The Greatest Analytical Studies of Hilaire Belloc . Hilaire Belloc

The Faith, which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return.

      For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries of a settled social order which was erected upon Slavery as upon a sure foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.

      Among the by-products of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old Pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the Servile State into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did proceed from the Pagan Servile State I will next explain.

      SECTION THREE

       HOW THE SERVILE INSTITUTION WAS FOR A TIME DISSOLVED

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      The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main lines.

      Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed bet ween the first and the fourth centuries (that revolution which is often termed the Conversion of the World to Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called the Growth of the Church) included no attack upon the Servile Institution.

      No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

      The emancipation of Slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the Faithful: but so was it regarded by the Pagan. It was, on the face of it, a service rendered to one’s fellowmen. The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilisation to force men away from Civilisation to Barbarism. In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively disappears.

      The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single proprietor, and generally known as Villӕ.

      There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters; groups of free men associated in what was called a Vicus; manufactories in which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns.

      But of all these the Villa the dominating type; and as society passed from the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark Ages, the Villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more and more the model of all society.

      Now the Villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste land. It was owned by a dominus or lord in absolute proprietorship, to sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was cultivated for him by Slaves to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order that they might perpetuate his wealth.

      I concentrate particularly upon these Slaves, the great majority of the human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle Ages, other social elements within the Villæ—the Freed men who owed the lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present through a contract terminable and freely entered into yet it is the Slave who is the mark of all that society.

      At its origin, then, the Roman Villa was a piece of absolute property, the production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much the property of the lord as was the land itself.

      The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary position of the Slave.

      The Slave was still a Slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social spirit of the time to make sure of that Slave’s produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. The Slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which the lord was content to receive and ask no more. The arrangement was made workable by leaving to the Slave all the remaining produce of his own labour. There was a sort of implied bargain here, in the absence of public powers and in the decline of the old highly centralised and vigorous system which could always guarantee to the master the full product of the Slave’s effort. The bargain implied was, that if the Slave Community of the Villa would produce for the benefit of its Lord not less than a certain customary amount of goods from the soil of the Villa, the Lord could count on their always exercising that effort by leaving to them all the surplus, which they could increase, if they willed, indefinitely.

      By the ninth century, when this process had been gradually at work for a matter of some three hundred years, one fixed form of productive unit began to be apparent throughout Western Christendom.

      The old absolutely owned estate had come to be divided into three portions. One of these was pasture and arable land, reserved privately to the lord, and called domain: that is, lord’s land. Another was in the occupation, and already almost in the possession (practically, though not legally), of those who had once been Slaves. A third was common land over which both the Lord and the Slave exercised each their various rights, which rights were minutely remembered and held sacred by custom. For instance, in a certain village, if there was beech pasture for three hundred swine, the lord might put in but fifty: two hundred and fifty were the rights of the “village.”

      Upon the first of these portions, Domain, wealth was produced by the obedience of the Slave for certain fixed hours of labour. He must come so many days a week, or upon such and such occasions (all fixed and customary), to till the land of the Domain for his Lord, and all the produce of this must be handed over to the Lord though, of course, a daily wage in kind was allowed, for the labourer must live.

      Upon the second portion, “Land in Villenage,” which was nearly always the most of the arable and pasture land of the Villæ, the Slaves worked by rules and customs which they gradually came to elaborate for themselves. They worked under an officer of their own, sometimes nominated, sometimes elected: nearly always, in practice, a man suitable to them and more or less of their choice; though this co-operative work upon the old Slave-ground was controlled by the general customs of the village, common to lord and slave alike, and the principal officer over both kinds of land was the Lord’s Steward.

      Of the wealth so produced by the Slaves, a certain fixed portion (estimated originally in kind) was payable to the Lord’s Bailiff, and became the property of the Lord.

      Finally, on the third division of the land, the “Waste,” the “Wood,” the “Heath,” and certain common pastures, wealth was produced as elsewhere by the labour of those who had once been the Slaves, but divided in customary proportions between them and their master. Thus, such and such a water meadow would have grazing for so many oxen; the number was rigidly defined, and of that number so many would be the Lord’s and so many the Villagers’.

      During the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries this system crystallised and became so natural in men’s eyes that the original servile character