the cities and towns rose against their feudal oppressors. This great
movement was not preconcerted, nor was it instigated by outside
conspirators. The cities, goaded by exactions and oppressions, rose
separately, and each one on its own account. The impulse came from
man's natural aspirations for freedom and justice, and his hatred
of tyranny. The true conspirators were the nobles who oppressed the
cities. Louis VI., of immortal memory, aided the cities in their
efforts to form themselves into communes, gave them charters, and
relieved them from the power of the barons; in short, he did every
thing possible to undermine the power of the nobles, and prevent
them from pillaging, torturing, and murdering the people. But the
emancipation of the cities was finally achieved only by blood; and the
kings, moved by humanity as well as policy, supported the citizens in
their efforts, and thus reduced the tyrannic and unruly barons and
nobles. The nobles, small and great, in France as in other parts of
Europe, resisted with arms the communal emancipation. They proclaimed
and treated as rebels and subverters of order and society, all who
tried to reconquer their liberty, as well as all those who advocated
the cause of the oppressed. Does not the same phenomenon reappear in
our own time and country?
With the emancipation of the cities and the formation of communes,
civilization began to illumine the horizon of France. But this great
social event had not such a direct influence on the condition of the
rural populations in France as it had in Italy. Still the serfs found a
safe refuge in the now independent cities.
The crusades acted in the same way on the condition of the peasantry in
France, as they did in Germany, Flanders, etc.
Successively, kings began to regulate and alleviate the condition of
the serfs on their domains, gradually interposing to limit the power
of the nobles over their serfs. A chronicler of that time (twelfth
century), says: "_Cetera censuum exactiones quæ servis infligi solent_
(nobles) _omnimodis vacent_." The French legists of the thirteenth
century, inspired by Ulpian and Roman law, the study of which was
again revived by a decree of Louis IX., declared that every man on
the soil of France is or ought to be free, by right as well as by
the law of nature. Subsequently this axiom was considered applicable
even to Saracens, Mahomedans, Africans, and all races, creeds, and
nationalities. Louis IX. was the friend of the oppressed and the
redresser of the wrongs of the peasantry. He abolished the more
oppressive servitudes in the domains, and tried to humanize the nobles.
The great principle of liberty asserted by the legists of the
thirteenth century, was in the fourteenth embodied in a law or edict
of Louis X., which decreed that the serfs might pay off their personal
and rural obligation to the nobles and become free tenants. This law
was very generally carried out in the royal domains, but did not find
much favor among the nobles or in the feudalized church. At that time,
moreover, many serfs and peasants, from poverty, mental degradation,
and shiftlessness, and others from distrust of the law and the nobles,
refused the freedom offered to them. In several provinces, disorders
even resulted from their resistance, especially in those places where
the conditions dictated by the seneschals (royal overseers), nobles,
and priests, were so oppressive as to make free tenantry no better
than bondage; and for this reason, also, serfs who had obtained
their liberty often returned to servitude. In defence of American
chattelhood, it is asserted that many chattels spurn the idea of
emancipation; that many of them, when emancipated, return, of their
own choice, into slavery, and that they are too degraded to appreciate
freedom, and too shiftless to achieve its rewards. These very reasons,
based on facts similar to those now set forth, were urged by the French
feudal masters against the efforts of the government to liberate the
oppressed whites.
The consequences of a bodily as of a social disorder are frequently
of protracted duration. The oppression of centuries so destroys the
mind and manhood of the oppressed that they consider slavery their
normal condition, even as physical monstrosities have sometimes been
regarded by their possessors as the symbols of beauty and health. Such
incurables may even be found among the now free descendants of social,
political, national, and legal bondmen--among the descendants of those
who in former times were covered with contempt, and who suffered
unutterable social degradation. Such are the Irish, _en masse_, and
some others who escape oppression in Europe only to support slavery in
America.
