FOOTNOTES:[17]See "America and Europe," by the present writer.
[17]See "America and Europe," by the present writer.
[17]See "America and Europe," by the present writer.
XVII.
LONGOBARDS—ITALIANS.
AUTHORITIES:
Leges Longobardorum, Cantu, Troya, Karl Hegel, etc.
The Western Roman empire was fatally permeated throughout with chattel slavery. Domestic usage had made its German invaders also familiar with the art and practice of enslaving: their conquest of Rome accordingly but added strength and extension to the slave-edifice. For a longer or shorter period, various German tribes ravaged Italy. The domination of the Ostrogoths lasted for about sixty years, and the rule of Theodoric the Great is recorded as among the best and wisest in that period of devastation and oppression. Finally, the Longobards founded in Italy a permanent establishment. At the first onset, the Longobards reduced all, in city and country, to bondage: the magnate, the rich, the slaveholder, as well as the workman, the poor, the serf and the chattel, constituted their booty, and as such were divided among the victors.
Some historians maintain that all free Romans,[18]rich and poor—a few favored aristocratic families excepted—were deprived of the rights of personalliberty and property by the Longobards; others, however, assert that the free population was only made tributary, but otherwise preserved their property, rights and laws. The conquerors (ashospites, or quartered soldiers) generally took about a half of the houses, lands and chattels of the conquered, and furthermore compelled the primitive owner to pay them a tribute from what was left. In Italy, the Longobards made the free Romans, rich and poor, tributary to the extent of one-third of all which was left them from actual confiscation; and Paul Diaconus—himself a Longobard—says: "Romani tributarii efficiuntur." The artisans and traders, and indeed all inhabitants of cities, likewise paid tribute. They could not move from one place to another without the written permission of their Longobard master; and in this way originated the system of passports for bondmen, which is still maintained in our Slave States. Thus the Romans, once proud and free, became but half free—a something between the positive freeman, such as the Longobard alone was, and the still more reduced tributaries, thealdiioraldions, and the serfs. In brief, the freemen, rich or poor, were made inferior in rights and in personal liberty to the soldiers; the non-free, the ancientcolons, etc., were pressed a degree lower in servitude; and the condition of the domestic chattels alone remained unchanged.
The Longobards, like all the other German warriors, disliked the cities, and the chiefs and nobles erectedtheir fastnesses outside of them. The common soldiers receiving lands in different quantities, formed the freeholders, yeomen, orahrimans, and were bound to perform military duty. Such was the origin of the feudal system, which sprang up on the ruins of the Roman empire. The numerous cities of Italy had no longer any political rights or signification, though they still preserved some remains of former culture and civilization, and even faint shadows of the former municipal regime. The imperial city itself was not overrun by the Longobards, and from thence, as also from the other cities of that part of Italy which belonged to the Eastern emperors, some faint glimmerings reached the Longobard region and tended to preserve ancient municipal traditions.
The influence of the Italian polity and culture at length began to humanize the Longobards. Some of their laws concerning chattels and slaves are more humane than were those under the emperors—more humane than those now existing in our Slave States. For example, a master committing adultery with the wife of his chattel lost the ownership of both her and her husband, and had no further power over them. Various regulations also protected the serf and chattel against a cruel master, and punishment was not arbitrary, but was in many cases regulated by law. Emancipations were encouraged and protected: King Astolf's edict even proclaimed that it was meritorious to change a chattel into a freeman. However, during the first period of their dominion, the Longobards,like all the other German conquerors, in Spain, Gaul, etc., and, above all, the feudal dukes and nobles, considered the blood of the conquered as impure, and therefore far inferior to their own.
Industry and commerce gradually began to acquire vitality, and the chattels began slowly to disappear from the cities, either by emancipation, by purchasing their liberty, or by being established asaldiior serfs on their masters' lands.
The slave-trade was now confined principally to non-baptized prisoners—whom the Christians of that epoch regarded as the progeny of the evil one. Mahomedans, heathen, Germans, as the Anglo-Saxons and others, from various nations and tribes, were more numerous in the slave marts than were those born on the soil of Italy.
Under the Longobards, Italy again began to be more commonly cultivated by numerouscolonswith very limited rights, but still in better condition than those of the preceding epoch; copyholders and freeholders also began to increase, as has been already mentioned. So that when the heavy clouds of the mediæval times began to break, the condition of Italy was slightly improving; and when Karl, or Charlemagne, put an end to the dominion of the Longobards, more land was under culture, and the free though tributary population was greater, both in the cities and the country, than on their first invasion.
