It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.

The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.