Serfdom as a Category in Historical Analysis

Vishwa Mohan Jha ARSD College, University of Delhi

Radha Krishna Choudhary Memorial Lecture

Mithila ltihas Sansthan, Darbhanga Second Biennial National Conference, April 2-3, 2011

0 Mr. President, Colleagues, and Friends, It is indeed a privilege to be associated with the memory of a worker of such tireless application as Professor Radha Krishna Chaudhary. I am grateful to Mithila ltihas Sansthan for bestowing upon me this honour, and should like to use this opportunity to speak on one of the concepts in which Professor Chaudhary had a lifelong interest, i.e. the concept of as a category in historical analysis. The occasion furnishes a chance also to revisit, in line with the universalist vision of Professor Chaudhary, the works of some of the greatest names in the discipline of history, especially Marc Bloch. Of the trio ', serfdom, and ', the problem of serfdom is unique in a very real sense. Identifying the slave or the wage labourer in history is hardly considered problematic by historians, generally speaking. By contrast, defining a serf has probably been the single most important issue in the scholarly studies on serfdom, as it has been in the past in the disputes about who the serf was. It is an issue oflong standing. As early as 1925, Bloch asked: 'Who was a serf?', and pointed out: ' Today's historians often ask this question, aqd rarely agree on the answer.' 1 The reason for this is that in the past serfdom meant very different things in different periods and places, and was liable to create false impressions about itself even at any given time and place (men and women

1 Marc Bloch, 'The Transformation of Serfdom: Concerning Two Thirteenth-Century Documents Regarding the Parisian Region' ( 1925), in Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the , translated by William R. Beer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, p. 159. could be regarded as serfs by their neiighbours even when they were not in fact); for long ]periods the same terms servus was used to denote the S

2 the land. Thus D. D. Kosambi repeatedly drew a contrast between feudal Europe with "'demesne-fanning, on tbe lord's estate, often on a considerable scale, by compulsory labour service"', and lndia ('this is decidedly not true oflndia ')/ and called the European practice 'serfdom' or, significantly, 'proper serfdom': Why have we no large-scale chattel slavery in the classical period, no proper serfdom in the feudal?3 India showed a series of parallel forms which cannot · be put into the precise categories, for the mode based on slavery is absent, greatly different from the European type with serfdom and the manorial economy.4

At the same time, serfdom for Kosambi could also stand for legal restriction on peasant mobility: 'The freedom [during the Gupta period] to stay on the land or to go would signify the absence of serfdom.' 5 While revising his Introduction to the Study ofIndian History, Kosambi evidently thought that this statement did not sufficiently distinguish the two distinct senses of serfdom, and accordingly, in the revised edition this is rephrased as 'the absence of bond-serfdom'. 6 The dual usage, as also the primacy attached to the first meaning as 'proper serfdom' as distinct from the secondary meaning of 'bond-serfdom', has been widely followed subsequently (though apparently without

2 Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study ofIndian History, Popular Book Depot: Bombay, 1956, p. 327. 3 Ibid, p. 13. 4 Ibid, p. 1Snl4. 5 Ibid, p. 279. 6 Kosambi, An Introduction, second revised edition, Popular Prakashan: Bombay, 1975, p. 300.

3 reference to Kosambi's usage). Thus :in a section entitled 'the question of serfdom' as well as elsewhere in an article, R S. Sharma agrees on labow· rent as the main meaning of the term, 7 but refers to its other sense too, 8 and can in fact move somewhat unobtrusively from one meaning to the otber.9 The first meaning is the only correct meaning for Harbans Mukhia10 as well as Irfan 11 Habib ; the latter would prefer to call 'semi-serf the peasantry tied to the land. 12