The rule of the Franks, which succeeded that of the Longobards, did not impair the condition of theItalians. Peace was beneficial to labor, labor stimulated emancipation. Thus the number ofchattelswas more and more reduced, while the serfs,adscripti glebæ, increased. But the disorders which succeeded the dismembering of the empire of Charlemagne again ruined many free yeomen, ahrimans, and others owning small homesteads, and obliged them to submit to the oppression of the mighty nobles. Many of the dispossessed and impoverished, however, sought refuge in the cities, where industry flourished in proportion with the freedom of the workmen and operatives. Finally, about the eleventh century, thecitiesbegan to strike for their independence. This was the time of the revival of the communal franchises in other parts of Europe also; but the first spark was struck in Italy. Around the standard raised by the cities crowded the serfs, rural and domestic chattels, and all other kinds of bondmen and oppressed. This was, in fact, the insurrection of these against the landed barons, nobles, and oligarchs. All runaways found refuge and protection in the cities; and hence arose the energy, the strength, and the democratic rancor of the cities against the nobility and their strongholds.
In the second part of the mediæval epoch, throughout Italy and Western Europe, prisoners of war were no more sold as slaves, but were ransomed or exchanged. The Moors and Arabs (Mahomedans) were the sole marketable chattels.
All the Italian cities extended their dominion, acquired lands, incorporated baronies, and regulated therelations between the owners of the soil and the tenants. Domestic slavery was altogether extinct; the cities were animated by free labor in their arts, industries and handicrafts, and on the estates, the peasants, serfs and bondmen,adscripti glebæ, became vassals obliged to follow the barons or the cities into war; they became free tenants—first paying rent for their land in kind, and then paying in money; and the number of freeholders, and others holding homesteads, continually increased. Hunting for absconded serfs now had an end. The cities and boroughs emancipated all the villagers and serfs around them. In the course of the twelfth century, personally degrading servitude of every kind almost wholly disappeared; and the relations between the proprietor of land and the farmer were established on the basis which, with more or less modification, prevails to the present day.
In the ancient classical world, in Greece and Rome, domestic slavery had its seat in the cities, and therefrom expanded over the land, destroying the whole social structure. But now, the first shout for liberty came from the Italian cities; the cities first emancipated the laborers within their own walls, and then emancipated the rural serf. Cities again became the centres of civilization; they nursed its infancy, tended its first footsteps and gave it the free air of heaven: they trained it not amid clanking chains and groaning chattels.
Thus does history annihilate the ignorant fallacyabout Saxons and Germans being the godfathers of social or political freedom.
Many evils and disorders undoubtedly remained and even yet remain; but the sum of all evils—property in man and in his toil—was utterly destroyed. Then came the brilliant epoch of the Italian Lombard cities—the culminating glory of Italian civilization—whose coruscating warmth set free the whole of Western Europe.
FOOTNOTES:[18]Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.
[18]Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.
[18]Romans as citizens of the empire and not of the city of Rome.
XVIII.
FRANKS—FRENCH.
AUTHORITIES:
Augustin Thierry, Henry Martin, Bonnemère, etc.
Domestic slavery, aggravated by the oppression of the poor, the devastations of war, the insatiable necessities of the imperial treasury, the confiscations of property during the reigns of bad emperors, and other causes, ate into the very vitals of Roman Gaul. It has been already shown how the ancient relations of clansman and client merged successively into tributarycolons, intoadscripti glebæ, and into chattels. At the period of the final assault of the northern races on the Roman empire, in Gaul, as everywhere else, there was no people behind the imperial legions except rich slaveholders and poor degraded freemen, serfs and chattels; and the legions, too, were mostly recruited from among vagabonds and barbarians. Long before this time, Stilicon, in order to raise soldiers for his army, proclaimed freedom to the chattels who should join his standard; and by this means collected over thirty thousand men!
During the integrity of the empire, branches of the tribe of Franks dwelt in parts of northern Gaul, either as colonists, or as allies who recognized in the Roman emperor their lord paramount. From herethey dealt their conquering blows; they subdued to their rule the other German races already established in Gaul, and laid the foundation of the future Carlovingian empire, and finally of France.
