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Serf   /sərf/   Listen
noun
Serf  n.  A servant or slave employed in husbandry, and in some countries attached to the soil and transferred with it, as formerly in Russia. "In England, at least from the reign of Henry II, one only, and that the inferior species (of villeins), existed... But by the customs of France and Germany, persons in this abject state seem to have been called serfs, and distinguished from villeins, who were only bound to fixed payments and duties in respect of their lord, though, as it seems, without any legal redress if injured by him."
Synonyms: Serf, Slave. A slave is the absolute property of his master, and may be sold in any way. A serf, according to the strict sense of the term, is one bound to work on a certain estate, and thus attached to the soil, and sold with it into the service of whoever purchases the land.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Serf" Quotes from Famous Books



... break-up of this rigid system came in England the emancipation of the serf, the rise of the artisan class, and the beginnings of peasant agriculture. That personal gravitation which always draws together men of similar ambitions and tasks now began to work significant changes in the economic order. The peasantry, more or less ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... the Gordon Dane order, he suspected. And it was not too soon to begin laying those unseen foundations—to think the thought that must come before the thing. He was veritably a king, yet for a time must he masquerade as a wage-slave, a serf to Breede, and an inferior of Bulger's, considered as a ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... do, do, with a purpose all your own, That makes a man a man, whether born a serf or king; And it's loaf, loaf, loaf, lolling on a bench or throne That makes a being thewed to act a ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... gun and ammunition, with furs and with clothing appropriate to his position, with special gifts whenever he or they were marrying, and with all the pretty girls on whom his eye had rested. Therefore the [vc]if[vc]ija would lose the last shadow of freedom, he would become a serf. His sowing and his reaping would now be for another, and as it did not profit him at all to make the land more fruitful, he was content with any prehistoric implement, with little wooden ploughs ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... Russian country! People of lord and serf you are— Farewell, salute, bent knee and ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi


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