7 Sharma, 'How Feudal was Indian Feudalism?', in T. J. Byres and Harbans Mukbia, eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies, Frank Cass: London, 1985, pp. 30-31, 24. 8 Ibid, p. 32. 9 Ibid, p. 21: 'peasants might be compelled to work as serfs on landlord farms in addition to working on their own farms .... But serfdom should not be considered to be identical with feudalism. lt was, after all, a form of servility that kept the peasant tied to the soil and made him work on the farm of his lord.' 10 Mukhia, 'Was There Feudalism in Indian Hlistory?' (1979), in Byres and Mukhia, eds., op. cit., p. 268. 11 Habib, 'Classifying Pre-Colonial India', in Byres and Mukhia, eds., op. cit., p. 50. 12 Habib, The Agrarian System ofMughallndia, 1556-1707, second revised edition, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 1999, p. 134. In the first edition of the book (Asia Publishing House: Bombay, 1963, p. 118), such a peasant was 'really a near-serf~. The vocabtalary of 'semi-serfdom' is followed by D. N. Jha too t.o describe the restrictions on peasant mobility (Jha, 'Editor's Introduction ', in Jha, cd., The Feudal Order, Manohar: New Delhi, 2000, p. 17). However, IJ1e sense of serfdom in Indian historical studi.es is not always clear. Thus, while it is obvious that labour rent is seen as constituting serf labour by Romila Thapar ('Nor was the labolllr used parallel to that of the serfs. The peasant ... was not necessarily required to cultivate the land of the grantee in addition to his own.' Thapar, Early India. Allen Lane: London, 2002, p. 295), she also refers to two other definitions the ambiguity of which makes them problematic. First, some kind of

4 There could of course be more than one form of attachment to the land of the peasant. Apart ffom the ) state imposing restrictions on the mobility of a tax­ paying peasantry, there was thus the widely prevalent practice of debt-bondage. A number of such practices have recently been studied meticulously, and it is important to look at the terminologies deployed therein. Thus, in the context of 'forms oflabour attachment to the surplus lands of a richer peasantry', Sugata Bose refers to 'the krishani form of labour attachment in Birbhum' ' under which tied indebted labourers were paid with one-third of the crop', and argues against the attempts to see it as part of a 'semi-feudal' arrangement: 'Krishani, however, was an atypical and localized form of labour attachment'. 13 In a comparable context in the Gaya region of Bihar, Gyan Prakash has preferred to describe the relationship between the lord and the labourer as kamiauti, i.e. one between the malik and the

'contractual relation' is stated to be nece!;sary to defining the tied peasant as a serf: 'the peasants working the land were transferred together with the land. This created a category of tied peasantry . ... But this was not the equivalent of serfdom as the contractual relation between peasant and grantee was not identical with the generally accepted pattern ofserfdom [?)'(ibid, emphasis added). Second, a criterion of serfdom among some historians, questioned by others, is stated to be aggravation of peasant exploitation: 'G~antees began to acquire fiscal and judicial rights that could aggravate the burden of labour, dues and [other] demands on the peasants. TI1ere is sqme disagreement [?] on whether this constituted serfdom' (ibid, p. 444).

13 Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, New Cambridge History oflndia, III.2, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993, pp. 106, 107, 137n59.

5 kamia, and has in fact argued that to s•ee it as is to subscribe to a form of colonial discourse. 14 Krishani or Kamiauti would be perfectly acceptable categories of social analysis, however,. if only their applicability could be tested for the situations where the terms are not found. It remains, for instance, for Gyan Prakash to conceptualize Karniauti relationship further in such a manner as to enable one to say, for instance, if the contemporaries under the kandh or harwahi arrangement in the adjacent regions of Jharkhad, or those bound by the kayika arrangement of early India for that matter, were the same or different from the kamias. Similarly, if the argument of Bose about the 'atypical and localized' nature of krishani form of labour attachment in Birbhum is to carry conviction, his analysis must be extended not only to incorporate the evidence for krishani arrangements in the Durnka, Deoghar, and Jamtara 15 regions of Jbarkhand , but also to the forms of labour attachment with different names so as to see if the difference is only in the name or in form as well. Reference to the existing conceptual categories must of necessity inform the analysis of terms thrown up by research. The identification of a form of labour should not just consist in the name by which iit is found in our particular source, but in such a manner as to allow us to

14 Gyan Praksh, Bonded Histories: Genealogies ofLabour Servitude in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990; idem, 'Terms of Servitude: The Colonial Discourse on Slavery and Bondage in India', in Martin A. Klein, ed., Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and in Modern Africa and Asia, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, pp. 131-149. 15 S. P. Tiwary, in Utsa Patnaik and Manjari Dingwaney, eds., Chains ofServitude: Bondage and , S~mgam Books: New Delhi, 1985, p. 190.