The Franks permitted the conquered peoples to retain their own law, which was the Roman, for all civil suits between Roman and Roman. This benefited only the freemen—of whom there were but few—and the rich, so that they could oppress the poor and treat them as they did under the empire; for the Franks did not interfere in any of their internal relations, legal or illegal. The rich and cunning Roman magnates ingratiated themselves with their conquerors: they becameantrustionesor commensals of the kings, thus acquiring a high social and political status and influence; and there were many of them among the powerful and influential aristocracy which sprang up under the Merovingians. All the conquered paid oppressive tribute; and the rich, as of old, used every means to increase their estates, serfs and chattels from the booty and exactions made by the Franks.
But although the rights of the free Romans were thus recognized in principle, their persons and property were by no means regarded as sacred. The Franks divided the conquered lands among them in lots, and often seized, along with the estate, the whole of the personal property of a rich Roman magnate.
The Merovingians were almost continually at war among themselves, and these wars were most ruinous to the cities and the rich free Romans. When a peacewas concluded, these Romans constituted the hostages for both belligerent parties; and when a peace was broken, the hostages on both sides were treated as prisoners of war; they became chattels, and their property was confiscated.
The Roman cities became the property of the kings and chiefs, the lands the property of the Frankish soldiery. The Franks also were perpetually at war either among themselves or with their neighbors. Military duty was a condition of the possession of land, so that Roman and other slaves and bondmen cultivated the soil and worked for their conquerors. During the imperial epoch, the opulent Gallic magnates and senators lived in magnificent villas, like the Roman nabobs and oligarchs in Italy, Spain, Africa, etc. During the early period of the invasions, an owner would often fortify his villa and defend it with his armed household and chattels. Such villas, changing masters, afterward, in many instances, became feudal strongholds, around each of which grew a village, which in the course of time became a borough, then a town, and finally a city. In this way the Gallo-Roman villas gave rise to the French namevillageandville.
In general, with the new Frankish conquest, oppression became increasedly grievous, while the slave traffic, especially in prisoners of war, received a new impulse. In the first storm the Roman fiscality for a moment disappeared; but it was soon restored, and with it almost the whole of the Roman administration. The Franks revolted against taxation when one of the kings tried to apply it to them, but the Roman populations bore its whole brunt. Tribute, taxes and other exactions finally became so oppressive that the poor and impoverished sold their children and sometimes even themselves into slavery. The Jews were the common mediators and factors in this traffic, as well as the most extensive slave-traders all over Europe, both then and in subsequent times; and a considerable part of the hereditary hatred of the European masses toward the Jews is to be ascribed to this historic fact.
The Frankish kings and their Frankish subjects had large estates,métairies, worked by serfs and chattels. The conquerors hated the cities, preferring the favorite old German life in the country, where they spent their time surrounded by their followers. The lordly mansions, thesalaof the kings and the powerful, were erected amidst great forests in the style of encampments; and to this day the German wordhoflager, "court-camp," is the name for the residence or court of a sovereign. Political power and prestige were no longer derived from municipal citizenship, but from the possession of land; and thus originated the feudal importance of the country and the barons, in contradistinction to the now powerlessmunicipium. In the Greek and Roman world, the country was wholly sacrificed, politically and socially, to the city, which, in turn, acquired more and more political power and importance in proportion as domestic slavery destroyed the primitive yeomanry. In the early stages of feudalism scarcely any attention was paid to the cities; they are principally mentioned as sources whence taxes and tributes may be largely squeezed.
In the Free States of the American Union, also, in the townships and villages, the significance of the country has reached its highest and noblest development. Here the free townships and villages are the fountains of healthy political life, and the genuine source of all civilizing agencies.
Under the Merovingians and Carlovingians, the frequent wars and oppressions proved destructive not only to the natives but also to the conquerors themselves. The Franks and other German landholders, by their violent and disorderly mode of life, were soon impoverished and became the prey of powerful neighbors of their own kindred. The savage rigor of the law regulating composition for crimes quickly drained and utterly destroyed the patrimonies of the reckless soldiery, and thus rapidly increased the number of landless vagabonds, who were neither tenants nor serfs, but became chattels to men of their own race, once their companions and perhaps even their followers. At the end of the second Salic dynasty very few free laborers existed, and kidnapping, especially on the sea-coasts, became common.
Charlemagne, as previously mentioned, tried to regulate and alleviate the condition of the bondmen and chattels. His capitularies forbade the sellingof chattels beyond the kingdom; and whoever violated this law became a slave himself. Slaves were to be sold in the presence of the count or the bishop, or their lieutenants, or notables, but not surreptitiously, or from one person to another, without being controlled by the authorities; and heavy fines also followed all violations of this law. Notwithstanding all this, however, Norman and Saracen wars and invasions, together with Frankish taxations and exactions, kept the country in the same state of desolation as during the centuries of the agonizing empire. Scarcely any towns existed, and the few large cities were scattered at enormous distances one from the other. Fastnesses, castles, burghs and fortified monasteries dotted the land; even they, however, being separated from each other by great forests and marshes. The poor and oppressed serfs and chattels were hunted and kidnapped, and no place of refuge existed for them.
