The noble incomers and their dependents did not bring with them their own peasantry and tenantry. The feudal settlement of Scotland was not a plantation, still less a conquest. It is likely that the greatest continuity between the tenth and eleventh centuries and the early medieval period lay in the people who lived on and worked the land. The reigns of David I and his two grandsons probably brought little difference to the pattern of their working lives: as late as 1200 it seems likely that the bulk of the peasantry, as before 1100, enjoyed few if any legal freedoms. Most were tied in some way to the land they worked, but freedom was still an abstract and largely meaningless concept (as were the later terms used in burghs 'free' and 'unfree') in a society where lineage and kindred were the determinants of its workings. The new lords - whether secular or ecclesiastical, earls and knights, or monasteries and abbeys - inherited a system in which nativi, already thirled to their lord by blood or place of birth, were expected to perform labour services on their estates, often as neyfs or serfs. It is unlikely that the neyfs were a standardised underclass, everywhere bound to their lord in the same practical terms, and by the fourteenth century they would quietly disappear from documentary record. The explanation of their disappearance lies in the changes already taking place in the twelfth century if not before towards a cash economy, in which food-rents were replaced, in whole or in part, for money rents. By then surpluses of grain, crops or produce were regularly turned into cash at a local market.