Serfdom

SERFDOM

SERFDOM. Serfdom was a status of legal bondage, almost invariably referring to peasants in enforced dependence on seignorial overlords. Serfdom could be an inherited, personal status (serfs of this sort were known as neifs in English, hommes de corps in French, and Erbuntertanen in German) or the consequence of the tenure of servile land (serfs of this sort were known as villeins in English, serfs de la glèbe in French, and Gutsuntertanen in German). During the early modern period serfdom encompassed a wide variety of conditions and social relations. Generally speaking, however, serfdom was a more recent, more widespread, and more onerous phenomenon in eastern than in western Europe, although even here there were important regional variations.

West European serfdom was of diverse and often obscure origin. In some places it developed out of the late Roman colonate (peasant tenants who were legally tied to the land during the fourth and fifth centuries); in others it was the result of self-commendation by peasants to powerful landlords in exchange for protection. Particularly important was the extension of the private jurisdictions of landlords at the expense of public systems of justice during the tenth and eleventh centuries, a process often accompanied by the imposition of fees and labor services on the peasantry. Finally, at the frontier between Christendom and the Islamic world, serfdom was also spread through military conquest. Thus in Sicily, which was seized by Norman adventurers between 1061 and 1091, most serfs were Muslims.

LEGAL STATUS OF SERFS

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, serfdom in western Europe had acquired a more precise legal definition, and was associated with a fairly standard series of legal disabilities. Particularly prominent was the obligation to provide corvées, or labor services, for the lord, ranging from a few days a year in southern France and the Mediterranean to one to two days every week on the northern European plain and in England. Serfs were forbidden to live outside the seignorial territory, and had to pay fines to marry the serf of another lord (merchet, formarriage, Ungenossame). Serfs were also subject to a characteristic set of fees, including poll taxes or annual recognition fees (tallage, chevage ), fees at the commencement of tenancy (entry fines, Handlohn, Erdschatz ), and death duties (heriots, mainmorte, Todesfälle ). Finally, serfdom often entailed disqualification from public office or exclusion from public jurisdiction.

Nevertheless, serfs were not slaves, but persons with rights in law. Only rarely could serfs be sold apart from their land; most "sales" of serfs in western Europe represented only the transfer of jurisdictional rights from one overlord to another with no physical movement of the peasants concerned. Moreover, de facto control of the means of production (the tenanted land) gave the serf leverage to bargain, and over the course of the Middle Ages, most of the rents, fees, and charges associated with serfdom became fixed by custom, while labor services tended to be commuted into cash payments. Serfs always retained extensive potential to resist seignorial pressure, either actively, through negotiation, protest, flight, and revolt, or passively, through foot-dragging and pilfering. Western European serfs also became adept at manipulating royal courts and other systems of public justice, despite seignorial efforts to impede their access to external legal authorities. Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that the serf's material circumstances were by no means necessarily inferior to those of the free peasant, as the legal encumbrances of servility were often counterbalanced by the greater size of servile, as opposed to free, landholdings. The English "Hundred Rolls" of 1279–1280 indicate that the average villein landholding was twice the size of its free counterpart, and similar patterns emerge from mid-sixteenth-century Swabian tax registers.

Serfdom was never a universal condition of the West European peasantry. It was insignificant in Scandinavia and most of the Iberian Peninsula (Catalonia being the main exception). Even in England, where servility assumed much greater significance, free peasants made up fully 50 to 60 percent of the rural population during the High Middle Ages. Furthermore, from the thirteenth century serfdom began to decline in significance throughout western Europe. Sometimes this happened through formal decrees of enfranchisement, as at Bologna (1257) and Florence (1289), or through mass sales of freedom, as in the Paris region from 1246. During the later Middle Ages serfdom also became a subject of several peasant protest movements, most notably the so-called Jacquerie in northern France (1358), the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 in England, and the German Peasants' War of 1524–1526. Almost all of these uprisings failed to secure a formal abolition of servile status, and instead were brutally suppressed by the authorities. The one great exception to this pattern occurred in Catalonia, where a series of revolts beginning in the 1370s culminated in the Peasants' War of 1462–1486 and ended with the suppression of serfdom by the Sentence of Guadalupe (1486). Despite the limited immediate successes of these rural rebellions, serfdom was in fact fatally undermined in western Europe by the plagues of the fourteenth century and by the ensuing late medieval agrarian depression.

