IV

feudal burdens outlasted the feudal barons, who vanished when they had grown useless; these dues became the appanage of nobles, often of middle class origin, who did not render the services of which these dues had been the meed. Violently attacked by the bourgeois writers, and energetically defended by the feudists, they were definitely suppressed in France by the revolution of 1789. The earlier English revolution which established bourgeois authority, the House of Commons by the side of the House of Lords, has allowed a number of feudal privileges to subsist which are anachronisms at a time when the aristocratic or landed classes are simply a wing of the “great middle class “ in every sense of the word.

The political economists and liberal bourgeois of this century, instead of investigating the origin of feudal obligations, exposing the transformations they have undergone, and explaining the necessity thereof, have fancied that they were giving proofs of learning and liberality of spirit by a sweeping condemnation of everything in any way connected with the feudal system. Howbeit, it is imperative for the understanding of the social organisation of the Middle Ages to ascertain the signification of these obligations, which are the movable form of feudal property. It would be wearisome to pass in review all of the feudal obligations. I will confine myself to those which have more especially roused the ire of the bourgeois writers, and try to show that if they were maintained and aggravated by force, they had been, at the origin, freely consented to.

SOCAGE. – We have seen that the feudal baron, when not a military chieftain installed by a conqueror, was, as a rule, a simple citizen, a member of the community distinguished by no special privileges from the rest of the villagers, his co-equals; like these he received his allotment in the partition of the lands, and if his acres were cultivated for him by the commoners this was done that he might devote himself exclusively to their defence. Haxthausen has observed that the Russian lord continued to receive a quarter or a third of the territory of the mir which was cultivated by the villagers. Latruffe-Montmeylian says that in France the proportion of the communal lands allotted to the lord varied according to the nature of the rights of the inhabitants. It amounted to two thirds when the peasants’ rights of common extended to the demesne forests, and to a third only when the rights were confined to the communal forest. With the increase of the possessions of the barons and the monks, there followed a lack of serfs to cultivate their lands, wherefore they gave their arable en bordelage to peasant collectivities, “eating from the same pan and off the same loaf,” to use the language of the period. But, whether freemen or serfs, the tenants owed a certain number of days of work to the feudal lord, to till his field or house his corn.

As, at this period, production of commodities and commerce did not as yet exist, the baron, no less than the peasant, was obliged to produce all that was requisite to supply his wants. In the feudal habitation there existed workshops of every description for the manufacture of arms, farming implements, stuffs, clothing, etc., in which the peasants and their wives were bound to work for a certain number of days in the year. The female labourer was under the direction of the lady of the manor herself, and the workshops for the same were termed geniciæ. The monasteries likewise possessed workshops for females. These workshops were rapidly turned into harems for the lords and their retainers, and even into dens of debauchery, in which the barons and the priests debauched their female serfs and vassals. The word geniciaria (woman working in the genicia) became synonymous with prostitute. Our modern brothels, as we see, have a religious and aristocratic origin.

In the beginning the number of days of work due to the baron by his vassal was insignificant; in some places it amounted to three days in the year. In France, the royal ordinances, in default of a contract or custom, prescribed the number of twelve days. Villein socage was harder; but the service was not to exceed three days a week, and the serfs had, further, the enjoyment of a small field which the lord had ceded to him and from which he could not be expelled; he had also a share in the baron’s harvest and a right of pasture in the forest and arable lands. Count Grasparin, who was Minister of Agriculture under Louis XVIII, in his treaty on Fermage, published in 1821, states his belief in the superiority, as regards the landed proprietor, of the system of métayage to that of socage. But in the decline of the feudal system the lords abused their power to aggravate socage. “They had usurped such authority,” says Jean Chenu, a writer of the beginning of the seventeenth century, “that they exacted the labour of tillage, the gathering their grapes and a thousand other services, with no better title than the peasants’ fear of being beaten or eaten up by their men at arms.” When, in the fourteenth century, peace was gradually established in the interior of Europe, every useful function had been taken away from the feudal baron; and the nobles who succeeded the barons became parasites and tyrants.

BANS DE MOISSON. – It has been supposed that the lord’s right of prescribing the days on which to mow the fields, gather the grapes, reap the corn, etc., was a purely feudal one, whereas its origin is traceable to the period in which collective property obtained. We have seen above that in order to allow the arable lands to remain open to the cattle of the village, the elders fixed the days for the various harvests. This usage, established in the interests of the villagers, could only be diverted from its true ends when the lord began to traffic with his crops. He substituted his own authority for that of the council of the elders, or influenced their decisions so as to retard the proclamation of the ban des moissons and be beforehand with his own crops, and able, consequently, to sell them earlier and on better terms than the produce of the communal fields.

