This is an attempt to construct an ordered synthesis of the evolution of labour in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. Its aim is not only to analyse the variations in the legal status of persons and of lands, but above all to set the working classes in the historical framework in which they lived, to trace the reciprocal action of political and social institutions, of exchange, of industrial and agricultural production, of the colonisation of the soil, of the distribution of landed and movable wealth, upon those economic transformations which brought about the appearance of new forms of labour and which gave to the masses a place in society which they had never hitherto occupied.

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