From Servitude to Freedom: Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century

During the thirteenth century, many great French nobles and churchmen who possessed serfs decided to grant freedom to them or at least to remove some of their disabilities. Manumission—that granting of freedom­-was of major significance to medieval French society. William Chester Jordan studies the causes and consequences of the movement toward manumission by looking at the region around Sens in northern France. He supplements this regional approach with an intensive case study of the freei...