ABSTRACT
Farmers ranged from free to slave and the origins of this inequality interested contemporaries. In his Customs of the Beauvaisis, Beaumanoir catalogued the causes of servitude. Some slavery resulted from capture in war, a belief that rang true in a time when captured Muslims were normally enslaved. These ideas came from Roman law where people were either slave or free, but the English author of Fleta remarked that, although Roman theory was true 'in law', it was not so 'in fact'. Craftsmen were deemed so valuable that they were sometimes held in dependency after ordinary farmers were freed and around 1200 both craftsfolk and soldiers on Bohemian ecclesiastical lordships were of ministerial status. Citizens are those who live in cities or towns equal to cities; of which group those are called burghers who, although they have masters and workers through whom they exercise professions, do not work with their own hands.
