Part 941

The Domesday Survey "attests the existence [in England, at the time of the Norman Conquest] of more than 25,000 servi, who must be understood to be, at the highest estimate of their condition, landless labourers; over 82,000 bordarii; nearly 7,000 cotarii and cotseti, whose names seem to denote the possession of land or houses held by service of labour or rent paid in produce; and nearly 110,000 villani. Above these were the liberi homines and sokemanni, who seem to represent the medieval and modern freeholder. The villani of Domesday are no doubt the ceorls of the preceding period, the men of the township, the settled cultivators of the land, who in a perfectly free state of society were the owners of the soil they tilled, but under the complicated system of rights and duties which marked the close of the Anglo-Saxon period had become dependent on a lord, and now under the prevalence of the feudal idea were regarded as his customary tenants; irremoveable cultivators, who had no proof of their title but the evidence of their fellow ceorls. For two centuries after the Conquest the villani are to be traced in the possession of rights both social and to a certain extent political. … They are spoken of by the writers of the time as a distinct order of society, who, although despicable for ignorance and coarseness, were in possession of considerable comforts, and whose immunities from the dangers of a warlike life compensated for the somewhat unreasoning contempt with which they were viewed by clerk and knight. During this time the villein could assert his rights against every oppressor but his master; and even against his master the law gave him a standing-ground if he could make his complaint known to those who had the will to maintain it. But there can be little doubt that the Norman knight practically declined to recognise the minute distinctions of Anglo-Saxon dependence, and that the tendency of both law and social habit was to throw into the class of native or born villeins the whole of the population described in Domesday under the heads of servi, bordarii and villani."

_W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 11, section 132._

"It has become a commonplace to oppose medieval serfdom to ancient slavery, one implying dependence on the lord of the soil and attachment to the glebe, the other being based on complete subjection to an owner. … If, from a general survey of medieval servitude we turn to the actual condition of the English peasantry, say in the 13th century, the first fact we have to meet will stand in very marked contrast to our general proposition. The majority of the peasants are villains, and the legal conception of villainage has its roots not in the connexion of the villain with the soil, but in his personal dependence on the lord. … As to the general aspect of villainage in the legal theory of English feudalism there can be no doubt. The 'Dialogus de Scaccario' gives it in a few words: the lords are owners not only of the chattels but of the bodies of their 'ascripticii,' they may transfer them wherever they please, 'and sell or otherwise alienate them if they like.' Glanville and Bracton, Fleta and Britton follow in substance the same doctrine, although they use different terms. They appropriate the Roman view that there is no difference of quality between serfs and serfs: all are in the same abject state. Legal theory keeps a very firm grasp of the distinction between status and tenure, between a villain and a free man holding in villainage, but it does not admit of any distinction of status among serfs: 'servus,' 'villanus' and 'nativus' are equivalent terms as to personal condition, although this last is primarily meant to indicate something else besides condition, namely, the fact that a person has come to it by birth. … Manorial lords could remove peasants from their holdings at their will and pleasure. An appeal to the courts was of no avail. {2915} … Nor could the villain have any help as to the amount and nature of his services; the King's Courts will not examine any complaint in this respect, and may sometimes go so far as to explain that it is no business of theirs to interfere between the lord and his man. … Even as to his person, the villain was liable to be punished and put into prison by the lord, if the punishment inflicted did not amount to loss of life or injury to his body. … It is not strange that in view of such disabilities Bracton thought himself entitled to assume equality of condition between the English villain and the Roman slave, and to use the terms 'servus,' 'villanus,' and 'nativus' indiscriminately."

_P. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, chapter 1._

"Serfdom is met with for the last time in the statute-book of England under Richard II. By reason of the thriving condition of the towns, many villeins who had betaken themselves thither, partly with the consent of their owners and partly in secret, became free. If a slave remained a year and a day in a privileged town without being reclaimed in the interval, he became free. The wars carried on against France, the fact that serf-labour had become more expensive than that of free-men, thus rendering emancipation an 'economical' consideration, and finally, frequent uprisings, contributed to diminish the number of these poor helots. How rapidly serfdom must have fallen away may be inferred from the fact that the rebels under Wat Tyler, in 1381, clamored for the removal of serfdom; the followers of Jack Cade, in 1450, for everything else save the abolition of slavery. … The few purchasable slaves under the Tudors were met with only on the property of the churches, the monasteries, and the bishoprics. This slavery was often of a voluntary nature. On the king's domains bondmen were only emancipated by Elizabeth in 1574. The last traces of personal slavery, and of a subject race permanently annexed to the soil, are met with in the reign of James I. As a rule, it may be assumed that, with the Tudors, serfdom disappeared in England."

