Still the serf can rise in vengeance--can admonish the autocrat that humanity may yet turn again and rend him.
Always confined to an ill-lighted chamber, the pure and white skin of the poor serf has not been tanned by the heat of sun; the hard labors of the field have not deformed her delicate hands.
A serf and an orphan, I own nothing in the world but this little spindle.
In my eyes, the female serf and the daughter of the monarch are equal, provided they be young, handsome and loyally and devotedly love.
It opened its ranks to the conquered races, and invested even the converted serf with dignities which placed him above the level of Thane or Count.
It is scarcely less difficult for them to conceive it, than for us to form a correct notion of what a slave was amongst the Romans, or a serf in the Middle Ages.
The serf was allowed a family, and even a certain amount of money; but the ground which he cultivated could never belong to him; and above all he could not leave this ground, nor make of his work and services the use he wished.
The peasant was a serfin Denmark in the fullest meaning of the term.
Thus a regulation was issued relating to the corvées on the noble estates, by which the poor serf ceased to be a helpless tool in the hands of his owner.
I do not believe in being the slave or serf or servant of a party.
That barbarous law which gave the feudal lord a right to call every man his serf who settled in his domains was softened.
The mental serf is a bodily serf too, and spiritual fetters are the agencies of political thraldom.
It may be remarked that St. Serf is said to have come into a "dysart" or desert.
St. Serf cures him by putting his thumb into his mouth.
St. Serf has a pet robin, which is wont to sit and sing upon his shoulder.
This St. Serf is a hermit of the true old type; and even if his story be, as Dr.
He could not make the serf utterly landless and desperate, utterly without access to the means of production, though doubtless it was rather the field that owned the serf, than the serf that owned the field.
It is true that he is free to go to the workhouse, but only in the same sense in which he is free to go to jail, only in the same sense in which the serf under the gibbet was free to find peace in the grave.
The serf was not free to go; but he was free to stay.
But even if you call the serf a beast of the field, he was not what we have tried to make the town workman--a beast with no field.
The serf still belonged to the lord, as the stick that struck root in the garden would have still belonged to the owner of the garden; but it would have become a live possession.
I have done no otherwise for a sennight," the man sighed as he hurried away to snatch the tongs from a serf who was spending an unnecessary fagot upon the fire.
From the master in his chair to the serf by the door, they stared dumb-founded at the messenger.
There be none but men with the King, and it is not fitting--" "And is the son of a Saxon serf to decide where it is fitting for me to go?
While one serf knelt beside him, scrubbing at his muddy riding-boots with a wisp of wet grass, another held a gilt shield up for a mirror, and before this the Etheling was carefully parting his shining hair.
I know all; and by the God above us, to whom your wives and children are even now at prayer, I swear to free the Hungarian serf from bondage!
Many a century lay between the serf and successful revolt, and though he tried it many a time and never lost heart, yet the coming change which his martyrdom helped on was not to be for him yet, but for the new masters of his successors.
There was no inducement for a landless serf to spend care or labor upon houses or surroundings; pigs and babies were permitted to tumble about both indiscriminately.
When the slave became a serf on the manorial estate of mediæval Europe, manufacturing was still a household employment and old methods were still in use.
From that time until age compels him to join the ranks of the unemployed he is bound to his machine, as firmly as the mediæval serf was bound to the soil.
A dash of walnut juice, and who will guess that under the tan of Conrad the serf there is concealed a prince of Holy Church?
Slavery, chattel slavery, died because it had ceased to be profitable; serf labor arose because it was more profitable.
It was this class, and not the serf class, which was destined to challenge the rule of the feudal nobility, and wage war upon it.
The serf pays no tribute directly to the king, only to his liege lord; the liege lord pays to his superior, and so on, up to the king.
But alongside of the feudal estate with itsserf labor, there were the free laborers, no longer regarding labor as shameful and degrading.
The principle laid down by Nicolas was, that the serf should obtain his personal freedom, and the lord should take possession of his land!
In the great questions of serf and soil, two points around which all popular politics then moved, they took a part with the peasant against his lord, though Ilyin was himself of noble birth.
On the day when Alexander the Second came to his crown (1855), both lord andserf expected from his hands some great and healing act.
While he was a serf he could be flogged into industry, if not into sobriety.
The monks had proved themselves unfit for such a trust; and as they held their lands by a title higher than the law can give, it was hard for a convent serf to believe that any part of the fields he tilled was actually his own.
The question, whether the serf is so far cured of his Tartar habit that he can live a settled life without being bound to his patch of ground, is still unasked.
The serf had got too much; the lords had kept too much.
Nobody knew how far the serfhad been broken of those nomadic habits which led to serfage.
But here the likeness of serf to either villein, aldion, colonus, fiscal, or homme de pooste ends sharply.
A serf might do so; he lived in terror of the stick; he had no notion of his rights; and he had worked for others all his life.
Free nations were all against him; and the serf nation which he ruled so sternly was not for him.
The peasant was never beaten down so low in the scale of life as his parish priest; for the serf had always his communal meeting, his choice of elders, his right of speech, and his faculty of appeal.
The runaway serf gained freedom by residence in a chartered town for a year and a day.
But the same process which freed the farmer from personal service in time became the chief way of freeing the serf also.
From a serf the common laborer had become his own master as far as choosing his own employer and the place of his employment.
Until this came about the serf or laborer, whatever other rights he might have, and he was not a slave, was born to his holding and his lord.
It lacked the symmetrical finish of the Roman institutions, although it was introduced from French soil through overlordship and proceeded from the sovereign to the serf, rather than springing from the serf to the sovereign.
They were regarded as the rightful prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their marriage, and from this custom, the oldest son of the serf was held as the son of the lord, "as perchance it was he who begat him.
