There are a lot of particulars in play in different places and times. Like peasants might own their land in a functional sense of being entitled to what it produces (minus what is owed to someone else - but this is still different from rents because it would typically be taxation payable “in kind” rather than in currency.), but they might also be bound to that land, unable to legally move where they live.

It really is difficult to apply the framework of capitalist ownership, enclosure, proletarianization, etc. In places where those things either hadn’t happened or had only happened unevenly and hadn’t become dominant for the majority of agricultural laborers. I think one of the big reasons that communist revolutions have largely been successful in still-industrializing, largely agrarian states is that in such a context a lot of a country’s productive base is still held in distributed control by peasants.

Now, because categorization is inexact and the development of economic systems is different in every case, there are numerous cases in history where some section of the peasant, i.e. primarily subsistence agricultural class had more land they had rights to than they could farm themselves or had the necessary funds to employ people without the rights to their own land (or some land less than their capacity to work it) in effectively wage labor.

There are similarities to proletarian labor given the nature of ownership versus work, but proletarian labor has its one unique characteristics. It also bears some resemblance to landlordism, but because the wealthier peasants did not own the land that their workers lived on, the nature of this relationship is different. It’s not that the agricultural laborers need to pay rents to work the land, it’s that they need the income to subsist.

Of course this is a vulgar generalization and I am no expert on the matter. There are myriad specific different examples of what we might call “landholding peasantry” in contrast to some other landless peasantry.