It is worthy of note that the immunity, the purport of which had so increased in extent since the Carlovingian time, exercised no influence on the military obligations of the churches to which it was addressed. In most of the immunity documents military duty is not touched upon, so it was considered something quite independent. In some it is expressly mentioned that no index publicus should exercise the arrière-ban over the particular cloister, but this made no change in the obligation of the abbots themselves. On the contrary, in a privilege of Otto I for the bishopric of Worms, the sentence from a document of Louis the Pious is retained which commands that the military followers of the men of the church are only to be called upon in the interest of the kingdom. The transfer of their service to the princes was of greater import to the military obligations of the church than the immunity.
Such transfers, however, only refer to monasteries and not also to bishoprics. There were two different kinds of exemption—either the king gives the cloister in question to a lord of his kingdom as a favour or as his property, so that (forever or for a time) it ceases to be a royal cloister, or he takes away a part of its landed property and makes it over to lay princes who thenceforward undertake the military duties hitherto pertaining to the cloister. By this means the cloister remains royal, only it is exempt from military obligations. A third possibility was added to these two. Very often the great lords did not wait for the king’s initiative to enrich themselves with church property, but they seized it on their own account and obtained possession of the longed-for cloister by any means.
With such measures by force there was certainly no legal adoption of the obligation which the cloister owed the kingdom. But there is no doubt that the property thus gained was taken into account in the valuation of the service due to the kingdom by the new owner. The documental protection of the king generally proved most inefficient against such seizures. In more ancient times, particularly under the later Carlovingians, we find taxations of abbotships. The cases became rarer later on without quite disappearing. The kingdom evidently did not depend upon increasing the power of the princes which was continually developing by such means, so that the seizures of the princes increased with the feudal system.[d]
SERFS AND VILLEINS
In the eleventh century, Carlovingian Europe was divided into a multitude of fiefs which formed each its own state, having its own life, laws, customs, and its almost perfectly independent lay or ecclesiastical chief.
We have described the community of the lords, but they were not the only feudal community. That was the fighting and war-making community, the community that ruled, judged, punished, and oppressed. Below this was the community that worked, by which the other lived, got its clothes, its arms, its castles, and its bread—the community of serfs, or rather craftsmen (gens potestatis). We must not now look for free men, for they have disappeared. Some have raised themselves and become the fortunate lords; others have been pushed back into the lower regions of society and have become serfs and villeins. That class of simple freemen which had been nearly swept away in the invasion of the Roman Empire had been engulfed a second time. There were no longer any freehold owners, or so few that their mention is not worth while.
But the villeins were a numerous lot. The chief, the noble, had not only vassals but subjects residing on that portion of his estate that he never enfeoffed. And these were the serfs, properly called, men of the soil who were entirely at their lord’s disposal. “The lord,” says Beaumanoir,[f] “can take from them all that they have, put them in prison, rightly or wrongly, and as often as he pleases, and has no account to give of them except to God.”
In spite of this the condition of the serf was better than that of the slave of ancient times. The progress which slavery had made at the fall of the Roman Empire was not entirely lost in the wreckage of invasion, but appeared again in feudal society. The freeman of antiquity had been harder towards his slave than was the barbarian in whom the leaven of Christianity had produced some effect. The serf was recognised as a man having a family, sharing the common ancestry of his lord, and made in the image of God. Serfs finally entered the church, and sometimes mounted higher than the most powerful lords.
Above the serfs were the inalienables (mainmortables), “more kindly treated,” continues the old jurist of Beauvais,[f] “since the lord, if they did no wrong, could ask nothing of them except their dues and rents and the debts which they were accustomed to pay for their servitude.” But the inalienable could not marry without the consent of his lord, and if he took a free wife, or one outside the seigneury, there was a fine at the pleasure of the lord. This was the right of “formarriage” (a tax for marriage out of rank or condition), and the issue of such a marriage was divided between the lords of the husband and of the wife. If there was but one child, it went to the lord of the mother. At an inalienable’s death all his property went to his lord. For these people there was no way of escape from the hand that bent them to the furrow. Wherever they went the right of succession was attached to their persons and their purse. The lord inherited on every hand from his serfs.
In a higher degree still were to be found the free tenants known as villeins, peasants, or commoners. Their condition was less precarious. They had preserved the freedom the serf did not possess, and had hung on to it at the sacrifice of an annual tax, a statute duty, and the rent of the land which the landlord had ceded them and which they could transmit with all their other property to their children. But while the beneficiary holdings or fiefs were under the protection of a public and well-defined law, the land of the villeins was under the absolute jurisdiction of the landlord and protected only by private agreements. This is why the villeins, and especially those in the country, where it was not necessary to oversee them as strictly as those in the large towns, were often under the heel of absolute dominion.