Serfs could be sold (usually only with the land, but see: villeins in gross), they were obliged to provide labour, and they were not allowed to travel freely or marry freely. Most importantly, they were mostly born into the estate, and they usually had no say in the termination of the situation, barring escape (Stadtluft macht frei).
Quibbling about the picayune differences between villeinage and slavery might make for an interesting debate in another thread, but I stand by my statement - feudalism was just rebranded classical slavery. This is even evident in the origins of the words villein and serf.
Also, I recall reading that the intellectuals in the church disagreed with the concept of slavery. Remember, serfs were tied to the land - they were not property to be sold or traded. A different concept. Actual slaves, people bought and sold like cattle - the church tended to object to at times because they were humans and had souls. Along the way, slavery where Africans were kidnapped and taken to the new world to work, got rebranded by the people who benefited from it with the excuse that since the Africans were heathens (allegedly), slave traders were doing them a favor by taking them to somewhere that they would learn about Christianity. This also morphed into the excuse that the African slaves were somehow subhuman and this was to be their lot in life.
But the southern plantations and those of the Caribbean and South America could benefit from free labor in this way, particularly when it also involved working them to death. There was never such a shortage in Europe of laborers or a need for them in volume to do back-breaking highly undesirable work. Thus Europe did not have the economic drive to accept slavery. The plantation economies did.
Depends on your definition of slavery. If it means “subject to the jurisdiction of a property owner and not free to come and go freely, except on pain of death, mutillation, or imprisonment” then serfdom was very much like slavery. Perhaps they couldn’t be bought and sold individually, but, as MrDibble notes they could effectively be considered to be servants of the land, with their services being bound to it and owed to whoever owned the land.
Sure, yeah, I properly mean serfdom (although serfdom was integral to feudalism)
Unless they were villeins in gross. Then identical in that regard.
Not that I think tying their villeinage to a manor (villein regardant) makes them any less of a functional slave. They are still *not *free persons. And that’s the only meaningful distinction to consider - are they free? If not, they are a captive of some sort. And any captives *who are forced to labour *are slaves.
I don’t know New Testament, but as far as I recall, the Old Testament goes, the only thing it says about utilizing slaves is that a non-Isralite female slave may be given to a male Israelite slave as a wife, with the resulting children being slaves. It also says that slaves (all types) must rest on the Sabbath as all Israelites must.
The only thing I know of that the OT says about punishing slaves is that if a master knocks out a slave’s eye or tooth, the slave is automatically freed.
The Old Testament forbids someone whom a runaway slave asks for refuge from turning said runaway into his or her master.
Well, I mean, there’s also the bit about how if a master beats his slave and the slave dies, it’s okay as long as a couple days passed between the beating and the death.
Oh, and how even a fellow Israelite can be enslaved indefinitely, so long as you give them a wife and they decide they don’t want to leave the wife you have them in exchange for their freedom. Because the wife is the slaveowner’s property no matter what.
I’m subject to the jurisdiction of my local government but I don’t consider myself to be a slave. Serfs weren’t owned by the local baron; they were subject to legal obligations. I’ll grant that serfs were subject to some legal obligations I’m not subject to - but that doesn’t make them slaves.
People in China are subject to some harsh laws (including some which restrict where they can live and work and even how many children they can have) and they don’t have any say in who gets to make those laws. Would you define the entire population of China as slaves?
I can’t find my copy of Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions. So this is from memory- One of the weirdos in the book still has plenty to mark him as strange. But one of the things that made his contemporaries look at him as bizarre doesn’t hold up. He was emphatically opposed to slavery. The shop he ran sold only items “Free From The Blood Of Human Cruelty”.
RE Privileged Class
How exactly do you deine that? In the USA, whites were the privileged class. But in many instances in other places, “privileged class” just meant ‘on the winning side of the war’ or ‘in home territory’.
Relatively few serfs were villeins in gross. The whole point of serfdom was to tie people to the land they worked on.
Are you and I free? I certainly have people who can tell me what to do. And they take my money too.
Which is what forced labor was; a tax by the local government which serfs paid with work instead of money. And in most cases, the local noble would be happy to accept a payment as a substitute for the work if the serf was able to offer it.
But, so far as I can tell, they simply viewed slaves as equals, not slavery as criminal. (I think they had to be careful about suggesting that people free their slaves since any anti-slavery movement was liable to cause a slave uprising. It’s relatively conceivable that they had to endorse slavery whether they wanted to or not.)
I believe that they main difference is that Serfs were Christians and so you were limited in their use. You were expected to treat them as your “flock”. They lived separate from you.
