The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureTracy Dennison
Serfdom is usually associated with the medieval period, and conjures images of an impoverished peasantry toiling under duress in the fields around the lord’s castle. This view is not so much incorrect as incomplete. In many parts of Europe, especially central and eastern Europe, there were still enserfed peasants in the 18th and 19th centuries. Serfdom disappeared from the European landscape gradually: first in England, in the decades after the Black Death, and last in Russia, by state decree in 1861.
We know much more about the realities of serfdom on the ground in different localities thanks to micro-level research of the sort often associated with Campop. Micro-level local studies have shed light on things like rural factor markets, social structure, feudal obligations, and marriage and household formation patterns, by extracting information from sources including manorial court rolls, estate administrative records, household inventories, tax registers, and other census-like listings.
Local sources like these can shed light on the inner workings of serfdom in concrete contexts. They make clear that serfdom was not a monolithic institution, even though serf societies across Europe, from the medieval to the early modern period, had many things in common. Notable variations at the local and regional levels had important social, economic, and demographic implications for individual serfs and for the societies they lived in.
Court Roll of Eusace Grenville. Huntington Library.
What were the common features of serfdom?
All serf societies in the past appear to have shared several key features:
First, enserfed peasants were bound to the land they tilled – not to the owners of that land. Unlike enslaved people, serfs were (in most cases) not the personal property of noble landlords; rather, they were tenants without the right to leave. They could not seek better employment terms on other manors. When manorial lands were sold or bequeathed, the serfs bound to them became tenants of the new owner. Mobility restrictions for serfs were enforced across generations and over centuries.
Second, enserfed peasants were obligated to labour on their landlords’ lands, the manorial demesne, in addition to working their own plots. On most manorial estates, serfs were also expected to provide labour for the maintenance of local infrastructure (roads, bridges, granaries, barns) and for day-to-day administration (e.g., to serve as constables or tax collectors).
Third, serfs had limited access to legal recourse to resolve disputes. Along with the right to restrict their tenants’ mobility, noble landlords were granted judicial monopolies on their lands, meaning serfs were forced to bring cases to their lords’ own manorial courts.
Serfdom granted extensive powers to landlords, which enabled them to exert control over the most basic decisions their serfs made. Mobility restrictions were crucial to the institutional framework of serfdom. Enserfed peasants could only leave their manors to travel or work (temporarily) elsewhere with permission from their landlords. In addition, most serfs were required to seek permission from their landlords to marry and had to pay fees for this right.
Most landlords forbade serfs from subletting their holdings or selling their property or engaging in other similar transactions without the lord’s permission. All these restrictions constrained the development of rural factor markets and depressed living standards in the countryside.
G. G. Myasoedov, Presentation of a marriageable girl.
Because their freedoms were so limited, it is often assumed that serfs were undifferentiated in their poverty and immiseration. But in fact, serf societies, like other societies, were stratified; in every serf society some households were better off (and thus more powerful) than others, and some were significantly poorer than the average. Some of this was due to demographic misfortune (as in the case of widows and orphaned children), but some was the result of institutional factors, including weak property rights and the mobility restrictions that made it impossible to seek better conditions elsewhere.
It is similarly assumed that serf societies were mainly self-sufficient societies engaged in subsistence agriculture, but in fact most serfs participated in surprisingly extensive markets in goods and services (as well as land, credit, and labour) – even in the medieval period.
How did serf societies vary across Europe?
Systems of serfdom differed in big and small ways. Many of the variations observed from place to place were the result of powers granted to landlords, who were free to make their own decisions about how their manors or estates were run. Landlords could decide whether to hire outside officials to manage local affairs – to act as bailiffs, bookkeepers, or scribes – or whether to select officials from among the tenant (serf) population. They could decide on procedures for tax collection, selecting conscripts for the military, managing local resources, granting poor relief, and resolving disputes. In some parts of Europe, mainly eastern Europe (and especially Russia), landlords could decide from year to year to levy new kinds and new levels of taxes and obligations on their serf tenants.