6 J precisely point out its similarity or difference with the labour forms that occur in the sources of other languages or regions. The danger of proper understanding getting submerged in a sea of endlessly proliferating terms from all languages was visualized and ui1derlined early by the masters of the field, but their recommendations have unfortunately been found, Tather too often, too demanding to practise by most of the rest of us. Let us see what two medievalists with formidable linguistic gifts - W. H. Moreland and Marc Bloch - had to say on this matter. With an almost palpable impatience, Moreland wrote in the Preface to his Agrarian System of Moslem India: 1 have tried to write in English, and to get away from the polyglot, and often ambiguous, jargon in which agrarian topics are commonly treated in India. In order to do this, I have tried to frame a precise terminology, choosing those names which carry the fewest misleading co~notations. The terms which I have selected for use are printed throughout with an initial capital letter, as a tacit reminder to the reader that they bear the definite sense which has been explained at their first mention. 16 Bloch discovered the problem to be common enough to merit a detailed discussion in a general treatment of the historical method: But such mechanical adoption of foreign words, obviously the easiest solution, cannot be made a general rule. Even putting aside any concern for

16 Moreland, The Agrarian System ofMoslem India, Oriental Books Reprint Corporation: Delhi, 1929 (reissued in 1968), p. v. The method is further elaborated in the Introduction (ibid., pp. xiii-xvi). 7 propriety of language, it would still be annoying to see historians encumbering their observations with foreign expression like those authors of rustic novels who, by their use of provincialisms, slip into a jargon which neither town nor country would recognize as its own. To renounce any attempt at equivalence is often to do injury to reality itself (Emphasis added.)17 In the same paragraph, Bloch goes on to illustrate the point by an example that is tailor-made for us. He points out why one cannot equate the Krepostnoi oftsarist Russia with serfdom, yet argues why one must not employ Krepostnoi as the substitute word for it: A custom which derives, I believe, from the eighteenth century permits the use of the French word se1f, or of closely related words in other Western languages, to designate the Krepostnoi of tsarist Russia. A more unfortunate comparison would be difficult to imagine. In Russia there was a system of attachment to the land gradually transformed into true slavery; with us, a form of personal dependence which, despite its severity, was very far from treating man as a thing deprived of all rights: the so-called Russian serfdom had almost nothing in common with our medieval serfdom. Simply to say 'Krepostnoi ', however, will hardly help our case. For, in Rumania, in , in Poland, and even in eastern Germany, there have been types ofpeasant subjection closely related to that established in Russia. Must we speak Rumanian, Hungarian, Polish, German, and Russian

17Bioch, The Historian 's Craft, (put together by Lucien Febvre from unfinished manuscripts dating from May 10, :t 941 ), translated by Peter Putnam, Vintage Books: New , 1953, p. 163. 8 by turns? Once more, we should miss the essential point, which is to map the underlying connections between the facts by expressing themselves with an accurate nomenclature. The label has been badly chosen. But that does not obviate the necessity ofa common label, and one which is, therefore, superimposed upon national words, instead ofmerely copying them. Here again, passivity is forbidden. (Emphasis added.) 18 It can now be seen that using the originally French word 'serf' is not a case ofEurocentrism (Francophilia, to be precise). There were many terms to denote serfs in medieval Europe, a number of which did not always mean 'serfs'. One such word was servus, which originally meant, and continued to mean, a slave. The other was villein, which meant a non-servile free peasant and came to acquire the meaning of a serf only during the later medieval period in (Please keep in mind both the meanings of villein, for both will be used here frequently in the argument being developed here, though the particular sense ofvilleinage/villainage should be clear from the context). Other terms were homme de corps, remem;a, etc. To cali'all these persons who were known by different terms in the sources by the common name of 'serf' is to underline the general import of the term, without reference to any specific set of historical sources, that is to say, in the sense of a general category like wage-labour or slavery. Just as we are able to identify slaves or wage-earners in our sources, irrespective of the names they might have in any given language, we should likewise be conceptually

