| Subject: Re: Seventh prompt for response |
Author:
Clem Perez
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Date Posted: 04:22:30 03/07/03 Fri
In reply to:
Melody Wolfshohl
's message, "Re: Seventh prompt for response" on 20:24:03 03/06/03 Thu
The use of the word "citizen" concerns me. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "citizen" as "1. An inhabitant of a city or (often) of a town; esp. one possessing civic rights and privileges, a burgess or freeman of a city," and "2. A member of a state, an enfranchised inhabitant of a country, as opposed to an alien; in U.S., a person, native or naturalized, who has the privilege of voting for public offices, and is entitled to full protection in the exercise of private rights." The third definition, "Inhabitant, occupant, denizen. (Of men, beasts, things personified)," is more like what you mean, but that is not as common an idea as the other two. A common person would usually be a serf:"1. A slave, bondman" or " 2. A person in a condition of servitude or modified slavery, distinguished from what is properly called ‘slavery’ in that the services due to the master, and his power of disposal of his ‘serf’, are more or less limited by law or custom.
In most of the typical examples of serfdom, the serf was ‘attached to the soil’ (adscriptus glebæ), i.e. he could not be removed (except by manumission) from the lord's land, and was transferred with it when it passed to another owner. This feature is often assigned as the distinctive mark of ‘serfdom’ as opposed to ‘slavery’, and is popularly apprehended as an essential part of the notion.
"
Your use of "citizen" leads me to think that people had rights similar to ours, except they had a king. While people had some rights, by custom, they were mostly negative. The common people had duties and the death of one or of many was not looked on as significant; their lives were often dependant on the whim of the lord to whom they were attached.
The etymology of "citizen" is from a word meaning "city." As cities became established and fewer people were attached to the land--this happened over a long period--the power of life and death of a lord over a common person, slowly eroded, and common people started to have a sense of their own power, limited though it was.
Another thing, the word "country" implies something like that which we have today, and that was, at this time, only starting to take hold. A "country" was a collection of lords who all gave fealty to one other, more powerful, lord. This was much more like the idea of warlords that has popped up in the news lately in Afganistan and Somalia. They can be the seeds of a country in the end, but only when one becomes powerful enough to demand fealty from or to defeat all the others. Even when this happens, more is needed for a country to, eventually, be the outcome. Part of this, we can judge from history, is the rise of the cities and the existance of people whose work in important, but who are not attached to the land.
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