DBWI: Feudalism so extreme it extends down to individual manors?

What if after the decline of the Roman Empire, feudalism became so entrenched (let's call this version "manorialism") that individual manors were actually split into demesnes, vassal dependents, and patches of ecclesiastical land that were farmed by helots?

Instead of feudal planters seasonally subletting their land to transhumant shepherds and migratory free peasants who could terminate the lease at will, the peasants would actually be attached to the land directly by hereditary tenure and forbidden from leaving, property of the lords. Arguably, this happened in Venetian-ruled Illyria, but nowhere else was stratification that steep.

If this "manorial" system became widespread, would Europe be stuck in a "Dark Age" for centuries?
 
Well, it would leave a problem Europe didn't have OTL : if peasants are just another type of property,they may not form milicias (which were a huge thing, at least in France).
And this changes everything : if they lack basic freedoms, they won't be armed or listened to, and a lack of milicias would make warfare a noble thing...

However we must also ask how such a thing could happen... I mean it almost happened once with the revolts against the Frankish Queen Fredegund, but I don't see it becoming the norm
 
Well, a good POD could be urban culture in the West entering a very steep decline as even at its "low point", Rome still had 200,000 people.
 
Well, a good POD could be urban culture in the West entering a very steep decline as even at its "low point", Rome still had 200,000 people.

Well, you can destroy one or two urban centers through fires or wars, but a whole society model ? We would need the bubonic plague to come centuries before it did. And that would be pretty hard. Specially since the local urban centers became the seat of power after the whole fall of rome thing, trade in Europe was way weaker than it became several centuries after, so epidemics would be less likely to happen.
 
Well, it would leave a problem Europe didn't have OTL : if peasants are just another type of property,they may not form milicias (which were a huge thing, at least in France).
And this changes everything : if they lack basic freedoms, they won't be armed or listened to, and a lack of milicias would make warfare a noble thing...

However we must also ask how such a thing could happen... I mean it almost happened once with the revolts against the Frankish Queen Fredegund, but I don't see it becoming the norm
Without the militia tradition, it would probably be much rarer for peasants to pick up and migrate as tribal armies. I mean, we wouldn't have seen the Second Age of Migrations at all. The Crusades wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a long standing trend, continuing from the Visigothic days, of basically barbarian armies forming and trying to conquer other lands.

Though, I suppose some of the nomadic pastoralist societies like the Magyars would still show up, take over a kingdom occasionally, and form a mounted nobility there.

Well, a good POD could be urban culture in the West entering a very steep decline as even at its "low point", Rome still had 200,000 people.
That's a good point. Even in Gaul and Britain, the cities became smaller, but they also became more numerous and focused on intensified craft production. Ultimately the urban population was not that much lower than it was during the Empire, it was just more spread out. We did see a few of the major Roman centers declining to absolute obscurity however, such as Londinium.

It could go either way. Maybe a more entrenched feudalism would actually increase the size of cities based on latifundia-like exploitation of the rural areas? If we look at Iqta tax farming, it supported the mighty cities of Baghdad and Samarra. Venice also exploited the serfs of the Haemus peninsula to an extreme, to sustain its own capital city.
 
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