_E. Fischel, The English Constitution, book 1, chapter 3._

ALSO IN: _F. Hargrave, Argument in the Case of James Sommersett (Howell's State Trials, volume 20)._

_W. R. Brownlow, Slavery and Serfdom in Europe, lectures 3-4._

See, also, MANORS.

SLAVERY: France. Villeinage.

On the condition of the servile classes in Gaul during the first five or six centuries after the barbarian conquest.

See GAUL: 5-10TH CENTURIES.

"In the Salic laws, and in the Capitularies, we read not only of Servi, but of Tributarii, Lidi, and Coloni, who were cultivators of the earth, and subject to residence upon their lord's estate, though not destitute of property or civil rights. Those who appertained to the demesne lands of the crown were called Fiscalini. … The number of these servile cultivators was undoubtedly great, yet in those early times, I should conceive, much less than it afterwards became. … The accumulation of overgrown private wealth had a natural tendency to make slavery more frequent. … As the labour either of artisans or of free husbandmen was but sparingly in demand, they were often compelled to exchange their liberty for bread. In seasons, also, of famine, and they were not unfrequent, many freemen sold themselves to slavery. … Others became slaves, as more fortunate men became vassals, to a powerful lord, for the sake of his protection. Many were reduced into this state through inability to pay those pecuniary compositions for offences which were numerous and sometimes heavy in the barbarian codes of law; and many more by neglect of attendance on military expeditions of the king, the penalty of which was a fine called Heribann, with the alternative of perpetual servitude. … The characteristic distinction of a villein was his obligation to remain upon his lord's estate. … But, equally liable to this confinement, there were two classes of villeins, whose condition was exceedingly different. In England, at least from the reign of Henry II., one only, and that the inferior species, existed; incapable of property, and destitute of redress, except against the most outrageous injuries. … But by the customs of France and Germany, persons in this abject state seem to have been called serfs, and distinguished from villeins, who were only bound to fixed payments and duties. … Louis Hutin, in France, after innumerable particular instances of manumission had taken place, by a general edict in 1315, reciting that his kingdom is denominated the kingdom of the Franks, that he would have the fact to correspond with the name, emancipates all persons in the royal domains upon paying a just composition, as an example for other lords possessing villeins to follow. Philip the Long renewed the same edict three years afterwards; a proof that it had not been carried into execution. … It is not generally known, I think, that predial servitude was not abolished in all parts of France till the revolution. In some places, says Pasquier, the peasants are taillables à volonté, that is, their contribution is not permanent, but assessed by the lord with the advice of prud'hommes, resseants sur les lieux, according to the peasant's ability. Others pay a fixed sum. Some are called serfs de poursuite, who cannot leave their habitations, but may be followed by the lord into any part of France for the taille upon their goods. … Nor could these serfs, or gens de mainmorte, as they were sometimes called, be manumitted without letters patent of the king, purchased by a fine.-Recherches de la France, l. iv., c. 5. Dubos informs us that, in 1615, the Tiers État prayed the king to cause all serfs (hommes de pooste) to be enfranchised on paying a composition, but this was not complied with, and they existed in many parts when he wrote."

_H. Hallam, The Middle Ages, chapter 2, part 2, and foot-note (volume 1)._

"The last traces of serfdom could only be detected [at the time of the Revolution] in one or two of the eastern provinces annexed to France by conquest; everywhere else the institution had disappeared; and indeed its abolition had occurred so long before that even the date of it was forgotten. The researches of archæologists of our own day have proved that as early as the 13th century serfdom was no longer to be met with in Normandy."

_A. de Tocqueville, State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789, book 2, chapter 1._

{2916}

SLAVERY: Germany.

"As the great distinction in the German community was between the nobles and the people, so amongst the people was the distinction between the free and the servile. Next to those who had the happiness to be freeborn were the Freedmen, whom the indulgence or caprice of their masters relieved from the more galling miseries of thraldom. But though the Freedman was thus imperfectly emancipated, he formed a middle grade between the Freeman and the Slave. He was capable of possessing property; but was bound to pay a certain rent, or perform a certain service, to the lord. He was forbidden to marry without the lord's assent; and he and his children were affixed to the farm they cultivated. … This mitigated servitude was called 'Lidum,' and the Freedman, Lidus, Leud, or Latt. The Lidus of an ecclesiastical master was called Colonus. … A yet lower class were the Slaves, or Serfs [Knechte] who were employed in menial or agricultural services; themselves and their earnings being the absolute property of their master, and entirely at his disposal. The number of these miserable beings was gradually increased by the wars with the Sclavonic nations, and the sale of their prisoners was one great object of traffic in the German fairs and markets. But a variety of causes combined to wear out this abominable system; and as civilization advanced, the severities of slavery diminished; so that its extinction was nearly accomplished before the 14th century."

