THE FEUDAL LAND SYSTEM 233 communications and left each locality in isolation to look after itself. Men would not obey even the local officials un- less they had to, since those officials often were no longer legally appointed by a king or emperor and often gave no better protection than king or emperor gave against the incessant invasions of heathen and Moslems. Therefore other bonds than those of political union must be found to hold society together and insure each individual some sort of order and protection. Such bonds The bond r 1 • 1 t j.' i_ of personal
- were found m personal relations between men subjection
and in dependent land tenure. Already in the slavery J Roman Empire and early Middle Ages men had been in [personal subjection to others. Both the Romans and the I early Germans had slaves, and although the number of ! slaves had been on the decline in the Roman Empire, the 'period of barbarian invasions brought in a new supply. Gregory the Great not only saw the Angle boys in the Roman slave market and planned to purchase heathen lads to educate as missionaries to their own peoples, but in one of his letters he makes a present of a personal servant (famulus) named John to another bishop. The Northmen, las we have seen, flooded Europe and Asia with slaves from
- Russia. In western and central Europe, however, there was
at this time little but agricultural work for slaves to do,
- so that most of them were sooner or later set out upon the
land and absorbed into the larger class of serfs. The serfs were peasants who were sold or transferred with the land which they cultivated, as if they had been so many ploughs or cows. When a king rewarded a valiant Medieval soldier or his wife's nephew or a new monastery serfdom with a slice of fertile soil off his own private estates, or when ' any one else gave or sold a piece of land, a villa, or so many mansi or hides, to another, it was understood that the peas- antry on the estate would now have to work for the new owner. We have already seen how a law of Constantine bound the coloni of the Roman Empire to the soil and thus reduced them to serfdom; that the prevalent land unit in the Roman Empire and early Middle Ages was the great
