Transition from slavery to serfdom.
On the estates of the Church in the early years of the seventh century the humanising power of Christian feeling had silently raised the status of the slave. It had dignified labour, and given to him a property in his labour, securing to him not only one day in seven for rest to his weary and heavy-laden limbs, but also three days in the week wherein his labour was his own. From slavery he had risen into serfdom. And this serfdom of the quondam slave had become, in the eyes of the still more weary and heavy-laden free labourers on their own land, so light a burden compared with their own—such was the lawless oppression of the age—that they went to the Church and took upon them willingly the yoke of her serfdom, in order that they might find rest under her temporal as well as spiritual protection.
Such an impulse did this rush for safety into serfdom on ecclesiastical or monastic estates receive from the unsettlement and lawlessness of the period of the Teutonic invasions, that by the time of Charles the Great a large proportion of the land in these once Roman provinces had become included in the manorial estates of the monasteries.
Scores of free-tenants on a single manor make surrenders to the Abbey of Lorsch.
In the thickly peopled Romano-German lands on both sides of the Rhine, including the present Elsass on the one side, and the district between the Rhine and the Maine (the present Baden and Wirtemberg) on the other, so strong was the current in this direction that we find in the Traditiones of the monasteries [p329] of 'Lorsch' and 'Wizenburg' scores of surrenders taking place sometimes in a single village. And these cases are of peculiar interest because G. L. von Maurer relies almost solely upon them as the earliest examples available in support of his theory of the original German mark and free village community. His only early instances are taken from the Lorsch Cartulary.[492] He cites 107 surrenders to the Abbey of Lorsch in 'Hantscuhesheim' alone,[493] and concludes that there must have been at least as many free holders resident there in earlier times. In Loeheim there were eight surrenders; in other heims thirty-five, five, twenty-three, ten, forty, five, and so on. These must, he concludes, have formed part of originally free village communities on the German mark system.[494]
Now these surrenders to the abbey go back to the reign of Pepin; and the question is, What were these freemen who made these surrenders? Were they indeed members of German free village communities?
In the first place, they lived in a district which for many centuries had been a Roman province. The manners of the people had long been Romanised. Even across the Maine for generations the homesteads had been built in Roman fashion.[495] And it is significant that the fragments surrendered in this district, which since the time of Probus had become devoted to the vine culture, were mostly little vineyards; e.g. 'rem meam, hoc est vineam, i. in Hantscuhesheim,' [496] and so [p330] on. These vineyards were often composed of so many 'scamelli,' or little scamni—ridges or strips marked out by the Roman Agrimensores. All this is thoroughly Roman. What looks at first sight so much like a German free village community, was once a little Roman 'vicus' full of people, with their vineyards on the hills around it. They look like German settlers or 'free coloni' on the public domains, who had become appendant to the villa of the fiscal officer of the district, which had in fact by this time become to all intents and purposes a manor.
A little further examination will confirm this view.
The villas were manors.
Turning to the record of the earliest donation to the abbey, in A.D. 763,[497] we find a description of a whole villa or heim—'Hoc est, villam nostram quæ dicitur Hagenheim, cum omni integritate sua, terris domibus ædificiis campis pratis vineis silvis aquis aquarumve decursibus farinariis litis libertis conlibertis mancipiis mobilibus et immobilibus, &c.'