Personal serfdom and vassalage began to be gradually modified; but
on the estates of the clergy and nobility it lasted till near the
eighteenth century, still preserving several of its worst features.
Nowhere in Europe was the peasant so long and so grievously oppressed
as in France; nowhere did he take such terrible but just revenge.
Insurrections of the peasantry in various parts of France form an
almost uninterrupted historic series, of which the great revolution was
the fitting climax.
The repeated _bagaudies_ of the Gallic peasantry have been already
mentioned: the next revolt was in the tenth century, when the serfs
and peasants of Neustræ (Normandy) rose against the Northmen, who
had just established themselves, and who tried to transform them
into chattels; and another rising took place about the same time in
Brittany. Beside many partial uprisings against particular strongholds
or districts, the most general and most celebrated were those of the
_pastouraux_, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries--one of
which was directed principally against the feudalized clergy--and the
repeated _jacqueries_. Indeed, during the fourteenth century, the
whole of Europe might be said to be divided into two great hostile
camps: the nobles with their exactions and oppressions forming one,
and the laborers, peasants and serfs, resisting their oppressors
with battle-axe and fire, forming the other. And thus the oppressed
everywhere hewed out their path to freedom and civilization.
The fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their
various revolts, sometimes evoked by governmental measures and
maladministration, but far oftener stirred up by the reckless and cruel
treatment of the laborer by the nobles--against whom both the law and
royal authority were too often inefficient and powerless.
Then came the epoch of atonement and of justice--1789-1793. Then
germinated the seeds which had been sown for centuries in the social
soil by the oppressors, and then, too, was gathered the bloody harvest.
The present rural population or peasantry of France, the descendants
of serfs and chattels, now possess the same civil and political rights
as any other class in the nation--rights more ample than are enjoyed
by any other peasantry in Europe. They have, of course, still to
suffer various evils arising from the common imperfection of all social
structures; but no special degradation is attached to their birth or
their condition.
The first glimpses of mental culture, in the earliest mediæval night,
came from the monasteries--from monks who generally belonged to the
conquered race, or sprang from chattels and serfs. Indeed, almost all
the modern European civilization was elaborated in the cities by the
so-called middle classes, and by peasants. Luther and Kepler were
the sons of poor peasants; and the sires of the immense majority of
the European middle classes, at one time or another, were chattels,
serfs, or bondmen, who were for ages considered and treated as brutes
by the nobles and barons. All over Europe many of the genealogies of
aristocratic families ascend to slaves, serfs and villeins.
XIX.
BRITONS, ANGLO-SAXONS, ENGLISH.
AUTHORITIES:
_Domesday-book, Sharon Turner, Lappenberg, Pauli, Hallam, Brougham,
Vaughan, etc._
The social condition of the Britons previous to the invasion of Cæsar
was in all probability similar to that of their kindred Gauls. They
lived in clans; the soil was held by a tenure similar to that which
prevailed among the Gauls, and was tilled by clansmen or free laborers.
Slavery was then, if possible, even more insignificant among the
Britons than among the Gauls; and the slaves consisted of criminals
and prisoners of war, and were the common property of the clan. The
laboring classes were not impoverished, nor were they dependent upon
the chiefs as in Gaul at the time of the Roman conquest. For various
reasons Rome's influence did not operate so fatally on the Britons as
it did on the Gauls; neither the culture of Rome nor her disorganizing
and oppressive administration permeated Britain to the same extent
as they did the rest of the empire. Still Roman rule seems to have
altered somewhat the primitive relations between the chiefs and their
clansmen, impoverishing the latter and corrupting the former. The Roman
rule was propitious to slavery; it surrounded the powerful natives
with dependents and chattels, while the poor gradually lost their
freedom, and began to cultivate the soil less for their own sake than
on account of their chiefs. The dissolution of former social relations
was effected and the impoverishment of the people fearfully increased,
by the uninterrupted invasions of the Picts and Scots, and by the
Anglo-Saxon conquest.
