SERFAGE.
Serfage has but a vague resemblance to the system of villeinage once
so common in the West; and serfage was not villeinage under another
name. Villeinage was Occidental, serfage Oriental.
Villein, aldion, colonus, fiscal, homme de pooste, are words which, in
various tongues of Western Europe, mark the man who belonged to a
master, and was bound by law to serve him. Whether he lived in
England, Italy, or France, the man was stamped with the same
character, and laden with the same obligation. He was a hedger and
ditcher--churl, clod, lout, and boor--heavy as the earth he tilled,
and swinish as the herds he fed. He could not leave his lord; he could
not quit his homestead and his field. In turn, his master could not
drive him from the soil, though he might beat him, force him to work,
throw him into prison, and sell his services when he sold the land.
But here the likeness of serf to either villein, aldion, colonus,
fiscal, or homme de pooste ends sharply. No one thought the villein
was an actual owner of the soil he tilled, and in no country was the
emancipation of his class accompanied by a cession of the land.
Serfage sprang from a different root, and in a different time. The
great settlement, which is the glory of Alexander's reign, can only be
understood by reference to the causes from which serfage sprang.
Some of the facts which prove this difference between Western
villeinage and Eastern serfage lie beyond dispute. Villeinage was
introduced by foreign princes, serfage by native tsars. Villeinage
followed a disastrous war; serfage followed liberation from a foreign
yoke. Villeinage came with the dark ages and passed away with them.
Serfage came with the spreading light, with the rising of
independence, with the sentiment of national life. Villeinage was
forgotten by the Rhine, the Severn, and the Seine, before serfage was
established on the Moskva and the Don.
In short, serfage is a historical phase.
In one of the book-rooms of the Academy of Sciences, in Vassile
Ostrof, St. Petersburg, you turn over the leaves of an early
copy--said to be the first--of "Nestor's Chronicle," in which are many
fine drawings of scenes and figures, helping you to understand the
text. This copy is known as the Radzivil codex. Nestor wrote his book
in Kief, a hundred years before that city was sacked by Batu Khan; and
the pictures in the Radzivil codex give you the early Russian in his
dress, his garb, and his ways of life. Was he in that early time an
Asiatic, dressed in a sheep-skin robe and a sheep-skin cap? In no
degree. The Russian boyar dressed like a German knight; the Russian
mujik dressed like an English churl.
In Nestor's time the Russians were a free people, ruled in one place
by elective chiefs, in another place by family chiefs. They were a
trading and pacific race; in the western countries settled in towns;
in the eastern countries living in tents and huts. Novgorod, Pskof,
and Illynof were free cities, ruled by elected magistrates, on the
pattern of Florence and Pisa, Hamburg and Lubeck. In those days there
was neither serf nor need of serf. But this old Russia fell under the
Mongol yoke. Broken in the great battle on the Kalka, the country
writhed in febrile agony for a hundred and eighty years; during which
time her fields were scorched, her cities sacked, her peasants driven
from their homes into the forest and the steppe. She had not yet
raised her head from this blow, when Timur Beg swept over her
prostrate form; an Asiatic of higher reach and nobler type than Batu
Khan; a scholar, an artist, a statesman; though he was still an
Asiatic in faith and spirit. Timur brought with him into Russia the
code of Mecca, the art of Samarcand, the song of Ispahan. His begs
were dashing, his mirzas polished. In the khanates which he left
behind him on the Volga and in the Crimea, there was a courtesy, a
beauty, and a splendor, not to be found in the native duchies of
Nijni, Moscow, Riazan, and Tver. The native dukes and boyars of these
provinces held from the Crim Tartar, known to our poets as the Great
Cham. They swore allegiance to him; they paid him annual tribute; they
flattered him by adopting his clothes and arms. The humblest vassals
of this Great Cham were the Moscovite dukes, who called themselves his
slaves, and were his slaves. Standing before him in the streets, they
held his reins, and fed his horses out of their Tartar caps. They
copied his fashions and assumed his names. Their armies, raised by his
consent, were dressed and mounted in the Tartar style. They fought for
him against their country, crushing those free republics in the north
which his cavalry could not reach.
This fawning of dukes and boyars on the Great Cham brought no good to
the rustic; who might see his patch of rye trodden down, his homestead
fired, and his village cross profaned by gangs of marauding horse.
Even when a Tartar khan set up his flag on some river bank, as at
Kazan, in some mountain gorge, as at Bakchi Serai, he was still a
nomad and a rider, with his natural seat in the saddle and his natural
home in the tent. A little provocation stirred his blood, and when his
feet were in the stirrups, it was not easy for shepherds and villagers
to turn his lance. A cloud of fire went with him; a trail of smoke and
embers lay behind him. No man could be sure of reaping what he sowed;
for an angry word, an insolent gesture of his duke, might bring that
fiery whirlwind of the Tartar horse upon his crops. What could he do,
except run away? When year by year this ruin fell upon him, he left
his cabin and his field; working a little here, and begging a little
there; but never striking root into the soil. Now he was a pilgrim,
then a shepherd, oftener still a tramp. To pass more easily to and
fro, he donned the Tartar dress; a sheep-skin robe and cap; the robe
caught in at the waist by a belt, and made to turn, so that the wool
could be worn outwardly by day and inwardly by night. In self-defense
he picked up Tartar words, and passed, where he could pass, for one of
the conquering race.
Why should he plough his land for other men to spoil? While he was
watching his corn grow ripe, the khan of Crim Tartary, stung by some
insult from the duke, might spur out rapidly from his luxurious camp
at Bakchi Serai, and, sweeping through the plains from Perekop to
Moscow, waste his fields with fire.
Like causes produce like effects. Nomadic lords produce nomadic
slaves. The Russian peasant became a vagabond, just as the Syrian
fellah becomes a vagabond, when from year to year his crops have been
plundered by the Bedouin tribes.
When Ivan the Fourth, having learned from the Tartar Begs how to rule
and fight, broke up the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, and ventured
to defy the lord of Bakchi Serai, he found himself an independent
prince at the head of a country, rich in soil, in capital, and in
labor, but with fields deserted, villages destroyed, populations
scattered, and public roads unsafe. The land was not unpeopled; but
the peasants had lost their sense of home, and the mujiks wandered
from town to town. Labor was dear in one place, worthless in another.
Half the land, even in the richer provinces, lay waste; and every year
some district was scourged by famine, and by the epidemics which
follow in the wake of famine. How were the peasants to be "fixed" upon
the land?
For seventy years this question troubled the court in the Kremlin,
even more than that court was troubled by Church controversy, Tartar
raid, and family strife; although within this period of seventy years
St. Philip was murdered, the Great Cham burnt a portion of Moscow,
Dimitri the legitimate heir was killed, and Boris Godounof usurped the
throne. Ivan the Fourth tried hard to induce his people to return upon
their lands; by giving up many of the crown estates; by building
villages at his own expense; by coaxing, thrashing, forcing his people
into order. Even if this reformer never used the term serf
(krepostnoi, a man "fixed" or "fastened,)" he is not the less--for
good and ill--the author of that Russian serfage which is passing away
before our eyes.