Reciprocity of Rights of Lords and Peasants

By the twelfth century, all peasants in Western Christendom, including serfs, had legally protected rights. Among these were the right to hold land of their lords on certain terms and conditions and the right to receive his protection and patronage.

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rights to use the communal village lands, including pastures, meadows, and forests. In addition, in most parts of Europe many peasants continued to have virtual rights of ownership in free peasant land (alod or alodium), which had survived from earlier times.

The right, even of a serf, to hold land of a lord was of great importance. The manor was divided into two parts: the lord's demesne, managed by his stewards and worked by his peasants, and the peasants' own holdings, which they worked on those days when they were not required to work on the lord's demesne. As Perry Anderson has pointed out, this "dual agrarian statute within the manor" was one of the "structural specificities of Western feudalism"; and it had the important economic consequence that it left a "margin for the results of improved productivity to accrue to the direct producer." 8More than that, it gave a legal foundation to the peasants' inclination to distinguish their own economic interests from those of their lords -- and to pursue them.

In addition to rights of land tenure, peasants also had rights with respect to the rent, taxes, services, and other obligations due their lords. As a general rule, these obligations could not be increased; they were considered to have been fixed by custom. Disputes over their character and extent were supposed to be resolved by law. In contrast to the lord­

vassal relationship, reciprocity of rights and duties of lords and peasants (including serfs) was not achieved through individual pledges of faith or other forms of contractual arrangement; nevertheless, it was understood that the loyalty of the peasants was given reciprocally for the willingness of the lord to abide by concessions previously granted by him or his predecessors, to grant new concessions when required, and in general to deal justly with them.

When peasants' rights were infringed by their lords, those who were freemen could sometimes carry their grievances over the heads of the immediate manorial lord to his feudal superior or to royal authority. Rodney Hilton tells of a dispute that raged for thirty-five years (from 1272 to 1307) between free tenants and a lord in Staffordshire, England. Because the land had formerly been part of the royal demesne, the tenants appealed to the crown, relying on custom from the time of Henry II, a century earlier. They claimed that they were obliged only to pay a fixed rent of five shillings a year plus certain tallages, while the lord claimed that they owed a large variety of labor services, taxes in kind, a heavy death duty (heriot), "merchet" on the marriage of a daughter and "leywrite" if she was found to be unchaste, as well as other obligations. 9_

The legal remedies of serfs were more limited, in that they were not entitled, as a matter of right, to resort to any court except that of the manorial lord. Yet they were not without protection in the manorial court. Moreover, they had still other means of exerting pressure upon their lord in order to maintain and advance favorable conditions of

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labor. They could make collective demands upon him, including the demand that he emancipate them; such manumission became more and more frequent, although the peasant often had to pay a high price for it. Also, the peasants could sometimes back up their demands by a strike. As a last resort, they could run away to another manor.

A dramatic early example of such group pressure was the desertion en masse of the inhabitants of the Ile de Re in France in the twelfth century, owing to their lord's severity. The lord was thereby induced to make substantial concessions in order to retain any labor force at all. To combat such pressures, lords often resorted to mutual assistance agreements to capture fugitive serfs. Perhaps equally often, however, they competed with one another to entice serfs away from neighboring domains.

An even more remarkable example of reciprocity achieved through class conflict and its resolution is that of charters of liberties granted by Italian city communes to serfs as early as the twelfth century, after peasant uprisings. Such charters contained not only guarantees of fixed rents and services but also safeguards against imprisonment without due process of law.

Eventually, the disloyalty of the serfs came to be a retaliation against the unwillingness -- inability -- of the lord to grant concessions or to abide by concessions previously granted. This was an informal, unofficial analogue to the vassal's right of diffidatio. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, flights of peasants from the manors assumed catastrophic proportions. ££As a result, laws were passed imposing imprisonment, branding on the forehead, and other severe penalties for abandoning feudal service. It was forbidden by English law in the fifteenth century for persons attached to a manor to learn a handicraft or for any man holding land of less than twenty pounds' annual value to apprentice his son to a trade. However, these measures were futile; the manorial system was defeated in England, as in many other parts of Europe, by the peasants' desertion of the manor. ¹² The earlier reciprocity had broken down.