Villenage

"Who knows," asked the New-York Tribune, "but we may see revived there the feudal tenures--maiden-right, wardship, baronial robberies, the seizure of white children for the market, military service, and the horrible hardships of villenage which men have fondly deemed forever abolished." Pro-secession propagandists like Edmund Ruffin frankly despised his Virginia legislature as "that despicable assembly" because of "the enlargement of the constituency to universal suffrage," and David Gavin frankly hoped for a new Southern nation with "no general suffrage." In that case, why not the monarchy William Howard Russell heard them praising?

Lastly, more than once I turned to the footnotes for a paragraph dealing with specific and obscure legal terminology, only to be redirected to general secondary studies (30 n18; 32 n21; 85 n19; 101 n2; 108 n28), or even a complete silence after a litany of terms like 'socage, escuage, burgage, frankalmoin, frankmarraige, villenage, and so on' (27, cf.

Slavery is indistinguishable from villenage, the court asserted,

The practice of slavery was relatively new in the new world, but there were other forms of involuntary servitude that had a history in Europe called villenage, which was inheritable from generation to generation and characterized by servile conditions.