Some historians deny that there ever was an end to medieval slavery—that nothing happened other than a linguistic shift in which the word “slave” was replaced by the word “serf.”77 Here it is not history but historians who are playing word games. Serfs were not chattels; they had rights and a substantial degree of discretion. They married whom they wished, and their families were not subject to sale or dispersal. They paid rent and thus controlled their own time and the pace of their work. 78 If, as in some places, serfs owed their lords a number of days of labor each year, the obligation was
...more
