If I mortgage, the bank owns my house until the tithe has been paid in full. If I rent, the landlord owns the house and the tithe is a straight tribute.

My employer owns such time as I'm able to persuade him (usually it's a him) will increase his relative social standing through surplus value.

The obligations are entirely assymetric. I'm obliged - forced, in fact - to tithe a substantial part of my social productivity to people and organisations in the ownership class.

There's some mobility so it's possible for canny players to become owners themselves. But for most people freedom of action and interest is very tightly proscribed.

The only difference between feudalism and capitalism is that capitalism adds a second tier of tithing through consumerism. I'm allowed to create some surplus value of my own, in the form of disposable income, but I'm then encouraged to dispose of it in very tightly proscribed ways.

This looks like freedom, but in fact it's a closed market. It's difficult - sometimes unimaginably difficult - for most people to spend disposable income in ways which don't feed straight back to profit for the owners.

This wouldn't be a huge problem if mobility was fluid, so everyone could become an owner and trade equally with other owners.

But in practice the largest owners - specifically the banks and the largest corporations - act as oligarchies and monopolies which makes equal trading impossible.

In fact property is not an object it is a relationship.

As Bentham pointed out we should in fact refer to eg land as "the object of a man's property" ie an object which is "proper" to the man.

Property is that bundle of rights and obligations which go with land. In England & Wales (Scotland is a bit different) the Queen technically owns all the land, and a fair chunk of it she owns in practice.

Since a simplification in 1925 we peasants now have two alternative types of tenure (there used to be all sorts of feudal complexities).

Freehold - an absolute, permanent - well,as long as you live and then it passes to your heirs if you have any, but if you have none, and do not have a will, it goes to the Crown....

Leasehold - for a temporary or defined period.

Beyond these statutory rights there are complexities in relation to rights of use involving Trust law ( a goldmine for lawyers) or contractual rights of occupation based on other statutes, eg through membership of a housing Coop which has a freehold or leasehold.

I am identifying a new option, which is keep land permanently in the stewardship of a "Custodian" and to encapsulate the property relationship in an "Open" corporate.

It is then possible to share the rights, benefits and obligations between stakeholders in new ways - particularly

"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky

The following review excerpt clarifies the feudal/patrimonial distinctions.

[In Pipes' view], Russia differed from all other European countries because, even after the monumental attempt of Peter the Great to transform it in conformity with the Western model, its rulers clung stubbornly and immutably to their own autocratic privileges instead of evolving along representative and democratic lines. In an influential book, Russia Under the Old Regime, which appeared in 1974, Pipes expounded a wide-ranging theory that endeavored to explain this anomaly.

Briefly stated, it was a view of Russian society as being "patrimonial," a term initially used by Hobbes and then taken over and amplified by Weber. What it means is that when "the prince organizes his political power ... in the same essential manner as he does his authority over his household, there we speak of a patrimonial state structure." The czar thus "owned" everything within the state, which was simply considered his own property. No one individual or group had any right to counteract his power, nor was any distinction made between society and the state. Such a regime is different from despotism because "a despot violates his subjects' property rights; a patrimonial ruler does not even acknowledge their existence." In his new book Pipes cites Machiavelli, who in the sixteenth century contrasted the sultan of Turkey with the king of France by pointing out that the former was "a ruler who treated his subjects like slaves"; and Russia was much closer to Turkey in this respect than to any European country. This "patrimonial" mentality continued to dominate Russian politics up through the collapse of the Soviet Union, and seems to have found a new lease on life under Vladimir Putin.

Other factors also enter, such as the submissive habits inculcated by the Mongol conquest of Russia for two centuries (and, by contrast, the influence of Roman law on European monarchies). Even feudalism in the West played a part, because it involved a contract between lord and vassal, with mutual obligations on both sides that theoretically placed restraints on the power of the lord -- something totally unknown in Russia. But it was the control of the purse strings that made the most crucial difference. A whole host of authorities, beginning in the thirteenth century, are cited by Pipes to illustrate "the sanctity of private property [as] an axiom of European political thought and practice."

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.

Of course he will, because he gets to keep all his labour and capital.

"What are they doing with their savings?"

Buy a new horse?