ABSTRACT
The bulk of the people in every country were serfs. The Church might be merciful to them, but their secular masters were not. Many poor people took arms in the first Crusade, hoping to escape the tyranny of their lords; and lords going on crusade recommended those whom they left behind to treat the villeins mercifully, not for the love of God, but for fear of mutiny. In the Assise of Jerusalem, an enlightened code, as far as feudalism permitted, a runaway serf might be claimed as if he were a strayed falcon. His value was estimated at one-third that of a warhorse. The Church has been blamed for not doing more to raise their condition. The wonder rather is, that the Church was able to help them at all. What could be done, they did, in awakening the conscience of the knights and gentry. They could not alter the fundamental rule of the society in which they lived. The Truce of God, brought about by the influence of the clergy, spared (as did Magna Carta) the labourer's cart and OX; and the serfs of the Church were more humanely treated than others.
