The Servile State Hilaire Belloc (ebook reader macos TXT) 📖

problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of slavery as acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called “the Faith,” which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of slavery must return.

For there came upon us Europeans after all those centuries, and centuries of a settled social order which was erected upon slavery as upon a sure foundation, the experiment called the Christian Church.

Among the byproducts of this experiment, very slowly emerging from the old pagan world, and not long completed before Christendom itself suffered a shipwreck, was the exceedingly gradual transformation of the servile state into something other: a society of owners. And how that something other did proceed from the pagan servile state I will next explain.

III How the Servile Institution Was for a Time Dissolved

The subconscious effect of the Faith in this matter⁠—The main elements of pagan economic society⁠—The villa⁠—The transformation of the agricultural slave into the Christian “serf”⁠—Next into the Christian “peasant”⁠—The corresponding erection throughout Christendom of the “distributive state”⁠—It is nearly complete at the close of the Middle Ages⁠—“It was not machinery that lost us our freedom, it was the loss of a free mind.”

The process by which slavery disappeared among Christian men, though very lengthy in its development (it covered close upon a thousand years), and though exceedingly complicated in its detail, may be easily and briefly grasped in its main lines.

Let it first be clearly understood that the vast revolution through which the European mind passed between the first and the fourth centuries (that revolution which is often termed the conversion of the world to Christianity, but which should for purposes of historical accuracy be called the growth of the Church) included no attack upon the servile institution.

No dogma of the Church pronounced slavery to be immoral, or the sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any human right.

The emancipation of slaves was indeed regarded as a good work by the faithful: but so was it regarded by the pagan. It was, on the face of it, a service rendered to one’s fellowmen. The sale of Christians to pagan masters was abhorrent to the later empire of the barbarian invasions, not because slavery in itself was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilisation to force men away from civilisation to barbarism. In general you will discover no pronouncement against slavery as an institution, nor any moral definition attacking it, throughout all those early Christian centuries during which it none the less effectively disappears.

The form of its disappearance is well worth noting. It begins with the establishment as the fundamental unit of production in Western Europe of those great landed estates, commonly lying in the hands of a single proprietor, and generally known as villae.

There were, of course, many other forms of human agglomeration: small peasant farms owned in absolute proprietorship by their petty masters; groups of free men associated in what was called a vicus; manufactories in which groups of slaves were industrially organised to the profit of their master; and, governing the regions around them, the scheme of Roman towns.

But of all these the villa the dominating type; and as society passed from the high civilisation of the first four centuries into the simplicity of the Dark Ages, the villa, the unit of agricultural production, became more and more the model of all society.

Now the villa began as a considerable extent of land, containing, like a modern English estate, pasture, arable, water, wood and heath, or waste land. It was owned by a dominus or “lord” in absolute proprietorship, to sell, or leave by will, to do with it whatsoever he chose. It was cultivated for him by slaves to whom he owed nothing in return, and whom it was simply his interest to keep alive and to continue breeding in order that they might perpetuate his wealth.

I concentrate particularly upon these slaves, the great majority of the human beings inhabiting the land, because, although there arose in the Dark Ages, when the Roman Empire was passing into the society of the Middle Ages, other social elements within the villae⁠—the freed men who owed the lord a modified service, and even occasionally independent citizens present through a contract terminable and freely entered into⁠—yet it is the slave who is the mark of all that society.

At its origin, then, the Roman villa was a piece of absolute property, the production of wealth upon which was due to the application of slave labour to the natural resources of the place; and that slave labour was as much the property of the lord as was the land itself.

The first modification which this arrangement showed in the new society which accompanied the growth and establishment of the Church in the Roman world, was a sort of customary rule which modified the old arbitrary position of the slave.

The slave was still a slave, but it was both more convenient in the decay of communications and public power, and more consonant with the social spirit of the time to make sure of that slave’s produce by asking him for no more than certain customary dues. The slave and his descendants became more or less rooted to one spot. Some were still bought and sold, but in decreasing numbers. As the generations passed a larger and a larger proportion lived where and as their fathers had lived, and the produce which they raised was fixed more and more at a certain amount, which