Late Middle Ages

Serfdom and freedom in late medieval Europe

The decline of serfdom is the most often rehearsed of all the social transformations of the late Middle Ages, and it is the one most often misunderstood. The standard textbook account — that the Black Death liberated the medieval peasant by destroying the labour basis of lordship — captures one important movement, the contraction of servilis tenure in the western European heartland between roughly 1340 and 1480. It badly misses two others. The first is the legal complexity of the institution, which had not been a single thing in 1300 and did not collapse into a single freedom after 1350. The second is the regional divergence: the contraction of serfdom in England, France, Catalonia, and the Italian peninsula was accompanied, east of the Elbe and Saale, by a striking reintensification of the Gutsherrschaft — the manorial lordship with compulsory labour — that lasted into the eighteenth century and shaped the social structure of Brandenburg, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia, and the Kingdom of Bohemia well past the threshold of the early-modern period.

The historiography of the subject has been transformed since the 1970s by the work of Marc Bloch, of Georges Duby, of Robert Fossier, of Paul Freedman, of Rodney Hilton, of Jean-Pierre Molénat, of Teofilo Ruiz, and (most decisively) of the late Philippe Dollinger. The older Marxist reading of serfdom as a “second serfdom” in the East is now complicated by the new agrarian and legal history of the western contraction. The late-medieval evidence is rich, and it is widely read; the great documentary collections — the English Calendar of Close Rolls, the French Censiers and Terriers of the Champagne and the Île-de-France, the Castilian Libros de Repartimiento, the German Urkundenbücher — preserve the legal and the customary in detail.

Serfdom, in its late-medieval form, was a bundle of disabilities. The most important was the obligation to hold land in the form of a customary tenure, transmissible only by the custom of the manor: by the descent of the holding to the eldest son (in much of France, by saisine; in England, by borough English or by primogeniture at the will of the lord), the payment of a chevage (a small annual capitation), a heriot (the best beast of the deceased), and a merchet or formariage (a fine on the marriage of a daughter, or on the marriage of a tenant to a person outside the manor). The serf could not, in general, leave the manor without the lord’s licence, could not be married outside it without paying a fine, could not sell his holding, could not bequeath it, and could not take the tonsure (a disability abolished in England by the Statute of Provisors of 1351, in Catalonia by the Sentencia Arbitral of Guadalupe of 1486). The serf’s blood was, in legal theory, contaminated: the son of a serf was a serf, regardless of the father’s status, and the descent of villein status through the maternal line was the rule in much of the continent.

The legal apparatus varied by region. In England, the villein socman and the villein in gross were the principal forms. The former held a customary holding; the latter was personally unfree but landless. The Rolls of the Curia Regis of the thirteenth century, the Year Books of Edward I, and the Bracton (the legal treatise of Henry de Bracton, c. 1230) preserve the early common-law doctrine. Bracton’s famous dictum — that a serf is one who is servilis conditionis, a slave in the sense of Roman law, even if the law of England does not allow absolute property in his person — was the legal baseline. The De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae of Ranulf de Glanvill (c. 1188) and the Tractatus de Legibus of Bracton are the principal legal sources. The late-medieval Year Books of the reign of Edward III and the Statute-Book of the Placita Coram Rege show the gradual narrowing of the legal category.

In France, the serf (or servus, homme de pooste, mainmortable) was a customary condition defined by the coutumes of the local lord. The great Coutumiers of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries — the Coutumes de Beauvaisis of Philippe de Beaumanoir (1283), the Établissements de Saint Louis (c. 1270), the Grand Coutumier de Normandie (c. 1270), the Coutume de Paris — are the principal sources. The Coutume de Paris, in particular, was the legal basis of the French pays de droit écrit of the northern and central pays, and it distinguished the serf de corps (a serf by birth) from the serf de suite (a serf by residence, sometimes a converted free tenant). The Pacte de l’Affranchissement — the contract of personal emancipation — was a commercial transaction; the Lettres de Franc-Archer were the formal instruments.

In Catalonia, the remença was the form. The remences were serfs attached to the soil, whose personal freedom was limited by the right of the lord to a redemptio (redemption) on the death of the tenant, the marriage of a daughter, and the alienation of the holding. The right of intestia (the prohibition of alienation) and the mal any (the personal mutilation) were the principal disabilities. The remença was the subject of the great Sindicat Remença of 1448, the great remença revolt of 1462–1486, and the Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe of 1486, which abolished serfdom in Catalonia under Ferdinand and Isabella.

