Serfs were bound to land, not sold like chattel slaves
Serfdom tied peasants to manors in debt-like bondage across medieval Europe, lingering in places into the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike slaves, serfs usually could not be traded alone—yet they owed labour, fees, and obedience in return for thin security.
Occupying a plot meant working the lord’s fields, mines, and forests while keeping some strips for subsistence, plus claims to protection and manorial justice. A lord could not sell a serf on his own, but when land changed hands its serfs went with it, in effect sold in bulk. Russian kholops, by contrast, could be bought outright as slaves. The word serf comes through Middle French from Latin servus; late Roman coloni under Diocletian’s land-and-head taxes already found it costly to leave their census plot.
Medieval serfdom thickened after the Carolingian breakup around the tenth century, when landlords locked in agricultural labour; slavery persisted but stayed rare. Freemen often slid into bondage through a magnate’s intimidation or a run of bad harvests, war, or banditry, and the status then passed to their children. West of the Rhine the institution faded in the later Middle Ages, often linked to labour shortages after the Black Death of 1347, while east of the Elbe a second serfdom intensified from about the fifteenth century.
England shows the gradations. After 1066 an unfree tenant owing labour was a villein, who could hold property but could not marry off his daughters or move without the lord’s consent; fleeing to a town and staying beyond a year could win freedom at the cost of land. The Domesday Book of 1086 counts bordars and cottars below villeins, each with a cottage and roughly 1 to 5 acres, while free tenants made up only about a tenth of peasants in parts of the country.
Analogues appear beyond Europe, from Qing China to contested Tibetan cases until 1959, and the UN’s 1956 Supplementary Convention bans serfdom as a practice akin to slavery. Feudal theory said serfs worked for all while knights fought and clergy prayed; serfs were the worst fed, yet held rights in land that slaves lacked.
Source: Serfdom