Under Charlemagne, public order and protection to the free tenants, serfs and chattels, existed to as high a degree as was possible at that epoch; but with his death all this disappeared. The crisis which then occurred and which ended in consolidating the feudal social structure, was even more terrible than the epoch of invasions. The poor classes and the serfs and chattels, as we might suppose, suffered most. The tenth century marks the triumph of the feudalrégime, and with this triumph chattelhood (mancipium) disappears from the laws and the usage of the oppressive masters. The chattels now became hereditary bondmen or serfs, and were no longer objects of sale or of traffic. They could not be separated from their families, but were established in villages; and the slave traffic was carried on solely in Saracens and other heathen.
In all other respects serfdom preserved almost all the most revolting features of ancient domestic slavery. The feudal lord employed the serfs as tillers of his soil, and the harvests they raised were the chief sources of his income; while they likewise formed his followers in his feuds with feudal neighbors or with his lords paramount—the counts, dukes, and kings. The feudal lord did not sell his serfs—as the churches, synods, and councils all united in condemning the traffic in Christians.
The present serf, tiller, and laborer, all over Western Europe, was the younger, outlawed member of the human family, and so now are our Southern chattels.
For a long time the difference between serfdom and ancient chattelhood was discernible only with great difficulty. The collar worn by chattels since the time of Augustus remained on the necks of the serfs (and these, too, notadscripti glebæ), with the expression—"I belong," or with the name of the master cut thereon. This was the custom in England with the Anglo-Saxon serfs of the Athelstanes and the Cedrics, so that the ancestry of the haughty Anglo-Saxon slaveholding American barons of the present day wore collars!
The feudal order was firmly established. Below the social hierarchy, composed of free fiefs, and estatesbelonging to nobles, churches, and monasteries (all of them free from taxation and public servitude), descend another social grade, whose only badges were humiliations, sufferings, toils, and martyrdom. Servitude and serfdom had similar gradations among the peasantry and workmen bound to the soil of their feudal master as existed among the barons, nobles, abbots, etc., intheirvarious relations and duties of vassalage.
A few towns and boroughs began to spring up from the same social soil whence arose those of Germany. But the immense majority of the nobles and owners of cities considered their inhabitants, at the best, as but half free, as tributaries orcensitaires, and continually attempted to plunge them deeper into servitude and villeinage. The remnants of the independent yeomanry, free tenantry, copyholders, etc., rapidly disappeared. These descendants of the conquerors—of kindred race, too, with the barons—accepted servitude in order to find patronage and alleviation from further oppression, or else sought refuge in the cities and towns, abandoning their homesteads, which were seized by the feudal baron and annexed to his estate.
All along the twelve or fifteen centuries which extend from the decline of the Greek and Roman republics and the first days of the empire down to the consolidation of feudalism, it is evident that similar causes were ever in operation, depriving the poor of their property, their labor, and finally of their liberty—a result, too, brought about in every case in an identical manner. In this, as in many other things,the history of the human race and its disorders and woes is a record of almost continuous analogies.
The smaller feudal masters, afterward calledhoberaux, were generally the most cruel and inhuman then, as well as afterward, during the long protracted centuries of serfdom of the French peasantry. Tyranny always becomes fiercer and more maddened in proportion as the circle of its power and action is diminished. Is it not so also on American slave plantations?
It has been already mentioned, that the kings and the more powerful feudal vassals began to erect towns, and that these towns served as refuges for the homeless, and also for the serfs. The lesser nobles and the feudalized clergy often upbraided the kings for thus depopulating their estates; while the barons who owned the cities soon exasperated their inhabitants by their exactions and cruelties.
Such were the prominent domestic and economic features of the times of feudalism and chivalry in France, as over the whole of Europe. It is for other reasons that, in the minds of some, a halo still surrounds their memory and their name. But, penetrating behind that halo, what a horrid spectacle of tyranny, oppression, and cruelty meets the eye! The sham chivalry of our Slave States has not even the shadow of such an aureola to hide its hideousness. The cruel and reckless barons sprang from a reckless race, in an age of darkness: they had no other traditions from the past, no other example before them. But the American chivalry and knight-errants of slavery spiton all the noble traditions transmitted by their sires. They have before their eyes the spectacle of freedom generating prosperity in all ages. And yet with all this do they deliberately turn their backs upon the light, and rush heedlessly toward dark barbarity.
