The Deed and the Wage · Episode 2 of 10 · 26 min
When Your Landlord Was Your Boss: Serfdom and the Manor Roll
For about a thousand years in Europe, to hold land was to owe labor, with no wage and no deed, only an entry on a manor roll. The episode traces that baseline from the late Roman colonate through villeinage, the Black Death, the Statute of Labourers and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. It ends with the second serfdom, where the same trade that freed Western workers bound Eastern ones tighter.
Who's who
- DiocletianRoman emperor whose census and tax reforms registered tenants on the estates
- Constantine IRoman emperor whose 332 CE law bound fugitive tenant farmers
- Edward IIIKing whose council issued the 1349 Ordinance and 1351 Statute of Labourers
- Wat TylerLeader of the Kentish rebels, killed at Smithfield in 1381
- Richard IIYoung king who granted then revoked charters abolishing serfdom
- John BallRadical preacher of the 1381 revolt
- Marc BlochHistorian who read feudalism as a total social system
- Robert BrennerHistorian whose 1976 article ignited the debate over serfdom's fate
Where it happens
- England+5 more episodesHome of the manor, villeinage and the 1381 revolt
- Mile End, LondonWhere Richard II conceded abolition of serfdom in 1381
- East of the ElbeRegion where serfdom was reimposed from the sixteenth century
Timeline
- 332 CEConstantine's law orders fugitive tenant farmers returned and bound
- 1086Domesday Book surveys England by tenure and obligation
- 1347-1351Black Death kills a third to half of Europe's population
- 1349-1351Ordinance and Statute of Labourers try to freeze wages at pre-plague levels
- June 14-15, 1381Richard II concedes abolition at Mile End; Wat Tyler is killed at Smithfield
- 16th-18th centuriesSecond serfdom intensifies labor services east of the Elbe
Still debated
Historians question whether the Roman colonate existed as a designed institution and how unfree villeins really were. The Brenner debate asks whether class power, demography or commerce explains why serfdom died in the West and hardened in the East.