They worked for wages.

They became villeins, in short--serfs bound to the soil by a living wage.

They could not leave their masters, for their masters composed the Plutocracy.
They could not go to the cities, for there, also, the Plutocracy was in control.

They had but one alternative,--to leave the soil and become vagrants, in brief, to starve.

And even there they were frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were passed and rigidly enforced.
Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole communities of farmers, escaped expropriation by virtue of exceptional conditions.