have features more purely negroid with coarser lips and heavier jaws. Many Serers are nominally Mahommedans, but nature-worship is still prevalent. Their two chief gods are Takhar, god of justice, and Tiurakh, god of wealth, who are worshipped at the foot of trees. Snakes, too, have their cult, and formerly living animals were sacrificed to them. A belief in transmigration, as shown by their funeral customs, is general among the Serers. They are an honest and industrious people, but are very heavy drinkers.
SÉRES, Serros or Siros, chief town of a sanjak in the vilayet
of Salonica, European Turkey, on Lake Takhino, a navigable
expansion of the river Karasu or Struma (ancient Strymon),
43 m. by rail N.E. of Salonica. Pop. (1905) about 30,000, of
whom about half are Bulgarians (one-third of them being
Mussulmans), nearly one-fourth Greeks, about one-seventh
Turks and the remainder Jews. Séres is built in a district so
fertile as to bear among the Turks the name of Altin Ovassi,
or Golden Plain, and so thickly studded with villages as to
appear, when seen from the outliers of Rhodope on the north,
like a great city with extensive gardens. It is the seat of a
Greek archbishop and patriarch. It consists of the old town,
Varosh, situated at the foot and on the slope of the hill crowned
by the old castle, and of the new town built in the European
fashion on the plain, and forming the commercial centre. The
principal buildings are the Greek archiepiscopal palace, the
Greek cathedral, restored since the great fire of 1879, by which
it was robbed of its magnificent mosaics and woodwork, the
Greek gymnasium and hospital (the former built of marble), the
richly endowed Eski Jami mosque, and the ruins of the once
no less flourishing Ahmed Pasha or Hagia Sophia mosque, whose
revenues were formerly derived from the Crimea. On a hill
above the town are the ruins of a fortress described in a Greek
inscription as a “tower built by Helen in the mountainous
region.” Séres is the headquarters of the Turkish wool trade,
and has also manufactures of cloth and carpets. There is a
large trade in rice and cereals, and the other exports include
tobacco and hides.
Séres is the ancient Seris, Sirae or Sirrhae, mentioned by Herodotus in connexion with Xerxes’s retreat, and by Livy as the place where Aemilius Paulus received a deputation from Perseus. In the 14th century, when Stephen Dushan of Servia assumed the title emperor of Servia, he chose Sirrhae as his capital; and it remained in the hands of the Servians till its capture by Sultan Murad II. (1421–1451).
SERFDOM (from Fr. serf, Lat. servus, a servant or slave).
The notion of serfdom is distinct from those of freedom and of
slavery. The serf is not his own master: to perform services
for other persons is the essence of his status, but he is not given
over to his lord to be owned as a thing or an animal—there are
legal limits to the lord's power. Serfdom is very often
conceived as a perpetual adherence to the soil of an estate owned
by a lord, but this praedial character is not a necessary feature
of the condition. Hereditary serfdom may sometimes assume
the shape of a personal relation between servant and master.
Such being the general features of serfdom, it is sure to appear
in very different ages and countries. It will be formed naturally,
for instance, in cases when one barbarous community conquers
another, but it is not able to destroy entirely the latter or to treat
its members as mere chattels. This mitigated form of appropriation
of human beings by their conquerors may be brought about
as well by the paucity or comparative weakness of the victors
as by the difficulty for them to draw income from pure slaves.
In a state of backward agriculture and natural economy it will
sometimes be more profitable for the conquerors as well as for
the conquered to leave the dependent population in their own
households and on their own plots, at the same time taxing
them heavily in the way of tribute and services. Such an
arrangement clearly obtained in several of the agricultural states
on ancient Greece. The Penestae of Thessaly appear as a
remnant of a distinct tribe settled on the confines of Macedonia
and at the same time as a class of tributary peasants serving
Thessalian aristocrats. The Mnoitae, Klarotae and Aphamiotae
of Crete were more or less in the same position. Their
chief occupation was the cultivation of the shares (κλᾶροι) of
the Dorian aristocracy, but they lived in households of their
own and were considered as subjects rather of the Cretan
commonwealths than of private men. The relation between both
classes is well illustrated by a fragment of the Cretan poet
Hybrias, who thus glories in his shield and sword: “I till the
land with them, I press the wine from the grapes. On account
of them I am called the lord of the Mnoa.” Even in the case
of the Helots of Sparta, although their condition was very hard
and they were made to perform services to any Spartiate who
might require them to do so, features of a similar tributary
condition are apparent. The chief work of the Helots was to
provide a certain quantity of corn, wine and oil for the lords of
the shares on which they were settled (roughly 82 medimni
of barley a year per share); personal services to other Spartiates
were exceptional. Pollux in his account of the Helots places
them distinctly in an intermediate position between free men
and slaves. The fact that in these instances governments had a
good deal to say in the regulation of the status of such serfs
is well worth noting: it explains to a great extent the legal
limitations of the power of the lords. Even downright slaves
belonging to the state or to some great temple corporation were
treated better and carefully distinguished from private slaves
by the Greeks.
We shall not be astonished to find, therefore, in the Hellenistic states of Asia a population of peasants who seem to have been in a condition of hereditary subjection and adherent to the glebe on the great estates of the Seleucid kings (see Rostowtzew in Lehmann's Beiträge zur alten Geschichte, ii.). It is not unlikely that the customs of these λαοὶ βασιλικοί went back to the epoch of the Persian monarchy. In any case these peasants (γεωργοί) were certainly not slaves, while, on the other hand, their condition was closely bound up with the cultivation of the estates where they lived. The regulation by the state of the duties and customary status of peasants on government domains turns out to be one of the roots of serfdom in the Roman world, which in this respect as in many others follows on the lines laid down by Hellenistic culture. It is important for our purpose to notice that the condition of coloni was developed as a result of historic necessity by the working of economic and social agencies in the first centuries of the Roman empire and was made the subject of regular legislation in the 4th and 5th centuries. In the enactments of Justinian, summing up the whole course of development (C.J. xi., 48, 23), two classes of coloni are distinguished—the adscripticii, representing a more complete state of serfdom, and the free coloni, with property of their own. But the whole class, apart from minor variations, was characterized by the idea that the peasants in question were serfs of the soil (servi terrae) on which they were settled, though protected by the laws in their personal and even in their praedial status. Thus the ascription to the soil, although originally a consequence of ascription to the tributes (adscriptio censibus), became the mark of the legal status of serfdom. The emperors actually tried in their legislation to prevent the landowners from evicting their coloni and from raising their rents. In this way fixity of tenure and service was aimed at and to a certain degree enforced by the state.
With the break-up of the Roman empire the legal protection in regard to serfs could not be kept up in the same way as before. The weak governments which took the place of imperial authority were not able to maintain the strict discipline and the stress of judicial power which would have been necessary to guarantee the tenure and status of the serfs. And yet serfdom became the prevailing condition for the lower orders during the middle ages. Custom and economic requirements produced checks on the sway of the masters which proved effectual even when legal protection was insufficient. The direction of events towards the formation of serfdom is already clearly noticeable in Celtic communities. In Wales and Ireland the greater part of the rural working classes was reduced not to a state of slavery, but to serfdom. The male slave (W. cæth) does not play an
