Many have heard the word "servants", but not everyone knows its meaning. To understand in more detail and understand the meaning, we turn to history. Serf, stink, servants ... In ancient Russia, these words were used everywhere, and at the present time only sometimes slip through the vocabulary. What do they really mean? Consider below.
What is a goof?
This is the name of all bonded people acquired in slave markets, prisoners, that is, slaves. The servants, or servants, were used for various work without special specialization, that is, for domestic, as a servant or as an “errand boy”. Some owners even had “whipping boys”, on which all the anger of the owners was carried out in moments of rage and aggression.
On average, the cost of one young chelyadin was ten coins, and for an old man or a child they gave no more than five. Young foreign girls captured during wars and raids on foreign lands during campaigns were especially valuable. Such slaves were used not only to work in the kitchen or in the laundry room, but also as sexual pleasures, although there were those who lived in the owner’s house as a wife.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when slavery gradually began to be abolished, the word “servants” was gradually replaced by “serf”, meaning all yard workers, although its semantic meaning was somewhat different from “servants”.
What is a serf?
Servants were called servants, but they fell into slavery because of debts, and also by court order for serious crimes. They sold children to slaves because of the inability to feed them. You could become a servant by marrying a slave (which happened, but rarely). At the same time, the state tried not to abuse the procurement of people and levied a tax on servants, which did not give such owners too much freedom in relation to serfs.
There were also special “enslaving” books, in which the terms of bondage or “slavery” were fixed, after which the master of the slave was obliged to release him. However, this happened quite rarely, since during servility, often the time of bondage increased, especially among debtors and sold children: their parents laid them back for longer periods of time during the famine.
What was the difference between smerds and servants and slaves?
The differences were significant: servants and slaves - these are slaves who did not have their own land, houses and property. After the death of the owner, they passed on to his heirs, were part of the material economy, had no voting rights anywhere.
Smerdy, on the contrary, owned a piece of their land, some property, a house and were free residents, most often farmers and cattle breeders, and they called them so mockingly because commoners did not go to the bathhouse too often, so they smelled not very pleasant. Although historian etymologists argue that "smerd" is a modified "smurd", which in the Indo-European dialect meant "simple man."
Smerdy had the right to vote at the national veche (meetings, gatherings), and also could transfer their simple property to their descendants, it was impossible for the servants. What is a goof? It turns out that the servants are the highest degree of dependence, foreign slaves who have nothing, even voting rights. After them come serfs - slaves of local origin, serfs, sometimes of temporary order (until the end of the serfdom), and after them smerds - free peasants with the right to vote, although poor.
The use of words in the modern world
Calling a person "smerd" or "servants" in Ancient Russia is a normal, common occurrence, but in civilized times, what does it mean if you call slaves or smerds? This suggests that the speaker is contemptuous of people (or a specific person), trying to humiliate him by his superiority, whether it is a material or social situation.
Usually far-fetched people behave this way, for whom the material aspect of life is primary, and the intellectual and spiritual qualities of the individual leave much to be desired. What does the word "servants" mean yet? The one who uses it is a selfish person. Such behavior testifies to the speaker's "slaveholding" manners, egocentrism, testifying to his contempt for people who are lower on the social ladder.
Modern youth can mention these words in conversation as a joke, banter, most often without subtext and desire to humiliate the interlocutor.