For it he sold 10,000 serfs in the market.

To protect serfs from injustice and be loyal to one's king.

Take it. How many serfs did you give to become a monk?

As soon as Napoleon approaches a village... the peasants and serfs run off with their carts and horses and grain.

Only by finding ways to put true value on the goods we produce will we be able to sustain a middle class society, rather than one of techno plutocrats and their service sector serfs.

Two billion people. One third of the global population producing 5 percent of the wealth because they didn't get this change, because they kept treating their people like serfs instead of like shareholders of a common project.

In short, the report says, officials can do what they like, unbound by law or transparency. By using the emergency law, which has restricted freedom since 1981, together with censorship and rigged elections, Egypt s government treats its citizens like serfs.

Now, suppose that same crank attempted to treat passersby as if they were his serfs. In that case, he would risk getting a beating, though perhaps a few beggars would indulge his fantasies in the hope of duping him out of his money.

The great reforms of the past, including the liberation of the serfs in 1861, followed many years of discussions among westerners, slavophiles, and others. The revolutions of 1905 and 1917 also came at a time when those discussions were finished, and everyone knew who stood for what.

Of course, Russia s rulers have usually preferred myth to reality. After all, it was during the reign of Catherine the Great that the Potemkin village was invented, whereby the squalor of the lives of Catherine s serfs was hidden behind cheerfully painted housing façades as the Empress toured her country.

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves, not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically at home, through a vicious system of colonialism that made us landless, propertyless and mere slaves and serfs in our own lands?