The feudal rights of the barons in the products and earnings of the tradesmen and workmen, as well as in the person and labor of the serfs, together with their right of civil and criminal jurisdiction, were all the result of successive usurpations.
Toward the end of the eleventh, and especially in the twelfth century, the cities and towns rose against their feudal oppressors. This great movement was not preconcerted, nor was it instigated by outside conspirators. The cities, goaded by exactions and oppressions, rose separately, and each one on its own account. The impulse came from man's natural aspirations for freedom and justice, and his hatred of tyranny. The true conspirators were the nobles who oppressed the cities. Louis VI., of immortal memory, aided the cities in their efforts to form themselves into communes, gave them charters, and relieved them from the power of the barons; in short, he did every thing possible to undermine the power of the nobles, and prevent them from pillaging, torturing, and murdering the people. But the emancipation of the cities was finally achieved only by blood; and the kings, moved by humanity as well as policy, supported the citizens in their efforts, and thus reduced the tyrannic and unruly barons and nobles. The nobles, small and great,in France as in other parts of Europe, resisted with arms the communal emancipation. They proclaimed and treated as rebels and subverters of order and society, all who tried to reconquer their liberty, as well as all those who advocated the cause of the oppressed. Does not the same phenomenon reappear in our own time and country?
With the emancipation of the cities and the formation of communes, civilization began to illumine the horizon of France. But this great social event had not such a direct influence on the condition of the rural populations in France as it had in Italy. Still the serfs found a safe refuge in the now independent cities.
The crusades acted in the same way on the condition of the peasantry in France, as they did in Germany, Flanders, etc.
Successively, kings began to regulate and alleviate the condition of the serfs on their domains, gradually interposing to limit the power of the nobles over their serfs. A chronicler of that time (twelfth century), says: "Cetera censuum exactiones quæ servis infligi solent(nobles)omnimodis vacent." The French legists of the thirteenth century, inspired by Ulpian and Roman law, the study of which was again revived by a decree of Louis IX., declared that every man on the soil of France is or ought to be free, by right as well as by the law of nature. Subsequently this axiom was considered applicable even to Saracens, Mahomedans, Africans, and all races, creeds, and nationalities. Louis IX. was the friend of the oppressed and the redresser of the wrongs of the peasantry. He abolished the more oppressive servitudes in the domains, and tried to humanize the nobles.
The great principle of liberty asserted by the legists of the thirteenth century, was in the fourteenth embodied in a law or edict of Louis X., which decreed that the serfs might pay off their personal and rural obligation to the nobles and become free tenants. This law was very generally carried out in the royal domains, but did not find much favor among the nobles or in the feudalized church. At that time, moreover, many serfs and peasants, from poverty, mental degradation, and shiftlessness, and others from distrust of the law and the nobles, refused the freedom offered to them. In several provinces, disorders even resulted from their resistance, especially in those places where the conditions dictated by the seneschals (royal overseers), nobles, and priests, were so oppressive as to make free tenantry no better than bondage; and for this reason, also, serfs who had obtained their liberty often returned to servitude. In defence of American chattelhood, it is asserted that many chattels spurn the idea of emancipation; that many of them, when emancipated, return, of their own choice, into slavery, and that they are too degraded to appreciate freedom, and too shiftless to achieve its rewards. These very reasons, based on facts similar to those now set forth, were urged by the French feudal masters against the efforts of the government to liberate the oppressed whites.
The consequences of a bodily as of a social disorder are frequently of protracted duration. The oppression of centuries so destroys the mind and manhood of the oppressed that they consider slavery their normal condition, even as physical monstrosities have sometimes been regarded by their possessors as the symbols of beauty and health. Such incurables may even be found among the now free descendants of social, political, national, and legal bondmen—among the descendants of those who in former times were covered with contempt, and who suffered unutterable social degradation. Such are the Irish,en masse, and some others who escape oppression in Europe only to support slavery in America.
Personal serfdom and vassalage began to be gradually modified; but on the estates of the clergy and nobility it lasted till near the eighteenth century, still preserving several of its worst features. Nowhere in Europe was the peasant so long and so grievously oppressed as in France; nowhere did he take such terrible but just revenge. Insurrections of the peasantry in various parts of France form an almost uninterrupted historic series, of which the great revolution was the fitting climax.
