m was to enable technological advancement, hence increase productivity and population, "thus altering the bases of its own existence" (Cameron, 1997, p. 50). Cameron cites innovations in the main industry (agriculture): plow design, crop rotation, harvesting sickle, fertilizer (pp. 51-4), as well as certain cooperative farming strategies forced on the serfs by the fact that plots of land allotted to them as individuals were often few and far between. However, the ultimate effect of exploiting the technology and developing coping strategies to maximize subsistence output was also to increase efficiency, plainly a feature of economic growth (Cameron, p. 54). In other words, the stability of the system and such innovations as emerged from within the system, seem to have positioned feudal Europe to receive future economic expansion, even though nobody in Europe particularly planned it that way.
For the majority who were serfs the tolerable level was little else than slavery because they were tied to the land and to serving the interests of the owner/lord of the manor even before their own. Their lot involved drudgery, squalor, difficult physical work, and subsistence living. The lesser landowners and manorial powers, under the feudal system, were also bound to serve the interests of their overlords, or more exactly the land, under the principle of adscripti glebe, though the entire noble population is estimated at 5% of the whole (Cameron, 1997, p. 48). As Cipolla (1994, p. 119) puts it, the serfs "saw no means of escaping serfdom, and the lesser nobility could see no clear way of breaking the stranglehold of the establishment," consisting of the higher nobility and the sovereign.
However, the very structure of this almost exclusively rural medieval society fostered the growth of towns, "an element of innovation, a place to seek one's fortune"; Cipolla (1997, p. 119) compares the medieval town to the American frontier, where individua...