18 Ibid, pp. 163- 164.

9 equipped to identify serfdom in them, or be able to deny its presence and identify some other existence-form of labour. When historians in India find peasants being attached to the land by the state and want to give it a name in English language, using the term 'serf is not Eurocentric, any more than writing in English is. It happens, however, that neither of the two meanings of serfdom - obligation to render labour r~e nt and attachment to land - is correct. A critique ofjust one of these is needed for elucidating the precise nature of the concept, and I suggest we take up the latter sense, which is probably more widely prevalent. u The tradition of regarding attachment to land as the hallmark of serfdom is truly redoubtable, and has become deeply entrenched over the decades through its subscription by some of the most inflw:mtial voices in social sciences. A good starting point is the authority of Michael Rostovtzeff, who in 1926 provided the following definition: Serfdom is an institution of social and economic li fe which was widely spread over Europe in a not very remote past, and still persists both in the Orient and, in survivals, in some parts of east,em Europe, especially in Russia. It assumes various forms in various periods and countries, but its main aspect remains invariable. By se1jdom is meant the situation ofa person who is personally and legally free but is tied to his place ofresidence and to his work. a bondage which is recognized and protected by the state. ln agricultural life the serf is not the owner of his land, and though bound to the parcel of land which he is tilling and to his plac·e of residence, he

10 might be deprived of this parcel by the will of his landlord, whoever he might be. In industry, serfdom appears more rarely but has the same peculiar features. The serf does not own his implements and his house, and is bound to his work. (Emphasis added.) 19 This concept was routinely employed by Gordon Cbilde in that all-time bestseller of his, What Happened in History: Finally the primary producers were reduced to the status of serfs attached to the soil. That fate had already overtaken the "king's peasants" it: Egypt .. . After 300 the same system was applied to Europe .. . In 332 Constantine, the first Christian emperor, madt the attachment of the share-farmer (co/onus) to the manor enforceable at law ... The tenant has become serf. 20 Specialist support came to be supplied, rather incongruously as we shall see, by Rodney Hilton, in his celebrated study of peasant movements in medieval . 'It was to the soil of the manor', Hiltor avers there, 'that those ofthem who were ofservile status [i.e. serfs] were bound from birth lo death' (emphasis added). 21 Among the other social sciences, we need to refer only to the enormously influential paper by the economist

19 Rostovt 7..cff, 'The Problem of the Origin of Serfdom in th e Romar Empire', The Journal ofLand & Public Utility Economics, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Apr., 1926), p. 198. 2°Childe, What Happened in Histo1y, Penguin Books, 1954, pp. 287 288. 21 Hilton. Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of1381 , Routledge: London and .New York, 197: p. 4 1.

11 Evsey David Domar, 'The Causes of Slavery nr Serfdom: A Hypothesis', where attachment to laud i:; a standard feature of serfdom. For instance, Domar CJtes there the following statement of a historian for the emergence of serfdom in the late : 'And so ever-increasing masses of the rural population were tied to the soil. This is s particular instance of a widespread compulsory fastening of the population to their occupation which scarcity of labour forced the later Roman Empire to pursue systematically.'22 In fact, the of the conception go much further back than twentieth-century scholarship, which were traced out at length by Marc Bloch in an article 'Serf de la Glebe' ('Serfofthe Soil') in 1921, where he also pointed out its inapplicability to medieval serfdom. 23 Jn fact, Vinogradoff had pointed out the fallacy much earlier: 'The majority of the peasants are villlains (a variant of ' villeins', meaning serfs here], and the legal conception ofvillainage has its roots not in the connexion ofthe villain with the soil, but in his personal dependence on the lord (emphasis added.)'. 24 Contra Rostovtzeff, the serf was not a free person blUt one of servile juridical status, who may or may not be tied to the soil, and the co/onus of the Later Roman Empire who was tied to the soil he worked was a free person and no serf. Going by the argument of Rostovtzeff, the coloni alone would not be serfs in the Later Roman Empire, a~ Bloch noted in one of his numeroous

22 Domar, Capitalism, Socialism, and Serfdom, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989, p. 234. 23 Bloch, 'Serf de Ia Glebe', in Bloch, Sla1·ery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, op. cit., pp. 179-201, 264-27 1. 24 Vinogradoff, Vil/ainage in England: Essays in English Medieval History, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1892, p. 44

