cloisters and ecclesiastical establishments, for the condition of
Church-slaves was preferable to that of other serfs. Persons worsted
in judicial duels, shipwrecked sailors, vagrants, strangers, criminals
unable to pay the money-bote imposed upon them, were all deprived of
freedom; but the prolific source of slavery was war. Prisoners were
almost universally reduced to servitude. A free woman who intermarried
with a slave condemned herself and offspring to perpetual bondage. Among
the Ripuarian Franks, a free woman thus disgracing herself, was girt with
a sword and a distaff. Choosing the one, she was to strike her husband
dead; choosing the other, she adopted the symbol of slavery, and became a
chattel for life.

The ferocious inroads of the Normans scared many weak and timid persons
into servitude. They fled, by throngs, to church and monastery, and were
happy, by enslaving themselves, to escape the more terrible bondage of
the sea-kings. During the brief dominion of the Norman Godfrey, every
free Frisian was forced to wear a halter around his neck. The lot of a
Church-slave was freedom in comparison. To kill him was punishable by a
heavy fine. He could give testimony in court, could inherit, could make
a will, could even plead before the law, if law could be found. The
number of slaves throughout the Netherlands was very large; the number
belonging to the bishopric of Utrecht, enormous.

The condition of those belonging to laymen was much more painful. The
Lyf-eigene, or absolute slaves, were the most wretched. They were mere
brutes. They had none of the natural attributes of humanity, their life
and death were in the master's hands, they had no claim to a fraction of
their own labor or its fruits, they had no marriage, except under
condition of the infamous 'jus primoe noctis'. The villagers, or
villeins, were the second class and less forlorn. They could commute the