The Italian historian and satirist Gregorio Leti (1630–1701), in his work
Del Teatro Brittanico (1683), among many other aspects of English life, commented on the condition of servants. Leti’s main source was precisely Chamberlayne’s
Angliae Notitia: he translated some parts almost literally, adapted others and added his own views, explanations of words and concepts that might have been obscure to Italians, and comparisons with Italy and France. He claimed that female and male servants’ condition in England, in the past described as their purgatory, had improved and was as elsewhere. Servants were normally hired for a year and could leave their masters (or be dismissed) only after serving the entire agreed period and giving notice three months in advance. Before being hired, they should present a certificate from their previous masters. Thanks to this custom, English masters trusted their servants more than the French and Italians. Servants were thus better protected by their masters. Furthermore, their wages were higher than in Italy and France. Yet they were forced to work very hard, and were punished harshly if they were insolent or disobedient; killing one’s master or mistress was punished as if it were treason against the state. While in the past the use of slaves had been widespread, it had disappeared a long time before; and, according to Christian customs, foreign slaves became free as soon as they landed on English shores, despite remaining bound to ordinary service. In his view, the condition of some peasants called villeins (
villani) was truly servile, to the extent that they should be called servants (
servidori) rather than tenants (
affituali). Such a condition was truly unhappy, as it was impossible to consider the condition of perpetual servitude as happy. A similar condition was that of apprentices, which Leti considered a truly servile one. Yet, while villains experienced long-life bondage, apprentices were normally bound for seven years or even less, depending on their contracts.
1 Gregorio Leti, Del Teatro Brittanico, vol. 1 (London, 1683), pp. 454–6; Raffaella Sarti, ‘“The Purgatory of Servants”: (In)subordination, Wages, Gender and Marital Status of Servants in England and Italy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, 4 (2015), 349–51.While Leti was surprised at the servile conditions of English villeins, the English Dr Moore, in his View of Society and Manners in Italy (1781), published about a century after Leti’s Teatro Brittanico, maintained that
Though the inhabitants of the Italian Cities were the first who shook off the feudal yoke, and though in Naples they have long enjoyed the privilege of municipal jurisdiction, yet the external splendour of the nobles, and the authority they still exercise over the peasants, impose upon the minds of the
lazzaroni; and however bold and resentful they may be of injuries offered by others, they bear the insolence of the nobility as passively as peasants fixed to the soil. A coxcomb of a
volanti [the volante was a kind of servant] tricked out in his fantastical dress, or any of the liveried slaves of the great, make no ceremony of treating these poor fellows with all the insolence and insensibility natural to their masters; and for no visible reason, but because he is dressed in lace, and the others in rags. Instead of calling to them to make way, when the noise in the streets prevents the common people from hearing the approach of the carriage, a stroke across the shoulders with the cane of the running footman, is the usual warning they receive. Nothing animates this people to insurrection, but some very pressing and very universal cause; such as a scarcity of bread.
2 John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, vol. 2 (London, 1781), pp. 164–5.In his view, the Neapolitan poor were similar to serfs (peasants tied to the soil) even though Italian cities had abolished serfdom early. Furthermore, he mentioned the presence of slaves, both in the previous passage and while speaking of the construction of the royal palace in Caserta:
Among the workmen employed in finishing this palace and the gardens, there are one hundred and fifty Africans; for as the King of Naples is constantly at war with the Barbary States, he always has a number of their sailors prisoners, all of whom are immediately employed as slaves in the gallies, or at some public work.
3 Ibid., p. 305.Interestingly, he used the term slave also in relation to people condemned to forced labour:
There are at present at Casserta, about the same number of Christian slaves; all of these have been condemned to this servitude for some crime, some of them for the greatest of all crimes; they are, however, better clothed and fed than the Africans. This is done, no doubt, in honour of the Christian religion, and to demonstrate that Christians, even after they have been found guilty of the blackest crimes, are worthier men, and more deserving of lenity, than Mahometan prisoners, however innocent they may be in all other respects.
