A note on serf: it doesn't mean slave. It refers to the lowest class of agricultural workers, them being forbidden to own land (as opposed to peasants and farmers). These people worked the soil as payment for food and lodging, basically but were at least in theory free to move (in reality they were of course unable to do so, being too poor to stock up n assets). Servant would be the closest modern aproximation.This had huge legal ramifications in old times.
Slave comes from medieval latin sclavus and refers to slavic peoples, the often being taken as or sold as (even by each other) human chattel to romans.
Truth be told, I had to look this up. That's retirement for you: you realise that you've forgotten more of what you've learned than you ever used.
Yes, I was trying to keep the concept of 'serf' and 'slave' distinct. But these are legal terms that can shift meaning according to place and time in history. Latin 'servus' originally meant something like 'slave' or 'servant', and through Vulgar Latin and Old French, I'm pretty sure it eventually ended up as "serf", with our present meaning of that word. Presumably slaves were settled on the land to work, as in the American plantations, and eventually their shelters and the land they worked were delegated to them conditionally in return for a rent payment in kind or labor.
As you say, 'slave' comes from the medieval name for 'Slav', because so many of them were sold south or west. Perhaps the social situation in eastern Europe then was comparable to that of West Africa in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.
A note on serf: it doesn't mean slave. It refers to the lowest class of agricultural workers, them being forbidden to own land (as opposed to peasants and farmers). These people worked the soil as payment for food and lodging, basically but were at least in theory free to move (in reality they were of course unable to do so, being too poor to stock up n assets). Servant would be the closest modern aproximation.This had huge legal ramifications in old times.
Slave comes from medieval latin sclavus and refers to slavic peoples, the often being taken as or sold as (even by each other) human chattel to romans.
Truth be told, I had to look this up. That's retirement for you: you realise that you've forgotten more of what you've learned than you ever used.
Yes, I was trying to keep the concept of 'serf' and 'slave' distinct. But these are legal terms that can shift meaning according to place and time in history. Latin 'servus' originally meant something like 'slave' or 'servant', and through Vulgar Latin and Old French, I'm pretty sure it eventually ended up as "serf", with our present meaning of that word. Presumably slaves were settled on the land to work, as in the American plantations, and eventually their shelters and the land they worked were delegated to them conditionally in return for a rent payment in kind or labor.
As you say, 'slave' comes from the medieval name for 'Slav', because so many of them were sold south or west. Perhaps the social situation in eastern Europe then was comparable to that of West Africa in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.