What do we call the medieval practice of paying rent in work rather than money?

The story behind the answer

It is the arrangement in which a peasant owed fixed days of work on the lord’s demesne—plowing, sowing, harvest “boon” days—instead of paying cash. These corvée obligations were scheduled (e.g., week-work) and quantified in manorial rolls, distinguishing them from payment in kind (rent in grain or livestock) and from sharecropping or tenant farming, where cultivators paid with a portion of the harvest or a monetary rent.

Rooted in the manorial economy and a shortage of coin, this labor-based rent underpinned feudal control and local infrastructure (mills, roads). After the Black Death reduced the workforce, bargaining power shifted: many obligations were commuted to money wages or cash rents, fueling social change and, in places like England, tensions that erupted in the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.