Non-Christian slaves, did not have the same protections. During Medieval times, they were generally female:
As I said, the main difference is whether slaves were treated more as indentured servant - they worked for you, but basically were simply humans who worked for free to a master who could trade them - versus the evolved tropical Americas model, that slaves were considered subhuman livestock.
As for slaves with primitive tribes, the problem is infrastructure. Without an extended society watching for runaways, a troublesome slave could be more of a difficulty. Women or children could be slaves, but in a hunter-gatherer tribal society, an adult male could probably strike out on is own and be gone before the tribe could catch him; he could hang around in the bush and pick off the tribe one by one if he so chose. Without permanent solid buildings and standing armies, rogue males were a liability. Put them in an agricultural society where strangers are noticed, the local city has walls and prisons, the city has a militia to chase down problems - then it becomes practical to have slaves who will realize they cannot escape. You have a ruling class with weapons like metal swords beyond what a renegade escapee could make. They can fashion chains and manacles that a slave cannot easily remove.
Although the movie “A Man Called Horse” describes a plains Indian practice where captives were worked like horses, watched by all the braves of the tribe and eventually left to die of exposure when winter came. (Spoiler - he didn’t) But this is the other side of the problem - it might work for one slave in a village of a few dozen men watching, but an appreciable number of slaves won’t work in that setting.
And again - slavery was not intended to create a class of subhumans, that was an affectation of the American South. Slavery in ancient times was just a mechanism by which the class with the upper hand obtained free labour while providing food and a place to live for those who had nothing, either by bad fortune or war.
Remember the Dickens novels times and earlier, there were “poor houses” which were essentially for the same purpose - take the hungry homeless off the street where they were a menace to alw and order, and lock them up somewhere where they provided work in return for what was supposed to be enough food.
Whatever society did once upon a time to take care of the poor and homeless, or those captured in war, is a different story from the plantation class who deliberately set about kidnapping people and transporting them across the ocean to be worked to death. OTOH, there was a thriving business bringing slaves to Zanzibar - you can still visit the slave market cells where they were auctioned off. The middle east and Persia were also quite willing to buy abducted Africans to be their drudge labourers.
But they existed and they weren’t explicitly called slaves. And you could be moved (without your say-so) from being regardant to in gross if circumstances on a manor changed. So my point stands.
And you can freely stop that relationship at any time. That’s why I said forced.
Another reference in the OT to limiting slavery are some passages suggesting that slaves were to be freed either in Sabbatical years or Jubilee years. (Or after 7 years in general. Or maybe it applied only to indentured servants. Or …)
These sort of things implied a negative view of permanent slavery.
On slavery, or in Orwell-speak “forced-labor”: In ancient Rome it was the practice of many (not all) slave-owners to educate their slaves, train them and give them special skills in order to increase their value. Roman slaves were commonly doctors, teachers, translators, engineers, and practitioners of other highly skilled professions. The Greek biographer Plutarch wrote about Marcus Crassus that at the time of his death he owned tons of premium real estate, lots of mansions and lots of silver mines, but that “nevertheless, one night regard all this as nothing compared with the value of his slaves; so many and so capable were the slaves he possessed.”
(I would be remiss not to point out that there were many slaves in Rome who did live under brutal conditions, even far worse than the conditions common in the southern states of the USA during its fling with unpaid labor.)
I know there were questions directed at me in this thread but I can’t answer them… at least I can’t right away.
I guess part of me was looking for confirmation that we aren’t ALL inherently capable of owning another person as property. I’m a meat eater, but becoming a non-meat eater has crossed my mind. I’m not judging anyone, but if we’re capable of feeling empathy with animals then we certainly be capable of feeling empathy with humans, correct?
I don’t know. I don’t want us to be so ugly.
By the way I’ve scanned through this thread I’m going to reread it later. I just wanted to make it clear what I was kind of secretly hoping to hear.
And thank you to all with the history lessons and things I might have forgotten since I’ve last visited this subject.
Thank you! Literally last week I heard this name in a speech, and I tried a bunch of spellings to Google it, but didn’t come up with this spelling. A dozen years ago I asked a similar question and didn’t get an answer.
Alcidamas, according to that link for those that didn’t follow it, declared, “God has left all men free; nature has made no man a slave.” That sure sounds like an abolitionist to me.
There’s a broader point, however, that literacy was a rare skill way back when, rarely possessed by slaves. Folks with skin in the game would’ve had a hard time recording their thoughts in a form that would’ve survived for a few millennia.