Classification of Villeins in Medieval Sicily

Abstract

According to a traditional view, villeins in Norman Sicily consisted of two basic classes, those who owed their lords hereditary service in person and those who owed service with respect to the terms of their tenure of land. Scholars who recently examined relevant terms in Arabic documents seem to share this view. For example, Jeremy Johns showed us a list of Latin, Greek and Arabic words categorized into two groups, a class of “registered” villeins (ḥursh) and a class of “unregistered” villeins (muls), while Alex Metcalfe explains that Arabic and Greek terms to refer to villeins can be resolved into two basic categories, “registered” and “unregistered” families. In this paper, I will make it clear that muls and ḥursh were not a pair of opposite Arabic terms indicating two different classes of villeins, but that muls simply signify those who were not listed in the previous documents. It has been generally understood, mainly based on studies of France, that a social class of unfree peasants subject to lords through land tenure was formed in Western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.[1] Marc Block, a well-known French medievalist, considered that most peasants in the Middle Ages had been unfree and in the status of serfdom due to the following three points. First, they had to pay chevage, a kind of poll-money and a symbol of servitude. Second, they could not marry women living outside their lords’ domains unless they got their lords’ permission by making a large payment. Third, they had to pay mainmorte (death duty) to their lords when they bequeathed their property.[2] Hans Kurt Schulze, a German scholar, defines Bauern (sing. Bauer, peasants) in medieval Europe as those who belonged to rural population (as opposed to urban population), and explains that they constituted a quite uniform class as a whole in terms of social function, management style, and lifestyle, although they consisted of various people in free, semi-free, and unfree conditions, and varied greatly in terms of land tenure.[3] Scholars seem to have divided medieval peasants into slaves, unfree peasants, and free peasants in terms of degree of freedom, and sub-divided unfree peasants into serfs and villeins in terms of degree of dependence on their lords, although these divisions and definitions are quite artificial. As a matter of fact, there were various words supposed to indicate peasants in medieval Europe, and some of them were sometimes ambiguous and polysemous. It is important for us to clarify here the usage of some frequently used words, modern and medieval, for peasants of Medieval Europe. The English word “serf” (“serf” in French, “servo” in Italian) derives from the Latin word “servus”, while the English word “villein” (“vilain” in French, “villano” in Italian) comes from the Latin Classification of Villeins in Medieval Sicily