ABSTRACT
It is not birth alone, but also the occupation of certain tenures, residence on certain parcels of land, which will turn a peasant into a serf. What is more, these territorial serfs will be regarded as 'attached' to the soil. It would hardly be correct to say that they must never leave their land; but if they depart without their master's permission, their tenures will be forfeit. Opinion on this question was influenced to some extent by academic theories. The lawyers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who set themselves to study Roman Law ransacked their venerable authorities, the source of all wisdom, for precedents bearing on the social institutions of their own day, and on serfdom in particular: a very tall order, when one considers that serfdom was the most specifically medieval of all existing institutions. Serf, servus: the consanguinity of the words was a standing invitation to compare serfdom with classical slavery. But the gulf between the two conditions was only too patent; and the French lawyers, if we except certain instances of individual aberration, had the sense to refrain from pressing an analogy which was to provide so much capital for their colleagues in Eastern Germany in succeeding centuries, to the great misfortune of their compatriot Leibeignenen. To make up for this restraint, the French jurists were less diffident about assimilating serfdom with the colonate, which certainly differed from slavery but resembled it in entailing submission to a lord. In this they were doubtless encouraged by the fact that the serfdom they knew, which was territorial rather than personal in character, had already advanced some way towards becoming inseparably linked with bondage to the soil. But by giving legal definition to this growing affinity they can only have accentuated it. The very terms used most readily by notaries and academic lawyers to designate the new-style serf were those applied by students of Roman law to the colonate: ascriptus glebae, or with still greater force, serf de fa glebe, serf of the glebe -an arresting contrast indeed with the 'body man' of former days. But we must not overrate the importance oflegal theory. Had the excess of land over labour been as great as formerly, the efforts of lords to retain their serfs by threatening to confiscate their 'glebe' would surely have met with little success. Had the great clearances not already been accomplished, the rule of 'attachment' would have been an empty formula.
