Serfdom in Europe:
The collapse of Western Roman Empire landlords transitioned
from outright slavery to serfdom which was a system to unfree laborers was tied
to the land.
The origins of serfdom in Rome:
The Roman economy's foundational thing was to enslave people tilled the fields, cleaned homes and sometimes served as accountants for wealthy Romans. Valuable crops like olives and grapes which were grown by enormous estates; which required many enslaved people to run.
Civil war, economic collapse, and a breakdown of trade across the Roman Empire was led by the Imperial Crisis of nearly fifty-year in the third century CE. This meant a temporary end to long-distance trade of wine and olive oil.
The elites who ran estate farms had to search elsewhere for low-cost labor as imperial expansion slowed, fewer prisoners of war and kidnapped children were enslaved. The estates had to become self-sufficient, producing food and crafts without outside aid as they were without a centralized economy to lean on.
Lower-class plebeians from the city immigrated to the countryside and entered into a new kind of labor agreement with the landholders as City etching crumbled. Coloni were sharecropper farmers who were neither entirely enslaved nor truly free.
A portion of the harvest produced in their fields was taken from the farmers in exchange for a portion of land which the farmers needed to rent.
Roman emperors created laws that bound the coloni to the land and made their status hereditary as this labor system emerged which got passed from parent to child. Coloni could marry, but they couldn't marry non-coloni.
They could not leave the land to which they were assigned.
They could not file suit against their landlords. This system, and these
restrictions, would eventually become known as serfdom. Similar systems emerged
independently throughout several different societies.
Slavery and serfdom:
The distinctions between slavery and serfdom are too many. Slavery is a system in which enslaved people were not considered human beings with rights as it was a system in which a person can be bought and sold as property.
The time this law was written classifying enslaved people as livestock was typical. Serfs, though they had far fewer rights than free peasants (poor farmers of low social status) however, legally they were people. Serfs' owed rents of all sorts to their landlords their movements were constrained even their property rights were limited.
People who didn't own the land they worked owed some kind of payment to their landlords were called tenant Farmers. The amount and type of payment was not influenced by market forces it was coercive, or forced.
Tenant farmers had few ways to contest the rent demanded of them as there was no standard rent in middle ages. Usually the local legal authorities were called the lord of the manor who set the terms of the rent agreement.
A moral economy was enforced by the teachings of the church where cultural or political intervention limits market prices or freedom of contract. This system ensured that the lord had the right to rule and that the poor farmers were entitled to his protection.
There were, for example, biblical prohibitions against charging interest that were enforced during this period. The peasants rejected the system and revolted when the shared values of the community were broken.
Many estates in England were monasteries, for example. In an accounting from a thirteenth-century English abbey, a serf named Hugh Miller paid three sorts of rent: monetary, labor, and rent within the sort of food. Each year, Miller paid three shillings and a penny—approximately $266 today.
He worked the abbot's land three days every week, apart from
one week at Christmas, one at Easter, and one at a summer festival. In addition
to money and labor, Miller owed the abbot one bushel of wheat, 18 sheaves of
oats, three hens, and a rooster annually, with a further five eggs owed for
Easter.
Why serfdom?
The serfs needed a lord's protection without the peace guaranteed by Charlemagne's unified rule. The threat of violence lurked everywhere: from bandits and therefore the armed bands of other warlords as there has been absence of a robust centralized government.
A serf could expect the lord's private army to guard them in exchange for tending a lord's demesne. The labor shortages caused by war and disease limited the available workforce in Western Europe therefore the lords needed the serfs too.
A peasant's rights to resettle were constrained within the terms of Serfdom because it maintained a labor force for the lordly class.
The terms were derived from a spread of sources like "barbarian" codes of the Germanic kingdoms, Church law, and Roman property ordinances so these agreements could vary widely though some labor practices were relatively standard.
The military units that protected elite landlords' estates, and therefore the people that worked and lived on them were sustained by the unfree farming which went overseen by the elite landlords.
The wealth generated by these feudal estates powered the Crusades, and, following the Black Death and therefore the Peasant Revolt, would begin to concentrate within the peasant class.
This would cause artisan specialization, the expansion of cities, and a desire for goods from far-off places. Those factors together would cause the increase of guild economies, the Renaissance, and therefore the colonial voyages of discovery.
Written by: Gourav Chowdhury
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