Eh? I’m not seeing that information on the page you linked to.
Serfdom was not slavery. Eh, if you wanna strenth the definition to fit your own personal viewpoint, then slavery still exists in the western world via corporate employment. We can stretch the definition as much as we like, but serfdom was NOT the same as slavery. It was fairly unpleasant and unfair, yes; but it was not slavery by any reasonably definition which doesn’t include modern corporate employment. One’s Lord could not kill you at will; you had rights to property, family, and earnings. Implying that this was slavery is stretching the definition beyond breaking point. Hell, I’m a slave, then.
Wiki says of serfdom in France ‘For example, serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315), and Philip V (1318). With the exception of a few isolated cases, serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century.’
I wouldn’t rely on Wiki, but the number of serfs in western, not eastern Europe, would have been pretty small by the 1500s…
Serfdom happened over a period of around 1100 years across all of continental Europe. Germany and on West (France, Spain, England) had relatively “mild” forms of serfdom. When you go East it gets worse the farther East you go, in Russia serfdom was probably one of the worst forms of human living ever seen on a large scale.
Serfs had to work for their lord, if they didn’t their lord could punish them. Serfs were often subject first and foremost to manor courts, which were ran by the feudal lord. There were a few more steps involved than traditional chattel slavery in Rome in which the master had arbitrary/on the spot powers of punishment, but the end result was the same. As a serf, you could not move out of your servitude, your children were bound because you were bound. The feudal lord had legal rights over you, including the right to punish you for not working for him.
Serfdom was slavery, I’m not sure why some people don’t seem to accept that fact.
However, if you note European colonization of the Caribbean you’ll note that every major European power made use of slaves there–even though many of these powers had long since abolished serfdom. So why did they “roll it back” so to speak? The answer is that the abolition of serfdom had nothing to do with the viewpoint of Europeans vis-a-vis slavery. Europeans showed for a period of 300 years or so they had few moral qualms about enslaving indigenous peoples of other societies. Europeans weren’t shipping indigenous peoples back to Europe to be agricultural slaves because Europe was full up of agricultural labor, it didn’t need chattel slaves.
After 1500 serfdom was very rare East of the Rhine, and fairly rare in Germany itself. Austria, Poland, Hungary, the Baltic territories, Russia, etc practiced serfdom for much longer.
When Emperor Joseph II worked to abolish serfdom in his realm in the late 18th century it was controversial enough that it caused serious issues for him politically. The Russians kept their serfs for more than fifty years after that.
What’s notable about East versus West Europe is sometimes Western European countries on paper didn’t abolish serfdom that much earlier than Eastern countries, but in practice Western Europe had only small pockets of serfdom post-1500 which was eventually outlawed by statute. Eastern Europe was still practicing it heavily, when Emperor Joseph outlawed it in Austria it wasn’t something that only affected a few people, it affected a huge number of people because it was still widely practiced there.
Oliver Cromwell didn’t sell them into slavery. That would be wrong, and no Englishman would be able to abide by that.
Instead, he merely forced them to become indentured servants for their short brutal lives and scattered them all over the empire while they toiled away in the sun at the various plantations. Nope. Not slavery at all!
Most of the Irish [del]slaves[/del] indentured servants were settled in Monserrat in the Caribbean which besides Ireland is the only other country where St. Patricks Day is a national holiday.
The Irish there are quite lucky. It’s a very lovely place. It’s called the Jewel of the Caribbean, the Paradise of… OH MY GOD THE VOLCANO IS ERUPTING! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!
I had assumed the whole island was abandoned back in the 1990s when a dormant volcano decided not to be dormant anymore, but apparently people still live in the northern 1/3 of the island. The rest is covered by volcanic ash along with the former capital of Plymouth. According to what literature I can find, it’s a place to go to experience what a Caribbean island is like without all the tourist hoopla.
The big difference between corporate employment and serfdom is you’re allowed to quit your employment with the corporation.
While in many scenarios a serf trying to “quit” would be unthinkable (because they would have to vacate the land and would almost immediately die of starvation along with the rest of their family), even still serfs did try to escape. I say escape because it was illegal for a serf to leave their lord’s service. There were people employed who tracked down runaway serfs and returned them to their lord. You’ve probably heard of similar persons who captured runaway slaves for profit in the pre-Civil War United States.
Talking in general about serfdom is kind of pointless though, because it was so different based on what time and what place you’re looking. Some serfs had legal rights, some serfs were protected against arbitrary punishment, some serfs had a right to family and property. In Russia, serfs could be and were sold and shipped elsewhere, without regard to their familial connections. In Prussia (a part of Germany), serfs could be punished through manor courts which were ran by the feudal lord. These punishments could be harsh and the courts were essentially as arbitrary as the lord themselves. (One of the things the Hohenzollern monarchs fought with the junkers over was the manor courts, eventually the monarchy reigned in the worst abuses and regulated the manor courts so that they were not mere instruments of the junker’s will.)
