How did things change?

The population of England rose steadily between 1066 and 1348. The extra people needed more food, and the chief food was bread. So the peasants had to plough more land, and grow more corn.

In some parts of England, they ploughed up part of the common land, and made extra fields. So now many villages had three open fields. The peasants still left one field fallow each year, but they grew crops in the other two. They still worked the fields in strips.

Money began to play a bigger part in the peasants' lives. Some lords stopped making villeins give them two or three days' work a week. They let them pay rent instead, like freemen. The lords' land still had to be worked, of course. So the lords paid wages to cottars, bordars, and poor villeins to work for them.

Some freemen and villeins became quite rich by selling corn in the market towns. (The more land they had, the more corn they grew.) So they rented extra land from their lords, and became richer still. Like the lords of the manor, they paid the poorer peasants to work for them.

Walter Robson: Medieval Britain; Oxford University Press, 1991/2000, page 54