From the 7th to the 12th century, the social organization of production was arranged round two poles: estate and village (a collection of free smallholders). The village social structure was the organizational form best adapted to insecure conditions, with the estate fulfilling this role once conditions were safe again. There was in principle a clear distinction between tenants who lived on the estates (and owed dues to the master of the place), and the village inhabitants, many of whom owned land, and consequently paid taxes to the state. Nevertheless, not all the cultivators on the estate lived there, and not all enjoyed a special status. Some of them were slaves and some were wage laborers; references to wage laborers occur continuously from the 7th century to the end of the Byzantine period. In the same way, the inhabitants of a village would not all be landholders, and of these, not all would be farmers; some village proprietors held the lowest rank of aristocrat status, and were wealthier than tenant farmers. The distinction between landholder and tenant farmer ("paroikos") was weakened once tenures held by "paroikoi" were considered hereditary, and once some "paroikoi" achieved owner status. From the 10th century on, large estates assumed the leading role that had been held until then by villages, albeit in an economy that was henceforth orientated toward demand, with monetary exchanges taking a larger share. By the beginning of the 14th century, the Macedonian countryside was made up of an almost unbroken network of estates that had replaced the former network of communes. Villages that are known to have possessed commune status in the 10th century became estates of the fisc, after which they might be ceded to a monastery or lay person.