The social influence of the aristocracy in the fourteenth century had been favoured by its clan structure which united, under a common crest and clan/family name, a lord, his kin and client knightly families. Noble privileges embraced the whole of the clan and its members and hence, despite attempts to regulate it with laws, the nobility was not divided into upper and lower castes. Despite the great differences in property-owning between the lords, the middling and the poorer gentry, the noble estate was a single body in the fifteenth century. It was, too, a large estate; in the sixteenth century (for which estimated figures are available) it may have amounted to 8 or 10 per cent of the population. The whole nobility enjoyed full allodial ownership of the land; there was no system of fiefs. The duty of loyalty to the king and crown of the kingdom of Poland bound it together.
Urban and agricultural reform in the thirteenth century had followed the model of German law (ius teutonicum) founded on the strength of ducal privileges granted to towns and villages in the face of immigrant colonists and the large number of native settlers who had come to live within the jurisdiction of that law. This law had local variations such as the ius Culmense (in Chelmno, Prussia) and the ius Sredense, named after the town of Sroda (Neumarkt) in Silesia. The towns were governed by the wojt (Vogt, advocatus) whose position was hereditary. His power had often been superseded in the fourteenth century by the town council, formed from the higher ranks of the urban mercantile patriciate (which produced the burgomaster), along with some representation from the commons (communitas), mainly the artisans who also grouped themselves into guilds. Towns paid additional taxes, every one of which was originally imposed with consent; however, from the mid-fifteenth century, the sejmiki and sejmsdid not seek agreement, but imposed taxes on towns and noble properties alike.
Despite the growth of commerce and local exchange, and the participation of large towns in the trade which linked western, central and north-eastern Europe, and regardless of a significant rise in local artisan production and means of credit, only a handful of towns such as Danzig, Cracow, Poznan and Lwow had populations which could be counted in tens of thousands. On the other hand, the network of smaller towns was dense and rivalled those of central European countries. However, the lack of representation prevented the towns of the kingdom from taking their place in a wider political life.
The position of villagers was varied. In the fifteenth century the majority lived under German law with local variations. The village paid the lord of the manor rent in coin, corn and modest services in labour dues. Custom regulated the right of a peasant to leave his village; the whole village could remove the lord if he raped the wife or daughter of a peasant, if he were excommunicated or if there were demands on the village to pay his debts. The headman of the village (soltys) inherited his status, held a greater parcel of land than the other villagers and had charge of the village court. In the fifteenth century lords of the manor tended to buy up the headships to increase the size of the manorial farm with the lands of the soltys or the peasants. This led to peasants working on a lord’s farm one day a week for each lan (laneus, mansus) of 16—24 hectares owned by them. In the fifteenth century monasteries led the way towards raising grain production for the new and expanding markets across the Baltic into western Europe. In the fourteenth century a vigorous new settlement of villages had spread into the wooded foothills of Little Poland. In the following century Polish settlers appeared in the western parts of Halicz, and immigrants came from Mazovia to Podlasie and as far as the lake district in Prussia, which thenceforth became known as Mazury. Together with these a sufficiently intensive form of agriculture was introduced: the three-field system and livestock breeding.
The Catholic Church organised its dioceses within two metropolitan sees: one had had its centre in Gniezno since AD 1000, and included the two Lithuanian sees; the other was based first in Halicz (1367—1414) and later in Lwow The archbishop of Gniezno (bearing the title of primate from 1417) led the whole episcopate, crowned the king and occupied the first place in the royal council, which he did not cede even to the bishop of Cracow, Zbigniew, the first Polish cardinal. Together the two ecclesiastical provinces contained seventeen sees; the jurisdiction of Gniezno stretched into Wroclaw (Breslau), whilst Lwow had jurisdiction over a diocese in Moldavia. Church property (owned by bishops, chapters, religious orders and the parishes) made up about 12 per cent of cultivated land. The nobles fought to change the tithe system and demanded the payment of taxation on ecclesiastical property. In Rus' the Orthodox Church enjoyed complete toleration. After the collapse of the short-lived Orthodox metropolitan see of Halicz (1370), the bishops of this province were placed under the jurisdiction of Kiev, where a metropolitan, with authority over nine sees, was established in 1458 for the Orthodox in Poland and Lithuania. The colonies of Armenian merchants had their own church and cathedral in Lwow after 1356; the attempt to unite the Orthodox and Roman Churches at the Council of Florence in 1439 did not involve the Polish Armenians. However, the idea of uniting the Orthodox and Roman Churches was supported by some of the Rus'ian prelates and the kings of Poland. Although an Orthodox metropolitan (Isidore of Kiev) took part in the Council of Ferrara—Florence (1439), no formal union between the Churches came of it.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are marked by the further mass influx of Jews, the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, from German-speaking lands. Thirteenth-century ducal privileges and those issued by the kings in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries assured the Jews of a separate estate with their own autonomous organisation in particular towns, freedom of religion and judicial rights along with protection of their persons and the right to trade. Despite attempts in some towns to restrict or banish the Jewish population, Jewish rights were preserved in their entirety.