[Sidenote: Hired Laborers]
While more prosperous peasants were becoming free-tenants, many of their poorer neighbors found it so difficult to gain a living as serfs that they were willing to surrender all claim to their own little strips of land on the manor and to devote their whole time to working for fixed wages on the fields which were cultivated for the nobleman himself, the so-called lord's demesne. Thus a body of hired laborers grew up claiming no land beyond that on which their miserable huts stood and possibly their small garden-plots.
[Sidenote: Métayers]
Besides hired laborers and free-tenants, a third group of peasants appeared in places where the noble proprietor did not care to superintend the cultivation of his own land. In this case he parceled it out among particular peasants, furnishing each with livestock and a plow and expecting in return a fixed proportion of the crops, which in France usually amounted to one-half. Peasants who made such a bargain were called in France métayers, and in England "stock-and-land lessees." The arrangement was not different essentially from the familiar present-day practice of working a farm "on shares."
[Sidenote: Steady Decline of Serfdom]
In France and in England the serfs had mostly become hired laborers, tenants, or métayers by the sixteenth century. The obligations of serfdom had proved too galling for the serf and too unprofitable for the lord. It was much easier and cheaper for the latter to hire men to work just when he needed them, than to bother with serfs, who could not be discharged readily for slackness, and who naturally worked for themselves far more zealously than for him. For this reason many landlords were glad to allow their serfs to make payments in money or in grain in lieu of the performance of customary labor. In England, moreover, many lords, finding it profitable to inclose [Footnote: There were no fences on the old manors. Inclosing a plot of ground meant fencing or hedging it in.] their land in order to utilize it as pasturage for sheep, voluntarily freed their serfs. The result was that serfdom virtually had disappeared in England before the sixteenth century. In France as early as the fourteenth century the bulk of the serfs had purchased their liberty, although in a few districts serfdom remained in its pristine vigor until the French Revolution.
In other countries agricultural conditions were more backward and serfdom longer survived. Prussian and Austrian landowners retained their serfs until the nineteenth century; the emancipation of Russian serfs on a large scale was not inaugurated until 1861. There are still survivals of serfdom in parts of eastern Europe.
[Sidenote: Survival of Servile Obligations after Decline of Serfdom]
Emancipation from serfdom by no means released the peasants from all the disabilities under which they labored as serfs. True, the freeman no longer had week-work to do, provided he could pay for his time, and in theory at least he could marry as he chose and move freely from place to place. But he might still be called upon for an occasional day's labor, he still was expected to work on the roads, and he still had to pay annoying fees for oven, mill, and wine-press. Then, too, his own crops might be eaten with impunity by doves from the noble dovecote or trampled underfoot by a merry hunting-party from the manor-house. The peasant himself ventured not to hunt: he was precluded even from shooting the deer that devoured his garden. Certain other customs prevailed in various localities, conceived originally no doubt in a spirit of good-natured familiarity between noble and peasants, but now grown irritating if none the less humorous. It is said, for instance, that in some places newly married couples were compelled to vault the wall of the churchyard, and that on certain nights the peasants were obliged to beat the castle ditch in order to rest the lord's family from the dismal croaking of the frogs.
[Sidenote: Persistence of "Three-field System" of Agriculture]