The Anglo-Saxons, spreading over the land, enslaved its former owners,
selling them abroad or making them work for the conquerors at home. The
Anglo-Saxons planted on the soil of Britain their German mode of life
and their social organism in all its details. They brought with them
their bondmen and slaves, their laws and usages relating to slavery,
to the possession of the soil, and to composition for crime (all of
which have been explained in former pages). Under the Anglo-Saxons and
Danes, the chattels consisted of the descendants of the slaves existing
in Roman times, as well as natives newly enslaved, criminals, debtors
and captives taken in war. The Anglo-Saxon families also had slaves
of Scotch and Welsh birth, generally from the borders; while, on the
other hand, many Anglo-Saxons were kept in bondage by the Scotch and
Welsh. Turner says: "It is well known that a large proportion of the
Anglo-Saxon population was in a state of slavery; they were conveyed
promiscuously with the cattle."
The Anglo-Saxon slaves were called _theow esne_ and _wite-theows_,
or penal slaves. Their condition was attended with all the horrors
of slavery. They were kept in chains, were whipped, branded, and
wore collars. They were sold in the markets, especially in London,
and were at times exported beyond the sea, and found their way even
to the markets of Italy and Rome. Every one knows that it was the
exposition for sale of Anglo-Saxon slaves in the Roman market which
resulted in the introduction of Christianity into Britain. Christianity
softened the savage customs of the Anglo-Saxons, and greatly promoted
emancipation; and this again increased the number of freemen and
half-freemen, which formed the lower class of the population.
The division into classes--castes almost--was very rigidly observed
by the Anglo-Saxons. The powers and rights of nobles, and of those
who reached a high position as royal officials or owners of extensive
landed property, were very great. The possession of land gave a higher
political _status_, and conferred greater power among the Anglo-Saxons
than among any of the other German tribes settled throughout Europe.
The free yeomen, or owners of land in fee simple, sought protection
from the _hlaford_ or mighty lord. For this they bartered away,
partially, both their freedom and their right to the land--as was
customary also among the German and all other ancient nations. The
Anglo-Saxon yeomen were, in general, in a subordinate condition; they
had no law, and their freedom consisted principally in having the right
to change masters. The tradesmen also were, for the most part, in a
servile state, and were manumitted like other chattels. Some of the
manumitted slaves became agricultural laborers and hired land from the
clergy, the great, the thanes or the _ealdormen_, paying them an annual
rent in produce or money; but many of them also went into the towns and
became burghers. Some of the burghers, also, were subject to barons
and other lords, as the king; indeed, the burghers generally were
not actual freeholders, and, if they were free, often had not wholly
escaped the domestic service of their masters. The condition of the
immense majority of Anglo-Saxons was therefore far from real freedom.
The Norman conquest transformed many landlords into tenants, while
the humbler classes passed into the hands of the new masters. They
became the tenants and laborers of the Norman, for whom otherwise the
conquered land would have been worthless. But the Norman conquest
rendered Saxon servitude so galling, that villeinage was nearly equal
to chattelhood.
The "Domesday-book" gives 25,000 as the number of slaves in England.
The great bulk of the rural population was composed of bondmen,
or villeins under various designations--as _bordiers_, _geburs_,
_cotsetlas_, etc.--who were compelled to pay oppressive imposts,
and submit to various degrading and oppressing servitudes. These
oppressions and exactions bore most heavily on the Anglo-Saxon
population.