12 corrective exercises critiquing the idea of 'the serf of the soil': The tenants of the manor, when they were not of servile status, generally .appeared, in the official Lati1 documents, under the name of coloni. Many of them, in the parts of the Frankish state which had formerly been Roman, were in fact undoubtedly descended from ancestors who had been subject to the laws of the colonate.... Several centuries before, under the Later Empire, the idea had been conceived of bindin! practically every man to his hereditary task as well a~ to his share of taxation- the soldier to his army, the artisan to his craft, the decurion to his municipal senate, and the farmer to his land, which he was not to quit, and from which the owner could not remove him... 25 In fact, parallel to the habit of regarding as serfs those who were attached to the land, a line of writers of comparable distinction went on critiquing the habit. Tha attachment to land did not make a serf of the colonus was thus pointed out by Eileen Power in her Medieval People: 'The most important people [on a ninth-century Carolingian estate] were those called coloni, who were personally free (that is, counted as free men by the law),

25 Bloch, Feudal Society, tr. by L. A. Manyon, Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1961, p. 257. This point was repeatedly made and elaborated by Bloch in his other writings, in his French Rural Histmy, for example: 'The serfs hereditary attachment was to a mar not to a tenure. The medieval serf must not be confused with the co/onus of the Later Empire' (tr. by Janet Sondheimer, University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966, p. 86).

13 but bound to the soil, so that they could never leave their farms and wer~ sold with it, if it were sold.' 26 A number of examples refuting the correlation between attachment to land and servile status were cited by Bloch. Thus, both free peasants as well as serfs could equally be compelled by their lords to stay on their holdings, without any reference whatsoe'::er to their fh~e or legal status; in other cases a specific provision would be made for serfs moving away from the land - again without their servile status being affected; and serfs became free not by moving away from the land but only through the legal act of enfranchisement by their masters: There is no disputing that the lords, with their vitall interest in protecting themselves against depopulation, might not on occasion retain their tenants by force. Two neighbouring lords o{ten reached a mutual agreement not to grant asylum to absconders. But these atrangements, which took their force from the over-all power of the seigneurial bc.rn, applied as much to the so-called 'free' villeins [in the sense of peasants in general] as to those whose status is described as servile. To cite only two examples among many: it was 'the serfs or other men, whatsoever they may be' of Saint Benoit-sur-Loire, 'the serfs or h6tes [free tenants] ofNotre-Dame de: Paris' whom the monks ofSt Jean-en-Vallee and the nuns of Montmartre agreed not to receive at Mantarville or Bourg-Ia-Reiue. And when Sir Pierre de Dongeon made residence a strict condition tor holding land of Saint-Martin-en-Biere, he never for a

26 Medieval People, tenth edition, 1963 (first published in 1924), Project Gutenberg eBook, p. 21..

14 moment dreamed of making a distinction in respect of the legal status of the subjects affected by his order. The departure of a serf was so little a crime against his condition that it was sometimes expressly catered for: 'I give to Saint Martin', says Sir Galeran in 1077, 'all my serfs, both male and female, of Nottonville ... on the understanding that whoever of their posterity, whether man or woman, removes himself to another place, near or far, village, fortified town or city, shall still remain tied to the monks of Saint Martin by the same knot of servitude'. The only difference, as clearly emerges from this and many other texts, is that the departure of a serf did not, as in the case of a free villein, automatically free him from his chains. Suppose he settles on another holding. Then he will henceforth owe the lord of that holding all the common obligations of villeinage [the status of a villein in the sense of a free peasant]. But at the same time he will continue to be liable to his old master, to whom his ' body' still belongs, for the obligations proper to his servile status. Since he is compelled to give aid to both, he will pay a double tallage. Or at least that was the law. In practice one can well imagine that many of these 'foreigners' ended by losing themselves among the throng of itinerants. But the principle leaves no room for doubt. There was only one way such a powerful bond could be broken, by a solemn act of enfranchisement. 27 There are interesting cases when attachment to land became a condition ofthe freedom of serfs, while freedom to move about was linked with servile status. A

27 Bloch, French Rural History, pp. 86-87. 15 lordship in 1258 laid it down thus: ' We enfra::lc!-)lse and manumit all our serfs living in the said village as long as they remain in it. If, however ... they leave, by that act they revert to their pristine servitude. ' 28 Likewise: At other times the lords tried to attach the free to the land but would actually want, for pecuniary reasons, their serfs to get mobile: 'In Lorraine, and Bavaria, lords of overcrowded communities encouraged serfs to move to nearby towns or villages in return for annual remitments, but were reluctant to let the free go. ' 29

