Village Cowtinin-iUj aiid Serfdom in Erujland. 131 



the Germanic nations, wliich I discussed in a former paper.' Holding that 

 serfdom was the original condition of the mass of the German people, he 

 naturally holds that the sanae was true of the Enghsh settlers. And it must be 

 conceded that, if his theory is true for Germany, it must perforce be true 

 for England, while the converse does not hold. To prove the primitive democ- 

 racy of the Germans does not prove a primitive democracy for the English, 

 for the reason that their migration and conquest of a foreign land may 

 have worked a fundamental change in their social institutions. 



The question to be considered is, it will be seen, not whether the village 

 community existed or not; that has been placed beyond controversy by 

 Messrs. Nasse and Seebohm. It is, whether it was a free or a serf commun- 

 ity; and the question resolves itself at once into a larger one, as to the 

 origin of serfdom in England. This will form the subject of the present 

 pajDer. 



It has generally been held that serfdom in England was in part at least 

 the result of a gradual deterioration in the condition of an originally free 

 peasantry — that while no doubt some serfs were in their origin emancipated 

 slaves, and others conquered Britons, while others again were brought over 

 as serfs by the Erighsh conqiierors; nevertheless the largest portion of 

 them were the descendants of the conquerors themselves, the rank and file 

 of the invading armies, who had sunk by degi'ees to a condition not much 

 above that of the native Britons. This view is disputed by Mr. Seebohm. 

 According to him there was no large body of free Germans, but the invad- 

 ing armies ^vere composed of chieftains with servile followers, whom they 

 settled at once as serfs upon their estates. The manorial system of the 

 middle ages, therefore, existed from the first; the free Angle or Saxon was 

 the lord of the manor, or thegn, the sei'fs whom he bi'ought with him, or 

 found ah-eady upon the soil, were the same body as the villeins of the 

 feudal period. 



His line of argument is as follows: Finding serfdom to be the condition 

 of the peasantry in the middle ages in association with the village ccm- 

 munity, he traces both institutions back by an inductive process of remark- 

 able ingenuity and cogency, to the reign of Alfred, at the beginning of the 

 tenth century, at which point of time he shows that the condition of the 

 peasantry did not differ essentially from what it was in the reign of Ed- 

 ward I. , four hundred years later. fFurther back than this he is not able 

 to go with the same thoroughness of detail, for the want of documentary evi- 

 dence; he finds, however, passages in the laws of the seventh century which 

 appear to support his view, and maintains that if we find no change in. 

 tracing the institution back six h undred years to the time of these laws, 

 we should not be likely to find any change if we could trace it lack s-tiU 

 further for the much shorter period of two hundred years or eo, to the first 

 settlement of the Angles and Saxons in Britain. This argument is still fur- 

 ther strengthened by the assertion that serfdom not merely existed in the 



1 See Transactions of the ■Wisconsin Academy, Vol. VI. 