Slaves and serfs attached to the soil might be sold in the
market-place, at the pleasure of their owners. Husbands sold their
wives, and parents, unable or unwilling to support their children,
might dispose of them in the same manner. The English slave-dealer of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sold his Anglo-Saxon commodities
to the Irish. A law enacted in 1102, prohibited this "wicked trade;"
but the law was eluded, the trade continued, and when Henry II. invaded
Ireland, he found English slaves there, whom he manumitted. In order to
increase the revenue, as also from other motives of policy, the royal
power in England, as all over Europe, generally favored the oppressed;
its tendency always was to curb the arbitrary exactions of the barons,
to promote emancipation, and generally to aid the serfs. William the
Conqueror ordered that the lords should not deprive the husbandmen of
their land; he enacted regulations to prevent arbitrary enslavement,
and prohibited the sale of slaves out of the country. He also enacted a
law which provided that the residence of any serf or slave for a year
and a day, without being claimed, in any city, burgh, walled town or
castle, should entitle him to perpetual liberty.
An independent freeholding yeomanry existed in comparatively small
numbers. The recklessness of the feudal barons obliged the yeomanry,
for the sake of protection, to render allegiance to the manor, and
thus, about a century after the conquest, almost all the small
homesteads disappeared. The conquered population held their property,
not by absolute right, but by a tenure from the lord. Thus all
individual freedom, except that of the nobles, became either entirely
lost, or more and more contracted, till finally time and circumstance
partly loosened, partly destroyed, the bonds which held the nation in
slavery. In England as in the whole of Europe, feudal oppression was
the growth of a very few generations; but it has required many hundreds
of years to destroy it. A disease may be caught in an hour--years may
be required for its cure. For the conquered race, the Norman had all
the contempt common to conquerors. Macaulay says that when Henry I.
married an Anglo-Saxon of princely lineage, many of the barons regarded
it as a Virginia planter might regard marriage with a quadroon girl.
But personal and economical interests obliged the barons to relent in
their treatment of their serfs and chattels; and many of them were
allowed under certain conditions to cultivate small portions of land.
The Saxon servile class, embraced under the general name of villeins,
by and by began to have a permanent and legal interest in the land they
cultivated, tilling it under the condition of a copyhold. The number of
tenants on the manorial lands thus rapidly increased. But for a long
period, even though the law declared that no man was a villein, still
less a chattel, unless a master claimed him (and while to all others he
was a freeman, eligible to have and hold property), still the nobles
often seized and appropriated to themselves the property of the poorer
class.
The laws under the Plantagenets, although in some respects hard for
the villeins, indirectly favored their emancipation, and threw many
obstacles in the way of suits brought to reclaim fugitives.
The influence of the cities on the condition of the serfs in England
was similar to that which they exercised everywhere else in Europe. As
under the Anglo-Saxons, so under the Normans, the inhabitants of the
cities were originally serfs and villeins, or their descendants. The
Plantagenets were unceasingly at war, and the enlistment of soldiers
opened up an avenue to emancipation; and predial and feudal servitude
of every kind ended forever with the performance of military service on
land or sea. So also the serf or villein obtained freedom in various
ways--through the law of refuge in cities, by being drafted into the
royal service, and finally by the tenure of the land on which the baron
may have established him at his own baronial pleasure. Thus by degrees
arose the right of copyhold lands; and Edward III. prohibited the lords
from appropriating such lands when service was rendered or the rent
regularly paid.
Forced servitude steadily diminished, and the estate-holders complained
that the cities and towns absorbed the labor necessary for agriculture.
In 1345, Parliament regulated the wages for all kinds of farm-work,
and made labor obligatory when paid for in money, but not as personal
servitude. Gradually the economic and social relations became more and
more those of employer and laborer, and less and less those of master
and serf. Still the nobles and estate-holders continually evaded the
laws, and preserved, as much as they possibly could, their oppressive
rights. Against these the peasants protested by various petty
insurrections.
Wat Tyler and his peasant-followers demanded that the existing remnants
of villeinage should be abolished, and that the land-rent be payable
in money and not in personal services, and also that the trades and
market-places be free from vexatious tolls and imposts. But Wat Tyler
fell--the insurrection was suppressed--the barons and lords compelled
the king to break the promises he had made, and the "shoeless ribalds,"
as the nobles called the insurgent rustics, were forced back to their
former condition. But in a little over a century afterward, villeinage
wholly disappeared. Contumely, oppression, and even butchery proved
in the long run quite powerless against the efforts of the oppressed
classes to reconquer their freedom.