The repeatedbagaudiesof the Gallic peasantry have been already mentioned: the next revolt was in the tenth century, when the serfs and peasants of Neustræ (Normandy) rose against the Northmen, who had just established themselves, and who tried to transform them into chattels; and another risingtook place about the same time in Brittany. Beside many partial uprisings against particular strongholds or districts, the most general and most celebrated were those of thepastouraux, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—one of which was directed principally against the feudalized clergy—and the repeatedjacqueries. Indeed, during the fourteenth century, the whole of Europe might be said to be divided into two great hostile camps: the nobles with their exactions and oppressions forming one, and the laborers, peasants and serfs, resisting their oppressors with battle-axe and fire, forming the other. And thus the oppressed everywhere hewed out their path to freedom and civilization.
The fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their various revolts, sometimes evoked by governmental measures and maladministration, but far oftener stirred up by the reckless and cruel treatment of the laborer by the nobles—against whom both the law and royal authority were too often inefficient and powerless.
Then came the epoch of atonement and of justice—1789-1793. Then germinated the seeds which had been sown for centuries in the social soil by the oppressors, and then, too, was gathered the bloody harvest.
The present rural population or peasantry of France, the descendants of serfs and chattels, now possess the same civil and political rights as any other class in the nation—rights more ample than are enjoyed byany other peasantry in Europe. They have, of course, still to suffer various evils arising from the common imperfection of all social structures; but no special degradation is attached to their birth or their condition.
The first glimpses of mental culture, in the earliest mediæval night, came from the monasteries—from monks who generally belonged to the conquered race, or sprang from chattels and serfs. Indeed, almost all the modern European civilization was elaborated in the cities by the so-called middle classes, and by peasants. Luther and Kepler were the sons of poor peasants; and the sires of the immense majority of the European middle classes, at one time or another, were chattels, serfs, or bondmen, who were for ages considered and treated as brutes by the nobles and barons. All over Europe many of the genealogies of aristocratic families ascend to slaves, serfs and villeins.
XIX.
BRITONS, ANGLO-SAXONS, ENGLISH.
AUTHORITIES:
Domesday-book, Sharon Turner, Lappenberg, Pauli, Hallam, Brougham, Vaughan, etc.
The social condition of the Britons previous to the invasion of Cæsar was in all probability similar to that of their kindred Gauls. They lived in clans; the soil was held by a tenure similar to that which prevailed among the Gauls, and was tilled by clansmen or free laborers. Slavery was then, if possible, even more insignificant among the Britons than among the Gauls; and the slaves consisted of criminals and prisoners of war, and were the common property of the clan. The laboring classes were not impoverished, nor were they dependent upon the chiefs as in Gaul at the time of the Roman conquest. For various reasons Rome's influence did not operate so fatally on the Britons as it did on the Gauls; neither the culture of Rome nor her disorganizing and oppressive administration permeated Britain to the same extent as they did the rest of the empire. Still Roman rule seems to have altered somewhat the primitive relations between the chiefs and their clansmen, impoverishing the latter and corrupting the former. The Roman rule was propitious to slavery; it surrounded the powerful natives with dependents and chattels, while the poor gradually lost their freedom, and began to cultivate the soil less for their own sake than on account of their chiefs. The dissolution of former social relations was effected and the impoverishment of the people fearfully increased, by the uninterrupted invasions of the Picts and Scots, and by the Anglo-Saxon conquest.
The Anglo-Saxons, spreading over the land, enslaved its former owners, selling them abroad or making them work for the conquerors at home. The Anglo-Saxons planted on the soil of Britain their German mode of life and their social organism in all its details. They brought with them their bondmen and slaves, their laws and usages relating to slavery, to the possession of the soil, and to composition for crime (all of which have been explained in former pages). Under the Anglo-Saxons and Danes, the chattels consisted of the descendants of the slaves existing in Roman times, as well as natives newly enslaved, criminals, debtors and captives taken in war. The Anglo-Saxon families also had slaves of Scotch and Welsh birth, generally from the borders; while, on the other hand, many Anglo-Saxons were kept in bondage by the Scotch and Welsh. Turner says: "It is well known that a large proportion of the Anglo-Saxon population was in a state of slavery; they were conveyed promiscuously with the cattle."
