Medieval Slavery

 The ancient Mediterranean region had been a society of slavery.  Slaves then were usually people who had been captured in battle, or the children/descendants of such people.  Slavery is distinguished from other sorts of subservience by the fact that slaves are treated as having no will of their own.  They cannot say No to any command, no matter how arbitrary or foolish, and they can be bought and sold like animals.  Ancient slavery did not have the racial component of later slavery in the Americas, because slaves might be the captured citizens of a different city located only a few dozen miles away, who had (until captured) shared language, religion, and culture with their captors.

The Roman Empire was built on slavery.  Rather than just raiding their neighbors, they captured hundreds of people from all over their vast territory.  Successful generals would have big parades, with captured slaves in chains walking along with the carts piled high with loot.  Some slaves were well treated, but there was no penalty for maltreating one's slaves, and even well treated slaves had nothing that we would call rights.  Runaway slaves would be captured and brought back.  In the city of Rome itself, slaves probably outnumbered the free people, and the Senate periodically worried that the slaves would figure this out and revolt (which they sometimes did anyway).

Mediterranean-region slaves might be given responsibility as school teachers, or those who ran shops, or those who ran a household, even as the equivalent of policemen in ancient Athens.  Certainly not every family had slaves, but all well-to-do ones did.  The gladiators who fought for the entertainment of the Roman masses were slaves.  The Romans used slaves for agriculture, working them very hard, even to death on big plantations.  Many Roman citizens in the countryside worked their own fields, and indeed it was from such yeomen farmers that the Roman legions were recruited, but with a lot of the young men off fighting, slaves made up the difference.

All of this changed in late antiquity.  Once the Roman legions stopped winning and bringing home new captured slaves, an economy built on the labor of slaves considered disposable become unsustainable.  With the breakdown of many of the structures of the Empire, due in part to changing climate, disease, and the rise of Islam, slaves could just run away.  In addition, freeing one's slaves became considered a Christian duty once the Empire became Christian, and it was clear that one was not supposed to enslave someone already a Christian.

Agricultural slavery was replaced during the sixth and seventh centuries by serfdom, as I have discussed earlier.  Serfs were not really free (and the term servus was the same Latin word used for slaves), but serfs could not be bought and sold or treated horribly without repercussions.  Most importantly, serfs had their own houses and own families and own plots of lands on which they raised their own food, rather than just being worked in gangs until they dropped, to be replaced by new slaves.

Household slavery continued until the eighth or ninth century in some cases, and one would never have wanted to be a serf, but for much of the Middle Ages slavery was not found in the West.  Slavs (in the Balkans and further east), who were not yet Christian, might be captured and sold as slaves (Slav is the root of the word slave), and Muslims and Christians might sometimes have engaged in the slave trade with each other around the Mediterranean, but this was rare.

But slavery returned at the end of the Middle Ages.  Both legal scholars at the universities and town councils in Renaissance Italy studied Roman law, where there was a great deal said about slavery.  North of the Mediterranean, there were attempts to reimpose serfdom, which had been dying out since the twelfth century. as I have discussed earlier.  In Italy, which considered itself the heir to Rome, slavery was once again considered appropriate.

And then Europeans started exploring the rest of the world in the late fifteenth century, discovering all sorts of people, especially in Africa and the Americas, who seemed very strange by their standards, thus perhaps to be treated as a lesser race, and who were not Christians.  With Roman law as their guide, people of the early modern period re-embraced slavery.

Today, one hopes, almost everyone would agree that slavery, treating humans like animals, is wrong.  But it has only been gone in the West (including North America) for about 150 years, and its legacy deplorably still lingers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval peasants, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

Peasant Agency

Medieval peasants. it is often now assumed, had little opportunity to express their own ideas or to choose for themselves what to do.  This is actually not true.  Although some peasants were legally restricted by having servile status, being "serfs" (not the same as slaves), all of them had opportunities for independent action or "agency," as the social scientists call it.

The term peasant means a country person (paysan in French, from pays, countryside), whose days are spent in farming, often paying rents and dues to a landowner who was supported and fed by the peasant's labor.  A peasant would live in a small village, not a town.  As much as we would all like to imagine we are descended from lords and ladies of the Middle Ages, most medieval people were peasants, and hence so were most of our ancestors.

