We hear about this a lot in Chinese history and also in contemporary Afghanistan, but instead of being called feudal lords, these landlords are called warlords.
They suppressed internal descent by demanding that every other year feudal lords leave their homelands and take up temporary residents near the Shogun's Palace in Edo.
Thus instead of the life of kings and feudal lords, the whole life in its ordinary aspects of the middle class became the major source of interest in literature.
From the middle of the 10th century, after the fall of the Carolingian Empire, imperial power in western and central Europe was being replaced by a large number of feudal lords, who were practically sovereign in their territories.
Propaganda took the fight from the physical realm into the hearts and minds of people. Gone are the days when men were forced to fight for a feudal lord or king simply because of where they lived.