A number of years ago during one of my many visits to Colonial Williamsburg, I was listening to one of the historical interpreters, who was discussing the highly-sensitive topic of slavery in 18th century Virginia. He mentioned that slavery had long existed in Western society. In fact, he asserted, even medieval Europe had slaves; they were just called by another name--serfs. However, with all due respect to the interpreter, his claim that medieval serfs were slaves in all but name is not supportable.
In fact, as historian Jason Kingsley explains in this helpful video, serfs were not the same as slaves. For one thing, serfs were not bought and sold as individuals. The land on which they worked could be bought and sold, and the new owner of a piece of land worked by serfs would become their new lord. However, the serfs' right to work on that land could not be taken away by the new lord. Moreover, as sociologist Rodney Stark points out:
[Serfs] 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. If, as in some places, serfs owned their lords a certain number of days of labor each year, the obligation was limited and more similar to hired labor than to slavery. Although serfs were bound to a lord by extensive obligations, so too was their lord bound by obligations to them...(The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, pp. 27-28, citations omitted).
Interestingly--in the case of England at least--slavery was largely disappearing in the 11th century, after the Norman Conquest. At least one reason for this was the Catholic Church. As Kingsley notes in his video, "various bishops preached against it and Bishop Anselm said, in particular, it should be wrong to sell a man like a brute beast." In preaching against slavery, Anselm was merely echoing earlier church leaders. As Stark tells us:
As the ninth century dawned, Bishop Agobard of Lyons [in France] thundered: "All men are brothers, all invoke one same Father, God: the slave and the master, the poor man and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned, the weak and the strong...none has been raised above the other...there is no...slave or free, but in all things and always there is only Christ." At the same time, Abbot Smaragde of Saint-Mihiel wrote in a work dedicated to [the Holy Roman Emperor] Charlemagne: "Most merciful king, forbid that there should be any slave in your kingdom." Soon, no one "doubted that slavery in itself was against divine law" (p. 30. citations omitted).
In short, not only were serfs treated differently from slaves, but slavery itself as an institution largely ceased to exist during the Middle Ages. As a consequence, serfs could not have been slaves. Indeed, as Stark notes, "[the Church] managed to enact a ban on the enslavement of Christians (and of Jews). Within the context of medieval Europe, that prohibition was effectively a rule of universal abolition" (p. 28). To be fair, up through the 19th century, some Christians (or at least professed Christians) did own slaves and/or defended the practice of slavery (to their shame, I would add). Moreover, the Christian New Testament does not explicitly condemn slavery. At the same time, though, the idea expressed in the New Testament that all Christians are equal in the eyes of God provided a theological rationale for doing away with slavery. Thus, despite his obvious expertise regarding slavery in 18th century Virginia, the historical interpreter at Williamsburg was wrong to assert that medieval serfs were merely slaves by another name.
Image of medieval serfs from Wikimedia Commons