Serfs and manorialism | World History | Khan Academy

In a previous video, we already talked about the feudal system. How you can have a king, and then you might have some vassals of the king who give an oath of fealty to the king in the homage ceremony. You might have a duke, and you could keep going down this chain of nobility. Maybe you have a count; maybe you have a baron. You could keep going down this chain of nobility where one noble is pledging fealty to the king as a king's vassal, but then they are lord of another vassal. You keep going all the way down until you get to a plot of land where the actual work might occur, and that term is often referred to as a manor.

A manor just doesn't happen at the bottom of this pyramid. A duke can have a manor, and they can split up the rest of their duchy and give sections of it to form counties that could be led by counts. But what we're going to focus on in this video is the manor itself, because that's where life in a medieval community actually takes place. The work on a manor is done essentially by the lowest rung of the ladder, and that is both free peasants and also by serfs.

To get a sense of what a medieval manor could have looked like, here's a picture, and this would have been a particularly fancy manor right over here. This is a dukal manor, so this would have been the manor of a duke. In this picture, you see the manor house, which in this case is the duke's castle, in many medieval communities, were the highest ranking of the nobility right beneath the king.

We see these people actually working the fields. We don't know from looking at them; some of them might be free peasants. Maybe this gentleman right over here is a free peasant, and this person right over here is a serf. The word serf comes from the Latin for service, the same word that eventually gives us words like servant. They are someplace in between a free peasant and a slave. They are bonded to the lord of the manor; in this case, it would be a duke. However, you could go down this hierarchy.

You could have a manor where the lord is a baron, or the lord is a knight, or the lord is just someone who is very wealthy and somehow got access to a fief. The serfs are bonded to the land; they can't leave without their lord's permission. They are allowed to cultivate certain tracks of land themselves but also have to work for their lord. They might help plant crops and harvest crops in the lord's land as well, and they also give a percentage of everything that they grow or everything that they do to the actual lord.

If the lord needs to go into war, the serfs might have to be soldiers in that war. You might be wondering, "Well, that sounds pretty bad. It sounds similar to being a slave." One of the key differences is that a serf actually can accumulate things on their own; they can actually own property.

Now, another term, or sometimes a subcategorization of serf in the Middle Ages, is the term villain. I know what you're thinking; you have heard that term before. The villain today means a bad guy, but the term originally comes from the Roman Empire. When Diocletian, the famous emperor who persecuted Christians, he also, because they were having trouble getting labor in rural villas, began to decree that certain people had to work in the villas. So someone who was compelled to work at a villa was called a villain. Hence, they were bonded to the land; they were a type of serf.

Now, the fact that villain in English means someone who is bad gives you an idea of how in a lot of languages and cultures, the notion of being captive or bonded and poor gets associated with being bad, which seems very contrary to our modern view of the world.

Now, to get a top-level view of what a manor might look like, we don't know what type of manor this is in particular, but the manor house here seems a little bit more humble than this duke manor right over here. This could be maybe a baron's manor house.

Now, the manor often had a village; this is where the serfs or the free peasants might live and keep their homes. Then you see the land that is cultivated collectively by this community, not just the actors that we've just talked about. You might also have a church or a monastery on that manor right over here.

These strips of land might have different crops, and the output of those crops goes to different people. The one common factor is that the lord of the manor might get all of the crops from some of these strips, while on the other strips, they get the taxation, so they'll get a certain percentage from the crops there. But all of the work is done by the serfs and the free peasants and possibly, if there are some, if this is a monastery and there are some monks at the monastery.

One interesting thing is why you often see in these manor maps these long strips of land. Our resident agricultural expert at Khan Academy, David Rystrom, says it's because the medieval plows, once you got going, you didn't want to turn them around. You got some momentum, and so people liked to plant crops in these long strips so the plows could just keep going in one direction. Only at the end do they just have to turn it around, minimizing the number of times that you actually have to turn around to plow.