The wave of epidemics that commenced with the Black Death of 1347–1351 and persisted into the fifteenth century created an acute labor shortage throughout the European continent, and the peasantry was able to capitalize on this situation by extracting major concessions from overlords. Initial efforts to enforce strict pre-plague wage and labor conditions, such as the English Statute of Laborers (1351) and the German Golden Bull of Charles IV (1356) foundered on economic realities and peasant resistance, and serfdom began to wither away through the practical modification of tenurial arrangements, rather than through formal abolition (that serfdom declined primarily in this way underscores the fact that most west European peasants incurred serfdom through villeinage rather than neifty). Landlords began to abandon the direct exploitation of seignorial reserves, which had required the mobilization of considerable labor services, and instead began parceling out their demesnes to the peasants in tenancy. Labor services and servile disabilities were gradually abandoned or (more commonly) commuted into fixed monetary payments and made incidents of land tenure, while peasant property rights grew more secure and increasingly heritable. In England, where the phenomenon has been particularly well studied, bondland was transformed over the course of the later Middle Ages into secure "customary" tenure, with robust rights of inheritance, conveyance, and mortgage. The tenant's rights were formalized in the manorial court roll, and a copy of the entry was issued to the tenant (hence the alternative appellation "copyhold" tenure). From the fifteenth century disputes over copyhold land could be appealed to royal courts, and by the 1580s English common law even upheld the copyholder's right to sublet such property to third parties. A similar pattern obtained in Germany, where the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the spread of heritable tenancy (Erblehenrecht) with extensive rights of conveyance, and guaranteed by the issue of parchment charters authenticated by seal.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, therefore, the burdens of servility had been "tenurialized" in most of western Europe, thereby disarming serfdom as a status of legal bondage. In France, even tenurial serfdom was largely confined to the eastern regions of Burgundy and Franche-Comté, where one-third to one-half of the population remained serfs until the institution was abolished by the French revolutionaries on 3 November 1789. In England, serfdom was still mentioned in the grievance lists of Kett's Rebellion (1549), and crown serfs were manumitted as late as 1575, but as far as contemporary commentators like Thomas Smith (1581) and William Harrison (1577) were concerned, neifty had ceased to exist, while villeins were "so fewe . . . it is not almost worth the speaking" (quoted in Hilton, 56). The most significant exceptions to this trend in western Europe were the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire, where serfdom remained a vital institution throughout the early modern period.

The persistence, indeed intensification, of serfdom in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages was in part a reaction to the late medieval agrarian crisis. Thus, in the German southwest, ecclesiastical lordships in particular began to impose new mobility restrictions and extend the scope and weight of death duties during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in order to retain control over the thinning ranks of the tenantry. This seignorial reaction ultimately collapsed because of determined peasant resistance—most spectacularly the aforementioned Peasants' War of 1524–1526—and most lordships came to an accommodation with their subjects guaranteeing peasant inheritance rights and capping the disabilities imposed by servility. More significant changes flowed from the second impetus for the revival of serfdom in Germany (again, especially in the southwest), namely the drive for territorial centralization. During the later fifteenth and well into the sixteenth centuries, rural lordships, territorial princes, and even free imperial cities began systematically exchanging rights with neighboring territories over "foreign" serfs in order to create exclusive jurisdictions free of legal claims from external authorities. Territorial serfdom of this sort did also entail some fiscal burdens and marriage and mobility restrictions, but the former were not especially onerous and the latter could always be waived for a moderate fee. By the early seventeenth century serfdom had ceased to occasion widespread complaint in Germany (with the notable exception of a protracted conflict in Hauenstein, in the southern Rhine Palatinate, between 1725 and 1745), and the institution persisted in its tenurial and territorial forms until abolished in the various German states over the years between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848.

