Does everything really scale together though? Once land is cleared and known to be arable it's around as supply after people have died. The reverse is not true, you need to put a lot of work in to clear land for organic population growth.
So when the population declines you have a bunch of landlords who have land supporting X people that they want the surplus on. But X/2 people can pick their landlord, so the landlord has to offer something in the deal, like better terms. This works even if the landlord class has halved, there's only one landlord regardless of how many of his family passed.
Note the acoup guy says peasants didn't store profits in the normal way, they preferred to buy social capital by throwing a party.
So when the population declines you have a bunch of landlords who have land supporting X people that they want the surplus on. But X/2 people can pick their landlord, so the landlord has to offer something in the deal, like better terms. This works even if the landlord class has halved, there's only one landlord regardless of how many of his family passed.
Note the acoup guy says peasants didn't store profits in the normal way, they preferred to buy social capital by throwing a party.