demands and judicial protections of royal authority. And that question, though never
unimportant, became crucial only later, when the monarchy and other central institutions
regained strength. Precise legal definitions of serfdom derive primarily from 12th-and
13th-century records, long after the varied social configurations we call “serfdom” came
into existence.
The legal precision in the French sources ca. 1200 owes much to the concern of jurists
for determining litigants’ access to royal or princely courts reserved for “free people.”
Certain obligations owed to lords or restrictions on personal power were said by the
jurists to debase personal status and thus to block access to courts of free people,
especially for the defense of property. These included subjection to an arbitrary
capitation, or head tax, often called chevage; the requirement to pay the token of lordship
known as the taille; the incapacity to inherit, termed mainmorte; the prohibition of
marriage outside the lordship, or formariage; restrictions on residence and free
movement; liability to forced labor, or corvée. Because serfdom differed from region to
region, it was not unknown for one or more of these obligations to be absent in practice.
Moreover, liability to any one of them did not necessarily make an individual a serf.
Burghers in a seigneurial town could be under the restriction of for-mariage or subject to
the taille, for example. But one effect of the sharpening of legal categories in the late 12th
and 13th centuries was the tendency of “free” people to buy themselves out of obligations
whose vocabulary or content raised any presumption of servile status.
It is still an open question whether most French rustics at any time in the Middle Ages
should be considered serfs, given the welter of names applied to varying forms of
dependence and changes in the nature of dependence even when the words remained the
same; homme de corps is a case in point. Some regions, like Normandy, never knew
serfdom, however we define it, as an important social or economic institution. Finally, it
is difficult to assess the economic and social impact of serfdom even in regions where
there is no doubt that the majority of rustics lived under theoretically debasing
obligations. The authority of lords, although expressed in the powerful language of
obligations owed to them, was never absolute and always contested. This helps explain
why so many of the obligations, theoretically arbitrary or at the pleasure of the lord, were
in fact rigorously regulated by custom.
In the most general sense, manorial courts—courts that adjudicated property and other
disputes involving servile tenants—were as bound by customary restraints on arbitrary
lordship as the courts of free people. More specifically, debasing obligations were usually
mitigated in practice. Negotiation led to chevage and even the taille (though less
systematically) becoming levies collectible only at regular intervals and, indeed, at fixed
sums whose burden was gradually eroded by inflation. Mainmorte might be resolved into
a system that permitted the serf to inherit as long as the lord received the “best beast” in
the legacy. Marriages between serfs of different lords or between a serf and a free person
could be accomplished by the payment of a fine or fines to the appropriate lord or lords,
and the relationship of the children of these marriages to the lord could frequently be
worked out by negotiation. Serfs could purchase permission to take up residence in other
lord-ships. And lords sometimes commuted corvées to fixed monetary sums, sometimes
required very limited amounts of labor as the corvée, or sometimes even “paid” for the
labor by giving workers a superabundance of food and drink during the period of the
corvée.
The Encyclopedia 1657