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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 292.: The Recovery of Fugitive Serfs, 1224. - A Source Book for Mediaeval History. Selected Documents Illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age

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Collection: Primary Sources
Subject Area: History

292.: The Recovery of Fugitive Serfs, 1224. - Oliver J. Thatcher, A Source Book for Mediaeval History. Selected Documents Illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age [1905]

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A Source Book for Mediaeval History. Selected Documents Illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age, ed. Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes McNeal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905).

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292.

The Recovery of Fugitive Serfs, 1224.

The condition of the serfs was a hard one. They had heavy work, poor shelter, and bad food. It is not strange that they sought freedom by running away. The cities offered them a good asylum, for they regarded it as a part of their law that a serf remaining in a free city a year and a day without being reclaimed by his lord became free. The lords objected to this, but without effect. Since the cities refused to deliver serfs to their lord on demand, it was necessary for the lords to enter the city and search for them. But in doing so they ran great risk of being stoned from the house-tops. Henry [VII] prescribed that they should have protection from the king as well as from the officials of the city which they wished to search.

Henry [VII], etc. . . . When a quarrel arose between our cities of Elsass and the nobles and ministerials of the same province in regard to the serfs who had run away and gone to the cities, or might hereafter do so, . . . it was settled by the following decision: If a serf belonging to a noble or ministerial runs away and goes to one of our cities and stays there, his lord may recover him if he can bring seven persons who are of the family of the serf’s mother, who will swear that he is a serf, and belongs to the said lord. If the lord cannot secure seven such witnesses, he may bring two suitable witnesses from among his neighbors, who will swear that before the serf ran away the said lord had been in peaceable possession of him, . . . and he may then recover his serf. We also decree and command that all nobles and ministerials who wish to recover their serfs may enter a city for this purpose with our permission and protection, and no one shall dare injure them. At their request a safe-conduct shall be furnished them by the Schultheissen and council of the city.