Rights in the Middle Ages

[Athanasiy]

I am in a metro, spontaneously reading the Dutch newspaper I found on my sit
The picture describes exactly what I was saying.
The Marxists considered the clergy as third stronghold in the taxonomy of existential pyramid.
First -the capital, Lords, clergy…
That’s why its interesting to read about the arguments, how strong was the church voice on human rights in mediaeval period. (Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Salibi]

Europe serfs had many rights

Such as?

Ten chars

 

[annem]

This is laughably wrong. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Russia, Greece, etc. aren’t the fringes of Europe. And all had slavery well into the 14th century. Many as late as the 18th and 19th century on mainland Europe and into the mid-to-late 19th century in their colonies.
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Sorry, but it is your statement which is factually incorrect.

The fringes of Europe I mentioned included a possible slave market in Ireland (disputed) , and some areas which were still under pagan control, such as the Norse countries and areas in what we now call Eastern European nations

Perhaps your misunderstanding comes from thinking that serfs were slaves?

 

[Rhubarb]

No, I didn’t mistake anything. And I provided the links to follow the sources for you. The serfs were freed in Brittan before the slaves were. The same in Spain and Portugal. You’re welcome to argue against those sources, perhaps with some of your own?

And I didn’t even bother to talk about how it’s silly to say that a country abolished slavery when their colonies still practiced slavery.

 

[dochawk]

I’m no historian but i believe these rights only applied to lords and the gentry back in medieval times tho.

Correct. A trial by “a jury of your peers” meant that only the other lords (the Peers of the realm" ), rather than the king on his own, could convict you. It very much didn’t apply to the commoners, who would still be tried by their local lord or perhaps even a mere squire or so for a petty offense (“low justice”)

A general acknowledgment of rights was a much later notion.

The Robin Hood tale is based on the historic Robin, Earl of Loxley, but . . . “Good King Richard” was one of the worst kings in English history. After gaining the throne by defeating and killing his father in battle , he immediately headed off to the crusades, and was promptly captured. His vassal/brother/regent, John, was obligated to raise the ransom. Richard spent less than a month of his reign in England . . .

And as for the taxes Robin was stealing? That wasn’t stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but rather the very taxes for the new courts established by Richard and Johns father to create a “Common Law of England” (law was far from uniform across the island), which, most importantly, gave the common man a chance for the first time if oppressed by his lord. Previously, his lord would be defendant, judge, and jury. If he could find an appropriate “writ”, though, he could take it from the feudal court into the king’s court . . . a very radical development.

And as for John, he was one of England’s better kings, although this was helped a long by signing the Magna Carta (albeit at the “wrong end” of a spear when the lords rebelled . . .) .

As for the Shire Reeve (later corrupted in language to “sheriff”) of Nottingham–I really know nothing about him.

Robin of legend’s love interest, Maid Marion, is a character from a french poem a second later that somehow escaped here now mostly forgotten poem and crept into Robin’s legend . . .

And as for juries? The original “petit jury” (what we commonly call a jury at a trial) had none of our modern notions of disinterest or lack of knowledge: when the king’s judge and officers came to town, and had to hold a trial, they rounded up the local men because they knew the people involved, and what had happened . . .

 

[dochawk]

Likewise, serfs didn’t have a ‘right to their land’. They were bound to their lord’s land.

but not his land in general–a specific part of it. The lord (supposedly) couldn’t move them around. (in fact, I"m not sure he could do it even with their permission, anymore than he could alienate a “fee tail” estate from his heirs).

In Russia thousands of them were transported to the Ural Mountains and worked to death.

Russian “serfs” were not serfs in the normal European sense ofd the word; they were flat-out slaves , ,

1). Slavery was ended by the Catholic church in Europe in about the 6th-7th century, over the great objections of the rich.

on a tour in New Orleans, I was informed that in Louisiana (as opposed to the rest of the American South), due to the Jesuits, slaves were obligated to work only Monday to Friday, and could sell their labor, if they so chose, on Saturday, and keep the wages (minimal though they were). It was at least theoretically possible to buy one’s freedom this way . . .

Roman slavery

I have a book somewhere on Roman slavery, that I never finished reading (I think I moved).

