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The people of the lowlands were as different as if belonging to another race. The enormous mass of ignorance the three hundred and fifty thousand men and women who could not read or write were mostly black and white serfs of the great landholders, whose plantations lie within one hundred miles of the Atlantic coast.
In this social organization, there are the two grand classes of the seigneurs and the serfs; but the seigneur, even if he be a king, may also hold fiefs as a vassal. SUZERAIN AND VASSAL. The suzerain and the vassal, or liege, were bound together by reciprocal obligations.
Hammer and plane, soap and water, paper and paint, can make it new again. The barber, I understand, is a worthy man, and has reared a decent family. His daughter plays the piano, and sings: 'I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, With vassals and serfs by my side. I heard her as I passed there yesterday." Miss Laura gave an apprehensive start.
But they did not go to war any more than the Wall Street Junkers go to war. Their predecessors declared the wars, but their miserable serfs fought the wars. The serfs believed that it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another, to wage war upon one another. And that is war in a nut shell. The master class has always brought a war, and the subject class has fought the battle.
One great work accomplished by the help of Wulstan was, the putting an end to a horrible slave-trade with Ireland, whither Saxon serfs were sold, not by Normans, but by their own country people, who had long carried it on before the Conquest.
The best crop was on the bank of the Braunwasser, by the Debateable Ford, but this was cut and carried on the backs of the serfs, much earlier than the mountain grass, and never without much vigilance against the Schlangenwaldern; but this year the Count was absent at his Styrian castle, and little had been seen or heard of his people.
The experience of all ages warrants the inference, which may be best stated in the words of Dr. Faber: "In the progress of the human mind there is an invariable tendency not to introduce into an undisturbed community a palpable difference between lords and serfs, instead of a legal equality of rights; but to abolish such difference by enfranchising the serfs.
Catharine II. extended the privileges of the nobility, made wars upon inoffensive nations, corrupted the morals of her people, and manifested her regard for the serfs by giving large numbers of them away to her paramours. The Emperor Alexander I. was ambitious of distinction, as the most cultivated and enlightened sovereign of his time. He issued liberal edicts, but seldom observed them.
Then the population of the manor was to be given in classes: freemen and sokemen; villeins, cotters, and serfs; the amount of forest and meadow; the number of pastures, mills, and fish-ponds; and what the value of the manor was in the time of King Edward, at the date of its grant by King William, and at the time of the inquiry.
The units of the community isolated; little chance for mind to kindle mind; no schools; no literary institutions, high or low; no public libraries; no printing-press; no intellectual freedom; no religious freedom; the forces of society tending to create two great classes a class of vast land-owners, haughty, hospitable, indolent, passionate, given to field sports and politics; and a class of impoverished white plebeians and black serfs; these constitute a situation out of which may be evolved country gentlemen, loud-lunged and jolly fox-hunters, militia heroes, men of boundless domestic heartiness and social grace, astute and imperious politicians, fiery orators, and, by and by, here and there, perhaps after awhile, a few amateur literary men -but no literary class, and almost no literature."
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