_Sir R. Comyn, History of the Western Empire, chapter 27 (volume 2)._

"The following table will show that the abolition of serfdom in most parts of Germany took place very recently. Serfdom was abolished:

1. In Baden, in 1783. 2. In Hohenzollern, in 1804. 3. In Schleswig and Holstein, in 1804. 4. In Nassau, in 1808. 5. In Prussia, Frederick William I. had done away with serfdom in his own domains so early as 1717.

The code of the Great Frederick … was intended to abolish it throughout the kingdom, but in reality it only got rid of it in its hardest form, the 'leibeigenschaft,' and retained it in the mitigated shape of 'erbunterthänigkeit.' It was not till 1809 that it disappeared altogether.

See GERMANY: A. D. 1807-1808.

6. In Bavaria serfdom disappeared in 1808. 7. A decree of Napoleon, dated from Madrid in 1808, abolished it in the Grand-duchy of Berg, and in several other smaller territories, such as Erfurt, Baireuth, &c. 8. In the kingdom of Westphalia, its destruction dates from 1808 and 1809. 9. In the principality of Lippe Detmold, from 1809. 10. In Schomburg Lippe, from 1810. 11. In Swedish Pomerania, from 1810, also. 12. In Hessen Darmstadt, from 1809 and 1811. 13. In Wurtemberg, from 1817. 14. In Mecklenburg, from 1820. 15. In Oldenburgh, from 1814. 16. In Saxony for Lusatia, from 1832. 17. In Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, only from 1833. 18. In Austria, from 1811.

So early as in 1782, Joseph II. had destroyed 'leibeigenschaft;' but serfage in its mitigated form of 'erbunterthänigkeit,' lasted till 1811."

_A. de Tocqueville, State of Society in France before 1789, note D._

SLAVERY: Hungary and Austria: A. D. 1849. Completed emancipation of the peasantry.

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 1849-1859.

SLAVERY: Ireland: 12th Century. The Bristol Slave-trade.

See BRISTOL: 12TH CENTURY.

SLAVERY: Moslem relinquishment of Christian slavery.

See BARBARY STATES: A. D. 1816.

SLAVERY: Papal doctrine of the condemnation of the Jews to perpetual bondage.

See JEWS: 13-14TH CENTURIES.

SLAVERY: Poland.

"The statements of the Polish nobles and their historians, to the effect that the peasant was always the hereditary property of the lord of the manor are false. This relation between eleven million men and barely half a million masters is an abuse of the last two hundred years, and was preceded by one thousand years of a better state of things. Originally the noble did not even possess jurisdiction over the peasant. It was wielded by the royal castellans, and in exceptional cases was bestowed on individual nobles, as a reward for distinguished services. … Those peasants were free who were domiciled according to German law, or who dwelt on the land which they themselves had reclaimed. It was owing to the feudal lords' need of labourers, that the rest of the peasants were bound to the soil and could not leave the land without permission. But the peasant did not belong to the lord, he could not be sold. … The fact that he could possess land prevented him from ever becoming a mere serf. … It is remarkable that the Polish peasant enjoyed these privileges at a time when villeinage existed in all the rest of Europe, and that his slavery began when other nations became free. Villeinage ceased in Germany as early as the 12th and 13th centuries, except in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Lusetia, which had had a Slavonic population. … In Poland it began in the 16th century. The kings were forced to promise that they would grant the peasant no letters of protection against his lord [Alexander, 1505; Sigismund I., 1543; Sigismund III., 1588]. Henceforth the lord was to have the right of punishing his disobedient subjects at his own discretion. … Without the repeal of a single statute favourable to the peasants, it became a fundamental principle of the constitution, that 'Henceforth no temporal court in existence can grant the peasant redress against his lord, though property, honour, or life be at stake.' The peasant was thus handed over to an arbitrary power, which had no limit, except that which the excess of an evil imposes on the evil itself. … There was no help for the peasant save in the mercy of his lord or in his own despair. The result was those terrible insurrections of the peasants—the very threat of which alarmed the nobles—the ruin of landed property, and the failure of those sources from which a nation should derive its prosperity and its strength."

