Serfs were not slaves (although there were slaves in Europe, notably the gypsies of Romania, who were treated as chattels and bought and sold on the open market until their emancipation by both Church and state in the 1840s, and altogether in 1848); serfs had rights as well as duties. But neither were they free agents. Because serfdom had evolved gradually over the centuries and depended for its implementation on local or regional custom, it appeared in many thousands of variants that make it difficult to generalize about the way it functioned. Fundamentally, however, it obliged the peasant
...more
