Serfdom

• 1. Introduction

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  Serfdom was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude that held many of Europe's peasants in place for centuries. A serf could not simply walk away. He placed his head in his lord's hands during a ceremony called bondage, and that gesture bound not only him but every child he would ever have. The children born to serfs inherited their status. By taking on the duties of serfdom, people bound themselves and their progeny.

  It was a system old enough to have roots in late antiquity, yet it survived in some places until the mid-19th century. How did a free person become a serf, and why would anyone agree to it? What separated a serf from a slave when both worked land they could not leave? And why did this institution fade west of one river while growing stronger to the east? The answers run from the ancient city-state of Sparta to an edict signed in 1861, and they reveal a world where land, labour, and survival were knotted tightly together.

• 2. Bondage And Slavery

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  Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually. In some areas they could be sold together with the land they worked, staying with that land to serve a new lord. This was different from the actual slaves of the period. The kholops of Russia could be traded, could be abused with no rights over their own bodies, could not leave the land they were bound to, and could marry only with their lord's permission.

  A serf who occupied a plot of land owed labour to the lord of the manor who owned it. In return he received protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields to feed himself. The arrangement carried a degree of reciprocity. One rationale of the age held that serfs and freemen worked for all, a knight or baron fought for all, and a churchman prayed for all. Everyone had a place. The serf was the worst fed and rewarded, yet unlike a slave he held certain rights in land and property.

  The word itself records this slow separation. Serf came from the Middle French serf, derived from the Latin servus, meaning slave or servant. As slavery gradually disappeared and the legal status of servi grew nearly identical to that of the coloni, the term shifted into the modern idea of a serf. The word serf was first recorded in English in the late 15th century. The word serfdom was coined in 1850, long after the thing it described had begun to vanish.

• 3. From Sparta To Charlemagne

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  The helots of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta held a status that resembled the medieval serf. Social institutions like serfdom were known in ancient times, well before the manor existed. By the 3rd century AD the Roman Empire faced a labour shortage, and large landowners turned increasingly to Roman freemen acting as tenant farmers instead of slaves.

  These tenant farmers became known as coloni, and their condition steadily eroded. The tax system Diocletian implemented assessed taxes on both land and the people who lived on it. That made it administratively inconvenient for peasants to leave the land where the census counted them. The colonus system of the late Roman Empire can be considered the predecessor of Western European feudal serfdom.

  Medieval serfdom truly began with the breakup of the Carolingian Empire around the 10th century. Powerful feudal lords encouraged its establishment as a source of agricultural labour. The system assured great landlords that others worked to feed them, holding those workers down both legally and economically. This arrangement supplied most of the agricultural labour throughout the Middle Ages, while slavery, though it persisted, remained rare.

• 4. Becoming A Serf

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  A freeman usually became a serf through force or necessity. Sometimes the greater physical and legal strength of a local magnate intimidated freeholders into dependency. Other times a few years of crop failure, a war, or brigandage left a person unable to make his own way, and he struck a bargain with a lord. In exchange for protection he gave service in labour, produce, cash, or some combination of all three.

  The bargain was sealed in the ceremony of bondage, where the serf placed his head in the lord's hands. It echoed the ceremony of homage, in which a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord. A 7th-century Anglo Saxon Oath of Fealty captures the spirit. The oath-taker swears: By the Lord before whom this sanctuary is holy, I will to N. be true and faithful, and love all which he loves and shun all which he shuns, according to the laws of God and the order of the world. The oath promised that the swearer would never, by word or deed, do anything unpleasing to his lord, so long as the lord held to the agreement made when the man submitted himself.

  Once sworn, the commitment encompassed every aspect of the serf's life, and it passed to his descendants. There were ways out, though they were costly. A serf could purchase his freedom, be manumitted by a generous owner, or flee to a town or to newly settled land where few questions were asked. In England, a serf who reached a chartered town and evaded recapture for a year and a day became a burgher of that town.

• 5. The Lower Orders

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  Freemen made up only about 10% of the peasant population in parts of 11th-century England, and their numbers were small across most of Europe. They held land by feudal contracts, owed little or no service, and enjoyed real security of tenure. Below them lay a graded ladder of unfreedom whose names were often less distinct than they appear.

  Villeins occupied the rung just under the freemen. After the Norman conquest of 1066, an unfree tenant who held land in return for agricultural and other services to his lord was called a villein. Villeins were tied to their lord and could not move away or marry off their daughters without his consent. They held more rights and higher status than the lowest serf, and unlike slaves they could generally hold their own property. Medieval England knew two kinds: villeins regardant, tied to the land, and villeins in gross, who could be traded apart from it. Half-villeins received only half as many strips of land yet owed a full complement of labour.

