22
The establishment of a noble monopoly over the legislative process was traditionally seen as the key element that enabled the szlachta to shape the Polish rural economy in its own interest. Noble domination of the legislature and a progressive weakening of royal power have been widely blamed for the establishment of a manorial system of agriculture in which the szlachta farmed its own demesne or manor—folwark in Polish, from the German Vorwerk—with free labour-service provided by serfs tied to the land, unable to appeal to the royal courts for protection, and burdened with ever higher demands from their rapacious lords. Although the system influentially categorized in 1882 by Engels as ‘the second serfdom’ and known to German scholarship as Gutsherrschaft, spread across Europe to the east of the Elbe from the fifteenth century, it has been widely presented as peculiarly oppressive in Poland-Lithuania on account of the szlachta’s domination of the legislative system.1
This emphasis on the nobility as the driving force behind the creation of an oppressive serf-based economy was encouraged in Communist Poland. Publications by Polish historians in western European languages gave sufficient material to scholars outside Poland to integrate it into attempts to explain the apparently divergent paths of western Europe, in which serfdom was largely abandoned after 1350, and eastern Europe, where, so it was argued, it had not been known before the fourteenth century, but where it became the basis of the rural economy after 1500. The work of the distinguished economic historian Marian Małowist in the 1950s and 1960s provided much evidence for those who argued that the key feature was the economic expansion experienced by western Europe from the late fifteenth century, where a growing population created demand for cheap Polish grain produced without significant labour costs.2 Particularly influential was Witold Kula’s An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, published in 1962 and translated into several languages with a laudatory preface by Fernand Braudel. Kula, using his own research into eighteenth-century magnate latifundia, constructed a theoretical model of the Polish manorial economy which concluded that since it lacked endogamous forces leading to capitalism, it was economically regressive.3
Thus, it was argued, as western economies expanded and diversified, the Polish economy entered a classical colonial relationship, supplying cheap raw materials—primarily grain, but also timber, hemp, flax, and other primary products—to burgeoning western markets. In order to maximize their profits, the szlachta increasingly adopted the monoculture of grain on their manors and, exploiting their domination of the legislature, stripped the peasantry of its rights and enserfed it to provide the necessary labour force. In the standard timetable, freedom to depart one’s native village was removed in 1496; access to the royal courts was denied to peasants from 1518; and labour service was fixed at a minimum of one day per week in legislation passed in 1520 and 1521. The divergence of the economies of east and west condemned eastern Europe in general and Poland in particular to a system that was more onerous and exploitative than the ‘first’ serfdom of the medieval west:
The serfdom of modern Eastern Europe was more cut and dried . . . Rather than spreading gradually through the ranks of the peasantry in the typically western way, as a result of the policies of estate or territorial management that lords adopted, in the modern East it was established . . . by government decrees which simply defined the inhabitants of private estates as the subjects of their landlord, with no right to leave and with limited access to public authority.4
Although in Poland serfdom was instituted by parliamentary statute rather than government decree, the results were, so it is suggested, similar; indeed, in Poland, where royal power was too weak to curb the excesses of noble power: ‘for the most part, [kings] had to give free rein to a nobility that had become virtually omnipotent, thanks to the growing grain trade and the expansion of the landed estate’.5 In Wallerstein’s ‘European World System’, Poland was reduced to a colonial adjunct of western Europe; with its vast grain-growing latifundia served by what he termed ‘coerced cash-crop labour’, which he presented as the equivalent of New World slave plantations.6
These grand theories have come under increasing fire. In Communist Poland, which inherited a strong tradition of research on the early modern rural economy, historians quietly assembled a mass of data that enabled them to challenge many aspects of this picture well before Communism fell. They realized that a major problem with research on the Polish rural economy in this period is that the vast majority of detailed studies have been of royal and ecclesiastical estates, or great magnate latifundia. Yet these estates were untypical: the small estates of the ordinary nobility comprised eighty per cent of the land in private noble ownership, and their production was much less geared to supplying the international grain trade, owing to the logistical problems and costs involved in transporting grain to the Prussian ports.7 Care needs to be taken in drawing general conclusions from data gathered on royal estates, which have been extensively studied by historians owing to the copious records generated by inventories and periodic audits after 1563. Royal estates, leased out for set periods, were very different from private or ecclesiastical properties; even after 1500, when leases were often for life, leaseholders treated them differently from their allodial possessions, and had an interest in giving a falsely low picture of their productivity to auditors.8
The grand theories of Małowist and Kula were based on data from estates that were not representative of the rural economy as a whole. Study of the estates of ordinary nobles was made easier by the compilation of the kartoteka wiejska, a cardfile index to the records of the local castle and land courts that was prepared in every Polish state archive between 1951 and 1953, and enabled scholars to retrieve inventories, testaments, and other materials relating to smaller estates from the mass of local court records across Poland. It became clear that all manors were not ‘everywhere identical to each other’, as had been assumed on theoretical grounds.9 As early as 1960, when the icy dogma of Stalinism had barely begun to thaw, Wyczański published a pioneering study of the manorial estates of the middle nobility in twelve palatinates, based on records uncovered through use of the kartoteka. Boldly asserting that since scholars knew next to nothing about the peasantry’s economic position, Wyczański stated that he would concentrate on an economic analysis and avoid the many aspects of relations between lords and peasants which were not relevant to such an objective.10 Although, in deference to Marxist orthodoxy, he paid lip-service to the concept of class-struggle, he claimed it lay outside the scope of his study, and in the five pages of observations he made on the subject he gently challenged the standard view of a grossly oppressive system characterized by rapacious lords and entrenched peasant resistance. He criticized scholars for failing to consider the economic basis of that resistance, observing that it had largely been studied on the basis of materials from royal, ecclesiastical, and a handful of magnate estates.11 By 1978 the climate had liberalized sufficiently for him to pose the provocative question ