How much did peasants make?

Answer 1

Peasants did not have to pay knights, except for rent if the knights were their landlords, or unless something quite illegal was going on.

Peasants paid their rent in various forms. One would have been labor, and in this case they did work for the landlord in terms of hours per week at jobs they were assigned. Another way they paid rent was to provide a part of the crop, in which case the rent was often paid in wheat, since it was a commodity with a fairly established price and easily judged quality. A third way to pay rent was money, but this appeared at the end of the Middle Ages. Looking at the source I usually use for wages and prices, I do not see rent for a peasant. I do see that a cottage rented for about 5s per year, which would have been 5d per month in a time when a common laborer got about 1d per day to work, and the rent of a cottage might have included the fields associated with it. This would mean that the peasant paid his landlord about a quarter of his earnings.

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Answer 2

Under the manorial system a serf had a number of obligations. The first was labor, which was typically no more than two days per week, and in some cases less. A serf that had his own farmland owed an annual rent for it. The amount varied by date and location, but in England in the high middle ages a figure of one shilling per acre per year was common. In addition, both serf and free farmers owed one tenth of their agricultural production to church parish in which they lived as a tithe. This was not a voluntary contribution, but a legal requirement, and representatives of the church would be present in the fields during harvest to make sure their portion was separated and stored in tithe barns. This represented the majority of the "taxes" on an unfree peasant, although the term in the modern sense does not exactly fit. In some cases a peasant might also owe a number of minor fees that were paid in goods over the course of the year, such as grain, animals, etc, to support the manor house, but these were a small expense compared to the rent and tithe.