These people, mostly being illiterate, did not produce written records, appearing instead either in the records of more powerful laymen or in records of the church.  Scholars thus long assumed they were marginal or even silent, at any rate not worth trying to study.  Interestingly, the same assumptions were once made about medieval women.  Once scholars stopped assuming "We'll find no information on women in the records" and thus didn't bother to look, and instead started looking, they found a lot.  The same is true of peasants.

Where peasants are seen most frequently is in legal disputes or in negotiations with their landlords.  Landlords were not in a position simply to impose whatever they wanted on their peasants.  Everyone believed in the value of tradition, meaning that sudden changes did not seem right, and even more importantly, peasants had a lot of leverage.  If a landlord gave them too hard a time, they could just leave.  No aristocrat wanted to end up walking behind his own plow or harvesting his own grain.

Peasants could also play different aristocrats off against each other.  Nobles wanted to be considered "defenders of the poor," and peasants knew that and could exploit it.  Where a serf had both a lord of the body and a landlord (different persons), he (or she) could appeal to one against the other.  Peasants could also appeal to the big regional courts.

In one well-known case, peasants appeared before the court complaining about a local noble, saying they were helpless, saying all they had was their "tormented voices."  They understood very well what all medieval people knew (though many moderns have forgotten), that professed weakness can be a real source of strength.  The court had little choice but to rule in favor of these "tormented" peasants.

It was through negotiation that twelfth-century peasants managed to get out of some of their more burdensome obligations.  For example, one of the markers of servitude was having to pay an annual head-tax, usually a penny a head.  Peasants who had been selling their produce to the growing towns and had saved up could and did offer their lords of the body a fairly large one-time payment in return for not having to pay the head-tax.  The lords of course accepted, but this meant that there was no longer an annual ceremony indicating that these particular peasants were serfs.  In a generation, they would have "forgotten" that they and their ancestors had ever been other than free peasants.

As landlords opened up previously-uncultivated land for farming during this period, they needed to attract peasants, and thus offered them low rents and the opportunity to regulate themselves in what was known as a commune.  In some cases the peasants insisted on having this in writing; the local priest could read it for them.

Certainly being a medieval peasant would not have been an easy life. By our standards even the most well-to-do were desperately poor, with none of the material goods we take for granted, living in a rough house with a dirt floor, snuggled up to the cowshed.  There was always the worrisome question whether the harvest would come in this year (no peasant ever decided he needed to go on a diet), and the back-breaking work would have worn them out by the time they were in their fifties.  But they were smart, and resourceful, and entirely capable of outwitting those who considered themselves their betters.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on medieval peasants, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Peasants and labor dues

One often hears that medieval peasants had to pay a certain percentage of their harvest and an unlimited amount of their labor to their landlords.  This (along with so many other myths about the Middle Ages) is not true.  They certainly owed produce and labor, but it wasn't unlimited.

This is because medieval peasants were not slaves, as I have discussed earlier.  Indeed, in the early twelfth century even serfdom, being legally bound to one's "lord of the body," disappeared in France (see more here).  But both serfs and free peasants owed rent, just like anybody who rents an apartment today owes rent.

The rents were generally a combination of money, of produce (like two bushels of wheat and a chicken each year), and labor (like having to work on the lord's land two days a week).  Rents were fixed and were not supposed to be raised.  You will note that they weren't a percentage of the crop; the only "percentage of the crop" in sight was tithes to the church, which many peasants did not pay at all because most villages out in the country did not have a church.

The labor dues were often the most valuable part of the rent to the landlord.  Unless he planned to be out there with the plow and the ox himself, he needed to have people working his fields to grow the food for his household--and to grow food that he could sell at market (thus generating cash to buy horses, silk, spices, jewelry, and all the other things aristocrats felt they needed).  If every tenant household had to provide someone to come work on the lord's land (his demesne) at least one day a week, the necessary work got done.

This labor in fact could be beneficial to the peasants, although they probably didn't appreciate this fact.  The chief way it benefited them was to acquaint them with new, expensive technologies, like heavy mould-board plows, which they would have been (understandably) reluctant to try themselves, knowing that if they didn't work as promised then their families would starve.  The landlords, however, could afford such experiments (as well as affording the equipment).  Once peasants had seen that something worked, then they could adopt it themselves.

