Seignorialism

I

Introduction

Seignorialism, known in England as manorialism, a system of political, economic, and social relations between seigneurs, or lords, and their dependent farm labourers in the Middle Ages. In England, King Alfred decreed that every man should have a lord, and throughout medieval Western Europe seignorialism was the norm. Seignorialism is not to be confused with feudalism, which was a system of military and political relationships among the lords only.

II

Historical Origins

In the Roman Empire agrarian life was increasingly dominated by the great estates, or villas, of the landowners, who supervised the cultivation of their land by slaves and former slaves. Some of these peasants were given their own sections of the estate to work and live on, but they remained dependent on the senior, the “old man”: even small freeholders became more and more dependent on their greater neighbours. Late in the 3rd century all cultivators of the soil were required by imperial edict to remain on their lands, along with their heirs after them, but in return they could not have their lands taken away from them, even if they were slaves. Under this system, the great landowners exercised the power of pater familias over the coloni, or settlers on their lands, whether free or in bondage; they held economic power as landlords and supervisors of cultivation on the estate; and they often acquired political jurisdiction by grant or usurpation of immunity from the imperial government.

The estate might be as small as 16 hectares (40 acres), but it might also be hundreds of hectares in extent. Typically, in land of good quality, an estate comprised about 400 hectares (1,000 acres). It centred on the big house (villa, hall, manor) of the owner, with its outbuildings—kitchens, bakery, brewhouse, workshops, stables, barns, and cellars. Domestic slaves might be housed in dormitories, but married slaves and free or freed labourers were commonly established in separate quarters. These quarters were collectively called a village, although sometimes the latter was no bigger than a mere hamlet. The lands might be divided into those cultivated for the seigneur, others tilled for the sustenance of the peasants, and the meadows, pasture, woodland, and wasteland that were not in cultivation but were needed for the nearly self-sustaining economy of the estate.

When the German invaders conquered the western Roman Empire in the 5th century, they took over this system of great estates with dependent cultivators. Outside the Roman Empire—in England, Germany, and Scandinavia—seignorialism was introduced by the Church and by the princes. Small freeholders continued to exist everywhere, but more and more of them found it desirable to “commend” themselves to the care of lords. The breakdown of strong central government in the 9th century accelerated the development of the seigneury as the principal unit of political authority on the local level. Economic localism, in the absence of strong urban settlements and a market economy, also strengthened the economic control of the seigneur as the head of an agricultural unit of production and consumption. All the people under the jurisdiction and economic supervision of the seigneur tended to be assimilated into his family and treated as if they were his children: to be judged and punished by him, to be directed by him in their work, and to be under his care and protection. They were his serfs, to use the term that became common after the 10th century.

III

The System in Practice

The years from 1000 to 1350 were the heyday of seignorialism. Throughout Western Europe, with variations from region to region, the seigneurs of the noble class dominated the lives of the peasants. The seigneurs had varying degrees of wealth and power, and their estates were of different sizes and degrees of compactness, but they were all rulers, employers, and patriarchs. The peasants might be either servile or free in personal status, but they were all the subjects and employees of the seigneurs. When the lord or his representative held court, all his peasants were required to attend, to bring their complaints before him, and to be judged for the offences that were within the lord's authority. When the lord needed his lands ploughed or his crops harvested, he had the right to his peasants' labour. By the 13th century his authority and his rights to labour were well defined in most seigneuries: He did or did not have the right to hang thieves, for example; and from each peasant holding he had the right to so many days' labour each week and so many extra days during ploughing, harvest, and other special times. He might build mills, ovens, or winepresses, and by his authority require his people to use them in order to increase his income. In general, he had the right to approve or disapprove the marriages of his people, to take a head tax from them annually, to tax their income at will, to take an inheritance tax at their deaths, and to reclaim their lands if they died without heirs. In return, the peasants, even those of servile origins, had the right to hold their land hereditarily, and although the lord might be able to give or sell them and their descendants, he then had to give or sell their lands with them. The peasants not only had certain strips of arable land in the fields of their villages, but they also had grazing rights on the common pastures and rights to fuel and building materials in the common woodland and wasteland, but usually no rights to any game or fish. The custom of the seigneury was its law, declared in its courts with the peasants participating.

IV

Decline and End

The reappearance of a market economy in these same centuries weakened the economic basis of seignorialism. The peasants were then able to sell excess produce for money and to buy freedoms of various sorts from their lords. The lords were only too ready to sell these freedoms because the money enabled them to hire wage labour that was superior in discipline and frequently cheaper. The political power of the seigneurs was also undermined by the developing jurisdiction of strong princes, who tended to take into their own courts the cases of any who could pay enough. Even the system of two classes, lords and peasants, was undermined by the rising towns whose bourgeoisie were a middle class between the two, attracting recruits from both. The Black Death of the later Middle Ages administered the coup de grace to the seignorial system: labour then became so valuable that in order to keep their land under cultivation and yielding revenue, few lords could afford to refuse franchises to their peasants. In England few serfs survived by the 16th century, and the land was largely cultivated by yeoman freeholders or farmer leaseholders; the great estates that were still intact were cultivated by paid labour. The lords remained socially dominant and often exerted patriarchal influence, but the peasants were legally free to change residence and employment. On the Continent changes came less rapidly. The seigneury in France was abolished only with the French Revolution in 1789, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1848, and in Russia as late as 1861.