Excerpt from A General History of the World, Vol. 2 Below the warlike society of the lords was the toiling society of the villeins and serfs. The freemen had dis appeared. The villeins, or free tenants, and the serfs cultivated the land for the lord under the shadow of the feudal keep around which they clustered, and which sometimes defended but more often Oppressed them. The villein had only to pay his fixed rents like a farmer and to perform the least onerous forced labor. He could not be detached from the land which had been assigned him to cultivate, but he had the right to hold it as his own. As for the serfs, The sire, says Pierre de Fontaine, can take all that they have, can hold their bodies in prison whenever he pleases, and is forced to answer therefor only to God alone. In spite of this the condition of the serf was better than that of the slave in antiquity. He was regarded as a man. He had a family. The Church, which declared him a son of Adam, made him, before God at least, the equal of the proud est lords. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.