by Will Durant
The decline of slavery was due not to moral progress but to economic change. Production under direct physical compulsion proved less profitable or convenient than production under the stimulus of acquisitive desire. Servitude continued, and the word servus served for both slave and serf; but in time it became the word serf, as villein became villain, and Slav became slave. It was the serf, not the slave, who made the bread of the medieval world.
2. The Serf
Typically the serf tilled a plot of land owned by a lord or baron who gave him a life tenure and military protection as long as he paid an annual rent in products, labor, or money. He could be evicted at the owner’s will;15 and at his death the land passed to his children only by consent and satisfaction of the lord. In France he could be sold independently of the land, for some forty shillings ($400.00?); sometimes he (i.e., his labor) was sold by his owner in part to one person, in part to another. In France he could abjure the feudal contract by surrendering the land and all his possessions to the seigneur. In England he was denied this right of migration, and fugitive medieval serfs were recaptured as zealously as fugitive modern slaves.
The feudal dues of the serf to the owner of his land were numerous and diverse; some intelligence must have been required even to remember them. (1) He paid annually three taxes in money: (a) a small head tax, to the government but through the baron; (b) a small rent (cens); (c) an arbitrary charge (taille) levied by the owner yearly or of tener. (2) He annually gave the lord a share—usually a dîme or tenth—of his crops and livestock. (3) He owed his lord many days of unpaid labor (corvée); this was an inheritance from older economies, in which tasks like clearing woods, draining marshes, digging canals, raising dykes, were performed by the peasants collectively as an obligation to the community or king. Some lords required three days weekly through most of the year, four or five days a week in plowing or harvest time; additional labor days, paid only by meals, might be exacted in emergencies. This obligation of corvée lay upon only one male in each household. (4) The serf was obliged to grind his corn, bake his bread, brew his beer, press his grapes, at the lord’s mill, oven, vat, or press, and pay a small fee for each such use. (5) He paid a fee for the right to fish, hunt, or pasture his animals, on the lord’s domain. (6)His actions at law had to be brought before the baronial court, and cost him a fee varying with the gravity of the case. (7) He had to serve at call in the baron’s regiment in war. (8) If the baron was captured, the serf was expected to contribute to the ransom. (9) He contributed also to the substantial gift due to the lord’s son on being made a knight. (10) He paid the baron a tax on all products that he took for sale to market or fair. (11) He could not sell his beer or wine until the lord had had two weeks’ prior time to sell the lord’s beer or wine. (12) In many cases he was obliged to buy a prescribed quantity of wine yearly from his lord; if he did not buy in time, says one customal (a collection of the laws of a manor), “then the lord shall pour a four-gallon measure over the man’s roof; if the wine runs down, the tenant must pay for it; if it runs upward, he shall pay nothing.”16 (13) He paid a fine if he sent a son to higher education or gave him to the Church, for thereby the manor lost a hand. (14) He paid a tax, and required the lord’s consent, in case he or his children married a person not belonging to his manor, for then the lord would lose some or all of the offspring; on many estates permission and fee were required for any marriage at all. (15) In scattered instances17 we hear of the ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur, whereby the lord might claim the “right of the first night” with the serf’s bride; but in almost all cases the serf was allowed to “redeem” his bride by paying a fee to the lord;18 in this form the ius primae noctis survived in Bavaria till the eighteenth century.19 On some English estates the lord fined the peasant whose daughter had sinned; on some Spanish estates a peasant wife convicted of adultery forfeited part or all of her belongings to the lord.20 (16) If the peasant died without issue residing with him, the house and land reverted to the lord by escheat. If his heir was an unmarried daughter, she could retain the holding only by marrying a man living on the same manor. In any event, as a kind of inheritance tax, the lord, on the death of a serf tenant, was entitled to take an animal, or an article of furniture or clothing, from the holding; in some cases the parish priest took a similar mortu-arium;21 in France these death dues were exacted only when the serf died without a codomiciled heir. (17) On some—especially on ecclesiasticalmanors he paid an annual and an inheritance tax to the Vogt who provided military defense for the estate. To the Church the peasant paid an annual tithe or tenth of his produce.
From so varied an assortment of dues—never all exacted from one family—it is impossible to calculate the total of a serf’s obligations. For late medieval Germany it has been reckoned at two thirds of his produce.21a The power of custom, pre-eminent in agricultural regimes, favored the serf: usually his dues in money and kind tended to remain the same through centuries,22 despite rising production and depreciated currencies. Many disabilities or obligations that lay on the serf in theory or law were softened or annulled by baronial indulgence, effective resistance, or the erosion of time.23 Perhaps in general the misery of the medieval serf has been exaggerated; the dues exacted of him were largely in lieu of a money rent to the owner, and taxes to the community, to maintain public services and public works; probably they bore a smaller proportion to his income than our federal, state, county, and school taxes bear to our income today.24 The average peasant of the twelfth century was at least as well off as some sharecroppers in modern states, and better off than a Roman proletaire in Augustus’ reign.25 The baron did not consider himself an exploiter; he functioned actively on the manor, and seldom enjoyed great wealth. The peasants, till the thirteenth century, looked up to him with admiration, often with affection; if the lord became a childless widower they sent deputations to him to urge remarriage, lest the estate be left without a regular heir, and be despoiled in a war of succession.26 Like most economic and political systems in history, feudalism was what it had to be to meet the necessities of place and time and the nature of man.
