Something very similar to this has in fact happened in the real world.

So yes, it is totally feasible.

This is essentially how saga-period Iceland worked. Free men owned their own land, and generally supported themselves as farmers. The equivalent of a "lord" (a gothi) was not a land owner, but someone whom you would contract with to provide taxes or service in exchange for protection and legal representation--and while it might be convenient, there is no actual need for the effective domain of any given gothi to be geographically contiguous.

Being a gothi came with obligations to provide, e.g., a meeting hall for public events, to arbitrate legal disputes, and to represent his constituents in parliament. Like a lordship, the office of gothi was heritable, and there was a limited number of them--you couldn't just make yourself a gothi by getting rich enough. Unlike a typical lordship, however, the right to the office could also be bought and sold.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no extended hierarchy in actual history--gothar reported to the Allthing, and that's it. But I see no particular reason why a similar system couldn't allow for lower-level nobility to contract with higher-level nobility in an arbitrary number of levels, just like feudalism.

Something very similar to this has in fact happened in the real world.

So yes, it is totally feasible.

This is essentially how saga-period Iceland worked. Free men owned their own land, and generally supported themselves as farmers. The equivalent of a "lord" (a gothi) was not a land owner[1], but someone whom you would contract with to provide taxes or service in exchange for protection and legal representation--and while it might be convenient, there is no actual need for the effective domain of any given gothi to be geographically contiguous.

Being a gothi came with obligations to provide, e.g., a meeting hall for public events, to arbitrate legal disputes, and to represent his constituents in parliament. Like a lordship, the office of gothi was heritable, and there was a limited number of them--you couldn't just make yourself a gothi by getting rich enough. Unlike a typical lordship, however, the right to the office could also be bought and sold.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no extended hierarchy in actual history--gothar reported to the Allthing, and that's it. But I see no particular reason why a similar system couldn't allow for lower-level nobility to contract with higher-level nobility in an arbitrary number of levels, just like feudalism.

[1] Or rather, was not the owner of the land you lived on; not a landlord. He almost certainly owned his own land to farm, just like his clients.

Something very similar to this has in fact happened in the real world. So yes, it is totally feasible.

This is essentially how saga-period Iceland worked. Free men owned their own land, and generally supported themselves as farmers. The equivalent of a "lord" (a gothi) was not a land owner, but someone whom you would contract with to provide taxes or servive in exchange for protection and legal representation--and while it might be convenient, there is no actual need for the effective domain of any given gothi to be geographically contiguous.

Being a gothi came with obligations to provide, e.g., a meeting hall for public events, to arbitrate legal disputes, and to represent his constituents in parliament. Like a lordship, the office of gothi was heritable, and there was a limited number of them--you couldn't just make yourself a gothi by getting rich enough. Unlike a typical lordship, however, the right to the office could also be bought and sold.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no extended hierarchy in actual history--gothar reported to the Allthing, and that's it. But I see no particular reason why a similar system couldn't allow for lower-level nobility to contract with higher-level nobility in an arbitrary number of levels, just like feudalism.

Something very similar to this has in fact happened in the real world.

So yes, it is totally feasible.

This is essentially how saga-period Iceland worked. Free men owned their own land, and generally supported themselves as farmers. The equivalent of a "lord" (a gothi) was not a land owner, but someone whom you would contract with to provide taxes or service in exchange for protection and legal representation--and while it might be convenient, there is no actual need for the effective domain of any given gothi to be geographically contiguous.

Being a gothi came with obligations to provide, e.g., a meeting hall for public events, to arbitrate legal disputes, and to represent his constituents in parliament. Like a lordship, the office of gothi was heritable, and there was a limited number of them--you couldn't just make yourself a gothi by getting rich enough. Unlike a typical lordship, however, the right to the office could also be bought and sold.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no extended hierarchy in actual history--gothar reported to the Allthing, and that's it. But I see no particular reason why a similar system couldn't allow for lower-level nobility to contract with higher-level nobility in an arbitrary number of levels, just like feudalism.