Serf in the context of "Middle Ages in England"

The Solonian constitution was created by Solon in the early 6th century BC. At the time of Solon, the Athenian State was almost falling to pieces in consequence of dissensions between the parties into which the population was divided. Solon wanted to revise or abolish the older laws of Draco. He promulgated a code of laws embracing the whole of public and private life, the salutary effects of which lasted long after the end of his constitution.

Under Solon's reforms, all debts were abolished and all debt-slaves were freed. The status of the hectemoroi (the "one-sixth workers"), who farmed in an early form of serfdom, was also abolished. These reforms were known as the Seisachtheia. Solon's constitution reduced the power of the old aristocracy by making wealth rather than birth a criterion for holding political positions, a system called timokratia (timocracy). Citizens were also divided based on their land production: pentacosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitae, and thetes. The lower assembly was given the right to hear appeals, and Solon also created the higher assembly. Both of these were meant to decrease the power of the Areopagus, the aristocratic council. Despite the division between classes and citizens, Solon felt these classes were connected as one. Solon felt that a disservice against even just one member of the society would indirectly be a disservice against every member of the society. The only parts of Draconian constitution that Solon kept were the laws regarding homicide. The constitution was written as poetry, and as soon as it was introduced, Solon went into self-imposed exile for ten years so he would not be tempted to take power as a tyrant.

A kholop (Ukrainian and Russian холо́п; Russian pronunciation: [xɐˈlop], Ukrainian pronunciation: [xoˈɫɔp]) was a type of feudal serf in Kievan Rus' from the 9th to early 12th centuries. The legal status of kholops in the 16th-century Tsardom of Russia was essentially the same as slaves.

England in the Middle Ages concerns the history of England during the medieval period, from the end of the 5th century through to the start of the early modern period in 1485. When England emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire, the economy was in tatters and many of the towns abandoned. After several centuries of Germanic immigration, new identities and cultures began to emerge, developing into kingdoms that competed for power. A rich artistic culture flourished under the Anglo-Saxons, producing epic poems such as Beowulf and sophisticated metalwork. The Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity in the 7th century, and a network of monasteries and convents were built across England. In the 8th and 9th centuries, England faced fierce Viking attacks, and the fighting lasted for many decades. Eventually, Wessex was established as the most powerful kingdom and promoted the growth of an English identity. Despite repeated crises of succession and a Danish seizure of power at the start of the 11th century, it can also be argued that by the 1060s England was a powerful, centralised state with a strong military and successful economy.

The Norman invasion of England in 1066 led to the defeat and replacement of the Anglo-Saxon elite with Norman and French nobles and their supporters. William the Conqueror and his successors took over the existing state system, repressing local revolts and controlling the population through a network of castles. The new rulers introduced a feudal approach to governing England, eradicating the practice of slavery, but creating a much wider body of unfree labourers called serfs. The position of women in society changed as laws regarding land and lordship shifted. England's population more than doubled during the 12th and 13th centuries, fueling an expansion of the towns, cities, and trade, helped by warmer temperatures across Northern Europe. A new wave of monasteries and friaries was established while ecclesiastical reforms led to tensions between successive kings and archbishops. Despite developments in England's governance and legal system, infighting between the Anglo-Norman elite resulted in multiple civil wars and the loss of Normandy.

A cloister (from Latin claustrum 'enclosure') is a covered walk, open gallery, or open arcade running along the walls of buildings and forming a quadrangle or garth. The attachment of a cloister to a cathedral or church, commonly against a warm southern flank, usually indicates that it is (or once was) part of a monastic foundation, "forming a continuous and solid architectural barrier... that effectively separates the world of the monks from that of the serfs and workmen, whose lives and works went forward outside and around the cloister."

Cloistered (or claustral) life is also another name for the monastic life of a monk or nun. The English term enclosure is used in contemporary Catholic church law translations to mean cloistered, and some form of the Latin parent word "claustrum" is frequently used as a metonymic name for monastery in languages such as German. Cloistered clergy refers to monastic orders that strictly separate themselves from the affairs of the external world.

The Imperial villages (German: Reichsdörfer [ˈʁaɪçsˌdœʁfɐ], singular Reichsdorf [ˈʁaɪçsˌdɔʁf]) were the smallest component entities of the Holy Roman Empire. They possessed imperial immediacy, having no lord but the Emperor, but were not estates. They were unencircled and did not have representation in the Imperial Diet. In all these respects they were similar to the Imperial Knights; the inhabitants of imperial villages were free men (being not serfs or similar feudal status).

In tsarist Russia, the term serf (Russian: крепостной крестьянин, romanized: krepostnoy krest'yanin, lit. 'bonded peasant') meant an unfree peasant who, unlike a slave, originally could be sold only together with the land to which they were "attached". However, this had stopped being a requirement by the 19th century, and serfs were by then practically indistinguishable from slaves. Contemporary legal documents, such as Russkaya Pravda (12th century onwards), distinguished several degrees of feudal dependency of peasants. While another form of slavery in Russia, kholopstvo, was ended by Peter I in 1723, serfdom (Russian: крепостное право, romanized: krepostnoye pravo) was abolished only by Alexander II's emancipation reform of 1861; nevertheless, in times past, the state allowed peasants to sue for release from serfdom under certain conditions, and also took measures against abuses of landlord power.

Serfdom became the dominant form of relation between Russian peasants and nobility in the 17th century. Serfdom most commonly existed in the central and southern areas of the Tsardom of Russia and, from 1721, of the subsequent Russian Empire. Serfdom was rare in Little Russia (parts of today's central Ukraine), other Cossack lands, the Urals and Siberia until the reign of Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796), when it spread to Ukraine; noblemen began to send their serfs into Cossack lands in an attempt to harvest their extensive untapped natural resources.

The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the full title of which is the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, is a 1956 United Nations treaty which builds upon the 1926 Slavery Convention, which is still operative and which proposed to secure the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade, and the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, which banned forced or compulsory labour, by banning debt bondage, serfdom, child marriage, servile marriage, and child servitude.