Medieval France
. When a peasant tenant died without a direct heir living in his house and ready to assume his tenancy and debts, his property was said to have fallen into “dead hands” (manus mortua) and thus reverted to his landlord. In most cases, the heirs living away from home or collateral heirs paid a tax in order to assume possession of the deceased’s personal and landed possessions: they forfeited the best animal or, more often, negotiated a cash payment. Although mainmorte, along with the taille and marriage tax, have been traditionally regarded as characteristic of “serfdom,” recent French scholarship has considerably downplayed the servile nature of those taxes. Mainmorte, in fact, was similar to the feudal relief in that it represented the landlord’s consent to an irregular succession.
Mainmorte is mentioned frequently in the 12th century, when landlords attempted to discourage the emigration of their tenants to new lands and into towns.
But it was the newly wealthy townsmen who most strongly resented restrictions on the disposition of their property, and perceptive lords invariably abolished or commuted mainmorte in the community franchises of the late 12th and 13th centuries. By the 14th century, those still subject to mainmorte, mostly residents of small villages or tenants of conservative lords, were stigmatized as being socially inferior.
Theodore Evergates
Evergates, Theodore. Feudal Society in the Bailliage of Troyes Under the Counts of Champagne, 1152–1284. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Jordan, William Chester. From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986.
Petot, Pierre. “L’origine de la mainmorte servile.” Revue historique de droit français et étranger. 4th ser. 19–20(1940–41): 275–309.
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