SERFS AND VILLEINS

I1n the eleventh century, Carlovingian Europe was divided into a multitude of fiefs which formed each its own state, having its own life, laws, customs, and its almost perfectly independent lay or ecclesiastical chief.

2We have described the community of the lords, but they were not the only feudal community. That was the fighting and war-making community, the community that ruled, judged, punished, and oppressed. Below this was the community that worked, by which the other lived, got its clothes, its arms, its castles, and its bread--the community of serfs, or rather craftsmen (_gens potestatis_). We must not now look for free men, for they have disappeared. Some have raised themselves and become the fortunate lords; others have been pushed back into the lower regions of society and have become serfs and villeins. That class of simple freemen which had been nearly swept away in the invasion of the Roman Empire had been engulfed a second time. There were no longer any freehold owners, or so few that their mention is not worth while.

3But the villeins were a numerous lot. The chief, the noble, had not only vassals but subjects residing on that portion of his estate that he never enfeoffed. And these were the serfs, properly called, men of the soil who were entirely at their lord’s disposal. “The lord,” says Beaumanoir,[f] “can take from them all that they have, put them in prison, rightly or wrongly, and as often as he pleases, and has no account to give of them except to God.”

4In spite of this the condition of the serf was better than that of the slave of ancient times. The progress which slavery had made at the fall of the Roman Empire was not entirely lost in the wreckage of invasion, but appeared again in feudal society. The freeman of antiquity had been harder towards his slave than was the barbarian in whom the leaven of Christianity had produced some effect. The serf was recognised as a man having a family, sharing the common ancestry of his lord, and made in the image of God. Serfs finally entered the church, and sometimes mounted higher than the most powerful lords.

5Above the serfs were the inalienables (_mainmortables_), “more kindly treated,” continues the old jurist of Beauvais,[f] “since the lord, if they did no wrong, could ask nothing of them except their dues and rents and the debts which they were accustomed to pay for their servitude.” But the inalienable could not marry without the consent of his lord, and if he took a free wife, or one outside the seigneury, there was a fine at the pleasure of the lord. This was the right of “formarriage” (a tax for marriage out of rank or condition), and the issue of such a marriage was divided between the lords of the husband and of the wife. If there was but one child, it went to the lord of the mother. At an inalienable’s death all his property went to his lord. For these people there was no way of escape from the hand that bent them to the furrow. Wherever they went the right of succession was attached to their persons and their purse. The lord inherited on every hand from his serfs.

6In a higher degree still were to be found the free tenants known as villeins, peasants, or commoners. Their condition was less precarious. They had preserved the freedom the serf did not possess, and had hung on to it at the sacrifice of an annual tax, a statute duty, and the rent of the land which the landlord had ceded them and which they could transmit with all their other property to their children. But while the beneficiary holdings or fiefs were under the protection of a public and well-defined law, the land of the villeins was under the absolute jurisdiction of the landlord and protected only by private agreements. This is why the villeins, and especially those in the country, where it was not necessary to oversee them as strictly as those in the large towns, were often under the heel of absolute dominion.

7One reads in ancient documents about the lords: “They are masters of heaven and earth; they have jurisdiction above and beneath the ground, over necks and heads, over the water, winds, and fields.” The villeins could not escape their jurisdiction, for the feudal law said, “Between thee, lord, and thee, villein, there is no judge but God.” “We recognise from our gracious lords,” runs another formula, “both ban and convocation; the high forest, the bird in the air, the fish in the stream, the beast in the bush, as far as our sovereign lord, or the servants of his grace, can hold his own. For this our gracious lord will take under his shelter and protection the widow and orphan as well as the peasant.” Thus were all rights given over to the lord, but in exchange he protected the weak. Such is the principle of feudal society towards its subjects. Royalty no longer filled the office for which it was instituted; bishops, counts, barons, and other powers were called upon for the protection which could no longer be expected from the nominal head of the state.

8Everything belonged to the lord; but since there was no industry or commerce, no luxury by which one alone could consume in a few moments the fruit of the labour of many, the exactions of this lord were not at first oppressive, and for the villeins these exactions were as systematically determined as are to-day the rights of the landlord over his farmer-tenants. Only in the Middle Ages was there always the element of arbitrariness and violence which modern law does not allow.

9The villeins’ tax was paid either in natural produce, as provisions, corn, cattle, and fowl, products of the soil and the farm; or in work, or manual labour, as statute labour in the fields and vineyards of the lord, in the building of his castle, or digging ditches, in the repair of roads; or the making of furniture, utensils, horseshoes, ploughshares, carts, etc. In towns and wherever money was scarce, the lord did not make the mistake, it must be understood, of demanding his dues in coin, or of imposing arbitrary taxes.

10But let us go back to the times themselves and listen to the words of a scribe: “The lord who demands unjust rights of his villein, does so at the peril of his soul.” If the fear of heaven did not suffice, here were the commoners coming to the rescue, and the king’s officials were not far behind.

11There were some strange compensations to enliven the sad life of the feudal lord, shut up the whole year within the sombre walls of his castle. At Bologna, in Italy, the tenantry of the Benedictines of St. Procule paid as a tax the steam from a boiled capon. Every year each man brought his capon between two plates to the abbot, uncovered it, and, the steam having all been given off, was quits, and took his capon back with him. Elsewhere the peasants brought solemnly before their lord, in a carriage drawn by four horses, a little bird, or perhaps a may-bush decorated with ribbons. The man who owned a monkey was quits, according to an ordinance of St. Louis, when he had caused the monkey to perform before the lord’s tax-gatherer; the jongleur had to pay with one song. The lords themselves did not refuse, sometimes, to play a rôle in these folk comedies. The markgraf of Jülich, whenever he made a solemn entry, was mounted on a one-eyed horse, with wooden saddle, and bridle of bark from the linden, and wearing two spires of hawthorn, and carrying a white stick. When the abbé of Figeac came into town the lord of Monbrun received him in a most grotesque costume with one leg bare.

12Feudalism, bored with itself, laughed sometimes with the poor people, as did also the church when she authorised the celebration in the basilicas of the feast of the Asses. The powerful and the fortunate, in this age so sad and so stern, where misery was everywhere and security nowhere, owed much to their villeins and peasants for giving them some moments of forgetfulness and pleasure.

13ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE; FRIGHTFUL CONDITION OF THE PEASANTS AND SOME HAPPY