III It is now possible to see what lies at the root of the fallacy of equating serfdom with attachment to land: it is the result of an unconscious shift from serfdom as a legal category in history to serfdom as a category devised by the historian from the complex history of serfdom as a legal category. The same may likewise be seen for its equation with labour rent. On one hand, we rnay choose to call a peasant working on the demesne of his landlord a serf; on the other hand, it is not difficult to show that labour rent did not necessarily imply a servil•e status and that there were people who were not required to render labour service but were still serfs in the eyes of the law. The basic idea for us to grasp is that like slavery, serfdom is a legal category. The serf was not a slave, but like slaves, serfs were also considered unfree legally. It is not correct to say that they were less free than slaves, or that some serfs were less free or less unfree than the

28 Cited in John H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150- 1309, second edilion, Longman: London and New York, 1991, p. 164. 29 Ibid. rest. It was pointed out by Frederick Pollock and Maitland that just because all .free persons were equal before the law, there was no middle ground (e.g. of semi-servility) between freedom and servitude: 'All men are either free men or serfs, and every serf is as much a serf as any other serf.' 30 Juridical status will of course have its economic and other concomitants, but the two are analytically distinct. Appropriately enough, M. M. Postan discussed the economic and the legal conditions of the medieval English villagers in two separate chapters: 'The Villagers: Economic Conditions' and 'The Villagers: Serfdom and Freedom'.31 Much earlier, R. H. Tawney also thought it important to underline the distinction: 'True, villeinage [i.e. serfdom] was a legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the fourteenth century there were serfs who were rich men.'32 It is the slippagefrom the juridical concept to its concomitants that has been responsible for the formulation of all the non-juridical concepts of serfdom. Thus, as Bloch himself noted, at a late date attachment to land did begin to count in some regions as a criterion for servile status: 'Definitions of serfdom arrived at by

30Pollock and Maitland,: The History ofEnglish Law before the Time ofEdward!., vol. I, second edition, The University Press: Cambridge, 1899, p. 4 12. Alsop. 413: 'There are no degrees of personal unfreedom'. Once again, it was left for Bloch to drive this point home among students of history time and again, pointing out that there was no such thing as semi-free status; his success, however, has been partial at best. 31 Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society: An economic hist01y of Britain in the Middle Ages, Pelican Books, 1976, chapters 8 and 9. 32Tawney, Religion and the Rise ofCapitalism: A Historical Study (Holland Memorial Lectures I 922), John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.: London, 1926, p. 5jS. 17 courts have survived in some quantity: none before the fourteenth century include 'attachment to the soil' among its characteristics in any shape or form. ' 33 Similarly, the obligation of providing labour service could be seen as a basis in English courts for de·ciding the servile personal status of a person. In point of fact, the criteria differed widely over time and space, and once agajn the issue is further complicated by its historiography, on such a scale that we cannot hope to offer here any survey of it even in briefest outline. We may note nonetheless that a substantial part of the discussion has centred on the three criteria whic:h were highlighted by Bloch: the obligation to pay a he:ad tax called chevage, restrictions on marriage outside the circle of the lord's servile subjects (formariage), and an inheritance tax (mainmorte). Bloch is often critiicised for supposing that whenever people are seen to be subject to these charges, they may be assumed to have been serfs.34 Though I cannot go into the details, I should like to state that this is an unfair criticism, Bloch probably did make an error ofjudgment or two in interpreting some evidence, 35 but in principle he does not seem to have ever suggested that any or all of these three criteria

