There will be more to say, and doubtless other examples to proffer, but perhaps the medieval "peasant republic" of Dithmarschen is the closest fit for the sort of community you are envisaging.

Located on the North Sea coastline in the marshy confluence of what is now the borderlands of Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, Dithmarschen was an ethnically Saxon enclave in a part-Danish, part- Frisian border district that lay within the perpetually-contested border between Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire.

This poor, low-lying and swampy district endured as what was to all intents and purposes an independent polity for 330 years, from 1227 to 1559, and was – according to William Urban, author of the only study of the place in English – a "unique" society whose "form of government violated nearly every generalization made about the medieval period."

This was not an area of much strategic significance, and nor was it an hospitable environment:

The coast is largely marsh – salty, forbidding, and ever-changing under the lash of storm and tide... The climate has proved to be both friend and foe to every person who has lived along that coast. The winters are long and dreary. Rain and fog cover the low-lying landscape for months at a time. A cold wetness permeates the stoutest covering. The meadows can become seas of mud. Winters are often a succession of terrible storms, breaking dikes and overwhelming the work of decades and generations... The wind is ever-present and powerful in ways that only sailors and inhabitants of the Great Plains can understand. No great woods, no quiet valleys exist. Instead, there is a feeling of unlimited space and open skies...

Nonetheless, the area did incorporate some rich farmland, and in the springs and summers "the meadows and marshes blossomed forth in magnificent abundance" that made the little territory covetable to some. According to Urban, Dithmarschen owed its independence largely to a power vacuum that emerged in the district as a result of the severe defeat of the Danish King Valdemar the Conqueror at the Battle of Bornhöved in July 1227 – a loss apparently occasioned by the precipitous retreat of a contingent of Dithmarscher infantry which was supposed to be covering the king's cavalry. Whatever their culpability in the matter, the local peasants put the disaster to good use, reaching an agreement with the Archbishop of Hamburg which involved them recognising him as their lord without actually conceding effective sovereignty, retaining, as a result, "such autonomy as to be practically self-governing." The Dithmarschers subsequently built their own dom, or cathedral, in the small town of Meldorp, and this building became, after about 1300, the seat of their quasi-independent peasant government.

Broadly, Urban argues, Dithmarschen was a clan-based society which owed its effective independence to a combination of ongoing chaos in the Holy Roman Empire, which prevented serious steps being taken to curtail the minor irritation caused by the existence of a small community of independent-minded peasants living in a hard-to-get-at marsh, and an obscure victory won by its peasant clans over the local petty nobility as a result of the so-called Rabbit War of 1289.

To take the external developments first: once the Danish border had been pushed north in 1227, the main temporal rulers in the area were the counts of Holstein. Their territory was broken up and divided between sons on two separate occasions, in 1263 and 1290, weakening what was left of the county to the point where it had no real ability to impose itself militarily on its neighbours. For his part, meanwhile, the bishop of Hamburg devoted most of his resources to attempting to improve his tax base by bringing the much richer peasants living south of the Elbe under his control. Dithmarschen took advantage of this situation, paying "a small contribution" to the archbishop every year, and studiously refraining from provoking him into serious military action in return "for guarantees that they would be permitted to practice the self-government they believed to be essential to their way of life." After 1329, the taxes owed to Hamburg amounted to no more than a one-off payment of 500 marks made by the Dithmarschers to each new bishop at the time of his election, "after which they would wish him a long life and have almost no other obligations." In the same period, the peasants of Dithmarschen established a long-lasting informal alliance with the Hanseatic port of Lübeck, across the Jutland peninsula to their east, which over the next two centuries provided them with both an outlet for surplus goods and a source of imports – not least weaponry. The presence of other small independent polities nearby, by the way, is a reminder not only that the Holy Roman Empire in this period comprised dozens, and eventually hundreds, of political units, among which it was almost always possible to find allies to band together with against common enemies, but also that Dithmarschen itself was not nearly so anomalous an entity, nor so threatening to the contemporary political order, as it might have been had it existed inside a more centralised state such as England – a factor that doubtless helps to explain the republic's considerable longevity.

