This is a complex question, and as always with things concerning feudalism, the answer is going to depend on when and where the actors are situated. This is not only because different regions and time-periods have different regimes of lordship, but also because demographic and socio-economic contexts will be the most definining factor. The 11th century in France is not the 14th in Italy, is not the 16th in Poland, etc. But luckily, that doesn't mean the question is unanswerable.

Leaving the already covered question of feudalism actually existed or not (see the thread by u/idjet on https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1xwqqf/comment/cfflog6/), I think it's safe to a say that most peasants in the 10th century post-Carolingian heartland (so broadly modern day France, Belgium, the southern Netherlands, Italy and Western Germany) were familiar with lordly power in a broadly similar way to each other. In most regions however, there did not exist anything like a 'feudal system' that was broadly recognised, just lords claiming and vying for power, with violent consequences that were mostly directed towards peasant communities.

One important qualifier here is that lords also were not (necessarily) some special class of noble people. A lord is a (legal) person with lordly rights concerning taxes and jurdisdiction. So while quantitatively, most lords would be of noble origin (kings, princes, dukes, counts, barons), many powerful lords came from the episcopal ranks, especially in the Holy Roman Empire. Many of the most powerful lords were even not individuals, but legal entitities with lordly powers, such as monasteries and powerful cities who controlled their rural hinterlands.

But to continue my answer, from the 11th century onwards, rural communities in the post-Carolingian regions experienced quite dramatic population growths which lasted until the early 1300s. This of course put huge pressure on their abalities to feed these increasing amounts of mouths, so many (young) people set their eyes on greener pastures. These two (lordly violence and population pressure), together with less structural factors like seasonal crop failures and the like, were the main push factors for people wanting to leave their communities in the 'high middle ages'.

These people had a perhaps surprisingly broad range of options before them, although their availability differed from region to region. The first and probably most common is the established of new communities within the general area that peasants were already familiar with. Let's call this 'internal colonisation'. Although it might seem so, peasants 'establishing a village of their own' was not very likely in this context. Barely any land in the post-Carolingian heartlands in the 11th and 12th centuries and other (relatively) densely populated areas like England (where the existence of a system of lordship before the Norman Conquest seems more and more likely) was not claimed by one lord or another. This did however not mean that a lord exploited all the land he claimed, as much of it was made up of agriculturaly 'marginal' areas like forests, bogs, swamps and heaths. These had to be literally 'brought into culture' first before agriculture could take place. For clearing and draining these areas, people were needed and with the above-mentioned push factors that caused peasants to move away from home, these people were a lot of the times readily available in the vicinity. This created a situation wherein lords actively competed with each other for peasant labour by offering them better conditions in terms of legal rights, lower taxes and dues, etc. This was a win-win situation for both sides; peasants that cleared these lands could live and farm there under better conditions than they were used to at home, while lords earned more income without having to invest more than say building a communal mill (for the use of which they could also ask dues).

The same could also happen in regions outside the initial 'Latin West', like the non-English parts of the British Isles, the Slavic regions of Central Europe and the Iberian frontiers. This could best be called 'external colonisation'. Here, we can distinguish between two main variants. In the first one, in regions like Cornwales, Wales, Ireland, Iberia and the borderlands of the Holy Roman Empire, it were conquering powers like England, the Christian Iberian kingdoms and the lords of the Empire who actively sought fellow 'Latin Christians' to settle and exploit the regions they had conquered, so they could exert more control over and gain secure income from these foreign territories. Local powers were not stupid though, and principalities that were still 'backwards and not-Latinised' around the turn of the year 1000 but would later become powerful kingdoms, such as Scotland, Poland and Bohemia would become this by attracting Latin colonisers for similar regions. A lot of the time, these 'Latins' were being recruited in densily populated and urbanised regions like the Low Countries and the Rhine valley because they had a lot of know-how in crafts, urban management, trade, etc that the did not exist yet in sparsely populated Scotland and the Slavic principalities. In both versions of 'external colonisation', Western European peasants were also attracted by being offered low taxes and high degrees of legal freedom. Again, this was a win-win situation for local/conquering lords and colonising peasants.

There also existed an extreme version of internal and external colonisation; city-founding. Sometimes, for example when competition between lords was extremely intense in regions that were important for trade (like the river-packed southern Low Countries, now Belgium), settling traders and craftsmen were given rights to such a degree that they became their own legal entities, with their own laws and politics and with comparitively minimal lordly interferance. This is how most cities in modern Western Europe, which was heavily de-urbanised after the dissilution of the Western Roman Empire, became urbanised again.

This general socio-demographic image of Europe is only of value for the 11th to mid 13th century though, as after this period populations were generally as dense as they could be in pre-industrial circumstances and there were no 'unsettled' places left. After the population crisis of the 14th century however (famine, Black Death, etc), there was again space for population expansions, but it would not take the shape as before. Western and Eastern Europe would also go on very different trajectories. Western Europe was, as mentioned, much more urbanised much earlier than the east, which made it also much more monetised because there was more trade. A more highly developed economy also meant that inflation was more of a thing, and as most lordly rents and dues were fixed sums (exactly because this had attracted peasants under the circumstances sketched above), by the late 14th century they had inflated so much they were almost worthless. This made it more worthwile for lords to switch to free peasants and (under)paying them (when they had the power) for their labour, as this was a more flexible form of exploitation.

In Eastern Europe, starting in Poland and moving east into Russia, lordly expoitation become more inflexible because these regions were not urbanised/monetised enough to make wage labour a viable option. Peasant communities (not cities) became much more tied to land and unfree again as lords sought to enter product markets by exporting grain. This situation would last a long time, for Russia sadly even into the late 19th century.

I hope you found this general overview somewhat useful. If you want to know more about this enormously fascinating period in European history, I would recommend you the classic 'The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350' by Robert Bartlett. For further reading about general social, economic and demographic developments I would recommend the most recent edition of the textbook 'Introduction to medieval Europe, 300-1550' by Wim Blockmans. There exist of course a lot of specialised studies on these topics, but these would be too much to list.

Can you expand on or send a reading suggestion that discusses the inflation of the 14th century?

I am having a hard time finding anything with Google being very cluttered right now with the current inflation situation.

During the early expansion of the iberian christian kingdomns it kind of existed, from mostly IX and X century, but not limited to it, generally seen up North from river Duero and Ebro.

In the Ebro valley this expansion was way more complicated as the control pf the valley was fought between local powers throught centuries, predominantly by either Navarra/Pamplona colonist, Aragon (at this point still just a county up the Pyriness), and the various muslims habitants of the valley

In the Duero valley, where i also got bit more knowledge as is something im more specialised, this happened up the North of the Duero. The system was called repoblación de presura, the christians had their core territories on the cantabric, or closer to the north in general, and throught the centuries had disputed the lands between each of them and the muslims. This constant in fighting and lawless in the frontier of the Duero gave the chnce to those who had accepted to live there to live as they want, sort of, the presura repoblation worked like this:

The colonist to the Duero valley would form their own village under the jurisdiction of their kind, and the locals would be expected to in some way defend their land, here borns the concept of caballero villano( villager knight), they were some of the lowest nobility and were just the guys capable of owning horses and weapons in this territories to protect them from the constant raids on the frontier, as they were responsible for defending their land.

This changed as the situation in Iberia evolved but yes, durong the period of early expansion in the Duero valley you could just set up your village, as long as you were up to defend it and had the means for that.