kind of owning people during the crusades

Tenant farming, like that which characterised much of the agrarian economy of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, did not equate to anything like owning people; in the same way that if you rent a house now, your landlord doesn't own you. For most villagers and smallholders, rent for their tenancies was carried out in the form of occasional labour on their lord's land. Actual slavery was, however, still very much of a phenomenon in eleventh century Europe.