BANALITÉ. – The term is feudal; but the custom which it designates is a communistic one. In the village collectivities, certain offices, as afore shown, were filled by individuals maintained at the expense of the commune; there was the village herdsman, who drove the cattle to pasture; there were common forges, mills, slaughter-houses, and animals to breed from, at the disposal of the community. Private families, instead of baking their own bread, sent it to be baked in the communal oven; a custom introduced from the economical consideration of reducing the consumption of fuel. The charge of watching over and attending to these ovens was entrusted to the council of elders; thereafter to the lord, who, whenever it was in his interest to do so, substituted his own authority for that of the men commissioned by the commune. A small tax was levied for this right of usage of the common objects; in an ordinance of 1223, of Guillaume Blanchemain, Archbishop of Reims, it is said that “the prelate shall be the proprietor of the common oven and be entitled to the tribute of a loaf for every batch of thirty-two loaves.” Boucher d’Argis cites decrees of 1563 and 1673 fixing the right of grinding in the common mills at a 16th and a 13th; it is computed that, at present, the miller deducts more than a tenth.

This sort of institutions could exist only in the absence of the production of commodities; they hampered commerce and stood in the way of private enterprise; the revolutionary bourgeois of France pronounced them tainted with feudalism, and abolished them in 1790.

The CHURCH, which eventually became the exclusive property of the clergy, and is now closed to the public out of the hours of worship, was previously the joint property of the curate, the baron, and the peasants. The chancel and altar belonged to the lord and curate; they were bound to repair the woodwork, flooring, seats, etc., but the nave belonged to the peasants, who used it for their markets, communal assemblies, and dancing parties, or as a storehouse for their crops in case of need. Mr. Thorold Rogers says that in all cases the Church was the common hall of the parish, and a fortress in time of danger, occupying the site of the stockade which had been built when the first settlers occupied the ground. The church bells, likewise, belonged to the peasants, who set them pealing to announce their assemblies, or to apprise the villagers of fires or hostile attacks. In the judicial archives of the French provinces of the 17th and 18th centuries, we find frequent mention of judgments rendered against the bells for having warned the peasants of the arrival of the collectors of the salt-tax; they were sentenced to be taken down and whipped by the hands of the executioner, “notwithstanding that they had been consecrated and blessed by a most solemn ceremony, in which the oil of St. Chrism and myrrh and incense had been used and many prayers recited.” The Church was the house of God, elevated in the face of the feudal manor, and the feudal peasants gathered together under the shadow of it as around a strong and tender mother.

The TITHE raised on the harvests of the peasants and the nobles in favour of the Church, was, in the beginning, optional; just as it is in Ireland at the present hour; it was paid alike to the priest and sorcerer. Agobard, an archbishop of the 9th century, complains that the ecclesiastical tithe is paid with far less regularity than that accorded to the tempestarii, men endowed with the power to lay storms and conjure up foul weather. But from being optional the tithes became compulsory in virtue of the feudal adage, “no land without its tithes and burdens”; they were converted into a seignorial right, and accorded to lay lords and abbots, who re-sold them to other laymen. Discretionary at the outset, the tithes became obligatory; and, in the sequel, constituted an oppressive impost that no performance of services any longer authorised: even so is refined gold transmuted into vile copper!

Just as the seignorial obligations, which became onerous and iniquitous when the feudal barons had ceased to afford protection to their vassals, tenants, and serfs, had at one time been voluntarily acquiesced in; in like manner, the landed property of the nobles, – at first a military post, entrusted temporarily to a warrior, or, simply a right to a share in the agrarian divisions, – grew and expanded by dint of fraud and violence, and generally at the expense of the communal lands.

Marx, in his admirable 27th chapter of Capital, “on the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land,” to which I refer the reader, has described the prompt and brutal fashion in which the Scotch and English lords stole the possessions of the yeomen. “The great encroachers,” as Harrison, the editor of Holinshed’s Chronicle, calls them, went to work expeditiously. In the 15th century the immense majority of the population consisted of peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden. Macaulay calculates that “the number of proprietors was not less than 160,000, who with their families must have made up more than one-seventh of the whole nation. The average income of these small landlords was estimated at between 60 and 70 a year.”