In the Italian peninsula, the servi della gleba (the “serfs of the glebe,” a term that emerges in the notarial practice of the Tuscan and Lombard communes) were the late-classical and early-medieval form. The catasto of 1427–1430, the Estimo of the Tuscan communes, and the Codice Diplomatico of the Lombard bishoprics preserve the documentary evidence. The Italian peninsula was, however, distinct in the speed with which serfdom declined; the schiavitù of the southern communes was a marginal institution, and the great commercial cities — Florence, Venice, Genoa — had no serfdom of the classic kind.

The Slow Erosion Before the Plague

Serfdom had been in slow retreat in western Europe for at least a century before the Black Death. The evidence is the gradual commutation of labour services into money rents, the multiplication of personal emancipations, the rise of the free tenant, and the appearance of a new class of wage labourers in the wake of the demographic shock of 1315–1317. The English Rolls of the Curia Regis and the Placita de Quo Warranto (1279–1290) show the legal struggles of the late thirteenth century; the Carta Mercatoria of 1303, the Statute of Westminster II of 1285, and the Carta Foresta of 1217 are the legislative moments. The English Statute of Labourers of 1349, the Statute of Cambridge of 1381, and the Statute of Apprentices of 1563 (the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers) are the late-medieval landmarks of the legal regulation of the free labour market.

The French Ordonnance of Philip IV of 1311, the Coutume de Saint-Denis of the late thirteenth century, the Census of the abbey of Saint-Denis of 1320, and the Cartulaire of the bishop of Beauvais are the documentary evidence. The Italian peninsula saw a more rapid decline: the catasto of Florence of 1427–1430, projected backward, shows a peasantry that was already mostly free in 1347. The Castilian evidence is distinctive: the Behetrías, free villages with the right to choose their lord, were the principal form of free peasant tenure, and the Libros de Repartimiento of the period of the Reconquista show the slow extension of free tenure at the expense of the solariegos (serfs attached to a particular lord).

The legal and the demographic moved together. The English Inquisitions post mortem of 1300–1350, the Hundred Rolls of 1279, the Testa de Nevill (c. 1240), and the Calendarium Inquisitionum of the Public Record Office are the principal fiscal and tenurial sources. The reconstructed tax records, in particular, show the gradual fall in the value of customary holdings relative to free holdings: by 1340, the customary holding was already less valuable than the free holding of equivalent size, in most regions of England, and the gap was widening.

The Black Death and the Crisis of Compulsory Labour

The Black Death of 1347–1351, the recurring plagues of 1361–1362, 1369, 1375, and 1390, and the long demographic recession of the fifteenth century transformed the labour market of western Europe. The shortage of labour, the rise of wages, the fall of rents, and the enclosure of the demesne for pasture are the standard elements of the story, and they are well documented in the English Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381, the Inquisitions post mortem of the late fourteenth century, the Lay Subsidies of 1428 and 1450, and the Hearth Taxes of the 1660s (the latter as a backward projection).

The legal response was, in many places, an attempt to hold the line. The English Statute of Labourers of 1349 and the Ordinance of Labourers of the same year, the French Ordonnance of King John of 1351, the Castilian Ordenanzas of the Hermandad, the Italian Statuti of the communes — all attempted to peg wages to their pre-plague level, to require the labourer to work for the customary employer, and to forbid the migration of labour to the towns. The English Rising of 1381 (the Peasants’ Revolt), the French Jacqueries of 1358 and 1380, the Tuscan Ciompi Revolt of 1378, the Castilian Revueltas of 1390 and 1449, and the Catalan Sindicat Remença of 1448 are the moments of social explosion. The Italian Ciompi of Florence, in particular, has been worked over by Gene Brucker in The Ciompi Revolution (1977) and by Anthony Molho and Franek Sznura.

The legal response gave way, gradually, to the demographic reality. By 1400, the English Statute of Labourers was unenforceable, and the wages of the labourer had, in real terms, doubled; by 1450, the French Ordonannce was a dead letter. The transition to wage labour was the central economic transformation of the western European countryside, and it was a transformation that was achieved by the combination of a structural labour shortage, a real rise in the price of labour, and a slow political rebalancing of the bargaining power of the customary tenant and the wage labourer.

The Western Contraction

The fifteenth century was the moment of the formal end of serfdom in western Europe. The English Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 (which abolished the remaining forms of villeinage) was a late act: by 1500, the legal institution had been reduced to a thin residue in the chartered boroughs and in a few great manors. The French Édit of Louis XI of 1474, the ordonnance of 1579, the declaration of 1779 are the French equivalents; the Coutume de Paris, in the redaction of 1510, had already emptied the legal category of personal serfdom. The Sentencia Arbitral of Guadalupe of 1486 abolished the remença in Catalonia; the Castilian Libros de Repartimiento of the period of the Catholic Monarchs show the disappearance of the solariego; the Italian peninsula had, in most regions, abolished serfdom in the early fifteenth century.