Within Dithmarschen, meanwhile, political power continued to reside in the hands of a class of petty nobles, the "serf-knights" (ministeriale), most of whom had risen from the ranks of the more well-to-do local peasantry themselves. These men held most of the administrative positions within Ditchmarschen, but lacked the right to claim hereditary control over these offices. In the aftermath of the Rabbit War, most of the members of this group were forced into exile in Holstein (c.1290), while others chose to stay in the district and form their own clan, the Vodiemannen (literally "advocates"), and were absorbed into the local peasant society. From then on, according to Urban and F.C. Dahlmann, Ditchmarschen's government comprised an annual assembly of elders and clan chiefs, which met at Meldorp once a year "to make laws for the entire land." Because these meetings were short, and focused largely on the urgent practicalities of dike-building and maintenance, and because there were well over 100 rival clans within the marshlands, it was almost impossible to pass comprehensive packages of legislation, and although a written constitution did gradually emerge (it is this, Urban argues, that gives Dithmarschen its claim to be considered a genuinely independent polity), no one clan could dominate even at a parish level without causing an alliance of rival families to form against it. The result was that the average Dithmarscher parish was in most respects independent from its neighbours, and the average peasant living in one of those parishes was a free man who farmed his own land and lived a life about as close to that of the "anarcho-syndicalist peasant" of Monty Python and the Holy Grail as any did in Europe, joining together with his neighbours only to resist the infrequent military incursions launched against Dithmarschen by its neighbours.

u/Mikedash has written about a specific peasant political unit, I'm going to answer more with reference to the specific scenario of the scene; England in... somewhere in the Middle Ages. Asking how accurate something from a Monty Python film is perhaps a fool's game, but there is a kernel of truth to the scene. The answer to 'so who is your lord?' could sometimes be 'we don't have a lord!'

Self governing settlements, known as communes, were a thing in the Middle Ages, and actually a very important part of the political landscape. Communes were given a charter and permitted to do what they liked in exchange for regular lump sums of money, though the specific arrangements might vary from town to town. The villagers or townsfolk would be bound by oath to each other; to protect each others' interest come what may. Initially only the cities and larger towns were given the status of communes, and you can read about why kings might be willing to forfeit control in an answer by u/WelfOnTheShelf here. If you want to know how communes could come into being by a variety of methods, I've written about that here.

But onto the specific scenario in the scene. The lord has died heir-less, and nobody else has come along. That in itself is rather unusual since there would often be some relative somewhere, but it wasn't unheard of for small villages to be left lordless during periods of war (crusades often had a fatality rate of over 50% so... lots of dead lords there). Another issue was villages left to their own devices because the local lord just couldn't be bothered running the place. Some villages did indeed seek the status of a commune, and got it. We know this from charters in which villages pay tax not in goods per household, but in a collective sum of money or goods of equivalent value. These are not always referred to as communes, and would not necessarily have had the legal status of one, but were communes de facto. The idea that a wondering king might come across a village in which the lord has been absent and the villages have gone 'sod this, we can take care of ourselves' is not as absurd as the scene makes out. An actual medieval king would not have been so confused by the back-talking peasant. The 1381 Peasant's Revolt began when a meeting to resolve a tax dispute in such an autonomous rural village turned violent.

The more interesting aspect to me about the scene is the peasant going on about scimitars and watery bints. There were plenty of peasants who thought the monarchical government was fundamentally silly. During the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, some literature derided the idea of monarchy and feudalism entirely, pointing out that God did not make Adam a duke. One of the radical leaders, Wat Tyler, called for complete dismantelling of the political landscape and instead for all land and property to be held in commons, and for that is often labelled a proto-marxist. During the baronial revolution in 1258, in which a council of barons seized control of England from Henry III, peasants generally supported the barons. When the new government and Henry III came to blows, royalist forces were occasionally met with the kind of sass dolled out by the Python characters. Only it wasn't as funny because 'sass' quickly evolved to 'swords drawn'. I've written about the peasants and their political views during the revolution, and how they might stick it to their lords, here.

So to answer the core question of 'Is it true that some small scale medieval settlements could be considered communes, collectives and autonomous, with sovereign and/or noble authority being absent?', the answer is sort of! There were many situations in which it was just easier to let villages do their own thing. But that came at a price - specifically lump sums of cash. They could be politically autonomous, but still answered to someone economically, which reminds me that I need to pay this month's rent :/

P.S.

the feudal pyramid?

Why we do we still teach that in schools? It's as if the curriculum hasn't been updated in 50 years. Fortunately, our FAQ section is updated regularly, including the one about that god forsaken pyramid.

Hi there! I'm most familiar with peasant political organization as it existed in middle Germany (The Holy Roman Empire) from the twelfth century through the end of the so-called Peasants' War of 1525 which was the largest social revolt in European history until the French Revolution. The following comment is therefore strictly limited to this context as the forms of peasant organization into larger polities could take a number of different forms depending on the setting. In fact, these differences in organization could affect how commune-like a settlement or region of settlements could be.