The chief period of eviction began with the 16th century. The great feudal lords drove the peasantry by force from the land, to which they had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and seized upon the common lands. The rapid rise of the Flemish wool manufacture, and the corresponding rise in the price of wool in England, gave a direct impulse to these evictions. The sheep drove out the men.

“The shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame,” says Thomas More, “and so small eaters, now, as I heare say, be become so great devourers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow downe the very men themselves.”

In the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and to their servants, the county clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About 1750 the yeomanry had disappeared, and so had in the last decade of the 18th century the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer. In the 19th century the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and the communal property has, of course, vanished in England. The agricultural population has received not a farthing of compensation for the 3,511,770 acres of common land which, between 1800 and 1831 were stolen from them by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords.

The last process of wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil is, finally, the so-called clearing of estates, i.e., the sweeping men off them. But what “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies we learn only in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland, landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with), finally by the peculiar form of property under which the embezzled lands were held.

The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or “great man,” was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English Government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these “great men,” and their constant incursions into the lowland plains, the chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honoured trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their own authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, they resolved to drive them out by open force. “A king of England might as well claim to drive his subjects into the sea,” says Professor Newman. This revolution, which began in Scotland after the last rising of the followers of the Pretender, can be followed through its first phases in the writings of Sir James Steuart and James Anderson. As an example of the method obtaining in the 19th century, the “clearing “ made by the Duchess of Sutherland will suffice here. This person, well instructed in economy, resolved, on entering upon her government, to effect a radical cure, and to turn the whole country, whose population had already been, by earlier processes of a like kind, reduced to 15,000, into a sheep walk. From 1814 to 1820 these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced the eviction, and came to blows with the inhabitants. One old woman was burnt to death in the flames of the hut which she refused to leave. Thus this fine lady appropriated 794,000 acres of land that had from time immemorial belonged to the clan. She assigned to the expelled inhabitants about 6,000 acres on the seashore – two acres per family. The 6,000 acres had until this time lain waste, and brought in no income to their owners. The duchess, in the nobility of her heart, actually went so far as to let these at an average rent of 2s. 6d. per acre to the clansmen who for centuries had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the stolen clan-land she divided into 29 great sheep farms, each inhabited by a single family, for the most part imported English farm servants. In the year 1835 the 15,000 Gaels were already replaced by 121,000 sheep. The remnant of the aborigines flung on the seashore tried to live by catching fish. They became amphibious and lived, as an English author says, half on land and half on water, and withal only half on both.

The plunder of the State lands on a large scale began with William of Orange.

“These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. All this happened without the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The crown lands thus fraudulently appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these had not been lost again during the Republican Revolution, form the basis of the to-day princely domains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois capitalists favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in land, extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm system, and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to hand.”

After the restoration of the Stuarts the landed proprietors had carried by legal means an act of usurpation, effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality. In 1660 a House of Commons, in which the landlords were supreme, relieved their estates of all feudal dues, then amounting to about one half of the entire revenues of the State. Military service, purveyance, aids, reliefs, premier seisin, wardship, alienation, escheat, all disappeared in a day. In their place were substituted excise duties. By 12 Charles II, c.23 the great bulk of taxation was for the first time transferred from the land to the people, who have borne it ever since.

Landed property monopolised by the lords was exempted from all dues towards the State, as the lord had been discharged from all obligations towards his vassals and tenants: feudal property had been changed into capitalist property.

This transformation was accomplished in Great Britain in the midst of the most awful misery of the peasant class; the cultivators were expelled from the land by wholesale and made beggars. Their numbers became a social danger against which the most barbarous measures were taken. Legislation treated them as “ voluntary “ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed. In England this legislation began under Henry VII.

Henry VIII, 1530: “Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s license. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to a cart tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birth place, or to where they have lived the last three years, and to put themselves to labour.” What grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off, but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the commonweal.”

Elizabeth, 1572: Unlicensed beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless someone will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offence, if they are over 18 they are to be executed, unless someone will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons. Similar statutes, 18 Elizabeth, c.13, and another of 1597, James I: Anyone wandering about and begging is declared a rogue and a vagabond. Justices of the Peace in petty sessions are authorised to have them publicly whipped, and for the first offence to imprison them for six months, for the second two years. Whilst in prison they are to be whipped as much and as often as the Justices of the Peace think fit. Incorrigible and dangerous rogues are to be branded with an “R” on the left shoulder and set to hard labour, and, if they are caught begging again, to be executed without mercy. – These statutes, legally binding until the beginning of the 18th century, were only repealed by 12 Ann, c.23.

