ice of men and women (_manoperae_, _manuum operae_, Fr.
_manoeuvres_, manual labour), (2) carriage (_carroperae_, _carragia_,
_carrata_, &c., Fr. _charrois_), i.e. service rendered by means of
carts, barrows or draught animals. These again were divided into fixed
services (_operae rigae_) and exceptional services, demanded when the
others proved insufficient. To these latter was given in the 8th century
the name of _operae corrogatae_ (i.e. requisitioned works, from
_rogare_, to request). From this term (corrupted into _corvatae_,
_curvadae_, _corveiae_, &c.) is derived the word corvee, which was
gradually applied as a general term for all the various services.

As to the nature of these corvees it must be noted that in the middle
ages the feudal lords had replaced the centralized state for all
administrative purposes, and the services due to them by their tenants
and serfs, were partly in the nature of rent in the form of labour,
partly those which under the Roman and Frankish monarchs had been
exacted in lieu of taxes, and which the feudal lords continued to impose
as sovereigns of their domains. To the former class belonged the service
of personal labour in the fields, of repairing buildings, felling trees,
threshing corn, and the like, as well as the hauling of corn, wine or
wood; to the latter belonged that of labouring on the roads, of building
and repairing bridges, castles and churches, and of carrying letters and
despatches. Corvees were further distinguished as _real_, i.e. attached
to certain parcels of land, and _personal_, i.e. due from certain
persons.

In spite of the fact that the corvees were usually strictly defined by
local custom and by the contracts of tenancy, and that, in an age when
currency was rare, payment in personal labour was a convenience to the
poor, the system was open to obvious abuses. With the growth of communal
life in the towns the townsmen early managed to rid themselves of these
burdensome obligations either by purchase, or by exchanging the
obligation of personal work for that of supplying carts, draught animals
and the like. In the country, however, the system survived all but
intact; and, so far as it was modified, was modified for the worse.
Whatever safeguards the free cultivators may have possessed, the serfs
were almost everywhere--especially in the 10th and 11th
centuries--actually as well as nominally in this respect at the mercy of
their lords (_corveables a merci_), th