The peasant’s cottage was of fragile wood, usually thatched with straw and turf, occasionally with shingles. We hear of no fire-fighting organization before 1250; when one of these cottages took fire it was usually a total loss. As often as not the house had only one room, at most two; a wood-burning fireplace, an oven, a kneading trough, table and benches, cupboard and dishes, utensils and andirons, caldron and pothanger, and near the oven, on the earthen floor, an immense mattress of feathers or straw, on which the peasant, his wife and children, and his overnight guest all slept in promiscuous and mutual warmth. Pigs and fowl had the run of the house. The women kept the place as clean as circumstances would permit, but the busy peasants found cleanliness a nuisance, and stories told how Satan excluded serfs from hell because he could not bear their smell.27 Near the cottage was a barn with horse and cows, perhaps a beehive and a hennery. Near the barn was a dunghill to which all animal or human members of the household contributed. Roundabout were the tools of agriculture and domestic industry. A cat controlled the mice, and a dog watched over all.
Dressed in a blouse of cloth or skins, a jacket of leather or wool, belt and trousers, high shoes or boots, the peasant must have made a sturdy figure, not much different from the peasant of France today; we must picture him not as an oppressed and beaten man, but as a strong and patient hero of the plow, sustained, as every man is, by some secret, however irrational, pride. His wife worked as hard as himself, from dawn to dark. In addition she supplied him with children; and since children were assets on the farm, she bore them abundantly; nevertheless we read in the Franciscan Pelagius (c. 1330) how some peasants “often abstain from their wives, lest children be born, fearing, under pretext of poverty, that they cannot bring up so many.”28
The food of the peasant was substantial and wholesome—dairy products, eggs, vegetables, and meat; but genteel historians mourn that he had to e
at black—i.e., whole grain—bread.29 He shared in the social life of the village, but had no cultural interests. He could not read; a literate serf would have been an offense to his illiterate lord. He was ignorant of everything but farming, and not too skilled in that. His manners were rough and hearty, perhaps gross; in this turmoil of European history he had to survive by being a good animal, and he managed it. He was greedy because poor, cruel because fearful, violent because repressed, churlish because treated as a churl. He was the mainstay of the Church, but he had more superstition than religion. Pelagius charged him with cheating the Church of her tithes, and neglecting to observe the holydays and the fasts; Gautier de Coincy (thirteenth century) complained that the serf “has no more fear of God than a sheep, does not give a button for the laws of Holy Church.”30 He had his moments of heavy, earthy humor, but in the fields and in his home he was a man of spare speech, straitened vocabulary, and solemn mood, too consumed by toil and chores to waste his energy on words or dreams. Despite his superstitions he was a realist; he knew the merciless whims of the sky, and the certainty of death; one season of drouth could bring him and his brood to starvation. Sixty times between 970 and 1100 famine mowed men down in France; no British peasant could forget the famines of 1086 and 1125 in Merrie England; and the bishop of Trier in the twelfth century was shocked to see starving peasants kill and eat his horse.31 Flood and plague and earthquake entered the play, and made every comedy a tragedy at last.
3. The Village Community
Around the baronial villa some fifty to five hundred peasants—serfs, half free, or free—built their village, living not in isolated homesteads but, for safety’s sake, close together within the walls of the settlement. Usually the village was part of one or more manors; most of its officials were appointed by the baron, and were responsible only to him; but the peasants chose a reeve or provost to mediate between them and the lord, and to co-ordinate their agricultural activity. In the market place they gathered periodically to barter goods in the residuum of trade that survived the economic self-containment of the manor. The village rural household raised its own vegetables and some of its meat, spun its wool or linen, made most of its clothing. The village blacksmith hammered out iron tools, the tanner made leather goods, the carpenter built cottages and furniture, the wheelwright made carts; fullers, dyers, masons, saddlers, cobblers, soapmakers … lived in the village or came there transiently to ply their crafts on demand; and a public butcher or baker competed with the peasant and the housewife in preparing meat and bread.
Nine tenths of the feudal economy were agricultural. Normally, in eleventh-century France and England, the cultivated land of the manor was yearly divided into three fields; one was planted to wheat or rye, one to barley or oats, one was left fallow. Each field was subdivided into acre or half-acre strips, separated by “balks” of unplowed turf. The village officials assigned to each peasant a variable number of strips in each field, and bound him to rotate his crops in accord with a plan fixed by the community. The whole field was plowed, harrowed, planted, cultivated, and harvested by the joint labor of all. The scattering of one man’s strips among three or more fields may have aimed to give him a fair share of unequally productive lands; and the co-operative tillage may have been a survival from a primitive communism of which scant trace remains. In addition to these strips each peasant fulfilling his feudal dues had the right to cut timber, pasture his cattle, and gather hay in the manorial woods, common, or “green.” And usually he had enough land around his cottage for a garden and flowers.
