Now, however, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the palmy days of feudalism were past and gone. Later generations of noblemen, although they continued by right of inheritance to enjoy the financial income and the social prestige which their forbears had earned, no longer served king, country, or common people in the traditional manner. At least in the national monarchies it was the king who now had undertaken the defense of the land and the preservation of peace; and the nobleman, deprived of his old occupation, had little else to do than to hunt, or quarrel with other noblemen, or engage in political intrigues. More and more the nobility, especially in France, were attracted to a life of amusement and luxury in the royal court. The nobility already had outlived its usefulness, yet it retained its old- time privileges.
[Sidenote: The Peasantry]
In striking contrast to the nobility—the small minority of land-owning aristocrats—were the peasantry—the mass of the people. They were the human beings who had to toil for their bread in the sweat of their brows and who were deemed of ignoble birth, as social inferiors, and as stupid and rude. Actual farm work was "servile labor," and between the man whose hands were stained by servile labor and the person of "gentle birth" a wide gulf was fixed.
[Sidenote: Serfdom and the Manorial System]
During the early middle ages most of the peasants throughout Europe were "serfs." For various reasons, which we shall explain presently, serfdom had tended gradually to and the die out in western Europe, but at the opening of the sixteenth century most of the agricultural laborers in eastern and central Europe, and even a considerable number in France, were still serfs, living and working on nobles' manors in accordance with ancient customs which can be described collectively as the "manorial system."
The serf occupied a position in rural society which it is difficult for us to understand. He was not a slave, such as was usual in the Southern States of the American Union before the Civil War; he was neither a hired man nor a rent-paying tenant-farmer, such as is common enough in all agricultural communities nowadays. The serf was not a slave, because he was free to work for himself at least part of the time; he could not be sold to another master; and he could not be deprived of the right to cultivate land for his own benefit. He was not a hired man, for he received no wages. And he was not a tenant-farmer, inasmuch as he was "attached to the soil," that is, he was bound to stay and work on his land, unless he succeeded in running away or in purchasing complete freedom, in which case he would cease to be a serf and would become a freeman.
[Sidenote: Obligations of the Serf to the Lord]
To the lord of the manor the serf was under many and varied obligations, the most essential of which may be grouped conveniently as follows: (1) The serf had to work without pay two or three days in each week on the strips of land and the fields whose produce belonged exclusively to the nobleman. In the harvest season extra days, known as "boon-days," were stipulated on which the serf must leave his own work in order to harvest for the lord. He also might be called upon in emergencies to draw a cord of wood from the forest to the great manor- house, or to work upon the highway (corvée). (2) The serf had to pay occasional dues, customarily "in kind." Thus at certain feast-days he was expected to bring a dozen fat fowls or a bushel of grain to the pantry of the manor-house. (3) Ovens, wine-presses, gristmills, and bridges were usually owned solely by the nobleman, and each time the peasant used them he was obliged to give one of his loaves of bread, a share of his wine, a bushel of his grain, or a toll-fee, as a kind of rent, or "banality" as it was euphoniously styled. (4) If the serf died without heirs, his holdings were transferred outright to the lord, and if he left heirs, the nobleman had the rights of "heriot," that is, to appropriate the best animal owned by the deceased peasant, and of "relief," that is, to oblige the designated heir to make a definite additional payment that was equivalent to a kind of inheritance tax.
[Sidenote: Free-Tenants]
As has been intimated, the manorial system was already on a steady decline, especially in western Europe, at the opening of the sixteenth century. A goodly number of peasants who had once been serfs were now free-tenants, lessees, or hired laborers. Of course rent of farm-land in our present sense—each owner of the land letting out his property to a tenant and, in return, exacting as large a monetary payment as possible—was then unknown. But there was a growing class of peasants who were spoken of as free-tenants to distinguish them from serf- tenants. These free-tenants, while paying regular dues, as did the others, were not compelled to work two or three days every week in the lord's fields, except occasionally in busy seasons such as harvest; they were free to leave the estate and to marry off their daughters or to sell their oxen without the consent of the lord; and they came to regard their customary payments to the lord not so much as his due for their protection as actual rent for their land.