Sedentary settlement in Scandinavia was predominantly agrarian during the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. Grain cultivation and animal husbandry were the basic means of providing sustenance, but were complemented, according to local conditions, by various forms of hunting, fishing and gathering. Most of the medieval sedentary population of Scandinavia based its existence on a combination of agriculture and animal husbandry. The systems of cultivation and the tillage technology that were employed at the end of the Viking Age had parallels in west and central Europe. Different patterns of settlement have existed in the Nordic countries from prehistoric times. There were farms grouped in villages of different sizes whose resource areas were more or less clearly separated from each other. There were also individual farms corresponding functionally and legally to villages in the sense that they had their own resource territories. Throughout the first millennium AD Danish agrarian society was marked by the continual relocation of rural villages and hamlets.

Rural society in Scandinavia was marked by the repercussions of a dramatic loss of population well into the second half of the fifteenth century when the first signs of recovery manifested themselves in some areas. Nobles and the Church were the dominant landowners in Denmark at the end of the Middle Ages, possessing together 75 per cent of the farms, but there were districts in the peripheral forested areas where freehold farms could amount to 50 per cent of the total. As a consequence of the late medieval loss of population the profitability of certain forms of agricultural production decreased radically, destabilising the economy of those involved. On the other hand, large groups of the rural population profited from the changes that occurred in the period of crisis. Auxiliary means of livelihood often permitted farmers to accumulate wealth. In the course of the high Middle Ages, the rural population of Scandinavia came to comprise only legally free persons.

In the Carolingian period, from 750 or so onwards, people began, for the first time in European history, to see rural society more directly. This chapter provides an understanding of how rural social relationships actually worked in practice, on the ground. It talks about four areas as brief examples of the local societies, and discusses what their similarities and differences might tell us about the vast range of small-scale realities that made up Europe as a whole. The four are two small Catalan counties, Urgell and Pallars; the villages north of the Breton monastery of Redon; Dienheim in the middle Rhine, just upstream from Mainz; and Cologno Monzese, a settlement just east of Milan: from, respectively, a marginal frontier area, a more prosperous marchland, a core area for Frankish political power, and the urbanised heartland of the Lombard-Carolingian kingdom of Italy.

In 1580 Todar Mal began a drastic experiment designed to completely restructure the Mughal agrarian revenue system. The revenue ministry under Todar Mal established a fresh, accurate revenue assessment to be placed against each village, pargana, revenue circle, district, and province. In forcing its agrarian system upon the variegated aristocracy of the North Indian plain, the Mughals began to compress and shape a new social class. The social class found itself becoming more dependent upon the state for its prosperity and for an essential aspect of its identity. Mughal success in the countryside relied upon the services of numerous local members of a gentry class whose interests and activities were both rural and urban. Akbar's new policy forced grantees to shift their holdings to selected parganas and districts within the central provinces of North India where these tax-free land grants could be better managed and controlled. Such grants provided a living to a substantial number of Muslim and non-Muslim gentry.

This chapter focuses on France, the Low Countries, and Western Germany. Geographical and chronological frameworks are modifications which took place respectively in the extent of land under cultivation, in the management of the soil and in the character and distribution of landed property. The old collective economy was replaced by a system of agrarian individualism. This basic change in the system of cultivation was particularly noticeable in Flanders during the thirteenth century. The dominant fact in the history of estate institutions is the decomposition of the villa, or the classical estate. The break-up of the villa was but one aspect of the changes in manorial organization which began in the tenth century. In the first place, as a result of the dissolution of the classical villa and the progressive loss of force of the dominium direction over the rural tenancies, die tenants tended more and more to become in practice small or middling peasant proprietors.