What were the peasant farmers who were not allowed to leave the manor called?

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure what your question is referring to, or how you may have been led to believe a peasant farmer could not leave a "manor". Perhaps you are referring to not being able to leave the land they had been allotted to farm? There were tenant farmers in Egypt, but they were not slaves. While they had to pay to the landlord a portion of their crops -- and the landlord may have been either a private citizen or a group of priests associated with a temple -- as well as a portion in taxes to the government who used it to pay/feed their bureaucracy, army, palace staff, full and part time workers who helped build monuments as well as those conscripted to shore up dams, dikes, and canals prior to each year's flood, etc., they would have been free to spend their leisuretime as they saw fit. If that meant travelling, then they travelled, though probably few went very far. Up until recent times most "farm kids" never expected to go more than 50 miles from their farms within their lifetimes. While they went to town to worship and to purchase items they didn't grow themselves and could not make on their own, such as cloth for clothing, most stayed on the farm they were raised on, or, if their family managed to prosper either through farming or some side business, bought land close to the farm they had grown up on. Most Ancient Egyptian peasants built small boats for fishing made out of papyrus reeds, which were good for short journeys on the river, but to really get anywhere one had to book passage on a wooden boat or barge, which would have been not only expensive for a peasant farmer but also unnecessary. Their native pack animal was the donkey, which was good only for taking things to and from market or riding on for short periods, not for long journeys (only the army elite and wealthy people had horses, and these were not introduced into Egypt until about 1500 bce, over 1500 years after the country was united under one king). Their extended family lived nearby, there were temples throughout Egypt with "favourites" for each locality, and most of what they needed they could obtain through trade with other farmers or by attending the local market. Peasant people might have attended some of the larger religious festivals once or twice in their lifetimes, or made a pilgrimage to an important temple or tomb for reasons of personal or family illness, or as a way to obtain favour from a certain god or famous personage from the past. But unless they were lucky enough to live close to a large religious centre like Thebes, making such journeys and attending such festivals were a "once in a lifetime" event as most of their spiritual (and material) needs could be met fairly close to home. Egypt was what we call a "supply economy". That is, in exchange for farm produce as taxes, and for taking part in country wide building and irrigation projects (and these may have afforded young men (and some young women, too!) their only real chance to travel and see new things, AND they were fed and clothed during their time away from home which took some burden off the shoulders of their families), the government "supplied" by storing away grain for lean times as well as transporting, organizing and directing large groups to help build canals and public buildings near to their own farms. These conscriptions were probably looked forward to by young people as a chance to socialize with people their own ages before setting down to a family and full time farming; this system lasted for most of ancient Egypt's 3000 year history, so could not have been seen as such a bad thing. All people of Egypt, men and women, had equal access to legal recourse, and though it is unlikely most actual peasants could read and write, their are many existing legal papyrus drawn up by scribes for peasant people that include wills, adoptions, marriage contracts, divorces, etc. Here is a link to a document entitled The Eloquent Peasant, about a rich man who steals from a poor man and how the poor man manages in his persistence to obtain justice.

Unnecessary cruelty was not part of the Ancient Egyptian fabric of life. Punishments were perhaps arbitrarily meted down by the some powerful landlords at times, but such behaviour was not approved of, and the peasants simply had to refuse to work at all if such aggravated behaviour persisted for long. Egypt was a land of farmers, and while most may not had had much in the way of material goods, the pharaoh and the entire country knew it could not operate for long without their cooperation.

Answer 2

Peasants