ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on persons who can be fitted into unambiguously servile categories and eschews any extended discussion of a variety of intermediate terms and statuses which can vary ambiguously in their meaning between precise legal terminology and generic social appellations. In contrast to the abundant references but limited variety of the Latin terminology, there are very few surviving Old High German vernacular references in Bavarian sources to slave status of any sort. In medieval Bavaria, the term 'servus', in its usage, designated the unfree legal status of the slave. 'Colonus' as a designation for a dependent tenant, possibly of privileged, even personally free status, occurs in an unusual provision of the Bavarian Law Code which is otherwise saturated with vestiges of Roman fiscal practice. 'Colonia', the 'colon-holding' or tenancy, continued to be used in the ninth century but as a neutral, descriptive designation for a dependent tenant farmstead or a standard measure of land.
