I think that what triggered of the 'feudal' comment was your own reference to weaponthanes having 'clients', and having the land worked on their behalf by others, and such like. While this isn't formally feudal, one can see burgeoning parallels, if one takes this very far. For clans that keep thralls, there's a great deal of logic to the comparison. For non-thrall clans, I'm not sure if I really see it. Being a client _in a cattle-loan_ seems an entirely separate matter from land assignment, so I don't immediately see how that part would work.
Rather than having cottars working land assigned to someone else, I suspect a more usual arrangement is that the freemen working the land would hold the 'rights' to the land, but the weaponthane (or whomever) would have 'rights' to some of the _fruits_ of working the land. (One might object that this was a largely technical distinction, and one might be right.)
Slan,
Alex.
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