ere being no limit to the amount
of money or work that could be demanded of them. The system was
oppressive even when the nobles to whom these services were paid gave
something in return, namely, protection to the cultivator, his family
and his land; they became intolerable when the development of the modern
state deprived the land-owners of their duties, but not of their rights.
In the case of France, in the 17th century the so-called _corvee royale_
was added to the burden of the peasants, i.e. the obligation to do
unpaid labour on the public roads, an obligation made general in 1738;
and this, together with the natural resentment of men at the fact that
the land which their ancestors had bought was still subject to
burdensome personal obligations in favour of people whom they rarely saw
and from whom they derived no benefit, was one of the most potent causes
of the Revolution. By the Constituent Assembly personal corvees were
abolished altogether, while owners of land were allowed the choice of
continuing real corvees or commuting them for money. The corvee as an
incident of land tenure has thus disappeared in France. The _corvee
royale_ of repairing the roads, however, abolished in 1789, was revived,
under the name of _prestation_, under the Consulate, by the law of 4
Thermidor an X., modified by subsequent legislation in 1824, 1836 and
1871. Under these laws the duty of keeping the roads in repair is still
vested in the local communities, and all able-bodied men are called upon
either to give three days' work or its equivalent in money to this
purpose. It is precisely the same system as that in force under the
Roman Empire, and if it differ from the corvee it is mainly in the fact
that the burden is equitably distributed, and that the work done is of
actual value to those who do it.

As regards other countries, the corvee was everywhere, sooner or later,
abolished with the serfdom of which it was the principal incident (see
SERFDOM). Though so early as 1772 Maria Theresa had endeavoured to
mitigate its hardships in her dominions (in Hungary unpaid labour was
only to be demanded of the serfs on 52 days in the year!) it survived
longest in the Austrian empire, being finally abolished by the
revolution of 1848. The duty of personal labour on the public roads is,
however, still maintained in other countries besides France. This was
formerly the case in England also, where the occupiers of each parish
who, by the common