Albeit not a single nation in Europe can boast of having raised an aristocracy that accomplished its work of monopolising the land with anything like the rapacity and ferociousness of Scotch and English landlords, nevertheless in all countries the peasant class has been in great part despoiled of its territorial possessions; and no means have been left untried to bring about that most laudable and lucrative consummation. Let me enumerate a few of the devices that were resorted to in France.

The feudal obligations, aids, and fines became so excessive that the peasants commuted for them by ceding to the lords a portion of the common lands. These cessions of territory, greedily hungered after by the feudal lords, would appear, well-nigh all of them, to have been obtained by the aid of artifice; the nobles corrupted a certain number of villagers who managed to constitute in their own persons the general assembly of the commune that voted the cessions; hence we come across royal ordinances in France which specify that for a cession of territory to be valid it must be voted in an assembly of all the inhabitants of the Commune.

The robbers of the communal lands did not invariably employ Jesuitical means; they often plundered with open brutality. In the 16th century, a period when the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie were rapidly developing, the communal lands were coveted at one and the same time by the nobles and by the bourgeois speculators. The towns were enlarged to meet the new requirements, and agriculture increased its yield. The development of agriculture was the great object of the speculators; under the pretext of giving increased extension to the arable lands, they induced the King to grant them, by royal edict, the right of bringing under culture the waste lands; they hastened to include in the category of waste lands the communal territories, and proceeded to wrest them from the peasants, who took up arms in their defence; and to vanquish whose resistance the speculators were compelled to appeal for aid to the armed force of the State.

The nobles had recourse to chicanery in order to win possession of the village territories; they pretended that the lands owned by the peasants did not correspond with their title deeds, which was perfectly true; they insisted on the verification of their claims, and confiscated what was held by imperfect titles for their own benefit. Upon occasion they proceeded after a revolutionary fashion; they destroyed the title-deeds which they had got hold of, and so disabled the peasants from establishing their rights to the fields now left without an owner; whereupon in virtue of the feudal adage, “pas de terre sans seigneur” the nobles seized upon the peasants’ territory. The autos da fé of proprietary titles, held by the peasants during the revolution of 1789, were in retaliation of the suppression of the peasant titles perpetrated by the nobility of the 16th century.

The forests were grabbed up more brutally: eschewing all legal formalities, the lords adjudged to themselves the ownership of the woods and underwood; they enclosed the forests and forbade hunting, and abolished the right of estovers; the right of taking wood for fuel and for the repairs of houses, fences, implements, etc. These encroachments of the nobles on the forest-lands, which were the common property of the village, gave rise to terrible revolts of the peasants.

The jacqueries which broke out in the middle of the 14th century in the provinces of the North and the centre of France, were, in fact, occasioned by the pretensions of the nobles to forbid hunting and to interfere with the rights of common in the forests, and the enjoyment of the rivers. Similar conflicts arose in Germany, such as the famous revolt of the Saxons against the Emperor Henry II, and that of the Suabian peasants, who, in the time of Luther, took up arms against the lords who debarred them from the enjoyment of the forests. These peasant insurrections compelled the lords on several occasions to respect the ancient rights of common which consisted in the right – limited only by the peasant’s wants – to take wood and brushwood for hedging, firing, and repairing his implements (hedge-bote, fire-bote, and plough-bote); and in the right of common pasture, or the right to send his cows, horses, swine, and in some cases his goats, to graze on the commons throughout the year, the month of May alone excepted. So firmly rooted were these rights that Lapoix de Fréminville declared, in 1760, that even in the event of their abuse by the peasants they could not be taken away from them: “for the right of usage is perpetual, and being so, it is accorded alike to the actual inhabitants and to those who may come after them; one cannot strip of an acquired right even those who are as yet unborn.” But the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1789 felt none of the feudal legist’s respect for the peasants’ rights, and abolished them for the benefit of the landed proprietor.

If the lords did, as a matter of fact, occasionally bow to the peasants’ rights of common, they nevertheless constantly declared that these were enjoyed on sufferance only; for they looked upon themselves as the proprietors of the forests; just as in later times they came to pretend to the ownership of the vassals’ lands. In the Middle Ages, when a free man, an alodial proprietor, commended himself to a lord, sought the protection, that is to say, of a powerful person, he presented him with a clod of turf, and vowed fealty and homage to him; yet he remained the master of his field. But in a number of provinces, e.g., in Brittany, the lord considered himself as the owner of the subsoil, while he recognised the peasants’ rights to the superficies, i.e., the crops, trees, buildings, etc. It is in virtue of such legal fictions that during the bourgeois period the nobles expropriated the peasants, descendants from the vassals, their ancestors. In Scotland, the robbery of the peasant property was perpetrated with such undisguised brutality as to arouse the public indignation. Karl Marx, in Capital, has related how the pious Duchess of Sutherland dispossessed the peasants whose fathers had built up the glory and the grandeur of her house.