EASTERN VERSUS WESTERN EUROPEAN SERFDOM

In eastern Europe serfdom had a rather different history from patterns in the west, although historians now characterize the east-west contrast as a gradual and varied transition, rather than in terms of a sharp demarcation along the river Elbe. Serfdom appeared only at the end of the fifteenth and especially during the sixteenth century in Eastern Europe, and was closely associated with intensified seignorial jurisdiction (often called Gutsherrschaft ) and the spread of vast demesnal economies predicated on large-scale inputs of labor service (often called Gutswirtschaft ). Explanations for the rise of Gutsherrschaft and Gutswirtschaft remain controversial, but most accounts stress a combination of factors, including the relative sparseness of population (which increased the appeal of a dependent labor force), the sixteenth-century boom in cereal prices as a result of both local and international demand, and the relative weakness of village communities, which were less able (though by no means utterly incapable) of resisting seignorial pressure than their counterparts in western Europe.

Eastern European serfs were subjected to the same kinds of disabilities as in the west, including the obligation to provide labor services, and restrictions on mobility and outmarriage. Eastern European serfdom also recognized the distinction between tenurial and personal serfdom, with the former pattern predominating in the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs and Prussian Hohenzollerns, and the latter obtaining in Poland, Hungary, and Russia. On the other hand, serfdom tended to be introduced in eastern Europe by governmental decrees forbidding peasants from leaving the jurisdiction or territory of their landlords, rather than spreading piecemeal as a result of the policies of individual overlords (as in the west). Decrees of this sort were first passed in Bohemia (1487) and Poland (1496), and thereafter in Hungary (1514), Prussia (1526), Brandenburg (1528), upper Austria (1539), Pomerania (1616 and 1645), Russia (1649), and Mecklenburg (1654).

Eastern European serfdom has often been characterized as more oppressive than its western counterpart because of the intensity of labor services demanded (three, four, and in some cases up to six days of work per week), the denial of a serf's right of appeal against the lord to royal or other public courts, and the fact that serfs could be sold apart from their land in the east (thousands of such cases have been documented for Poland alone). Although this contrast is broadly true, it is subject to important qualifications. First of all, a great deal of time often elapsed between a royal proclamation of serfdom and the full elaboration of seignorial jurisdiction and demesnal economies. In the Russian case it seems that it was only in the later eighteenth century that the system of servile dependency implied by the 1649 law code was actually enforced. Moreover, in some parts of eastern Europe (in particular Prussia and the Austrian Habsburg lands), the steady intrusion of royal courts into seignorial jurisdiction during the eighteenth century created a significant avenue for the mitigation of serfdom, as peasants were able to appeal to the crown for redress. Nevertheless, serfdom lasted much longer in eastern than in western Europe, and was only abolished over the course of the nineteenth century, beginning in Prussia (1807), and then later Austria (1848), Hungary (1853), Russia (1861), and Romania (1864).

See also Agriculture ; Class, Status, and Order ; Enclosure ; Feudalism ; Laborers ; Landholding ; Peasantry ; Peasants' War, German ; Plague ; Serfdom in East Central Europe ; Serfdom in Russia .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Blum, Jerome. The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe. Princeton, 1978.

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Freedman, Paul. The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Hilton, R. H. The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England. London and New York, 1969.

Hoch, Steven L. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov. Chicago, 1986.

Luebke, David Martin. "Serfdom and Honour in Eighteenth-Century Germany." Social History 18, no. 2 (1993): 143–161.

Scott, Tom. Society and Economy in Germany, 1300–1600. Houndmills, U.K., and New York, 2002.

Scott, Tom, ed. The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries. London and New York, 1998.

Govind P. Sreenivasan