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That said, David Sabean's Power in the Blood is one of the clearest insights that we have into the nature of peasant village organization and peasant social relations. Sabean took a look at clerical documents from the area around Würtemberg from 1580-1800 to reconstruct how peasants interacted with each other and with outsiders. Because the typical peasant was illiterate, these clerical documents often written by non-natives to their parishes are the best sources we have to go on. One of these records, for instance, shows how peasants dealt with grudges between members of the village. One villager refused to go to Sunday mass because another villager in attendance had wronged him and the grievance had yet to be made up for. In attempting to convince the first villager to go back to church, the cleric in charge of the parish tried to threaten him with excommunication, yet he did not budge. This villager made it clear that he physically could not bring himself to be in the presence of the other villager until their mutual beef had been adequately made up for, his desire for atonement even going beyond his desire to fulfill his religious obligations. From this vignette, Sabean concluded that late medieval peasants very much valued their reputations and the appearance of "face", though once the metaphorical hatchet was buried, relations between the two parties could go back to normal as if nothing happened.

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In the same book, Sabean suggests that German peasant life was very insular and highly distrustful of strangers, whatever their claims to authority were. Indeed local holy men were often preferred to specially trained priests in matters of religion because the local holy men often spoke to issues that mattered in the communities whereas the priests were often from out of town, behaved improperly (i.e. drinking, gambling, fighting, keeping mistresses, etc.), and behaved as if they were above the very communal minded villages they preached to. For a clear example of this, Hans Böhm was a holy man who stirred up armed resistance against perceived clerical and noble injustices in late fifteenth-century Franconia.

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In looking at why this is, it is important to remember that these communities were largely self-sufficient in terms of food and other basic necessities but often engaged in short-range specialized trade with other villages, market towns, and cities to acquire whatever they could not make themselves or make in adequate supply. Often villagers would never leave more than a few miles beyond their village borders and so their neighbors were often people they had known for their entire lives and they were stuck together for better or worse. If your barn was knocked over in a storm, your neighbors were often the only people on hand to help you rebuild. Sabean suggests that this sort of sustained close contact bred the communal mindset that reached much further back into German history.

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That said, just how communal medieval/ early modern peasant life was and what the communal mindset really meant has been a matter of debate for the better part of a century. Indeed, some East German medievalists would suggest that Marxism had roots in peasant organization and so in their minds, a Das Kapital quoting peasant wouldn't be far from reality. Jokes aside, few credible historians would posit that relations between peasants and their overlords (clerical or noble) were peaceful and amicable. The current consensus is that peasants were often in a constant state of negotiation with their overlords about the exact nature and amount of dues that they owed their landlords and the peasants had a variety of tools in their toolbelts in order to help ensure that they weren't simply trampled by the desires of their overlords. One popular method was a rent strike in which villagers would all agree to withhold payment of their dues in cash or kind to their landlords as a means of renegotiating these dues. Other means included sending petitions, and holding debates in meeting spaces. Armed uprisings against landlords were often a weapon of last resort when landlords and subjects were at an impasse and conditions no longer lent themselves to the peaceful renegotiation of dues.

These uprisings could force the hand of their landlords into granting concessions to the peasants if their forces were either too small in number, too dispersed, or mercenaries were too expensive. However, peasants could also be obliterated by their landlords (or their benefactors) . During the Peasants' War, the Swabian League of North German principalities systematically cut through swaths of uprising peasants leaving tens if not hundreds of thousands dead. The exact causes of the peasants' war are still a matter of debate, but it seems fair to characterize it less as a coordinated movement of interconnected villages defined by a common political agenda. Rather the Peasants' War and other uprisings of its type should be better understood as a wave of semi-independent uprisings against their overlords based largely on local grievances.

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For more reading, I suggest you check out the sources I used for a term paper on this topic below:

Blickle, Peter. The Revolution of 1525. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Engels, Friedrich. “The Peasant War in Germany.” In The German Revolutions, edited by Leonard Krieger, 1–120. Chicago: The Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1967.

Fink, Bertram. Die Böhmenkircher Bauernrevolte 1850-1582/83. Leinfelden-echterdingen: DRW Verlag, 2004.

Franz, Günther. Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg. 8th ed. Bad Homburg vor der Höhe: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1969.

Krieger, Leonard. “Editor’s Introduction.” In The German Revolutions, IX–XLVI. Chicago: The Universtiy of Chicago Press, 1967.

Luebke, David Martin. His Majesty’s Rebels: Communities, Factions, and Rural Revolt in the Black Forest, 1725-1745. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Schulze, Winfried. “Die Veränderte Bedeutung Sozialer Konflickte Im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert.” Geschichte Und Gesellschaft Sonderheft 1 (1975): 277–302.

Scott, Tom. Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country Relations in the Age of Reformation and Peasants’ War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Sreenivasan, Govind. “The Social Origins of the Peasants’ War of 1525 in Upper Swabia.” Past & Present, no. 171 (May 2001): 30–65.

Vice, Roy. “The Leadership and Structure of the Tauber Band during the Peasants’ War in Franconia.” Central European History, 1988, 175–95.

Wilson, Peter H. Heart of Europe: A History of The Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016.