of land easily brought under cultivation so attraction: if you could give each household 30-40 acres instead of 3-6, you could realize substantial improvements in quality of life (and the social standing of the farmers in question). And of course that kind of ‘land scarcity’ problem seems to have motivated both ancient and early modern settler-colonialism: if you put farmers next to flat, open ground owned by another community, it won’t be too long before they try to make it farmland (violently expelling the previous owners in the process). This is also, I might add, part of the continual friction in areas where nomads and farmers meet: to a farmer, those grazing fields look like more land and more land is really valuable (though the response to getting new land is often not to create a bunch of freeholding large-farm homesteaders, but rather to replicate the patterns of tenancy and non-free agricultural labor these societies already have to the point of – as in the Americas – forcibly trafficking enormous numbers of enslaved laborers at great cost, suffering and horror, to create a non-free dependent class whose exploitation can enable those patterns. Most conquering armies dream of becoming landlords, not peasants).9

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There is no real way around it: our peasants need access to more land. And that land is going to come with conditions.

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Now the question is: on what terms?

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And the answer here won’t surprise: bad terms. The terms are bad.

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Consequently, while peasants, unencumbered by taxes, rents, elites, debt, conscription and so on might have been able to survive working only a relatively small fraction of their time (probably around 100 days per year per-working-age male (again, age 7 or so and up) would suffice), they did not live in that world.

Instead, they lived in a world where their own landholdings were extremely small – too small to fully support their households, although their small holdings might still provide a foundation of income for survival. Instead, they had to work on land owned or at least controlled by Big Men: local rentier-elites, the king, temples, monasteries, and so on. Those big institutions which could wield both legal and military force in turn extracted high rents and often demanded additional labor from our peasants, which soaked up much of their available labor, leading to that range of 250-300 working days a year, with 10-12 hour days each, for something on the order of 2,500-3,600 working hours for a farm-laboring peasant annually.