That said, there's a ton of exchange going on in the early medieval countryside. Rural graves of ordinary people are full of glass imported from the Middle East, garnets from India, jewelry produced by skilled craftspersons, carefully worked iron -- that's just the stuff that doesn't decay, and just the stuff that shows up in graves. There much have been much more production, and much more stuff, circulating among the living.

These goods require some sort of economic system among the ordinary farmer class. You can't explain it by elite production -- the production sites are in the rural settlements themselves, and elite production sites can't process the volume, and appear to late anyways to explain where this came from. You can't explain it as recycling, because new things are being made from new materials. And you can't explain it as farms making goods for themselves, because their materials are being imported and their products are skilled and specialized. It's rural farmers making things to exchange among themselves.

And these are the sorts of activities that you can do in your free time, if you get the cows fed early and the crops are sewn and sprouting.

As our archaeological knowledge of the middle ages continues to improve, I think we'll see that 'peasants' had more opportunities to produce and exchange surplus goods than we've previously realized.

(A lot of this is shamelessly cribbed from arguments Frans Theuws is sharing in some recent public lectures.)