Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/366

 356 Revicivs of Books The most instructive and original portion of M. Doniol's work, how- ever, lies in the chapters which trace the emancipation of the serf. Ac- cording to his statements emancipation became active about the middle of the thirteenth century and was practically completed within two hundred years. Liberty was offered by lords to their serfs before it was asked for by them. Enfranchisement was granted by the king to the serfs on his domains earlier than by any private lords on theirs. This was because the king wanted taxable subjects more than he wanted laborers. The town corporations were the next to emancipate their serfs, the noblemen followed ; the ecclesiastical corporations were the last. Notwithstanding the vast number of written charters of emanci- pation, the greater part of the work of enfranchisement was done by tacit agreement. Emancipation was a purely local change differing in time and character in different provinces ; Normandy being the earliest to free itself from serfdom. Burgundy the last. Among the various reasons for difference of period of enfranchisement in different localities the charac- ter of the soil was the most important. For a century or more the serfs had no great desire to be freed, then freedom became attractive to them and their desires and those of the lord's corresponded, so that servitude rapidly became exceptional. This is all extremely suggestive and interesting, and it may be true, — indeed much of it undoubtedly is, but M. Doniol has neither proved it nor given us the necessary means of proving or disproving it. One cannot get rid of a feeling of doubt and uncertainty. May not his fundamental distinction between serfs and villains be an arbitrary or imaginary one ? That distinction did not exist in any positive institutional sense across the Channel. Indeed M. Doniol's own reservations in the course of dis- cussion make the distinction very tenuous indeed in medieval France. Mr. Page's work, in contrast with that just described, is a study of entirely new material, most of it never read by any previous student, much less utilized for historical purposes. His statements moreover are always fortified by direct references and his generalizations supported by a sufficient number of recorded facts. His pamphlet is threefold in sub- ject, giving first a description of the institution of villainage as it existed in the thirteenth century ; second, disproof of any considerable change in that institution before the middle of the fourteenth century ; and lastly, an analysis of the course of change from that time forward until villain- age had become a thing of the past by the close of the fifteenth century. The first section is of inferior importance, having become by this time a matter of commonplace knowledge. In the other two divisions of his subject Mr. Page has fulfilled three tasks of a negative character which immediately attract attention. He shows, in opposition to the statements of Professor Rogers, that there had been but little commutation of labor services for money payments before 1350. He has examined records dated between 1325 and 1350 of eighty-one manors, and finds in more than half of them practically no commutation and in but six complete com- mutation of praedial services. Similarly Professor Rogers's suggestion that