Complete the account of the seigneurie as an economic unit.

The lord worked part of the estate directly; this was the demesne. The rest was divided into peasant tenures, which owed rent and fixed labour days known as week-work. On top of that, tenants paid to use the lord’s mill and oven, a set of monopolies called banalités.

The monopolies are easy to underrate and were not. Rent is taken once from a holding; the mill and oven charges are taken from every loaf a household eats, which makes them regressive, unavoidable and, in the fourteenth-century revolts, the grievance people actually destroyed things over.