On Friday, the 4^th of March, 2022, Prof. Dr Vladimir Simič, retired professor of the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law, gave a lecture titled „If You Mount my Hen, You Become my Rooster”. Prof. Simič dedicated the lecture to a colleague, Marko Petrak, of the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, who left us suddenly and all too soon the month before. Behind the unusual title there is an interesting story of the position of serfs in Slovenia, from the early Middle Ages to their slow liberation from serfdom in the 18^th and 19^th century. The phrase about the hen and the rooster was a saying suggesting that in marriages where the spouses were from different social classes – with some exceptions – the husband would acquire the legal status of his wife. Prof. Simič told us about the different types of taxes and dependent relations, and of the different categories of people who were, one way or another, tied to the land in medieval Slovenia – from the slaves, who were undisputably present at least until the 10^th century, through different categories of peasants (and various types of land leasing), up to the lower noblemen, the milites, whose status can be compared to the Serbian vlasteličići. After the lecture there was an interesting discussion on various subjects, from some unclear points in the sources, to interesting parallels in comparative law.