Serfdom In Western Europe

Systems similar to serfdom are found as far back as 300 AD when the Roman Empire dealt with labor shortages (Mackay, 2004). Major landowners began to rely more on freemen to work as tenant farmers. As stated by Mackay, “because the tax system implemented by Diocletian assessed taxes based on both land and the inhabitants of that land, it became administratively inconvenient for peasants to leave the land where they were counted in the census. In 332 AD Emperor Constantine issued legislation that greatly restricted the rights of the [tenants] and tied them to the land.” The first traces of the establishment of serfdom in Russian society were found in the 11th century in the legal document Russkaya Pravda of the ancestral Russian society Kievan

Eastern European countries such as Russia were encouraged to increase their unpaid labor force to profit from the agricultural demands of Western Europe. In the 17th century serfs were divided into three classes, landlord serfs, state-bonded serfs, and royal serfs. For the purpose of narrowing the field of study for this paper, only landlord serfs from private estates will be discussed and referred to when mentioning the term serf. Serfs were bonded to the land of their landowners and were not permitted to move. They were subject to physical punishment by the landowners if they attempted to flee or resisted orders. Besides working on the landowners plot for a certain amount of days in the week, the serfs were allotted land of their own plots called nadel (still property of the landowners), but were forced to give the landowners a portion of their own