In France, though a general edict of Louis X., in 1315, purported to enfranchise the serfs on the royal 'domain on payment of a composition, this measure seems never to have been carried into effect, and a limited sort of villeinage continued to exist in some places clown to the revolution. In some estates in Champagne and Nivernais, the villeins, known as Bens de main. morte, were not allowed to leave their habitations, and might have been followed by their lords into any part of France for the Mille or villein-tax. In Italy, oue great cause of the decline of villeinage was the necessity under which the cities and petty states found themselves to employ the peasant popula tion for their defense, whom it became expedient to reward with enfranchisement. In the 11th and 12th centuries the number of serfs began to decrease, and villeinage seems no longer to have had an existence in Italy in the 15th century. Over a large portion of Germany the mass of the peasants had acquired their freedom before the end of the 13th e., hut in some parts of the Prussian dominions a modified villeinage continued to exist until swept away by the reforms of Von Stein in the present century.
In Russia, where the feudal system never prevailed, the early condition of the peasant was not a servile one. Down to the 111-h c. he could occupy any portion of the soil that he had the means of cultivating, the land being the property of all, and farmed on on the purest communistic principles. The reduction of the peasantry to a state
of serfdom, and their attachment to the soil, was gradually effected, and not completed till the close of the 16th century. The Russian peasant of the 19th c. was in some respects in as servile a condition as the feudal villein of the 12th c. in the w. of Europe; but there was this attaching to his position, that while be himself was the property of his lord, the land which he cultivated belonged to himself—a con sideration which greatly complicated the question of his emancipation. The emperor Alexander I. introduced various improvements in the condition of the peasantry, par ticularly those belonging to the crown, and iu his reign serfdom was abolished in Ciour land and Livonia. The entire abolition of villeinage has been effected by the present emperor, Alexander II., by a very sweeping measure. From March, 1863, the peasants, both husbandmen and domestics, have been made entirely free as regards their persons, while they have also obtained the perpetual usufruct of their cottages and gardens, and certains portions of land.—See, on the subject of serfdom generally, Hallam's State of Europe Daring the .Agee, chap. 2.