Whether there were limitations on landlords’ powers of extraction was one of the bigger ways in which serf societies varied. Russian landlords, for instance, held almost unlimited powers over their serfs. They could extract levies on non-agricultural activities like factory work or service undertaken beyond the boundaries of the manor. They could compel their serfs to work in industries (non-agricultural) outside the manor and commandeer their earnings.
Serfdom in medieval western Europe, by contrast, was characterized by customary terms that limited landlords’ powers of surplus extraction. Labour obligations, rents, and taxes were usually tied to feudal land holdings and codified in various ways, and with greater formality, over time. Custom operated as a kind of contract, which placed some constraints on landlords’ abilities to siphon off household and village surpluses.
But checks on landlords’ powers only worked if there were enforcement mechanisms. What incentives did powerful landlords have to adhere to customary terms? A number of factors have played a role historically, including reputational mechanisms and an awareness of the costs associated with internal conflict and even revolt. These were in play everywhere.
Charles Michel Geoffroy, Vengeance of Serfs. Engraving (1845).
But other, more formal mechanisms were in place in some serf societies: property rights and legal recourse for disputes. In western and central Europe, serfs did have some property rights, even if weak by modern standards, and they increasingly had access to courts when contractual terms broke down. In western Europe, these rights evolved over time in ways that enabled serfs to appeal beyond their manor courts, and even to bring suit against landlords in higher courts. These mechanisms were weaker in eastern Europe where landlords’ powers were strongest. Russia was perhaps the most extreme case; there, proprietary serfs had no standing in the eyes of the law and could neither own property nor seek redress in courts.
How did these variations affect outcomes?
These institutional differences – property rights and court systems – had both short-term and long-term implications. In the short term, where serfs’ property rights were recognized and mechanisms for dispute resolution were well-established (such as those documented by manorial courts), we observe more extensive markets and more complex rural and household economies. The possibility of saving, investing, or obtaining credit made it possible to expand household enterprises or smooth consumption at difficult periods in the lifecycle. In poor, agrarian societies the availability of these strategies could make an enormous difference to individuals’ and households’ well-being – to their ability to survive the crises that were regularly visited upon pre-modern societies.
Where these institutions were absent, serfs’ economic transactions were riskier. It was hard to get credit without collateral (which rights to property made possible), or when lenders were not sure they could claim the pledged collateral (which courts facilitated). The scope for corruption was also greater, since these transactions took place outside a formal legal framework.
In parts of central and eastern Europe, village communities were formally charged with managing economic transactions and resolving disputes among members. In these cases, serf oligarchies frequently emerged, exercising authority over their neighbours by commandeering communal resources and using their roles as communal officials and arbiters of disputes to act in their own interests.
In the longer term, the evolution of law, and the increased security of property rights that resulted, shaped the way serfdom ended in Europe and influenced the trajectories of societies from the medieval to the modern period. At one end of the spectrum, the co-evolution of the common law and the royal courts in late medieval England likely hastened the end of serfdom after the plague crises of the 14th century. At the other end was Russia, where these institutions were weak when emancipation was decreed in 1861; there, inequality and corruption persisted and rural economic growth remained muted well after serfdom ended.
Further reading
- Bailey, M., The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Boydell and Brewer, 2014).
- Briggs, C., Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 2009).
- Bush, M. L., Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage (Routledge, 1996).
- Dennison, T., The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Freedman, P., and Bourin, M. (eds.), Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, Resistance, and Expansion (Brepols, 2005).
- Ogilvie, S., ‘Communities and the Second Serfdom in Early Modern Bohemia’, Past and Present 187:1 (2005), 69-119.
- Scott, T. (ed.), The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (Longman, 1998).
- Smith, R. M. (ed.), Land, Kinship, and Life-Cycle (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Tags: economic history, Europe, medieval, serfdom, social history