Black Iron's Glory - Chapter 5: Morssen’s Ambition

... ners usually belonged to that class. They owned private property and lived in towns and cities, paying taxes to the king or other nobles in exchange for their benevolence and protection. Over the generations, however, the freemen became an exploited and maltreated class.

The third class was the peasantry. These were people who didn’t own land and worked mainly as labour for others, especially those in the countryside that worked on farms. Two subclasses existed among the peasants, those ...