Until the bourgeois revolution of 1789 had established private property in land, the landed estates in France, including those of the nobility, were subjected to rights of common, which periodically took from them the character of private property. Once the harvest was secured, the forests and arable land appropriated by the nobility became common property again, and the peasants were free to turn their cattle on them. The vines were liable to a similar usage. François de Neufchateau, in his Agronomical Voyage, 1806, cites a Memoire, published in 1763, by the Société d’Economie Rurale en Berne, in which it is complained that “after the vintage the vineyards are laid open to the sheep, who grass there as on common land.” But not only were the landlords bound to permit the pasturing on their lands of the village cattle; they were moreover forbidden to cultivate the soil according to their own methods; they were constrained to conform to the council of the elders, and required permission for the planting of their vines. A permission of this kind was refused a few years before the French Revolution to Montesquieu, greatly to the scandal of the political economists. The proprietor was not allowed to leave his lands uncultivated; for a royal ordinance of Louis XIV, enacted in 1693, and which but consecrated an ancient usage, authorises, – in the event of the owner not cultivating his land himself. – “any person to sow the same and to gather the fruits.”

Landed property, under the feudal system, was anything but free; not only was it burdened with obligations, but it belonged to the family collectively; the owner could not dispose of it at pleasure; he was only the usufructuary possessor whose mission it was to transmit his estates to his descendants. The Church estates, likewise, bore this character; they were the property of the Church, the great Catholic family; the abbots, monks, and priests who occupied the lands were merely the administrators – the very faithless administrators – of them. In order to claim immunity from impositions, the French clergy, down to the time of the revolution, pretended that ecclesiastical possessions ought not to be considered as ordinary property; that it was nobody’s property (res nullius), because it was sacred, religious property (res sacræ, res religiosæ). The revolutionary bourgeois took them at their word; they declared that the clergy were not the proprietors of the ecclesiastical estates, which belonged to the Church. Now, the Greek word ecclesia, whence is derived eglise (church), signifies the assembly, the reunion of all the faithful, which is the nation at large; wherefore the estates of the Church are national property. By the help of such subterfuge did the revolutionary bourgeois, like Henry VII. of England, lay hands upon the Church property and distribute amongst themselves the estates which belonged to the poor.

It is these obligations of feudal property which the political economists and Liberal historians attack with special virulence; obligations which were vestiges of the primitive communism that secured a measure of well-being to the peasants, and which they forfeited as soon as private property had superseded feudal property.

The bourgeois historians have invented the legend of the Revolution of 1789 bestowing the land upon the peasant, and freedom and happiness therewithal; whereas the plain truth is that the great Revolution stripped him of his rights of common and other secular rights of equal importance, delivering him up, defenceless, into the clutches of the usurers and middlemen; loading him with taxes and forcing him to enter into competition with the great landed proprietor, equipped with capital and machinery. The great bourgeois revolution was fraught with misery and ruin for the peasant. According to the official census, there were, in 1857, 7,846,000 landed proprietors in France; out of these 3,600,000 were so poor that they paid no direct contributions; the number of proprietors, great or small, was consequently reduced to 4,246,000. In 1879 the various questions were ventilated of an agricultural credit, of the application to the landlords of the law of bankruptcy, of the simplification of the law of procedure in expropriations; and an inquiry was instituted to determine the number of landed proprietors entitled to a share in the famous credit. La Republique Française, conducted by Gambetta, much interested in the question, stated in its issue of 25th August, 1879, that there existed in France only 2,826,000 landed proprietors, offering the necessary guarantees entitling them to a share in the credit. Thus from 1851 to 1879 the number of landed proprietors deserving of the name had dwindled to 1,420,000.

To dissipate the errors and falsehoods which the bourgeois writers have propagated respecting the status of the cultivator during the Feudal Period, and the benefits accruing to him from the Revolution, it suffices to compare the conditions of labour of the mediæval cultivator with those of the modern agricultural labourer. The researches made by men of learning, during the last 50 years, and the numerous documents discovered in different towns and convents, enable us to institute such a comparison.