Agricultural science in feudal Christendom could hardly compare with that of Columella’s Romans, or of Moslem Mesopotamia or Spain. Stubble and other refuse were burned on the fields to fertilize the soil and rid it of insects and weeds; marl or other limy earths provided a crude manure; there were no artificial fertilizers, and the costs of transport limited the use of animal dung; the archbishop of Rouen emptied the offal of his stables into the Seine instead of carting it to his fields in nearby Deville. Peasants pooled their pence to buy a plow or harrow for their common use. Till the eleventh century the ox was the draft animal; he ate less expensively, and in old age could be eaten more profitably than the horse. But about 1000 the harness makers invented the stiff collar that would allow a horse to draw a load without choking; so dressed, the horse could plow three or four times as much in a day as the ox; in wet temperate climates speed of plowing was important; so during the eleventh century the horse more and more replaced the ox, and lost his high status as reserved for travel, hunting, and war.32 Water mills, long known to the Moslem East, entered Western Europe toward the end of the twelfth century.33
The Church eased the toil of the peasant with Sundays and holydays, on which it was a sin to do “servile work.” “Our oxen,” said the peasants, “know when Sunday comes, and will not work on that day.”34 On such days, after Mass, the peasant sang and danced, and forgot in hearty rustic laughter the dour burden of sermon and farm. Ale was cheap, speech was free and profane, and loose tales of womankind mingled with awesome legends of the saints. Rough games of football, hockey, wrestling, and weight throwing pitted man against man, village against village. Cockfighting and bullbaiting flourished; and hilarity reached its height when, within a closed circle, two blindfolded men, armed with cudgels, tried to kill a goose or a pig. Sometimes, of an evening, peasants visited one another, played indoor games, and drank; usually, however, they stayed at home, for no streets were lit; and at home, since candles were dear, they went to bed soon after dark. In the long nights of the winter the family welcomed the cattle into the cottage, thankful for their heat.
So, by hard labor and mute courage, rather than by the initiatives and skills that proper incentives breed, the peasants of Europe fed themselves and their masters, their soldiers and clergy and kings. They drained marshes, raised dykes, cleared woods and canals, cut roads, built homes, advanced the frontier of cultivation, and won the battle between jungle and man. Modern Europe is their creation. Looking now at these neat hedges and ordered fields, we cannot see the centuries of toil and tribulation, breaking back and heart, that beat the raw materials of reluctantly bountiful nature into the economic foundations of our life. Women, too, were soldiers in that war; it was their patient fertility that conquered the earth. Monks fought for a time as bravely as any; planted their monasteries as outposts in the wilds, forged an economy out of chaos, and begot villages in the wilderness. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the greater part of Europe’s soil was untilled and unpeopled forest and waste; at their end the Continent had been won for civilization. Perhaps, in proper perspective, this was the greatest campaign, the noblest victory, the most vital achievement, of the Age of Faith.
4. The Lord
Under every system of economy men who can manage men manage men who can only manage things. In feudal Europe the manager of men was the baron—in Latin dominus, in French seigneur (the Roman senior), in German Herr (master), in English lord. His functions were threefold: to give military protection to his lands and their inhabitants; to organize agriculture, industry, and trade on these lands; to serve his liege lord or his king in war. In an economy reduced to elementals and fragments by centuries of migration, invasion, rapine, and war, society could survive only by the local independence and sufficiency of food supply and soldiery. Those who could organize defense and tillage became the natural lords of the land. Ownership and management of land became the source of wealth and power; and an age of landed aristocracy began that would last till the Industrial Revolution.
The basic principle of feudalism was mutual fealty: the economic and military obligation of serf or vassal to the lord, of lord to suzerain or superior lord, of suzerain to king, of king to suzerain, of suzerain to lord, of lord to vassal and serf. In return for the services of his serfs, the lord gave them land on a life tenure verging on ownership; he allowed them, for a modest fee, the use of his ovens, presses, mills, waters, woods, and fields; he commuted many labo
r dues for small money payments, and let others lapse in the oblivion of time. He did not dispossess the serf—usually he took care of him—in helpless sickness or old age.35 On feast days he might open his gates to the poor, and feed all who came. He organized the maintenance of bridges, roads, canals, and trade; he found markets for the manor’s surplus products, “hands” for its operations, money for its purchases. He brought in good stock for breeding purposes, and allowed his serfs to service their flocks with his selected males. He could strike—in some localities or circumstances he could kill—a serf with impunity; but his sense of economy controlled his brutality. He exercised judicial as well as military powers over his domain, and profited unduly from fines levied in the manorial court; but this court, though often intimidated by his bailiff, was mostly manned by serfs themselves; and that the rude justice there decreed was not too oppressive appears from the readiness of the serf to buy indemnity from service in these judicial assemblies. Any serf who cared and dared could speak his mind in the manorial court; some dared; and in their piecemeal and unintended way these tribunals helped to forge the liberties that ended serfdom.