The Servile State

by Hilaire Belloc

The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary position of the Slave.

The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave’s produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave’s effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which they could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.

By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit began to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.

The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions. One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord, and called domain: that is, lord’s land. Another was in the occupation, and already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of those who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the “village.”

Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and all the produce of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily wage in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.

Upon the second portion, “Land in Villenage,” which was nearly always the most of the arable and pasture land of the Villæ, the Slaves worked by rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves. They worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or less of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old Slave-ground was controlled by the general customs of the village, common to lord and slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land was the Lord’s Steward.

Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated originally in kind) was payable to the Lord’s Bailiff, and became the property of the Lord.

Finally, on the third division of the land, the “Waste,” the “Wood,” the “Heath,” and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in customary proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such a water meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was rigidly defined, and of that number so many would be the Lord’s and so many the Villagers’.

During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and became so natural in men’s eyes that the original servile character of the working folk upon the Villa was forgotten.

The documents of the time are rare. These three centuries are the crucible of Europe, and record is drowned and burnt in them. Our study of their social conditions, especially in the latter part, are matter rather of inference than of direct evidence. But the sale and purchase of men, already exceptional at the beginning of this period, is almost unknown before the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves within the household, slavery in the old sense which Pagan antiquity gave that institution had been transformed out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century, the true Middle Ages begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a new civilisation to arise, though the old word servus (the Latin for a slave) is still used for the man who works the soil, his status in the now increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we can certainly no longer translate the word by the English word slave; we are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different connotations: the word serf.