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Reviewed by:
  • Forces of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, Resistance, and Expansion
  • J. S. Ryan
Freedman, Paul and Monique Bourin, eds, Forces of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe: Decline, Resistance, and Expansion (Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 9), Turnhout, Brepols, 2007; hardback; pp. x, 449 ; 22 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €80.00; ISBN 2503516947.

This volume presents papers given at a 2003 conference on servitude and its (apparent) expansion in the late Middle Ages, a process due either to the nobles' greater power or to the economic crises following on the Black Death. This expansion varied by region and phase of the process down to the sixteenth century, and it is one central to an understanding of the ambiguous condition of the peasants and to the systems of land tenure operating throughout that period. The consequence of almost a century of scholarly investigation of the issue is a clearer notion of this aspect of the overall feudal structure as one parallel to the differing forms of – or complementary to – the vassalage between a knight and his lord. Ceremony, contract and obligation are explored to shed light on the bonds by which the land was painfully but effectively exploited.

These papers address the basic problems: how widespread serfdom was; how it affected ordinary lives; and its further progress in the period. The results are complex: considerable local variation, as between the more enlightened Normandy or the harsher Castile. The processes were necessitated by economic stress, and became particularly harsh and degrading in Eastern Europe. In the west there was even armed conflict over serfdom and agrarian conditions. Finally, the modern state would emerge slowly after a sequence of obligations, constraints and prohibitions, and from a realization that society's orders were oppressive or [End Page 274] ultimately insupportable. The whole poses one of the most recalcitrant questions about mediaeval society, and the editors have succeeded in presenting a whole range of responses – French, Danish, German, Hungarian and English, the better to assist our comprehension of particular societal values then held across the continent.

Certainly the imposition of burdensome customs, the variety of social practices, the brutal terminology of serfdom, its obligations and benefits are explored with sensitivity. The core driver, the exploitation of the land, is the key to subsequent demographic and social realities. Larger questions, such as the motives for insurrection and reform, are all consequences of the inevitable perception of serfdom as unjust and unjustified.

J. S. Ryan
English, School of Arts
University of New England
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