When I quoted Wiki a few hours ago, this line appeared in the Wiki article:
Oddly, you have to go back a version to see it now, because in the last hour it appears someone has edited that line out of the Wiki.
However, the Wiki does still state (as of this post) that:
Which suggests that Cromwell himself wasn’t personally responsible, but the point is still valid: Irish could be and were sold into slavery.
I’ve never heard that it was even called indentured servitude. I’m pretty sure it was understood as slavery. I suspect that the children of the Irish would not have inherited that status of slavery from their parents: the absolute heritability of slavery was still an ambiguous idea in 1650, and even then tended to be applied mostly to African slaves. But that’s all pretty meaningless when you are being deported to the sugar islands: those populations worked too hard and died too fast to reproduce much. Populations were always sustained through importation.
To be exact, in England ( and Germany ) if one managed to get to a city ( or in the German states a Free City, at least ) and live there a year and a day, then the lord’s claims lapsed.
Whereas with escaped chattel slavery, at least in the US, if one escaped and was recognized, even years later, people were legally bound to assist the owner’s claim — not that everyone would; still it was best to get to Canada if possible.
“To you” isn’t a definition. Like I said, if you wanna expand the definition to what it means “to me” then it can mean anything you want.
But “to me” is not relevant.
Because it doesn’t meet the definition of slavery.
Corporate employment to me = slavery.
See what I did there?
Of course, I don’t actually believe that; I’m just playing devil’s advocate. All I’m trying to say is that you can’t define slavery as whatever you disaprove of; it has a specific meaning - and serfdom does not fall under that definition because it doesn’t meet the criteria. A serf could marry, own property, and could not be killed at whim by his lord. These are important differences (*especially *the last).
I’m not saying serfdom was good; I’m just saying it wasn’t slavery.
I’m not totally unsympathetic to your point of view, but by this definition, there was no slavery in America by 1850: out and out murder of a slave was illegal, even if those laws were poorly enforced. It was discussed here.
Really, I am not sure flat out killing has been acceptable since Roman slavery, and since Roman fathers could also kill their children and generals could kill their soldiers, I think it was more a function of being Roman than being a slave.
To my knowledge outside of “me and you” I believe the only hard and fast difference between a serf and slave, at least in the minds of historians and people who lived through the times, was that serfs were primarily defined by their being bound to specific land while slaves were bound to a specific master.
However, if you’re a slave in service of a specific fief instead of a specific person I’d argue you’re still a slave.
You seem to totally ignore what I’ve already said:
Some serfs were subject to summary execution
Some serfs could not marry without approval
Some serfs were not allowed to own property
And while we’re at it:
Some slaves were protected from summary execution
Some slaves could marry without prior approval
Some slaves were allowed to own property
So as fun as it is to mock me by saying my definition only has meaning “to me” I think you’ll find that while serfs and slaves were treated very differently throughout human history based on time and place, they both shared something very much in common.
If you’re going to say that the key distinction between “slave” and “not slave” is that a slave can be summarily executed, then I could point to instances in which peoples that all of history refers to as “slaves” were protected from summary execution. Likewise, I could point to people that all of history refer to as “serfs” who were not protected from summary execution.
To me the defining attribute of slavery is that you lack liberty. Which I define as freedom of movement and freedom over your own time and how you choose to pursue it. I don’t mean freedom from consequences. If you’re employed by a company you do not have true freedom of time on a daily basis, but you have agreed to give up freedom over your own time in exchange for something. A slave does not get to enter into that agreement willingly and cannot leave it willingly.
I would then argue there is a second dynamic to slavery, namely that you enter into it primarily so that someone else can benefit directly from the deprivation of your labor, primarily in terms of that person being able to increase their wealth and income.
This is an important point, because one could point to conscripts and convicts as lacking liberty. However, conscripts are drafted for the good of the State for the protection of the State as a whole; convicts are denied liberty for the protection of the State and its citizens, and as punishment for illegal actions. Slaves generally are not being enslaved as punishment (sometimes they were…though), but they’re being enslaved to directly benefit another individual in a financial sense.
Serfs share both of these traits. Serfs lack liberty and they are subject to their condition primarily to serve the economic interests of a more powerful individual.
