The Meaning of Serfdom
Three or four days of every week the serfs—men and women alike—must labor in their master's fields for nought. What was left of the week, they were granted to earn subsistence for themselves and their families.
But that was not the worst. More bitter than labor was the fact that they were not their own, were chattels of their lord, who could sell them at his pleasure or gamble them away at cards.
He could beat them too, or kill them if he wished, without fear, for what advocate would take up the case of a penniless serf against the all-powerful aristocracy.
Hideous, too, was the glaring fact that young daughters of the serfs were regarded as the legitimate prey of the landlord and his sons.
In these later days the sins of the fathers have been visited in awful fashion on the descendants of these landlords. But can we