33 Bloch, French Rural History, p. 86. This seems to have been modified by subsequent research. See, for instance, Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, t:r. by Cynthia Postan, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd: Londom, 1968, pp. 248-249. Jol See, for example, Paul , Origins ofPeasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991, pp. 1-10. Cf. Dominique Barthelemy, The Serf, the Knight, and the llistorian, tr. by Graham Robert Edwards, Cornell Unive1rsity Press: Ithaca. New York. 2009, pp.44, 75-78, 168. 15 Sec Guy Fourquin, 'Serfs and Serfdom: West European', in I >ictionury ofthe Middle Ages, edited by Joseph Strayer, vol. II , <: harles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1988, pp. 203-204. 18 should lead a historian to see serfdom, which, he argued consistently, must remain a matter of cQntemporary juridical judgment rather than a fiat of the modem historian. N I should like to conclude by drawing your attention to a major way in which the understanding of serfdom has been affected by the formulation of Maurice Dobbin his classic Studies in the Development ofCapitalism. ln his celebrated definition of feudalism in this work, Dobb equated it with serfdom, and defined serfdom as the forcible extraction from the peasant by 'an overlord' of a surplus in any one or more of its three forms - labour service, dues in kind, dues in money: As such it [i.e. feudalism] will be virtually identical with what we generally mean by serfdom: an obligation laid on the producer by force and independently of his volition to fulfil certain economic demands of an overlord, whether these demands take the form of services to be performed or 36 of dues to be paid in money or in kind ... . In equating it with the three fonns of surplus extraction, it is plain that Dobb is divesting serfdom of its more specific connotations. He could fairly be criticized for this, for taking liberty with a term which was differently understood by different scholars including Marx and Engels. Despite some criticisms, however, Dobb's definition tended to be accepted as the Marxist definition of serfdom. G. A. Cohen, for instance, completely accepted Dobb's usage of serfdom as meaning feudal rent relations in general, where serfdom becomes a

36 Dobb, Studies in the Development ofC apitalism, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd: London, 1946, p. 35.

19 shorthand for feudal mode ofproductionjus:t as slavery becomes one for the slave mode of production. 37 If there was one person who could have suc•cessfully countered this construct of serfdom it was Rodney Hilton, the great historian of medieval serfdom who was equally deeply read in Marxist theory. Hilton did have a certain unease with the treatment of serfdom in both Marxism as well as outside it. As he put it in his Introduction to the famous Transition Debate, 'the term "serfdom" in Marxist discussion is often unJnecessarily ambiguous, an ambiguity which seems to be derived from non-Marxist historical research . .3S Unfortunately, however, in place of any further engagement with this ambiguity, he offers us a 'Marxist' definition of serfdom that in fact turns out to be the same as Dobh's: Its [serfdom's] essence was the transference to the use of the lord of the labour of the peasant family which was surplus to that needed for the family's subsistence and economic reproduction. The surplus labour could be used directly on the lor·d's demesne (home farm of the manor), or its produce could be transferred in the form of a rent in kind or in money, from the family holding. Given the effective possession of the subsistence-producing holding by the peasant family, the transfer of the surplus must be forced, since the peasant, as contrasted with the wa?e

37 Cohen, 's Theory ofHistory: A Defence, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1979, pp. 65 n3 ('This characterization [of the feudal producer as the "serf'] applies not only to serfs traditionally so called, but to all non-slave producers burdened with duties towards exploiters which do not result from a labour contract.'), 68; cf. 176-1 77, 177nl. 38 Hilton, in Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, New Left Books: London, 1976, p. 14.

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----~---·-··--- labourer, does not need to alienate his labour power in order to live. Having accepted this broad definition of serfdom as the enforced transfer, either of surplus labour or of the product of surplus labour, many different juridical and institutional forms of serfdom can exist which in many - perhaps most- cases are not necessarily considered to be 'servile' in the eyes ofthe law.39 These sentences sum up what may be called Hilton's lifelong dilemma, in which he moved somewhat awkwardly between his adherence to what he took to be the correct Marxist position, and his equally scrupulous commitment to source-based historical research. In all his contributions to Marxism-focussed works, Hilton would take the same line, privileging his Marxist notion of serfdom as a surplus-extracting relationship, and calling it the real serfdom in relation to 'juridical serfdom' that would be opposed and devalued in relation to Marxist serfdom in varying ways. However, when Hilton returned to his sources of medieval Europe, to write for instance The Decline ofSerfdom in Medieval England or Bond Men Made Free, he could have hardly helped addressing the issue of serfdom in those very juridical terms he would denounce in his 'Marxist' writings! Hoping to find a way out of the dilemma, and looking forward to your valuable feedback, I thank you a1l in the end.

1 3' Ibid.

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