FEUDAL LORDS AND FORCED LABOUR As to the nature of these corvees it must be noted that in the middle ages the feudal lords had replaced the centralized state for all administrative purposes, and the services due to them by their tenants and serfs were partly in the nature of rent in the form of labour, partly those which under the Roman and Frankish monarchs had been exacted in lieu of taxes, and which the feudal lords continued to impose as sovereigns of their domains. To the former class belonged the service of personal labour in fields, of repairing buildings, felling trees, threshing corn, and the like, as well as the hauling of corn, wine or wood ; to the latter be longed that of labouring on the roads, of building and repairing bridges, castles and churches, and of carrying letters and dis patches. Corvees were further distinguished as real; i.e., at tached to certain parcels of land, and personal; i.e., due from certain persons.
In spite of the fact that the corvees were usually strictly de fined by local custom and by the contracts of tenancy, and that, in an age when currency was rare, payment in personal labour was a convenience to the poor, the system was open to obvious abuses. With the growth of communal life in the towns the towns men early managed to rid themselves of these burdensome obli gations either by purchase, or by exchanging the obligation of personal work for that of supplying carts, draught animals and the like. In the country, however, the system survived all but intact; and, so far as it was modified, was modified for the worse. Whatever safeguards the free cultivators may have pos sessed, the serfs were almost everywhere—especially in the Loth and II th centuries—actually as well as nominally in this respect at the mercy of their lords (corveables a merci), there being no limit to the amount of money or work that could be demanded of them. The system was oppressive even when the nobles to whom these services were paid gave something in return, namely, protection to the cultivator, his family and his land ; they became intolerable when the development of the modern state deprived the land-owners of their duties, but not of their rights.
In the case of France, in the 17th century the so-called corvee royale was added to the burden of the peasants; i.e., the obliga tion to do unpaid labour on the public roads, an obligation made general in 1738; and this, together with the natural resent ment of men at the fact that the land which their ancestors had bought was still subject to burdensome personal obligations in favour of people whom they rarely saw and from whom they derived no benefit, was one of the most potent causes of the Revolution. By the Constituent Assembly personal corvees were abolished altogether, while owners of land were allowed the choice of continuing real corvees or commuting them for money. The corvee as an incident of land tenure has thus disappeared in France. The corvee royale of repairing the roads, however, abolished in 1789, was revived, under the name of prestation, under the Consulate, by the law of 4 Thermidor an X., modified by subsequent legislation in 1824, 1836 and 1871. Under these laws the duty of keeping the roads in repair is still vested in the local communities, and all able-bodied men are called upon either to give three days' work or its equivalent in money to this purpose. It is precisely the same system as that in force under the Roman empire, and if it differs from the corvee it is mainly in the fact that the burden is equitably distributed, and that the work done is of actual value to those who do it. The introduction of this system into the African colonies has since been subjected to some criticism.