SERFDOM. The notion of serfdom is distinct from those of freedom and of slavery. The serf is not his own master : to perform services for other persons is the essence of his status, but he is not given over to his lord to be owned as a thing or an animal—there are legal limits to the lord's power. Serfdom is very often con ceived as a perpetual adherence to the soil of an estate owned by a lord, but this praedial character is not a necessary feature of the condition. Hereditary serfdom may sometimes assume the shape of a personal relation between servant and master. Serf dom will be formed naturally in cases when one barbarous com munity conquers another, but is not able to destroy entirely the latter or to treat its members as mere chattels, but this miti gated form may be brought about as well by the paucity or com parative weakness of the victors as by the difficulty for them to draw income from pure slaves. In a state of backward agriculture and natural economy it will sometimes be more profitable for the conquerors as well as for the conquered to leave the dependent population in their own households and on their own plots, at the same time taxing them heavily in the way of tribute and services. Such an arrangement clearly obtained in several of the agricultural states of ancient Greece. The Penestae of Thessaly appear as a remnant of a distinct tribe settled on the confines of Macedonia and at the same time as a class of tributary peasants serving Thes salian aristocrats. The Mnoitae, Klarotae and Aphamiotae of Crete were more or less in the same position. Even in the case of the Helots of Sparta, who were made to perform services to any Spartiate who might. require them to do so, features of a similar tributary condition are apparent. The chief work of the Helots was to provide a certain quantity of corn, wine and oil for the lords of the shares on which they were settled personal services to other Spartiates were exceptional. Pollux in his account of the Helots places them distinctly in an intermediate position between free men and slaves. The fact that in these instances governments had a good deal to say in the regulation of the status of such serfs is well worth noting : it explains to a great extent the legal limita tions of the power of the lords. Even downright slaves belonging
to the state or to some great temple corporation were treated bet ter than private slaves by the Greeks.
We shall not be astonished to find, therefore, in the Hellenistic states of Asia a population of peasants who seem to have been in a condition of hereditary subjection and adherent to the glebe on the great estates of the Seleucid kings. They were certainly not slaves, but their condition was closely bound up with the cultiva tion of the estates where they lived. The regulation by the state of the duties and customary status of peasants on government domains turns out to be one of the roots of serfdom in the Roman world, which in this respect as in many others follows on the lines laid down by Hellenistic culture. It is important for our purpose to notice that the condition of coloni was developed as a result of historic necessity by the working of economic and social agencies in the first centuries of the Roman empire and was made the sub ject of regular legislation in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the enactments of Justinian, summing up the whole course of develop ment (C.J. xi., 48, 23), two classes of coloni are distinguished— the adscripticii, representing a more complete state of serfdom, and the free coloni, with property of their own. But the whole class, apart from minor variations, was characterized by the idea that the peasants in question were serfs of the soil on which they were settled, though protected by the laws in their personal and even in their praedial status. Thus the ascription to the soil, although originally a consequence of ascription to the tributes (adscriptio censibus), became the mark of the legal status of serf dom. The emperors actually tried in their legislation to prevent the landowners from evicting their coloni and from raising their rents. In this way fixity of tenure and service was aimed at and to a certain degree enforced by the state.