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February 05, 2004
Free Serfs
DeLong posits:
In the first, you are a free and independent peasant living in a village. Your field is your own. Your crops are you own. After working, you huddle before the fire in your peasant hut until you fall asleep. A smallpox epidemic comes. You, your spouse and your children all die.In the second, you are a peasant living in a village. Once a year a thug with a spear--Sir Pierre de Bois-Guilbert, say--comes and takes 10% of your crop. He uses his takings to live well in the castle up on the hill. He also employs a troubadour who comes and entertains the peasants nightly in the village square, singing, juggling, and telling stories. He also employs chirurgeons who undertake research into the balance of the four humours. One day, the chirurgeons come with their knives: they cut the arms of you and your family, and insert some cowpox-infested tissue. When the smallpox epidemic comes, you and your family (and the other families in the village) survive.
In which situation are you "freer"? Do you really care whether you are "freer"?
I'd complicate this a little by saying there are both kinds of serf living at the same time, each under both circumstances. Peasant A keeps sticking his tongue out at Peasant B saying that the troubadors are corrpting influences and that the chirurgeons don't respond to supply and demand. Peasant B figures out that he can live longer and now in eternal gratitude to Lord Bois-Guilbert, figures that if he can live 10 years longer at 10% crop reduction that he can live 20 years longer with 20%.
Posted by mbowen at February 5, 2004 06:45 AM
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