The wars of the roses dissolved many of the old liens, destroyed
various domestic relations, and yet, with all their devastations,
on the whole rather promoted the emancipation of land and labor.
Richard III. made various regulations favorable to the peasantry and
destructive of the still remaining vestiges of servitude. On this
account, as well as for other reasons, some historians defend the
memory of Richard III.; and it really seems that at first Richard was
a good and upright man. But violent passions, lust of power, hatred
of whoever opposed him or stood in his way, drove him step by step to
measures of violence and to murder; and so he stands in history, a
hideous and accursed monster in human form, reeking in the blood of
his victims. Nations and parties often run the same career of violence
and crime as individuals. Let the pro-slavery faction of to-day, which
already begins to move in the bloody tracks of Richard, take warning!
Under the Tudors but few traces of the former villeinage are to be
found; still it survived until the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. But
throughout the whole of the centuries during which rural servitude was
slowly but steadily passing away, relics of a very stringent personal
servitude, almost equal to slavery, lingered in the baronial manors
and castles, in the personal relation between the masters and their
retainers and menials. Against these remains of rural villeinage,
vassalage, and slavery, the Henries and Elizabeths exercised their
royal power, and issued decrees bearing on the subject generally, as
well as others relating to special cases.[19]
It is not necessary to record here--what every student in history
knows--that in proportion as servitude began to decay, the prosperity
of England increased, and that from its final abolition in every
form dates the uninterrupted growth in wealth and power of the
English nation. The abolition of rural servitude gave a vigorous
impulse to agriculture, and secured to it its present high social
significance; and now the old nobility all over Europe are proud to be
agriculturists. Agriculture is now a science, and it is by freedom that
it has thus reached the highest honor in the hierarchy of knowledge and
labor.
Through such various stages passed the Anglo-Saxons and the English
people, in their transition from chattelhood and various forms of
personal servitude, to freedom. The present inhabitants of English
towns, as well as the free yeomanry and tenants--in brief, all the
English commercial, trading, farming and working classes--have emerged
from slavery, serfdom or servility. In the course of centuries the
oppressed have achieved the liberty of their persons and labor, and the
freedom of the soil: they have conquered political status and political
rights; and their descendants peopled the American colonies, and here
finally conquered the paramount right of national independence. The
genuine freemen of the great Western Republic are not ashamed but proud
of such a lineage of toil and victory. These freemen now and here again
boldly and nobly enter the lists to combat with human bondage in every
shape; and thus they remain true to the holy traditions which they have
inherited from their fathers.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: Certain pro-slavery organs and small yelpers (see
"Southern Wealth," etc., New York, 1860) defame the memory of the
Henries and Elizabeths for their generous action toward the serfs,
forgetting that such royal decrees, in many cases, _liberated their own
direct ancestors_.]
XX.
SLAVI, SLAVONIANS, SLAVES, RUSSIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
_Schaffarick, Corpus Scriptorum Historiæ Byzantinæ, Nestor, Fischer,
Karamzin, Gerebtzoff, etc._
At what epoch the Slavic race left the common home of the Aryans and
immigrated into Europe, will forever remain an insoluble mystery. Some
ethnologists suppose the Slavi to have preceded the Gauls, and think
they find their traces all over central Europe, on the Po, and around
the Adriatic Gulf. At all events, the Slavi are very ancient occupants
of European soil, and without doubt took possession of it long before
the Germans. The region between the Danube, the Vistula and the Volga,
was from time immemorial, as it still is, distinctly a Slavic region,
although at some previous time, it was probably occupied by the Yellow
or Finnic races. Subsequently the Slavi covered the lands between the
Vistula and the Elba (now again lost), and colonized the southern
shores of the Danube.