Organization and Condition of the Rural Classes in the West from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries.

In the rural districts of the West, as in the towns, emancipation and colonization brought about the formation of new social categories, and determined the birth of classes different from those which had characterized the previous age. Distinctions began to appear between the free peasant proprietors, the censitaires, tenants who paid dues and were not proprietors, though they enjoyed a sort of semi-ownership, and the associates and organizers of cultivation. Above the survivals of the old social and economic régime, serfdom, and even slavery, there appeared a class of agricultural wage-earners.