Slavery (on Thursdays)

[Bad Wolf]

Leviticus 25
39 And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant:
40 But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile.

Don't play semantics with me. They were slaves. They were treated as property, they were not paid, and they could not leave whenever they wanted. The fact that you are appealing to word games is pathetic.

You are wrong.

why? because you say so?

Leviticus 25
40 But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile.
41 And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the possession of his fathers shall he return.

No, you aren't wrong because I say so, you are wrong because your bible says so:

If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years. Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom. If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year. But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him. If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master. But the slave may plainly declare, 'I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.' If he does this, his master must present him before God. Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl. After that, the slave will belong to his master forever. (Exodus 21:2-6 NLT)

except that the KJV doesn't use the word "slave"

Is that all you are reduced to? Pathetic word games?

they were paid a pittance. here is part of a post I found describing life in that time period.

Its irrelevant how much they were paid. They were servants, not slaves. They were not bought and passed around as property, they were not allowed to be beaten, and they could leave and quit their job whenever they want. Give up, you are just plain wrong on this

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"In the 1700s and early 1800s, in the Georgian era, ALL the land around a lord's estate became private property. EVERYTHING. The forests, the ponds, the common-land, the farming land...even the animals. If a rabbit hopped over the lord's fence, it was considered HIS PROPERTY. If you shot it without permission, you could be hanged for poaching.

Some lords stuck to the old ways and kept tenant farmers. After all, it was how it had been for centuries, and they saw no reason to change. After all, without farmers, they'd have no food.

But the Enclosure Acts and the Game Laws devastated rural England. Forced off their land, the majority of farmers and farmhands and their familes flocked to the big cities to find work...or starve. Crime in London is skyrocketing up faster than you can count it. Jails are literally overflowing with criminals. Punishments are harsh. For stealing so much as a handkerchief, you could be hanged by the neck until dead.

There was VERY little social welfare. You either begged, you relied on charities, or you ended up in the workhouse. And the workhouse was so horrible that you would never want to end up there. It was literally worse than prison.

Fast forwards a few decades.

The Industrial Revolution has brought jobs. But it's brought even more people into the cities. Without enough jobs to go around, people will take WHATEVER situations they can find.

Enter, the domestic servant.

Domestic service in those days was dirt cheap. There was a huge surplus of labour and it cost a moderately wealthy family almost nothing, to keep a maid or three, in the house, to do the heavy work.

While it's true that it was a system of interdependence (the master needs the servant to do the work, the servant needs the master for a job. The master could fire the servant. The servant could resign. Both are in the lurch etc etc etc), it was nonetheless true that domestic service was a form of social security.

There's very few pension-schemes in those days. Moral reformists said that if you earned a pension, you were a wastrel and a vagabond who was idle and lazy. There was no distinction between those who held a pension for lack of ability, and those who held one for lack of motivation (ie: lazy). They tarred everyone with the same brush, and they took strokes as wide as the street is broad.

Domestic service was seen as a way out of the drudgery of the period.

If you lived in an overcrowded, filthy London tenement, with four brothers and three sisters, with both your parents working and earning maybe a shilling between them each day of the week, you counted your lucky stars if you managed to get a job as a housemaid, or a hallboy, a scullion, a boot-boy...anything.

Granted, the pay was not great. In fact even for the highest ranking staff-members, it was not especially large. But that was because you had almost everything provided free. Bedding, housing, food, safety and security a job, clothing...

Yes, you couldn't marry (or it was difficult TO marry, rather), and there were a long list of other issues, but servants ignored all these things for the security of knowing that they weren't going to starve.

The lowest-ranking servants were the scullery-maid and the hallboy. The scullery maid did all the washing-up. The hallboy did all the heavy work. Heavy work might include carrying coal, carrying firewood, cleaning below-stairs, moving furniture and anything else that a woman couldn't do.

A footman NEVER sullied his hands with work like that. That was the job of the hallboy.

Some masters were horrible to their servants. It wasn't unheard of for the master of the house to rape the servant-girls. But mistresses were not exactly angels, either. There are plenty of recorded cases, and one notorious one, where a mistress flogged her housemaids with a horsewhip, back in Georgian times. The beatings were so vicious that at least one maid died. The mistress was arrested and thrown in prison."

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And an enormous block of irrelevant text there....