Abstract This chapter examines the lived experiences and social structures of eleventh-century European rural communities, highlighting their economic activities, social hierarchies and interactions with the authorities. It discusses various forms of rural settlement, from farming villages in northern Iberia to the stateless society of Iceland, and explores what freedom and unfreedom meant. The chapter further contrasts the ‘fiscal Europe’ of the Byzantine empire and al-Andalus, where the state apparatus imposed taxes, with the ‘seigneurial Europe’ of the Latin West, where aristocratic rent extraction was dominant, increasingly overlaid with judicial exactions. Not everyone in Europe lived from settled agriculture, however, and so the chapter also explores the distinct lifestyles of nomadic societies such as the Sámi and the Pechenegs. By investigating local agricultural practices, taxes and rents, the chapter offers insights into the evolution of rural European communities during the eleventh century, an evolution which underpinned change at other scales of activity and organization.