The Anglo-Saxon slaves were calledtheow esneandwite-theows, or penal slaves. Their condition was attended with all the horrors of slavery. They were kept in chains, were whipped, branded, and wore collars. They were sold in the markets, especially in London, and were at times exported beyond the sea, and found their way even to the markets of Italy and Rome. Every one knows that it was the exposition for sale of Anglo-Saxon slaves in the Roman market which resulted in the introduction of Christianity into Britain. Christianity softened the savage customs of the Anglo-Saxons, and greatly promoted emancipation; and this again increased the number of freemen and half-freemen, which formed the lower class of the population.
The division into classes—castes almost—was very rigidly observed by the Anglo-Saxons. The powers and rights of nobles, and of those who reached a high position as royal officials or owners of extensive landed property, were very great. The possession of land gave a higher politicalstatus, and conferred greater power among the Anglo-Saxons than among any of the other German tribes settled throughout Europe.
The free yeomen, or owners of land in fee simple, sought protection from thehlafordor mighty lord. For this they bartered away, partially, both their freedom and their right to the land—as was customary also among the German and all other ancient nations. The Anglo-Saxon yeomen were, in general, in a subordinate condition; they had no law, and their freedom consisted principally in having the right to change masters. The tradesmen also were, for themost part, in a servile state, and were manumitted like other chattels. Some of the manumitted slaves became agricultural laborers and hired land from the clergy, the great, the thanes or theealdormen, paying them an annual rent in produce or money; but many of them also went into the towns and became burghers. Some of the burghers, also, were subject to barons and other lords, as the king; indeed, the burghers generally were not actual freeholders, and, if they were free, often had not wholly escaped the domestic service of their masters. The condition of the immense majority of Anglo-Saxons was therefore far from real freedom.
The Norman conquest transformed many landlords into tenants, while the humbler classes passed into the hands of the new masters. They became the tenants and laborers of the Norman, for whom otherwise the conquered land would have been worthless. But the Norman conquest rendered Saxon servitude so galling, that villeinage was nearly equal to chattelhood.
The "Domesday-book" gives 25,000 as the number of slaves in England. The great bulk of the rural population was composed of bondmen, or villeins under various designations—asbordiers,geburs,cotsetlas, etc.—who were compelled to pay oppressive imposts, and submit to various degrading and oppressing servitudes. These oppressions and exactions bore most heavily on the Anglo-Saxon population.
Slaves and serfs attached to the soil might be sold in the market-place, at the pleasure of their owners. Husbands sold their wives, and parents, unable or unwilling to support their children, might dispose of them in the same manner. The English slave-dealer of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sold his Anglo-Saxon commodities to the Irish. A law enacted in 1102, prohibited this "wicked trade;" but the law was eluded, the trade continued, and when Henry II. invaded Ireland, he found English slaves there, whom he manumitted. In order to increase the revenue, as also from other motives of policy, the royal power in England, as all over Europe, generally favored the oppressed; its tendency always was to curb the arbitrary exactions of the barons, to promote emancipation, and generally to aid the serfs. William the Conqueror ordered that the lords should not deprive the husbandmen of their land; he enacted regulations to prevent arbitrary enslavement, and prohibited the sale of slaves out of the country. He also enacted a law which provided that the residence of any serf or slave for a year and a day, without being claimed, in any city, burgh, walled town or castle, should entitle him to perpetual liberty.
An independent freeholding yeomanry existed in comparatively small numbers. The recklessness of the feudal barons obliged the yeomanry, for the sake of protection, to render allegiance to the manor, and thus, about a century after the conquest, almost all the small homesteads disappeared. The conquered population held their property, not by absolute right, but by a tenure from the lord. Thus all individual freedom, except that of the nobles, became either entirely lost, or more and more contracted, till finally time and circumstance partly loosened, partly destroyed, the bonds which held the nation in slavery. In England as in the whole of Europe, feudal oppression was the growth of a very few generations; but it has required many hundreds of years to destroy it. A disease may be caught in an hour—years may be required for its cure. For the conquered race, the Norman had all the contempt common to conquerors. Macaulay says that when Henry I. married an Anglo-Saxon of princely lineage, many of the barons regarded it as a Virginia planter might regard marriage with a quadroon girl. But personal and economical interests obliged the barons to relent in their treatment of their serfs and chattels; and many of them were allowed under certain conditions to cultivate small portions of land.
The Saxon servile class, embraced under the general name of villeins, by and by began to have a permanent and legal interest in the land they cultivated, tilling it under the condition of a copyhold. The number of tenants on the manorial lands thus rapidly increased. But for a long period, even though the law declared that no man was a villein, still less a chattel, unless a master claimed him (and while to all others he was a freeman, eligible to have and hold property), still the nobles often seized and appropriated to themselves the property of the poorer class.