  The Domesday Book of 1086 used bordarii and cottarii as interchangeable terms, with cottar from the Anglo-Saxon tongue and bordar from the French. A bordar or cottar held a cottage, a garden, and just enough land to feed a family, between roughly 1 and 5 acres at the time of the survey. They ranked below the villein and owned no draught oxen or horses. The Domesday Book showed England as 12% freeholders, 35% serfs or villeins, 30% cotters and bordars, and 9% slaves.

  Beneath all of these sat the lowest groups. In Medieval Poland and Kievan Rus the smerdy stood above the kholops, who were the lowest class of serfs and could be freely traded. The slave held the fewest rights of all, owned no tenancy in land, worked for the lord exclusively, and survived on the landlord's donations. Runaway slaves could be beaten if caught. It always served the lord's interest to prove a servile arrangement existed, since that gave him greater rights to fees and taxes.

• 6. Labour And Dues

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  A portion of every week belonged to the lord. The usual serf ploughed the fields the lord held in demesne, harvested crops, dug ditches, repaired fences, and often worked in the manor house. The rest of his time he spent on his own fields, crops, and animals to provide for his family. A cruel difficulty shaped his year: when the lord's crops ripened, so did his own, and the lord's work took precedence.

  In exchange the serf gained certain privileges, including the right to gather deadwood for fuel from the lord's forests. Taxes and fees came on top of labour, assessed on the value of his lands and usually paid in produce rather than cash. The best ration of wheat from the harvest often went to the landlord. Hunting and trapping wild game on the lord's property was generally forbidden. On Easter Sunday a family might owe an extra dozen eggs, and at Christmas perhaps a goose. When a family member died, extra taxes were paid as feudal relief so the heir could keep the right to till his land.

  The tests for these dues could be arbitrary. A chicken might be required to jump over a fence of a given height to prove it was old enough or well enough to count for tax purposes. A young woman who wished to marry a serf outside her manor had to pay a fee for the right to leave her lord and to compensate for her lost labour. These restraints were enforced through manorial customary law and the court baron.

  The weight of the demand varied by place and century. In Poland the labour owed per household was a few days per year in the 13th century, one day per week in the 14th, four days per week in the 17th, and six days per week in the 18th. Per household meant each dwelling supplied a worker. In the 18th century, six people in one home, a peasant, his wife, three children, and a hired worker, working one day a week, counted as six days of labour.

• 7. Rights And Survival

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  Common wisdom held that a serf owned only his belly, and that even his clothes were, in law, the property of his lord. Yet within his constraints a serf had freedoms. He could accumulate personal property and wealth, and a few serfs grew richer than their free neighbours, though this happened rarely. A well-to-do serf might even buy his freedom.

  The landlord could not dispossess his serfs without legal cause. He was supposed to protect them from robbers and rival lords, and to support them by charity in times of famine. Many of these rights were enforceable by the serf in the manorial court. A serf could grow whatever crop he saw fit, though his taxes often had to be paid in wheat, and any surplus he could sell at market.

  Being a villein was much preferable to being a vagabond, a slave, or an unlanded labourer. Land within a lord's manor meant sustenance, survival, and crops kept safe from marauding robbers. Landlords rarely evicted villeins even when legally entitled to, because their labour held real value. A villein could win freedom by escaping to a city and living there more than a year, but that meant losing his land rights and livelihood, a prohibitive price unless his landlord was especially tyrannical.

• 8. Two Directions, One Ending

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  The Black Death reached Europe in 1347 and caused massive fatalities, and the decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to it. In the later Middle Ages serfdom began to disappear west of the Rhine. In France the shortage of workers made manumission more common after the plague, and by the 18th century serfdom had grown relatively rare across most of the country.

  In the opposite direction, serfdom grew stronger in Central and Eastern Europe, where it had been less common. This phenomenon was known as the second serfdom, and it became dominant in the east around the 15th century. In Poland serfdom became the dominant relationship between peasants and nobility in the 17th century and was a major feature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, though its origins reach back to the 12th. In Russia serfdom became dominant in the 17th century and gradually evolved into de facto slavery while still being called serfdom. In 1649 up to three-quarters of Muscovy's peasants, 13 to 14 million people, were serfs whose lives were barely distinguishable from slaves.

  The institution fell in stages. The Habsburg emperor Joseph II issued the Serfdom Patent of 1781, abolishing serfdom in Bohemia and the German-speaking areas, and a similar decree for Hungary in 1785. Serfdom was formally abolished in France on the 4th of August 1789. Prussia declared serfdom unacceptable in 1792 and abolished it in 1807. Alexander II freed Russia's privately held serfs, over 23 million people or about 38% of the population, by an edict in 1861, with the owners compensated through taxes on the freed. Descriptions of serfdom reach beyond Europe too, to the Tlacotin of the Aztec Empire and the paroikoi of the Byzantine Empire. The United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery prohibits serfdom as a practice similar to slavery, naming in a modern treaty the bargain a 7th-century farmer once sealed by placing his head in another man's hands.