Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/801

 SERF 775 they had acquired, -which has justly been held to prove that the number of such fiefs was large, and the class of emancipated coloni too numerous to be assailed. Louis X., in 1315, emancipated all persons in the royal domains upon their paying a fair composition, his object being to set an example to all seigneurs ; but his example was not extensively followed. Philip the Fair had emancipated the villeins on the royal domains in Languedoc, but the num- ber of freemen was always greater in southern France than in the north, except in Normandy. One of the chief effects of the crusades was to favor emancipation. Previously the obstacles in the way to emancipation were almost insur- mountable. The labor of the villeins was very valuable to their lords, and a lay noble " was unable to enfranchise the serf without the con- currence of each in turn of the various other lords who, in the long chain of feudal depen- dence, might have an interest, mediate or im- mediate, or more or less remote, in the fief to which the serf belonged." To emancipate a serf on an ecclesiastical estate would have been to alienate a part of the church's property, and that property was inalienable according to the canon law. The crusades operated to change this, as military service was incompatible with the servile condition. The serf who took the cross became free, not through the force of positive law, but because opinion was so strong in his favor that his owner durst not reclaim him, either while in service or after his return. The crusades, too, by introducing unwonted habits of change of place, greatly increased the numbers of those vagrants whom the law had previously presumed to be serfs, and assigned to the lord on whose property they remained beyond a year and a day, unless they acknowl- edged themselves to be the property of some other lord. The crusaders were soldiers of the cross, and it would not answer to deal with them as slaves. It was allowed to va- grants to declare themselves the king's vassals, and such vassals were free. Further, this movement of the people caused great additions to be made to the populations of the communes, and the gates of the communes stood constant- ly open to refugees ; and whoever resided therein for a year and a day, being a serf at the beginning of that term, became a free man. No serf could be a bourgeois, for in the citizens of a bourg resided, collectively, its seigneury ; and a serf could not hold seigneurial rights. But when the serf who had taken refuge in a bourg had acquired freedom, he became a citi- zen on easy terms. Before the crusades these bourgs had become so many places of refuge to men of servile condition ; and the crusades led to the great increase of the number of such fugitives, promoted commerce, and created new sources of wealth, which things were favorable to freedom. Nevertheless, serfdom was not abolished throughout France until the French revolution, and serfs could not be manumitted without letters patent from the king. It was a French rule of law, and as such put in prac- tice concerning foreigners as early aa the 18th century, that whoever entered France, being a slave, became free; but the practice of the country was very different toward the mass- es of the natives. That terrible insurrection known as the Jacquerie, which occurred in 1358, shortly after the battle of Poitiers, was caused by the sufferings of the people at the hands of the seigneurs, though its immediate occasion was the additional suffering created by the English wars. The fierceness of the peasants afforded an excuse for keeping them in a subordinate condition; and from that time the progress of emancipation became slow. The triumph of the central power, too, was injurious to the servile classes, as the kings no longer had occasion to favor the peo- ple at the expense of the nobles. From the closing years of the 14th century, therefore, the condition of the French people ceased to be directly affected by those causes which previously had tended to their elevation ; but general causes to that end still remained in operation, and at least prevented their condi- tion from becoming worse. In Italy the peo- ple had become free by the 13th century ; and in some of the German countries the peasants acquired their freedom before the close of the 18th, but in other parts of the country they remained in a condition of modified villenage until the present century. In England the state of most of the laboring people was on the whole, and comparatively speaking, mild down to the time of Henry II. (1154-'8y). The mllani of Domesday Book were the ceorh of Anglo-Saxon law ; and in the second genera- tion after the Norman conquest the villein was mentioned as a freeman. But in the next gen- eration he became completely dependent upon the lord, and his general condition was very harsh, though somewhat mitigated by the exis- tence of legal fictions, and by opinion. "This class," says Hallam, "was distinguished into villeins regardant, who had been attached from time immemorial to a certain manor, and vil- leins in gross, where such territorial prescrip- tion had never existed, or had been broken. In the condition of these, whatever has been said by some writers, I can find no manner of difference ; the distinction was merely techni- cal, and affected only the mode of pleading." Gradually the condition of the English villeins was improved, until the system silently disap- peared. By the middle of the 14th century there were many peasants who had become free laborers, and who worked for wages. The English villeins of that time shared in that general aversion to servitude which led the Jacques to rise in France, and the rebellion that takes its name from Wat Tyler was of substantially the same nature as that in which Guillaume Callet figured, though the English revolt was a quarter of a century later than the French. From the close of the 14th cen- tury the tendency to the abolition of English