The laws under the Plantagenets, although in some respects hard for the villeins, indirectly favored theiremancipation, and threw many obstacles in the way of suits brought to reclaim fugitives.
The influence of the cities on the condition of the serfs in England was similar to that which they exercised everywhere else in Europe. As under the Anglo-Saxons, so under the Normans, the inhabitants of the cities were originally serfs and villeins, or their descendants. The Plantagenets were unceasingly at war, and the enlistment of soldiers opened up an avenue to emancipation; and predial and feudal servitude of every kind ended forever with the performance of military service on land or sea. So also the serf or villein obtained freedom in various ways—through the law of refuge in cities, by being drafted into the royal service, and finally by the tenure of the land on which the baron may have established him at his own baronial pleasure. Thus by degrees arose the right of copyhold lands; and Edward III. prohibited the lords from appropriating such lands when service was rendered or the rent regularly paid.
Forced servitude steadily diminished, and the estate-holders complained that the cities and towns absorbed the labor necessary for agriculture. In 1345, Parliament regulated the wages for all kinds of farm-work, and made labor obligatory when paid for in money, but not as personal servitude. Gradually the economic and social relations became more and more those of employer and laborer, and less and less those of master and serf. Still the nobles and estate-holders continually evaded the laws, and preserved,as much as they possibly could, their oppressive rights. Against these the peasants protested by various petty insurrections.
Wat Tyler and his peasant-followers demanded that the existing remnants of villeinage should be abolished, and that the land-rent be payable in money and not in personal services, and also that the trades and market-places be free from vexatious tolls and imposts. But Wat Tyler fell—the insurrection was suppressed—the barons and lords compelled the king to break the promises he had made, and the "shoeless ribalds," as the nobles called the insurgent rustics, were forced back to their former condition. But in a little over a century afterward, villeinage wholly disappeared. Contumely, oppression, and even butchery proved in the long run quite powerless against the efforts of the oppressed classes to reconquer their freedom.
The wars of the roses dissolved many of the old liens, destroyed various domestic relations, and yet, with all their devastations, on the whole rather promoted the emancipation of land and labor. Richard III. made various regulations favorable to the peasantry and destructive of the still remaining vestiges of servitude. On this account, as well as for other reasons, some historians defend the memory of Richard III.; and it really seems that at first Richard was a good and upright man. But violent passions, lust of power, hatred of whoever opposed him or stood in his way, drove him step by step to measures of violence and to murder; and so he stands in history, a hideous andaccursed monster in human form, reeking in the blood of his victims. Nations and parties often run the same career of violence and crime as individuals. Let the pro-slavery faction of to-day, which already begins to move in the bloody tracks of Richard, take warning!
Under the Tudors but few traces of the former villeinage are to be found; still it survived until the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. But throughout the whole of the centuries during which rural servitude was slowly but steadily passing away, relics of a very stringent personal servitude, almost equal to slavery, lingered in the baronial manors and castles, in the personal relation between the masters and their retainers and menials. Against these remains of rural villeinage, vassalage, and slavery, the Henries and Elizabeths exercised their royal power, and issued decrees bearing on the subject generally, as well as others relating to special cases.[19]
It is not necessary to record here—what every student in history knows—that in proportion as servitude began to decay, the prosperity of England increased, and that from its final abolition in every form dates the uninterrupted growth in wealth and power of the English nation. The abolition of rural servitude gave a vigorous impulse to agriculture, and secured to it its present high social significance; and now the oldnobility all over Europe are proud to be agriculturists. Agriculture is now a science, and it is by freedom that it has thus reached the highest honor in the hierarchy of knowledge and labor.
Through such various stages passed the Anglo-Saxons and the English people, in their transition from chattelhood and various forms of personal servitude, to freedom. The present inhabitants of English towns, as well as the free yeomanry and tenants—in brief, all the English commercial, trading, farming and working classes—have emerged from slavery, serfdom or servility. In the course of centuries the oppressed have achieved the liberty of their persons and labor, and the freedom of the soil: they have conquered political status and political rights; and their descendants peopled the American colonies, and here finally conquered the paramount right of national independence. The genuine freemen of the great Western Republic are not ashamed but proud of such a lineage of toil and victory. These freemen now and here again boldly and nobly enter the lists to combat with human bondage in every shape; and thus they remain true to the holy traditions which they have inherited from their fathers.