askchapo

Local lords had access to trade networks and specialist laborers that the common folk didn't, and they were expected to gift things back to their peasants with banquets and festivals. So yes, Baron Scrotumface might actually be where you got your better plows and scythes from, along with fabrics and spices from more than a few towns away.

Would your subsistence farming community have been able to produce these things themselves? Well, not while they're busy spending all their time generating a surplus to feed nobles.

Not to be a medievalist here, but there is no single "feudalism" system with any sort of consistency. The stereotypical "feudalism" we're taught about only really applies to England and Northern France for a period of about 300 years. To answer your question simply, it didn't really give many benefits for most serfs other than the nominal protection from raids and the fact you were technically more free than a slave.

If your question is "was there ever any benefit to having being a serf and having a Lord", there are some rare cases. My best example is in Southern France/Aquitaine before the Albigensian Crusades of the 13th century. While Northern France in the 11th-12th tightened their control over landed peasants with the "every land a lord" policy, Southern France had it's own system. While Aquitaine and Toulouse were part of the kingdom of France, they had their own local laws and administration which made them fairly autonomous. Specifically, landed yeoman were not obligated to serve militarily or serve on their lord's farms (at least not to the same extent as in the north). Townfolk had even more protection via their communes. There was no unified system, every Lord and tenant could have different arrangements which generally made it better for lower classes. Southern lords also permitted more religious freedoms, which is why the Albigensian Crusade began.

Essentially peasants and townfolk in Southern France and Northern Italy felt disconnected from the increasingly bureaucratic church, so commoners started preaching about wealth inequality the way they imagined Jesus did. Soon these lay preachers began performing holy sacraments, which the Church would not stand for because that was how the Church made their money. Although this movement was not unified, the Church labeled it a "heresy" and called for an inquisition to get to the bottom of it. Soon it became a full on Crusade where Northern French lords invaded Southern hotspots of religion. Southern lords, first the Count of Toulouse and then later the Lord of Aquitaine, defended their lands and people and got labeled heretics themselves. After decades of back and forth fighting, the King of France eventually toppled Southern lords, grabbed land, and systematically eliminated the privileges commoners enjoyed and instituted their own form of feudalism. However it's worth noting that southern lords were invested in protecting their tenants from Northern incursion on their rights.

All of this is to say "feudalism" was no set standard and was constantly changing. If your question is "were there things medieval peasants enjoyed that modern proles do not", there are some things. It's hard to say exactly, but it's likely that pre-modern peasants "worked" fewer total hours in a year than modern proles. There were intense periods of work in the sewing and harvest seasons, with much less work to be done in the winter (mainly maintaining your house and animals). Peasants worked with the sun and could take breaks as they needed (assuming they were working their own land). In times of good harvest, they were able to profit from any extra produce. They also enjoyed many religious holidays which were so sacred, peasants would frequently rebel to protect those privileges. Lords were also supposed to donate surplus food to those festivals (but since that came from the peasants anyways it's hard to count it).

If you compare them to proles of the 19th century who worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week the comparisons are even more stark.

Ostensibly the lords were supposed to provide military protection against other lords and such

What people immediately missed upon transition to capitalism were two things: the commonly owned land which had been taken from them and the greater autonomy in production and reproduction, which was replaced by strict control. To clarify the latter:

In capitalism, production of commodities and reproduction of labor power (like eating to be able to work again the next day) are strictly separated in two different spheres. Any created value is immediately under the direct material control of the capitalist, who decides, considering their best interests alone, what to funnel back into reproduction (via wages). Under capitalism, a worker can't go to the market, sell the product they created, buy food, eat it and then say:"Sorry boss, that's all that's left of the revenue. Guess we all suffer from the recession." No, the boss takes everything first and is free to give back less, than the worker needs to survive.

This system ensures, that production can thrive for some time, even when reproduction is in crisis (until the crisis inevitably catches up with production when demand lowers, but this can be mitigated by buying labor on a different market than the market where you sell commodities - colonialism). It makes the system more flexible and resilient by enabling over-exploitation. It's also the material basis for the further separation of live into other spheres such as private/family(empathy expected) vs public(empathy punished) as well as political (democratic ambitions are limited to this sphere) vs economic (explicitly non-democratic).

Pre capitalist economies are much less strict in the division between production and reproduction. When looking at different feudal contexts, expect the producing classes to be able to funnel considerable value into the process of reproduction before their lord gets a cut off what's left. This means in a crisis, such as a draught, the capacity of the lord to over-exploit is more tightly limited. People could more easily eat directly from the field first and worry later about what's due to their lord. A feudal lord could still raise taxes above what people need to survive, if they whish to over-exploit, but it's much harder to benefit from this. Their serfs will try everything to survive and hide stuff from the collectors they send around. Also, they are bound to the land. Getting new ones isn't as easy as posting a job offer and hiring new workers.

In general, transitions in economic systems don't take place, if they don't increase the ability of the new exploiting class to exploit. That's how they get an edge over the old class. Else, the old ruling classes would just stay in power. Feudal lords won over slave holders not because they were somehow less evil, but because they were more efficient and/or resilient than slave holders at exploiting people. Capitalist were even better at exploitation than feudal lords. If conditions have in any way improved, it's because the change in economic systems is always caused by change in the means of production, which also became more efficient. And of course because of the organized struggle of the exploited classes.

Edit: Another separation of spheres that gets increasingly enforced under capitalism: female(primarily tasked with unpaid reproductive labor) vs male (primarily tasked with productive wage labor). Until the rate of profit lowers enough, that more types of work need to enter the cycle of production.

Feudalism was a step up from the slave economies of the previous era, but not by much. While peasants and serfs had more rights than slaves (such as being able to own property of their own), they were still at the whims of the nobility.

Also, slavery still existed, so it's not like any progress made a difference for the slave populations across the globe. Even as feudalism gave way to capitalism in the American south, the form of slavery practiced there was especially brutal when compared to other slavery practices elsewhere.

I'd have to go look it up, but IIRC slave economies like Rome and Mali were at war more than fuedal societies that replaced them.