Early slavery was actually merciful in it’s own way–once a city defeated its neighbor, it was a change from killing them all: you had to do something to stop them from coming back and fighting again. (contrast to the Old Testament “ban” )

 

[Athanasiy]

But on the other side, russian Lords were not legalistic.
They were not as pedantic despots as Lords on the West.
In drunk amusements and debousheries the serfs could be treated cruelly or vice versa, they were treated like a comrades or the part of the family.
Therefore in some degree the serfs were treated not too strictly, but serfdom in the empire is very bitter historical period.
The literature of 18th and 19th century(both Russian and Ukrainian) willingly or unwillingly paving the road for the socialism.

 

[midori]

…But the sale and purchase of men, already exceptional at the beginning of this period (8th, 9th, 10th c. Britain), is almost unknown before the end of it. Apart from domestic slaves within the household, slavery in the old sense which Pagan antiquity gave that institution had been transformed out of all knowledge, and when, with the eleventh century, the true Middle Ages begin to spring from the soil of the Dark Ages, and a new civilisation to arise, though the old word servus (the Latin for a slave) is still used for the man who works the soil, his status in the now increasing number of documents which we can consult is wholly changed; we can certainly no longer translate the word by the English word slave; we are compelled to translate it by a new word with very different connotations: the word serf.

The Serf of the early Middle Ages, of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, is already nearly a peasant. He is indeed bound in legal theory to the soil upon which he was born. In social practice, all that is required of him is that his family should till its quota of servile land, and that the dues of the lord shall not fail from absence of labour. That duty fulfilled, it is easy and common for members of the serf-class to enter the professions and the Church, or to go wild; to become men practically free in the growing industries of the towns. With every passing generation the ancient servile conception of the labourer’s status grows more and more dim, and the Courts and the practice of society treat him more and more as a man strictly bound to certain dues and to certain periodical labour within his industrial unit, but in all other respects free.

 

[midori]

As the civilisation of the Middle Ages develops, as wealth increases and the arts progressively flourish, the character of freedom becomes more marked. In spite of attempts in times of scarcity (as after a plague) to insist upon the old rights to compulsory labour, the habit of commuting these rights for money-payments and dues has grown too strong to be resisted.

If at the end of the fourteenth century… or the beginning of the 15th… you had visited some Squire upon his estate in France or in England, he would have told you… “These are my lands.” But the peasant (as he now was) would have said also of his holding, “This is my land.” He could not be evicted from it. The dues which he was customarily bound to pay were but a fraction of its total produce. He could not always sell it, but it was always inheritable from father to son; and, in general, at the close of this long process of a thousand years the Slave had become a free man for all the ordinary purposes of society. He bought and sold. He saved as he willed, he invested, he built, he drained at his discretion, and if he improved the land it was to his own profit.

Meanwhile, side by side with this emancipation of mankind in the direct line of descent from the old chattel slaves of the Roman villa went, in the Middle Ages, a crowd of institutions whih all similarly made for a distribution of property, and for the destruction of even the fossil remnants of a then forgotten Servile State. Thus industry of every kind in the towns, in transport, in crafts, and in commerce, was organised in the form of Guilds. And a Guild was a society partly co-operative, but in the main composed of private owners of capital whose corporation was self-governing, and was designed to check competition between its members: to prevent the growth of one at the expense of the other. Above all, most jealously did the Guild safeguard the division of property, so that there should be formed within its ranks no proletariat upon the one side, and no monopolising capitalist upon the other…

These three forms under which labour was exercised-- the serf, secure in his position, and burdened only with regular dues, which were but a fraction of his produce; the freeholder, a man independent save for money dues, which were more of a tax than a rent; the Guild, in which well-divided capital worked cooperatively for craft production, for transport, and for commerce-- all three between them were making for a society which would be based upon the principle of property. All, or most, – the normal family-- should own. And on ownership, the freedom of the State should repose…

-Hillaire Belloc (The Servile State)

 

[alcuin18]

I think we should be careful counting post-medieval slavery as the responsibility of medieval Catholic Europe. Post-medieval slavery was justified, against the warnings of the Church, by reference to Roman pagan slavery. Post-medieval Europe largely ignored what the Church said and idolized everything from Antiquity, hence all the neo-classical art, architecture, etc. Also, while Catholic countries certainly did have slavery in the post-medieval period, they went against the Church, whereas Protestant nations often justified their slavery by their religious beliefs, and in England it was approved by the head of their church, the monarch. Catholicism has always been anti-slavery and has struggled against its pagan roots since Antiquity.