L. Delisle, in his afore-cited study of the condition of the labouring classes in Normandy, points out how the lord shared the fortune of the labourer; for the rent was based upon the harvest. For instance, the tenants of the monks of St. Julien de Tours contributed the sixth sheaf; in other parts the tenant contributed the tenth sheaf; in still others the twelfth. Now, we may rummage the bourgeois world and shall not find a landlord contenting himself with a twelfth or even a sixth of the crops gathered on his estate. These conditions were not confined to a single province, for in the south of France, at Moissac, we meet with identical ones.

Enactments of 1212 and 1214 show us the monks of the Abbey of Moissac receiving only a third, a fourth, or even as little as a tenth of the crops harvested by the peasants who tilled their lands. Lagreze-Fossat, who has studied these enactments, remarks that “a mutual agreement was come to between the peasants and the monks, and the contribution of the produce demanded by the latter does not bear the character of an impost; it was debated beforehand, and freely consented to.”

In the 11th and 12th centuries, when the vine was cultivated in Normandy, the landlords claimed only one half of the crops; the other half belonged to the cultivators. Nowadays, in the vine-growing countries, the peasant rarely tastes the wine he produces.

Guérard has discovered and published the account-book of the Abbey of St. Germain des Près; that precious document, which dates from the time of Charlemagne, enables us to study the lives of the serfs and peasants of the 9th century. The abbey lands were cultivated, not by individuals, but by collectivities of peasants, composed of from 20 to 30 adult persons living together, and the dues paid by them would appear ridiculously small to a modern farmer.

The abbey lands were divided into three categories, the manses ingenuiles, the manses lidiles, the manses serviles. At that period certain qualities were inherent in the land; it was seignorial, free, or servile: Guérard calculates that the peasants paid in labour and in kind 5s. 6d. per acre for the free lands, 8s. 1d. for the tributary lands, and 10s. for the servile lands. The cultivators employed on the abbatial lands, and who, to judge from their names, were mostly Germans, attained, with their families, to the respectable figure of 10,026. The condition of these peasants, considering their great numbers, must have been the normal condition of the cultivators; and what labourer of our day, I ask, would not gladly consent to barter his bourgeois landlord of the 19th for the monk of the 9th century, and hold servile lands at the rate of 10s. per acre?

The condition of the English labourer was no worse.

“There is one very unpleasing remark,” says Hallam in his View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, “which everyone who attends to the subject of prices will be induced to make, that the labouring classes, especially those engaged in agriculture, were better provided with the means of subsistence in the reign of Edward III or of Henry VI than they are at present. In the fourteenth century, Sir John Cullum observes, a harvest man had fourpence a day which enabled him in a week to buy a comb of wheat; but to buy a comb of wheat a man must now (1784) work ten or twelve days. So under Henry VI, if meat was at a farthing-and-a-half the pound, which, I suppose, was about the truth, a labourer earning threepence a day, or eighteenpence in the week, could buy a bushel of wheat at six shillings the quarter, and twenty-four pounds of meat for his family. Several Acts of Parliament regulate the wages that might be paid to labourers of different kinds. Thus the Statute of Labourers in 1330 [1*] fixed the wages of reapers during harvest at threepence a day, without diet, equal to five shillings at present; that of 23 H. VI, c.12, in 1444, fixed the reapers’ wages at fivepence, and those of common workmen in building at threepence-halfpenny, equal to 6s. 8d. and 4s. 5d.; that of 11 H. VII, c.22, in 1496, leaves the wages of labourers in harvest as before, but rather increases those of ordinary workmen. The yearly wages of a chief hind or shepherd by the Act of 1444, were £1 4s., equivalent to about £20; those of a common servant in husbandry, 18s. 4d., with meat and drink; they were somewhat augmented by the Statute of 1496. Yet, although these wages are regulated as a maximum by Acts of Parliament, which may naturally be supposed to have had a view rather towards diminishing than enhancing the current rate, I am not fully convinced that they were not rather beyond it; private accounts at least do not always correspond with these statutable prices. And it is necessary to remember that the uncertainty of employment, natural to so imperfect a state of husbandry, must have diminished the labourers’ means of subsistence. Extreme dearth, not more owing to adverse seasons than to improvident consumption, was frequently endured. But after every allowance of this kind, I should find it difficult to resist the conclusion that, however the labourer has derived benefit from the cheapness of manufactured commodities and from many inventions of common utility, he is much inferior in ability to support a family to his ancestors three or four centuries ago.”

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 feudal property had not as yet succeeded in enfranchising itself from the manifold obligations which recalled its collectivist origin, and which prevented it from being converted into private property having the right to use and to abuse.

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