Some would argue that a key component separating a serf and a slave is that slaves were paid for their labor, so even though it was forced and involuntary, it cannot be slavery. Well, I disagree with that. Serfs were allowed to keep a portion of their output, and to live on the land. Historically you can find many instances in which slaves were paid by their masters, either on a regular basis or in the form of periodic gifts. So to me the simple fact that serfdom had a built in “payment” system in the form of “free rent” doesn’t change the underlying involuntary servitude (and perpetual/lifelong at that) aspects of serfdom.
I’m not one to quote Wikipedia as authoritative, but I quote them here because I think it makes my argument in a manner agreeable to myself and my views on this:
I think “modified slavery” is a perfect way of describing serfdom. I view serfdom as a subclass of slavery. Not all slaves are serfs, but all serfs were, in my opinion, slaves.
I don’t know the full history in England, but in Germany the “year and a day” thing was rescinded at various times throughout history. I know that in Prussia for example under the pressure from junkers, the monarchy for a time stopped providing such protection. There were also instances in which the German Free Cities were stripped of their ancient protections and liberties, during the rise of absolutist monarchy and et cetera.
There were also instances in which persons who were paid to capture runaway serfs in Prussia captured persons who had never been serfs at all. (There was also a point in Prussian history in which persons who captured Army deserters would round up any random group of people and force them into the Army under the ruse that they had previously deserted.) Just as in America there were instances in which runaway slave catchers illegally kidnapped free blacks. As for being bound to assist in the capture of a runaway slave, that was not generally true until passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, and as you note it was not widely supported in the North. In many Northern States the State legislatures passed laws which effectively made it legally very difficult for a slave catcher to find success in bringing runaway slaves back.
But not in England. There were no laws providing for slavery in England. The slaves all were in English colonial possessions, which had their own laws.
Not that early. Abuses of serfdom were one of the complaints of the Jaqueriue. I mean, I agree that serfdom was pretty much obsolete in France by the end of the 15th century, but the same was true in England. Nevertheless, it took until the French Revolution that serfdom was abolished by statute.
Well, at the same time, England may not have had slaves nor conscription, but we did have the Press Gang. Once on a ship, the captain had full powers of life or death pretty nearly at whim. Some of them, oddly enough not Captain Bligh, had a marked taste for flogging.
True. One general sent an officer off to catch a deserted officer and execute him: to the fellow’s delight he found the other had not deserted but been delayed and brought him back against his specific orders. The general had both of them killed.
Yes, but they were white and they were Christian (-ish, from Cromwell’s perspective). Go a hundred years in the future and it’s hard to imagine British solders selling 50K rebellious American colonists into slavery: by then, slavery had picked up a distinctive racial element.
I apologise if it seemed I was mocking you; that was not my intention.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that the two share traits. And given the rest of your post, I’ve actually come round to your point of view - you’ve convinced me!
I was curious as to what extent “their own laws” allowed them to make all the decisions about slavery up to the revolution. Which would also point to the degree to which the Founders were influenced by the attitudes of the mother country when they were doing the founding.
I was also curious about the other colonial possessions and the extent to which slavery was still a key economic factor when slavery was abolished in them.
Here’s a complete list of Parliamentary bills dealing with slavery and the slave trade. As you can see, most of them deal with the slave trade itself, because almost all decisions about slavery itself before the American Revolution (as well as after it in the other British colonies) was colonial law made by colonial assemblies. The page might be helpful, though:
Slavery was important up to abolition is the West Indies colonies, and they, especially Jamaica, which which was the biggest and richest, were strong opponents of its abolition. You might want to check out Sharpe’s Rebellion in Jamaica.
There were two classes of indentured servants. There were those who served a master for a set period of time. And, there were those who indenturetude was a wee bit longer (like forever). Quote from Wikipedia:
Indentured servitude was a common part of the landscape in England and Ireland during the 17th century. During the 17th century, many Irish were also kidnapped and taken to Barbados. In 1643, there were 37,200 whites in Barbados (86% of the population).[25] Many indentured servants were captured by the English during Cromwell’s expeditions to Ireland and Scotland, who were forcibly brought over between 1649 and 1655.
Much like slaves, indentured servants could be bought or sold. Excuse me, I mean their contract could be bought or sold. They were at the mercy of their master, and many suffered ill treatment. However, they were never “slaves” since enslaving a fellow British citizen was legally dubious.
Britain had all sorts of methods to have what looks like slavery without having to refer to it by such a nasty name. One was arresting people for petty crimes, then shipping them off to penal colonies to work for the colonial masters. Others included forcing people to work off their debt, indentured servitude, and later workhouses for the poor.
England didn’t do much to stop the Arab slave raiders raiding the English South Coast.
It’s very difficult to understand, but slavery used to be a normal and accepted part of human history since before there was writing. It’s only in the past few hundred years that people have actively worked against slavery.