ever, the servile institution was for
a time dissolved. This dissolution was a sub-conscious effect of the
spread of Christianity and not the outcome of any direct attack of the
Church upon slavery:

No dogma of the Church pronounced Slavery to be immoral, or the
sale and purchase of men to be a sin, or the imposition of
compulsory labour upon a Christian to be a contravention of any
human right.

Mr. Belloc traces the disappearance of this fundamental institution
rather as follows. He says:

The sale of Christians to Pagan masters was abhorrent to the later
empire of the Barbarian Invasions, not because slavery in itself
was condemned, but because it was a sort of treason to civilization
to force men away from Civilization to Barbarism.[15]

The disappearance of slavery begins with the establishment as the
fundamental unit of production of those great landed estates which were
known to the Romans as _villae_ and were cultivated by slaves. In the
last years of the Empire it became more convenient in the decay of
communications and public power and more consonant with the social
spirit of the time, to make sure of the slave's produce by asking him
for no more than certain customary dues. In course of time this
arrangement became a sort of bargain, and by the ninth century, when
this process had been gradually at work for nearly three hundred years,
what we now call the Manorial system was fairly firmly established. By
the tenth century the system was crystallized and had become so natural
to men that the originally servile character of the folk working on the
land was forgotten. The labourer at the end of the Dark Ages was no
longer a slave but a serf.

In the early Middle Ages, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at the
time, that is, of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the serf is
already nearly a peasant. As the generations pass he becomes more and
more free in the eyes of the courts and of society.

We see then that Saxon England, at the time the Conqueror landed, was
organized on the Manorial system. This arrangement, with its village
lords and their dependent serfs, was common to the whole of the West,
and could be found on the Rhine, in Gaul and even in Italy; but the
Manorial system in England differed from the Manorial system of Western
Europe in one fatally important particular.

In Saxon England [says Mr. Belloc] there was no systematic
organiz