A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [155]
To hold labor on the land, Coucy’s rather belated remedy was enfranchisement of the serfs, or non-free peasants and villagers, of his domain. From “hatred of servitude,” his charter acknowledged, they had been leaving, “to live outside our lands, in certain places, freeing themselves without our permission and making themselves free whenever it pleased them.” (A serf who reached territory outside his lord’s writ and stayed for a year was regarded as free.) Except for the charter issued to Coucy-le-Château in 1197, Coucy’s territory was late in the dissolution of serfdom, perhaps owing to former prosperity. Free peasants were already in the majority in France before the Black Death. Abolition had occurred less from any moral judgment of the evils of servitude than as a means of raising ready money from rents. Though the paid labor of free tenants was more expensive than the unpaid labor of serfs, the cost was more than made up by the rents, and, besides, tenants did not have to be fed on the job, which had amounted to an important expense.
Coucy’s charter of August 1368 took the form of a collective grant of freedom to 22 towns and villages of his barony in return for specific rents and revenues from each, “in perpetuity to us and our successors.” The sums ranged from 18 livres for Trosly down to 24 sous for Fresnes (still extant villages, as are most in the list), and 18 pence per hearth for Courson. The wording, though swollen by lawyers’ superfluity in every line, is a clear and precise picture of medieval tenure, unlike the dense tangle that has been made of the subject ever since.
“By general custom and usage,” it states, all persons who live in the barony of Coucy “are our men and women by morte-main and formariage” except if they are clerics or nobles or others “who hold of us by oath and homage.” Because of the many who have departed, “our said land was left in great part uncultivated, unworked and reverted to wasteland, for which the said land is greatly reduced in value.” In the past the inhabitants had requested their freedom from his father, offering certain revenues in perpetuity, “of which thing our dear and well-beloved father whose soul is with God took counsel and found it would greatly profit him to destroy and render null the said custom, taking the profit offered to him”; but before he could accomplish the request, he died. Being fully informed of these things, and having come of age and in full control of his lands, and since the same request has been made of him and payments offered “more profitable and honorable than the said morte-mains and formariages are or could be in the future”; and since by ending their servitude “the people will be more abundant and the land cultivated and not allowed to revert to waste, and in consequence more valuable to us and to our successors”; therefore, let it be known that, having taken “great deliberation on these said matters and well ascertained our rights and profits, we do destroy and render null … and free of all morte-mains and formariages each of them in perpetuity and for always, whether clergy or any other estate, without retaining servitude or power to renew servitude to any of them now or in the future by us or our successors nor by any other persons whatsoever.” Rent and revenues to be received from the said places will be joined “to our heritage and fief and barony which we hold of the King,” who will be asked to approve and confirm the deed. Royal confirmation was duly received three months later.
Landowners in general, especially the less prosperous with holdings too small to allow a margin of revenue, had suffered economically more than the peasantry from the disasters of the past twenty years. Servile labor, lost through the plague, could not be replaced, since free men could not be turned back into serfs.