serf

“Qui n'en a vois ne respons en court ne peut garentie porter, ne houme ne feme, qui ne soit obeissant à Rome; ne serf, ne autre home ne feme de religion, ni enfant merme d'age.” 

Serf (lat. servus: "slave" or "servant") was a judicial term used in the Latin East to designate social and legal status. The Clef des assise, a legal treatise from the Latin East, listed serfs as a group of people who did not have any voice in court, meaning they could not give any responses nor give testimony. Women, minors, and non-Christians also held the same lack of legal rights. All of these social categories were indistinguishable in court, though an individual could belong to more than one category at a time. To be a serf was a personal condition, meaning that even when a person moved he/she, in theory, remained a serf.

“Serf” was already a social category in western Europe prior to the period of the crusades. Many of the laws and customs that the Franks imposed in the East were derived from traditions in western Europe, including the category of serfs. Serfdom can be confused with slavery, which is another type of “unfreedom”, however, the term esclaf (slave) was a distinct category from serf in the Latin East. The two classes appear separately from one another in John of Ibelin’s treatise concerning the laws of the Latin Kingdom. The status of esclaves is addressed more fully in the law codes of the Livre des assises de la cour des bourgeois.

The word serf rarely appears in documents recording daily life in the Latin East. Instead, the term is most commonly found in legal texts. John of Ibelin spends the most time discussing the status of the serf in his law treatise over the course of five chapters. Philip of Novarra and Geoffrey of Tort also discuss special legislation referring to serfs. Much of this legislation deals with the rights lords had over their serfs, including what lords were obligated to do if a serf came to their property. In the case of fugitive serfs, it was expected that they were returned to their lord.

When the crusaders came to the Levant they did not supplant the population, rather the Franks became the overlords over the local population, regardless of their religion. No Latin Christians who came from the West were categorized as serfs once they lived in the East. Thus, serfs often comprised of eastern Christians and Muslims. For much of the autochthonous population, who were used to being categorized as dhimmi under Muslim rule, this was not a substantial change. Instead, in the Latin East, a person’s social status as a non-Frank, was more significant than their legal status as a serf.

Related Terms: dhimmi, esclaf, femme, rustici, servus, servi, vilains, vilaines

Bibliography:

Devroey, Jean-Pierre. “Men and Women in Early Medieval Serfdom: The Ninth-Century North Frankish Evidence.” Past & Present, no. 166 (2000): 3–30.

Prawer, Joshua. Crusader Institutions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. See particularly pages 201- 214

Richard, Jean. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Translated by Janet Shirley. Europe in the Middle Ages Selected Studies. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979