Sure, it’s realistic – depending on what period you’re talking about.
Generally speaking, the earlier you go, the more the army looks purely feudal – land is literally divvied up by how much it takes to support a heavily-armed and armored mounted soldier – whether we’re talking about the knight’s fee/knight-service as a unit of land in England, or the fief du haubert (i.e, a fief that can pay for a hauberk of chainmail) in France – and armies are made almost entirely out of men providing military service as their rent.
For reasons that have been talked about in the fandom a lot, this was always a bit of a pain for rulers – armies take a long time to assemble, armies start to dissolve if the fighting lasts longer than the term of service laid down in their contracts, and so on. It was also not hugely popular from the lower end either – once they’ve got their nice fief, and especially once that fief becomes hereditary and much harder for kings to revoke or transfer, military service for the higher ups interferes with your nice local land-grabs and feuds, managing your estate, hawking and hunting, and the other pastimes of the aristocracy.
So somewhere between the 12th and 13th centuries across a wide swathe of Medieval Europe, people came up with the scutage as an alternative. This is a cash tax paid in lieu of military service, and it was rather convenient all-around. It meant that the king had regular cash-in-hand (especially once they figured out you could impose a scutage during peace time as well as during a war) and could hire mercenaries to supplement their feudal levies, and it meant that landowners who didn’t want to fight could pay cash instead. And the popularity of this system meant that increasingly armies were more professional and less feudal in nature.
And this is how we get to the situation around the time of the Wars of the Roses where we have what historian Charles Plummer called bastard feudalism. In this period – the 14th through 16th centuries – kings and nobles realized that it was a lot easier to convert rents and taxes from service into cash, and then use that cash to hire people to fight for them, than the old feudal system. In this new system, people would join the affinity of a nobleman and, in addition to room and board and cash and an inside track to lands and appointments, would wear the livery of their patron. And nobles found out that they could afford to hire a lot more people this way than with the old land-sharing system. Hence the phenomenon of over-mighty vassals who could put a lot more men under arms than the monarch could deal with their more traditional armies – and why Edward IV and Henry VII both spent a good deal of their reigns trying to abolish the system.
Now, who were these men who were fighting for a living? Well, one thing to understand is that, from the beginning of this period, there’s always been a class of people who took room and board and a cash wage to serve as permanent soldiers of a household – the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians had their housecarls; the Franks had their socii or scara, who served as the retainers and bodyguards of the various counts, dukes, kings, and emperors; and so on. Later on, the impact of primogeniture within the nobility meant that you had a significant population of men who had been trained as knights who weren’t going to get land – those men need work. During “bastard feudalism,” it gets even more complicated, because you had iterative affinities as the Earl of Salisbury’s affinity was part of the larger Neville affinity, and he would have had lesser lords in his affinity.
As for examples – the Earl of Salisbury during the Wars of the Roses had a personal affinity of at least a thousand men, while the Earls of Darby had about 2,000 men in their affinity, and so on.
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