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In countries where the pirates succeeded in establishing themselves, all the native population was either destroyed by them, as Dudo tells us was the case in Normandy, or, as more frequently happened, the sword being unable to carry destruction so far, the inhabitants who survived were reduced to serfdom, and compelled to till the soil for the conquerors; they were thenceforth called villeins or ascripti glebae.
The fruits of this establishment were visible in the decent and orderly habits, and in the superior information of the whole population; presenting a moral picture exactly the reverse of that which too often characterises the now liberated ascripti glebæ who are usually engaged in such occupations, and who are proverbially the most barbarous and ignorant class of the community of Scotland thus furnishing an example, which is now become pretty general, of supplying an interesting and improving employment of the hours of relaxation from labour, instead of misspending the precious intervals at the alehouse or other houses of debauchery.
In feudal countries the lord imposed no tax on his villeins; these were mere chattels, ascripti gleboe, who tilled the land for their masters, and, as good serfs, could own nothing but the few utensils of their miserable hovels. They were just allowed what sufficed to support their own life and that of their families, and consequently they could bear no additional tax.
Thus was the holding of landed property allowed to the nobles alone; the great mass of the population being composed of men ascripti glebae who were incapable from their position of rising in the social scale; so that all were duly impressed with the idea that the mass of the people had been conquered and reduced, if not to slavery, to what greatly resembled it serfdom.
These few words suffice to show that the communes, wherever they arose, presupposed the existence of feudalism, and the slavery once so widely extended, passing gradually into serfdom. But neither feudalism nor slavery, in the old pagan sense of the word, nor even serfdom, properly so called, as the doom of the ascripti glebae, ever existed in Ireland.
Thousands of variations would have been developed by time which no letter of Scripture could have been comprehensive enough to reach. Were the serfs and the ascripti glebae of feudal Europe to be accounted slaves? Bald, a Scottish engineer, well known and esteemed in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He may be relied on.
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