Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/153

 SLAVERY 137 mortable, taillable, serf, vilain}. The three personal conditions here described coexisted to some extent in all these periods, one of them, however, greatly preponderating in each. Towards the end of the 9th century the serf-tenants were already proprietors of their holdings ; under the third dynasty they were rather subjects than tenants, and the dues they paid were rather taxes than rents ; they were, in short, vassals occupying the lowest round of the feudal ladder. Guerard enumerates as immediate causes which led to the liberation of serfs (besides the master's voluntary gift or bequest) their flight, with the prescription which arose after a certain interval off absence, ordination, redemption by themselves or others, marriages with women of higher status, and the action of law in the case of certain wrongs inflicted by the master. The church co-operated to the same result, as might be shown by many instances. Thus St Benedict of Aniane (d. 821), the reformer of the monasteries in the Carolingian territories, received a number of donations of lands from the faithful; but, whilst accepting them for his religious establishments, he enfranchised the serf's lio inhabited them. All the serfs, not merely in a village, bourg, or city, but in whole districts, were liberated by charters of sovereigns or lords. Such documents are most common in the 13th century. The general edicts of Louis X. (1315) and Philip V. (1318) are little more than recognitions of a fait accompli, and were dictated, at least in part, by financial motives. Some relics of serfdom con- tinued to exist in local customs down to the Revolution, and were not abolished till the night of the 4th August 1789. But these survivals do not affect the truth of the proposition that the work of emancipation was essentially accomplished early in the 14th century. England. Guerard has observed on the difficulty created by the ambiguity of the word servus in the mediaeval authorities. In the study of English serfdom, even eminent writers like Robertson, Hallam, and Kemble have obscured the subject by the use of the term slave, sometimes in its proper sense, sometimes in relation to the serf. Dr Stubbs has avoided this equivocal nomenclature, and by attending more to social fact than to the letter of the law has placed the history of the class in a clear light. The slaves of Anglo-Saxon times were " regarded as the stock of their owner; . . . their offences against a third person he must answer for, as for the mischief done by his cattle ; . . . they had no credibility, no legal rights ; wrongs done to them were regarded as wrongs done to their master." Practice, indeed, was kinder to them than legal theory; as in the case of the Roman peculium, they were "in some un- explained way " allowed to keep their savings, and so to purchase their freedom ; and " the spiritual law could enforce a penance on the master for ill-treating them. " There were laws of Ethel bert and Canute forbidding the sale of men to heathen masters, and the slave trade, the principal seat of which was Bristol, was put down by the preaching of St Wulfstan. The villein of Domesday Book is not a slave; he represents the Anglo-Saxon ceorl; he is an irre- movable cultivator, now regarded as customary tenant of a lord. The Norman knights probably confounded with the villanus the bordarii and other tenants who stood on a less favourable footing. Whilst the free ceorl became a villein, the servus (thcow) dis- appeared altogether. The position which the class constituted by this fusion came to occupy was one " compatible with much personal comfort and some social ambition." The villeins "were safe in the possession of their homes ; they had a remedy against the violence of their masters; they could, if they chose to renounce their holdings and take refuge in a town, become members of the guild, and there, when unclaimed for a year and a day, obtain the full rights of freemen; they could obtain manumission by the intervention of the church, which always proclaimed the liberation of the villein to be a work of merit on the part of the master. . . . Under a fairly good lord, under a monastery or a college, the villein enjoyed immunities and security that might be envied by his superiors ; he had a ready tribunal for his wrongs, a voice in the management of his village ; he might with a little contrivance redeem his children and start them in a higher state of life." Walter Map declares that in his time (12th century) the villeins were educating their ignoble offspring in the liberal arts. In the early part of the 14th century "it was by a mere legal form that the villeins were described as less than free." In the reign of Richard II. it seems that " the legal theory of their status has become hardened and sharpened so as to warrant almost wanton oppression;" but social causes, on the other hand, have ameliorated their actual lot. It