4 Ibid.In summary, Moore dealt with serfdom, abolished without leading to a substantial improvement of the condition of the poor, as well as with domestic servants, including slaves; with African slaves employed in services other than domestic, and even with ‘Christian slaves’, a definition that might seem inconsistent with many triumphant speeches on the role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery.
That slavery and serfdom were two components of the same category had been argued in 1755 by the heading
Esclavage of the
Encyclopédie, too: ‘there are two types of slavery or servitude, the real and the personal one’. The real one, according to the heading, tied the slave (
esclave) to the soil, the personal one referred to household management and to the person of the master. The more abusive slavery was that which was both real and personal.
5 Louis de Jaucourt, ‘Esclavage’, Encyclopédie, vol. 5, pp. 934–9, here p. 934. Slavery (
esclavage) had been abolished in most of Europe in the fifteenth century, yet too many survivals of slavery still existed in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and several places in low Germany, and in some small way even in French customs.
6 Ibid., p. 936. See also [Boucher D’Argis], ‘Esclave’, p. 940. What we would probably define as serfdom was included in the heading about slavery.
7 Rebekka von Mallinckrodt, ‘There are no Slaves in Prussia?’ in Brahm and Rosenhaft (eds), Slavery Hinterland, pp. 109–32, p. 115 argued that in the Holy Roman Empire ‘the debate about the abolition of slavery and the dispute over the elimination of serfdom were interconnected’.While opinion on the differences between types of servant and slave existing in different European countries changed over time, the persistence of feudal forms of dependence was still stressed, for instance, by Mittre in 1837: in his view, French masters and servants were freer than English ones to part company (
de se quitter réciproquement), even though English norms were not always respected. The opposite happened in ‘the Northern countries’, Austria and Prussia, where feudal distinctions remained strong.
8 Marius-Henri-Casimir Mittre, Des domestiques en France (Paris–Versailles, 1837), 203–4.Some decades earlier, it was exactly the freedom to leave one’s master that had been presented by the
Encyclopédie as the distinctive feature of free servants in comparison with slaves: ‘In France, where there are no slaves, all servants (
domestiques) are free’; they could leave their masters when they wanted. When they broke their contracts, masters could only claim compensation for damages, although some exceptions to this rule existed.
9 [Boucher D’Argis], ‘Domestiques’, p. 29. In France, there were some laws, only partly enforced, limiting the servants’ freedom to leave: see Sarti, ‘Freedom’, pp. 8–9. Conversely, English servants could be imprisoned for breach of contract, because it was a criminal offence. Yet, according to the English, this did not affect personal freedom as long as people entered service voluntarily. While the French
Encyclopédie stressed the freedom to leave one’s master as the distinguishing feature of free servants, in England the freedom to enter service, rather than to leave, was seen as crucial.
10 Steinfeld, The Invention, pp. 96–7.In England, to the surprise of some French commentators, there were also people forced to serve. Domestic service implies ‘a contract between two free people’, Abbot Grégoire wrote in 1814. ‘Nevertheless, in England, there are cases where the law seems to curb freedom, since some people can be forced to enter service; but this is a barrier that the policy maker thought he had to erect against laziness.’
11 Grégoire, De la domesticité, p. 178. As Blackstone explained, rehearsing the measures of the Statute of Artificers (1563), which repeated those of Statute of Labourers (1351), and which are known to have been enforced well into the eighteenth century: ‘All single men between twelve years old and sixty, and married ones under thirty years of age, and all single women between twelve and forty, not having any visible livelihood, are compellable by two justices to go out to service, for the promotion of honest industry.’
12 Blackstone, Commentaries, p. 413. In fact, norms forcing people to serve in order to reduce vagrancy and and/or to guarantee (unpaid or low cost) manpower to feudal lords, farmers and others existed in several European countries,
13 See the chapters on England, the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland in this volume. thus contributing to blurring boundaries among different types of serving people.
14 See also Sarti, ‘Freedom’.