Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

The organization of feudal government by the Normans brings us to a consideration of the territorial system of England which can be traced certainly from Saxon and conjecturally from Roman times.

In making the study of history, as does Mr. Belloc, living and organic, it is of capital importance to seize the fact that the fundamental economic institution of pagan antiquity was slavery. Before the coming of the Christian Era, and even after its advent, slavery was taken for granted. Mr. Belloc says:

In no matter what field of the European past we make our research, we find, from two thousand years ago upwards one fundamental institution whereupon the whole of society reposes; that fundamental institution is Slavery.... Our European ancestry, those men from whom we are descended and whose blood runs with little admixture in our veins, took slavery for granted, made of it the economic pivot upon which the production of wealth should turn, and never doubted but that it was normal to all human society.[14]

With the growth of the Church, however, the servile institution was for a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the Church upon slavery:

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution rather as follows. He says:

The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]

The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were known to the Romans as villae and were cultivated by slaves. In the last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of communications and public power and more consonant with the social spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years, what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no longer a slave but a serf.