A "peasant" just means a country person, a farmer, someone engaged in agriculture. The most common medieval term was rusticus (which you don't need to know Latin to interpret). They worked extremely hard (as of course modern farmers do as well), but not all of them were serfs.
A serf (servus) was someone who was legally unfree, although exactly what this status entailed varied widely. The term servus had been the term in Roman law for slaves, but medieval serfs were not slaves. Slavery had died out in western Europe by the eighth century. Serfs could not be bought and sold because they were not property, and killing a serf was murder just as was killing a free person. They were not even usually referred to with the term servus. More common were such terms as mancipius, collibertus, famulus, hospes, or colonus. Because different regions might use different terms, it is nearly impossible to say what was the distinction between these different terms.
Mancipius suggests someone seized in the hand, collibertus someone with only partial liberty, famulus someone who served the family, hospes someone who came from elsewhere, colonus someone who was supposed to open up new lands, but all we can say for sure is that medieval scribes knew what they meant and we're left trying to figure it out from context.
As legally unfree, a serf (of whatever variety) was not supposed to be able to enter the church--though some did--and was not supposed to be able to give testimony in court--though again, some did. They were supposed to defer to their lord-of-the-body (as the person whose serf they were was called) in marriage and inheritance, because servile status was hereditary.
In some places, a serf was supposed to come before his lord once a year with a rope around his neck and some pennies on his head. Serfs usually had to pay a fine if they married someone who was not a serf of the same lord. And sometimes serfs had to pay an inheritance tax (called mainmort) if they weren't living at home when their parents died and wanted to take up their parents' house and land.
Serfs owed the same mix of rents as free peasants who had landlords--a combination of money, produce, and "work days" in which they worked in the lord's fields. On the average, serfs had heavier labor dues (more work days) than free peasants, but they were not subject to arbitrary payments. That is, the lords could not just demand whatever they wanted and get away with it.
A lot of serfs had both a lord-of-the-body and a separate landlord from whom they rented some additional land. In addition, serfs, like everyone else in a region, were subject to the regional count and the diocesan bishop. This helped, because they could play one off against another, complaining with heart-rending cries to count or bishop if someone tried to demand something of them not approved by tradition. Peasants (including serfs) had nothing like the freedoms we now take for granted, but they still had agency, the ability to take charge of their own lives.
Serfdom essentially disappeared in France in the early twelfth century. Understandably, serfs found the ritual with the rope and the pennies very humiliating, and many bought their way out--their lords were willing to take a large lump sum in return for never again receiving the pennies, whose value became less and less all the time. Some forgot (or "forgot") that they were serfs, since in many respects they were indistinguishable from other peasants. Other just ran away to lose themselves in the rapidly growing cities.
In England and Germany, however, serfdom lingered much longer than in France. Christian Spain started having serfdom for the first time in the thirteenth century. Russia acquired serfs for the first time at the end of the Middle Ages.
Interestingly, mainmort, the inheritance tax for those heirs not living at home with their parents, lasted for at least a century after serfdom had disappeared in France. Eventually most peasants bought their way out of it.
© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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