In addition, peasants could ride along with a lord when he took produce to market.  They might only each have a small amount to sell, but by going with him, and his larger amount, they found it worth it.

But peasants hated labor dues.  They would much rather be putting the effort into their own fields than their lord's.  By the twelfth century, a lot of lords were finding it a total pain to enforce labor dues.  The workers would show up late--with expanding cultivated land, the peasants might live miles away, and you couldn't expect them to leave home before dawn--leave early, and expect lunch.  Many landlords "commuted" (as it was called) labor dues into an extra monetary payment.  Then they could use the money to hire day laborers, who would not get paid if they didn't show up on time and work hard.  Young men could start saving up money by working as paid laborers.

Many a lord who owned unused, woodsy or swampy land would establish "new towns" (actually new villages), hoping to attract peasants (that is, other lords' peasants) to come work on land that hadn't been producing anything before, peasants who would pay rent.  In these new towns, the peasants would not owe labor dues, generally just money rents and maybe a little produce.

In the expanding economy of the High Middle Ages, the cost of hiring labor kept rising, and it became harder and harder to hire good workers on the cheap.  Rents, however, were fixed as they had always been.  What had once been a good deal for landlords no longer was.  As a result, in the thirteenth century landlords stopped commuting labor dues and tried, generally with minimal success, to reinstate them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

Medieval Peasants

Life for a peasant in the Middle Ages was, not surprisingly, more difficult than life for an aristocrat.  A student once asked a colleague of mine, "Why would anyone choose to be a peasant?  Was it a bad high school counselor?"

Um, no.  You would be born a peasant.  Although most of us can imagine ourselves as medieval knights and ladies, in fact, let's face it, our ancestors were peasants, along with a good 90% of the population.

Basically a peasant was a country person, someone who farmed.  Although in the modern US only about 3% of the population lives on a working farm, in the Middle Ages, before modern hybrid seed and fertilizers, a farmer would raise barely more food than needed to feed his family, meaning that almost everyone was out working the soil.  As any modern farmer will tell you, it's very hard work, and you're subject to random, uncontrollable events like storms, drought, and insect invasions.  Famine sat at the shoulder of every medieval peasant (as is still the case in much of the Third World).

A peasant might be completely free, owning his or her own land.  Or a peasant might be personally free yet rent land from a landlord (probably the most common situation).  Or he might be a serf.  A serf was not a slave, as agricultural slavery had disappeared in the sixth century with the breakdown of the Roman Empire (click here for more on the end of imperial Rome), but he or she was considered "bound in the body" to a "lord of the body."  This meant a serf could not give testimony in court or become a priest, as he or she was not considered to have the ability to make free-will oaths.  On the other hand, not being a slave, a serf could not be bought or sold and was not subject to arbitrary commands.

In practice there were a great many varied statuses for peasants, including many varieties of serfdom, depending on location and whether one was a descendant of slaves or a descendant of someone who had commended himself to a lord of the body in return for protection and support.  In a village, every family probably had a slightly different status and owed different rents to different people.  All of this was kept track of orally, which meant that slippage was always possible.

Anyone who rented land owed rents, of course, whether a free peasant or a serf:  usually some combination of money rents, rents in kind (a certain number of chickens or bushels of wheat a year), and days a week in which the peasant was obligated to work on the landlord's fields, raising food for the landlord.  These rents were (theoretically) fixed, not a percentage of the crop.  Serfs as a group generally (though not necessarily) had higher rents, and in addition they owed servile dues, generally a few pennies a year, more symbolic than anything--but humiliating if, as in many places, the serf was required to approach his lord on his knees, pennies on his head.

Although a serf might have both a landlord and a lord of the body, and one would think this would make life very difficult, in practice it could be an advantage, as a serf could use one against the other.  Serfdom ended in France and Italy in the early twelfth century, although it lingered longer in Germany and Britain.  Russia acquired serfs for the first time after the end of Europe's Middle Ages.

Peasant houses were very simple, at most a few rooms, generally built right up against the cowshed (this can be an advantage in the winter--cows keep you warm).  Their diet was also very simple, mostly bread and whatever vegetables might be available.  Meat was an extremely unusual luxury.  (Click here for more on the medieval diet.)

(Click here for more on medieval peasant farming, and read my post here on the word 'feudalism' before you use it to refer to medieval peasants.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.