Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The problem
Our object being to inquire into the origins of the rural seigneurie in Western and Central Europe, our first task must necessarily be to form as clear an idea as possible of what it was like when fully developed. You cannot study embryology if you do not understand the grown animal.
The seignorial system, or to use the name under which it is known in England, the manorial system, was not based on slavery in the true sense of that word. Whatever their legal status may have been, even if it went by the name of serfdom, the peasants who composed a seigneurie were in no sense human livestock, fed by their master and owing the whole of their labour to him. They lived on the produce of fields that they cultivated on their own account, which were usually handed down from father to son; and if the opportunity occurred they could sell or exchange the produce in order to procure other necessaries of life. They usually formed little rural communities with a strong esprit de corps; exercising common rights over waste land where their flocks could graze and they could gather food; able to regulate the arable land itself in the common interest with a jealous insistence. But they did not work only for themselves, or for Church and ruler: a great part of their toil went towards the maintenance of one who stood immediately above them.
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