The historiographical question of why the west contracted and the east intensified has been much debated. The older explanation, of the Zweite Leibeigenschaft (the second serfdom) of Marc Bloch, of Gunnar Mickwitz, of the Polish school of Franciszek Bujak, of Marian Małowist, and (in his later writing) of Eric Williams, attributed the intensification of eastern serfdom to the rise of the grain market and the export of grain to the West. The export of rye from Danzig to Amsterdam, the export of wheat from Pomerania and Silesia to the cities of the Hanseatic League, and the export of barley from Bohemia to the Austrian duchies are the principal commercial mechanisms. The Gutsherrschaft that emerged in the fifteenth century was, on this reading, a response to the new commercial opportunities of the Baltic and the Alpine.

The revisionist reading, of which the late James Scott and the more recent work of the German agrarian historians are the principal representatives, stresses the political and the military. The eastern German territories and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the object of the Teutonic Knights’ Rechtsstaat of the Prussian territories, the political and military penetration of the Jagiellonian dynasty, and the slow collapse of the Reichsverfassung. The intensification of serfdom in the east was, on this reading, a response to the political weakness of the central state, the military pressure of the Slavic powers, and the need of the German landlords to bind the labour of the local peasantry. The two readings are not, in fact, incompatible: the export of grain was the economic basis of the Gutsherrschaft, and the political weakness of the central state was the legal basis.

The Eighteenth-Century End

Serfdom in the West was, in the manorial records, a memory by 1500. The persistence of the legal form in Catalonia until 1486, in the comtat of Nice until 1670, and in the marches of Lorraine until 1700 are the late instances. The Code Noir of Louis XIV of 1685, the Code Noir of 1724, and the Bureau de la Librairie of 1789 are the political moments. The French Revolution of 1789 abolished the mainmorte and the servage in the eastern provinces of France; the Napoleonic Code Civil of 1804 abolished the surviving forms of feudal tenure in the German Rhineland, in the Italian peninsula, and in the Low Countries. The Emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861, the Emancipation of the Austrian serfs in 1848, and the Emancipation of the Polish serfs in 1864 are the very late instances of the institution, and they were the consequence of a long political and intellectual movement whose roots are in the late-medieval and early-modern transformation of western Europe.

The historiographical question of why the institution persisted in the east so much longer is the central question of the late-medieval economic history of the region, and it is a question that has not been fully resolved. The answer is, in part, a function of the political structure: the central state in the east was, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, too weak to enforce the abolition, and the landlord class was too strong to permit it. The answer is, in part, a function of the commercial economy: the export of grain to the West made the serf a profitable source of labour. The answer is, in part, a function of the military and the religious: the Teutonic Order, the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Counter-Reformation, and the Orthodox Church were all parties to the persistence of the institution. The answer is, in part, a function of the demographic: the relatively high population density of the eastern European countryside made the legal imposition of the compulsory labour easier.

Reading the Evidence

The principal documentary sources for the history of late-medieval serfdom are the Curia Regis Rolls and the Feet of Fines for England, the Censiers and Aveux of the Champagne and the Île-de-France for France, the Libros de Repartimiento and the Libros de Visitas for Castile, the catasto of 1427–1430 for the Italian peninsula, and the Urkundenbücher of the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Havelberg, Brandenburg, and Prague for the eastern German territories. The principal secondary literature is the Coutumes of the French legal historians, the Polyptychs of Marc Bloch, the work of Georges Duby, the Lords and Peasants of Robert Fossier, the Censiers of the Société de l’histoire de France, the work of Jean-Pierre Molénat, the Castilian Peasants of Teofilo Ruiz, and the work of the late Philippe Dollinger for the German and Hanseatic evidence.

The decline of serfdom is, in the end, the most important of all the late-medieval social transformations, and it is the transformation that the modern historiography has understood best. The Black Death, the demographic recession of the fifteenth century, the rise of wage labour, the new political balance of town and countryside, the new military and the new ecclesiastical needs, and the new commercial and the new agrarian needs all played a part. The institution of serfdom was, in the end, the institution of a particular economic, social, and political system, and it was abolished when that system was.

References and Further Reading

  • Marc Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931).
  • Georges Duby, L’Économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (1962), 2 vols.
  • Robert Fossier, Les hommes et la terre: les paysans de la Picardie et du Nord (1985) and Enfance de l’Europe, vol. 1 (1999).
  • Rodney Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (1975).
  • Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (1991).
  • Teofilo F. Ruiz, Medieval Spain and its Seigniorial Economy: A Frontier of Freedom (2011).
  • Philippe Dollinger, The German Hansa (English edn. 1970) and his L’évolution des classes rurales en Bavière (1949).