Note 26 — FLECHIER'S CHRONICLE OF CLERMONT ASSIZES.[23]
Reading edition
From the end of the fifteenth century there were no serfs in Auvergne, as is shown by the municipal law of 1510; "Toutes personnes estans et demeurans au dict pays sont francs et de franche condition." All persons being and dwelling in the said country are free and of free condition. Nevertheless, there were still "héritaiges tenus à condition de mainmorte."—(Coutume, titre xxvii. art. 1.) But on the confines of Auvergne, in the Pays de Combrailles, there were persons "de serve condition, de mainmorte et de suyte;" ibid. art. 2, which means that the servitude of those persons was attached to their flesh and bone; that it followed them every where, even when they abandoned their inheritance and fled the country. One is glad to hear Fléchier and Talon stigmatising, in the names of religion and humanity, those iniquitous rights, which subsisted more than a century after them. Personal servitude was abolished only by an edict of August 1779; for which Louis XVI. and his minister Necker are to be thanked. It took ten more years and the revolution of 1789 to do away with real servitude, which was general in France.—Mémoires, p. 112.