was not their normal condition that led to the insurrection of 1381, but the enforcement of jthe Statute of Labourers and the attempt of the lords to reassert legal claims Avhich were practically obsolete. Serfdom died out in England without any special legislation against it. It survived in exceptional instances, as in France; Hallam mentions as the latest deed of enfranchise- ment one of Elizabeth in 1574 in favour of the bondmen on some of her manors ; and it appears that in Scotland the workers in coal and salt mines were in a state of serfdom until they were liberated by Acts of the 15th and 39th years of the reign of George III. Italy. Essentially similar movements took place in the other countries of the West. In Italy " the llth and 12th centuries," says Hallam, " saw the number of slaves " (by which word he means serfs) "begin to decrease ; early in the 15th a writer quoted by iluratori speaks of them as no longer existing. . . . The greater part," he adds, "of the peasants in some countries of Germany had acquired their Germany, liberty before the end of the 13th century; in other parts . . . they remained in a sort of villenage till the present age." The most rigorous forms of serfdom (Lcibcigcnschaft] existed in those German districts which were once Wendish, as Lusatia, Pomerania, and Mecklenburg, and in Holstein. The last remains of the system in Germany were abolished in 1832 and 1848. In Castile the serfs Spain, were slowly converted into solariegos, who cultivated the land of the lord under obligations similar to those of the colonus. Alphonso X. (El Sabio) declared that the solariego could quit his holding when he wished, though he could not alienate it or demand anything for his improvements. Alphonso XI. (El Justiciero) decreed that no lord should take the solar (holding) from the tenant, nor from his sons or grandsons, so long as they paid the fixed dues. They thus became irremovable, and their tenures were hereditary. By these gradual processes every form of servitude dis- appeared from the social order of western Europe, whilst at the same time was bequeathed to the modern world the inexorable problem, still but partially solved, of the definitive position of the classes whose origin is traceable to that condition. But not very long after the disappearance of serfdom Modern in the most advanced communities comes into sight the slave new system of colonial slavery, which, instead of being the trade< spontaneous outgrowth of social necessities and subserving a temporary need of human development, was politically as well as morally a monstrous aberration, and never pro- duced anything but evil. In 1442, when the Portuguese under Prince Henry the Spanish Navigator were exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa, one colonies, of his officers, Antam Gonsalves, who had captured some Moors, was directed by the prince to carry them back to Africa. He received from the Moors in exchange for them ten blacks and a quantity of gold dust. This excited the cupidity of his fellow-countrymen ; and they fitted out a large number of ships for the trade, and built several forts on the African coast. Many negroes were brought into Spain from these Portuguese settlements, and the colonial slave trade first appears in the form of the introduction into the newly-discovered western world of children or descendants of these negroes. When Ovando was sent out in 1502 as governor of Hispaniola, whilst regulations, destined to prove illusory, were made for the protection of the natives of the island, permission was given to carry to the colony negro slaves, born in Seville and other parts of Spain, who had been instructed in the Christian faith. It appears from a letter of Ovando in 1503 that there were at that time numbers of negroes in Hispaniola ; he requested that no more might be per- mitted to be brought out. In 1510 and the following years King Ferdinand ordered a number of Africans to be sent to that colony for the working of the mines. Before this time Columbus had proposed an exchange of his Carib prisoners as slaves against live stock to be furnished to Hispaniola by Spanish merchants. Infidels, he represented, would thus be converted, the royal treasury enriched by a duty on the slaves, and the colonists sup- plied with live stock free of expense. He actually sent home in the ships of Antonio Torres, in 1494, above 500 Indian prisoners taken in wars with the caciques, who, he suggested, might be sold as slaves at Seville. But, after a royal order had been issued for their sale, Queen Isabella, interested by what she had heard of the gentle and hos- pitable character of the natives and of their docility, pro- cured a letter to be written to Bishop Fonseca, the super- intendent of Indian affairs, suspending the order until inquiry should be made into the causes for which they had been made prisoners, and into the lawfulness of their sale. Theologians differed on the latter question, and XXII. 1 8