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By Root 1375 0

featherbeds who could hoard money to send his son to the university. The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of protection and justice. A serf was someone in personal bondage who belonged by birth to a particular lord, and, so that his children should follow him, was forbidden under a rule called formariage from marrying outside the domain. If he died childless, his house, tools, and any possessions reverted to the lord under the right of morte-main, on the theory that they had only been lent to the serf for his labor in life. Originally he owed, in addition to agriculture, every kind of labor service needed on an estate—repair of roads, bridges, and moats, supply of firewood, care of stables and kennels, blacksmithing, laundering, spinning, weaving, and other crafts for the castle. By the 14th century much of this was done by hired hands and the castle’s needs were supplied by purchase from towns and peddlers, leaving a large part of the peasantry on a rent-paying basis with a certain number of days’ work owed on the lord’s fields.

Besides paying the hearth tax and clerical tithe and aids for the lord’s ransom and knighting of his son and marriage of his daughter, the peasant owed fees for everything he used: for grinding his grain in the lord’s mill, baking his bread in the lord’s oven, pressing apples in the lord’s cider press, settlement of disputes in the lord’s court. At death he owed the heriot, or forfeit of his best possession to the lord.

His agricultural labor was supplied under rules that favored the seigneur, whose fields were plowed and seed sowed and hay cut and crops harvested and, in case of storm or pests, his harvest saved before the peasant could attend to his own. He had to drive his beasts to pasture and bring them home across the lord’s fields rather than his own so that the lord should have the benefit of the manure. By these fees and arrangements, economic surplus was produced for the proprietors.

The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests allied it more to the great than to the meek. The Church taught that failure to do the seigneur’s work and obey his laws would be punished by eternity in Hell, and that non-payment of tithes would imperil the soul. The priest exerted constant pressure for tithes in kind—grain, eggs, a hen or a pig—and told the peasant these were a tax “owed to God.” Everyday life was administered by the lord’s bailiff, whose abuses and extortions were a constant source of complaint. The bailiff could levy an augmented tax, keeping a percentage for himself, or accuse a peasant of theft and accept a fee for letting him off.

Rents were generally reckoned in pennies earned by paid labor and sale of produce in the market. At harvest-time, men and women flocked to the grape-picking for extra cash and a few weeks’ fun. Women were paid at half the rate of the men. The worst fear was famine, and local shortages were common because transportation was poor and yield, owing to inadequate fertilizer, low.

Possession of a plow which cost 10 to 12 livres and of a plow horse at 8 to 10 livres was the line between a peasant who prospered and one who just survived. Those too poor to afford a plow rented a communal one or turned the earth with hoe and spade. Perhaps 75 to 80 percent were below the plow line, of whom half had a few acres and some economic security while the rest lived on the edge of subsistence, cultivating tiny plots supplemented by paid work for the lord or for richer neighbors. The lowest 10 percent existed in misery on a diet of bread, onions, and a little fruit, sleeping on straw, living without furniture in a cabin with a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. Without even the tenure of serfs, they were a new agricultural proletariat created as the old manorial system was changing