It's been a while since I read about feudal economics and political structures, but IIRC, nobody 'owned' the land.
In a pure feudal system. The king owned the land absolutely, usually by right of implied violence.
The king would gift or un-gift favourites and un-favourites with estates and titles to indicate preferment or disfavour. Although most nobles had one or more home estates, it was possible to have tens of different land grants. So many estates were run in absentia by estate managers who collected tithes and dealt with the finance and accounting, but rarely met the owner directly.
If nobles could threaten enough coordinated violence they could threaten or replace the king to improve their own position.
Once the merchant class started to prosper, the threat of violence became more legal and mercenary. Merchants and bankers rarely had their own war bands, but they regularly hired mercenaries to do their enforcement for them.
The aim was the same though - concessions, further land grabs, or occasionally the complete overthrow of the local top dog and replacement with someone more amenable. But merchants could also use money in less direct ways, which often outflanked the noble classes who weren't used to that kind of abstract financial engineering.
The Medici famously funded a criminal and made it possible for him to become pope. He repaid them with a monopoly on management of church tithes across all of Europe, which made them insanely wealthy almost overnight.
Either way, estates and land were very definitely owned explicitly. Although there was a tradition of common land, it was likely to be common land on an estate - i.e. common in a very local sense, in that everyone in a village was allowed right of pasture. There was no question of it being un-owned.
The UK still has the tradition of crown ownership with grants through the land registry. Even if land is owned freehold it still nominally belongs to the crown and is granted as a freehold. The giveaway is that if land stops being part of anyone's estate it reverts back to crown ownership rather than becoming government or common land.
Depending on which part of the world, Common land (a common), is a piece of land owned by one person, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, such as allowing their livestock to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. Common land, an English development, was used extensively in England and Wales and in many former British colonies, for example in Ireland and the USA. Today commons still exist in England, Wales, Scotland and USA, although their extent is much reduced from the millions of acres that existed prior to the 17th century
Is a reasonable explanation Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