_Count von Moltke, Poland: an Historical Sketch, chapter 4._

SLAVERY: Rome, Italy, and the Church.

"It is perhaps hardly surprising that the city of Rome should, even down to the 16th century, have patronised slavery, and it was only natural that the rest of Italy should follow the example of the metropolis of Christianity. The popes were wont to issue edicts of slavery against whole towns and provinces: thus for instance did Boniface VIII. against the retainers of the Colonnas.

See PAPACY: A. D. 1204-13481;

Clement V. against the Venetians; Sixtus IV. against the Florentines; Gregory XI. against the Florentines;

See FLORENCE: A. D. 1375-1378.

Julius II. against the Bolognese and Venetians; and the meaning of it was, that anyone who could succeed in capturing any of the persons of the condemned was required to make slaves of them. The example of Rome encouraged the whole of Italy, and especially Venice, to carry on a brisk trade in foreign, and especially female slaves. The privilege which had sprung up in Rome and lasted for some years, by virtue of which a slave taking refuge on the Capitol became free, was abolished in 1548 by Paul III. upon the representation of the Senate. {2917} Rome, of all the great powers of Europe, was the last to retain slavery. Scholasticism having undertaken in the 13th century to justify the existing state of things, a theological sanction was discovered for slavery; Ægidius of Rome, taking Thomas Aquinas as his authority, declared that it was a Christian institution, since original sin had deprived man of any right to freedom."

_J. I. von Döllinger, Studies in European History, p. 75._

See, also, CATTANI.

SLAVERY: Russia. Serfdom and Emancipation.

"In the earliest period of Russian history the rural population was composed of three distinct classes. At the bottom of the scale stood the slaves, who were very numerous. Their numbers were continually augmented by prisoners of war, by freemen who voluntarily sold themselves as slaves, by insolvent debtors, and by certain categories of criminals. Immediately above the slaves were the free agricultural labourers, who had no permanent domicile, but wandered about the country and settled temporarily where they happened to find work and satisfactory remuneration. In the third place, distinct from these two classes, and in some respects higher in the social scale, were the peasants properly so called. These peasants proper, who may be roughly described as small farmers or cottiers, were distinguished from the free agricultural labourers in two respects: they were possessors of land in property or usufruct, and they were members of a rural Commune. … If we turn now from these early times to the 18th century, we find that the position of the rural population has entirely changed in the interval. The distinction between slaves, agricultural labourers, and peasants has completely disappeared. All three categories have melted together into a common class, called serfs, who are regarded as the property of the landed proprietors or of the State. 'The proprietors [in the words of an imperial ukaze of April 15, 1721] sell their peasants and domestic servants not even in families, but one by one, like cattle, as is done nowhere else in the whole world.'" At the beginning of the 18th century, while the peasantry had "sunk to the condition of serfs, practically deprived of legal protection and subject to the arbitrary will of the proprietors, … they were still in some respects legally and actually distinguished from the slaves on the one hand and the 'free wandering people' on the other. These distinctions were obliterated by Peter the Great and his immediate successors. … To effect his great civil and military reforms, Peter required an annual revenue such as his predecessors had never dreamed of, and he was consequently always on the look-out for some new object of taxation. When looking about for this purpose, his eye naturally fell on the slaves, the domestic servants, and the free agricultural labourers. None of these classes paid taxes. … He caused, therefore, a national census to be taken, in which all the various classes of the rural population … should be inscribed in one category; and he imposed equally on all the members of this category a poll-tax, in lieu of the former land-tax, which had lain exclusively on the peasants. To facilitate the collection of this tax the proprietors were made responsible for their serfs; and the 'free wandering people' who did not wish to enter the army were ordered, under pain of being sent to the galleys, to inscribe themselves as members of a Commune or as serfs to some proprietor. … The last years of the 18th century may be regarded as the turning-point in the history of serfage. Up till that time the power of the proprietors had steadily increased, and the area of serfage had rapidly expanded. Under the Emperor Paul we find the first decided symptoms of a reaction. … With the accession of Alexander I. in 1801 commenced a long series of abortive projects of a general emancipation, and endless attempts to correct the more glaring abuses; and during the reign of Nicholas no less than six committees were formed at different times to consider the question. But the practical result of all these efforts was extremely small."

_D. M. Wallace, Russia, chapter 29._