(11-08-2024, 04:59 PM)Michigan Swamp Buck Wrote: Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that these feudal kingdoms went to war and then payed off their knights with land from conquered territory. They now own the land and everything on it, including the people that have lived there through every other lord or king that had ruled before the new bunch. The land and the people of the land are owned by the local lord or baron who collected taxes for themselves and the monarchy. Plus the land provided people for the on going war efforts.
So, as comparison, I can own land, but have to pay tribute to keep it in the form of property taxes. If the government needs my property, eminent domain can take it from me as well. If a war breaks out and I am able bodied and of a certain age range I could be drafted to fight in said war.
I guess I can think of a few more if I tried a little harder.
Yes, in some cases the knights were paid off with conquered lands, especially after the Norman Conquest. They didn't actually "own" the serfs, but it was a defacto sort of slavery - the serfs were not allowed to leave the lands without permission, and had to work them and pay "taxes" to the Lord from their produce. So, he still got rich off their work, and used some of the surplus to pay taxes to HIS Lord, and so on right on up to the king.
Some times, one Lord would "poach" some particularly useful serfs from another Lord.
In America, the original "slaves" were indentured Irishmen, "transported" to America for being "troublesome". They were indentured to whomever paid for their transport for varying times, from 4 to 7 years, during which time they had to work for their masters to pay off the price of their indenture, which was the price of their transportation to America. At the end of their indenture, the master was bound by law to give them a suit of clothes and a gun, at which time they were free to go off and get their own lands, and make their own indentures if they had the money (from working that land) to transport more people.
Some of the people in America got their lands through indentures - they were granted an extra 50 acres for every indentured servant they paid transport for. Plus, they got the free labor from the people they indentured for the length of the indenture. Sweet deal, eh?
Some folks were just plain granted land, in huge tracts, through patents and royal charters and grants. Lord Fairfax comes to mind - he was granted a huge tract in what is now northern Virginia and eastern West Virginia. These lands were parceled out and sold to newcomers and freed indentured servants, who would live on the land as the "owner" and work it. Even thought hey "owned" the land by virtue of having purchased it from Lord Fairfax, they still had to pay him yearly "quitrents" from it. Those quitrents were paid to the Lord Fairfax instead of the government, but were the same thing as our modern taxes, just paid to the lord rather than to the government. Some time after the revolution, they became taxes paid to the government instead, but amounted to the same thing - money paid to a 3rd party to be allowed to continue to "own" their own lands.
I have some records of some of my ancestors having to pay quitrents to Lord Fairfax of 5 shillings per year, which back then was a considerable value more than it is now, due to inflation over the years.
The first African to come to North America came in 1619, to Jamestowne. They arrived as cargo on a ship captured in the incessant piracy on the Spanish, and were sold as indentures rather than true slaves. After the price of their "passage" was worked off, they were given their clothes and gun and sent off to make good on their own, the same as their Irish predecessors.
One of those original African indentures - or his son, but probably the original immigrant - was the first actual slave owner in Virginia through an act of the courts which made one of his indentured servants, John Casor, or John Bunch - I forget just now which was which - a "slave for life". This happened in either Accomack or Northampton County on the eastern shore of Virginia - that bit of VA on a spit of land east of the Chesapeake Bay that VA shares with MD. As I recall, he was made the first "slave for life" in America because of his runaway tendencies and therefore not giving the value of his passage to his master, who was also an African.
So those indentured servants were not true, legal, life-long slaves, nor were the serfs of old, but they could be punished as "runaways" the same as runaway slaves if they did not fulfill their obligations to their masters or lords. So, the difference is really academic because of a time-limit on their servitude on the part of the indentures and a slight chance of mobility (to the lands of the next-door Lord) on the part of the serfs..
So, yeah - taxes evolved from feudal quitrents, and slavery evolved from feudal serfdom via indentured servitude. Our world of today is an awful lot like the feudal world, just using different words for the same or scarily similar concepts. Those at the top of the heap, ever greedy, just want to take us back to full-on feudalism under different terminology, and are working diligently to that end.
Hence they do things like push electric vehicles and "15 minute cities" to reduce the mobility of us serfs, and push for themselves to own everything that we used to own so that they can rent it back to us.
.