Objectivity and Universality

In the earlier centuries the services and other obligations of serfs and other peasants were of the most varied kind, with relatively few limitations imposed by norms of customary law.

In addition to labor services, there were various financial and other obligations. The so-called headtax (capitagium; in French, chevage,) though only a small fee, was an important symbol of the peasant's inferior status. A customary fixed farm rent, or cens, was generally charged as well. The lord also imposed various regular and occasional taxes under the generic name "tallage" (from the French taille, a cut or notch in a piece of wood, made to record payment of the tax). Upon the death of a serf, the lord was to be given his best beast and other goods (heriot There were a host of other charges, burdens, and obligations, which varied widely in their incidence from place to place and from time to time, but which were always a reminder of servility. A serf could not marry without the lord's permission; and he could not voluntarily depart the manor. If he died without heirs, the land which he occupied reverted to the lord.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries these various types of services and obligations became subject to substantially more precise regulation. It came to be widely accepted that definite limits should be set to the kinds of services that the lord could require and also to the amounts of services of each kind.

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not merely for individual manors or individual localities but for all manors within a given region or even a given country, and in some cases for all manors within (Western) Christendom as a whole. Thus the requirement that a serf receive the lord's permission in order to marry was commuted everywhere to the payment of a tax (forismaritaglum) when the serf married outside the lord's domain, and of a composition (mercheta mulierum, "marketing of women") when he married within the lord's domain; and Pope Hadrian IV, himself of humble birth, declared that the marriage of a serf, with or without his lord's consent, was valid and indissoluble.

The commutation of services and other obligations of peasants into fixed money payments in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which was a widespread phenomenon throughout Europe, reflected not only the percolation of money into the manorial economy but also the tendencies of manorial law in that period toward objectivity and universality. Nevertheless, manorial law did not achieve nearly so high a degree of objectivity or universality as feudal law, mercantile law, urban law, and royal law, not to mention canon law. One reason may have been the sharpness of class conflict on the manor; yet domination by the lord could have taken the form of imposition of his will through objective and universal norms of law. A more plausible reason is that by its very nature manorial life required informal, intimate, and diffuse regulation rather than a set of precise, specific, generally applicable, and nondiscriminatory norms. The manor was in many ways like a small clan or village, or a large household. What is surprising, therefore, is not the extent to which manorial law responded to the will and interests of the head of the household -- the lord and his immediate entourage -- but rather the fact that it acquired any objectivity and generality whatsoever. The lord or his agent (bailiff, reeve, "mayor") was present, with his servants, to exercise his will, by law or by other means. The peasants, however, needed to legalize their relationships with the lord, if only to curb the arbitrary exercise of his power. The strengthening of manorial law was thus an index of the balance of power between the sharply conflicting interests of the lord and his immediate entourage, on the one hand, and those of the peasant households of the manor taken as a whole, on the other. It was also an index of the extent to which the manorial system received its character from the larger social, economic, and political context of the time, a context in which legality played a central role.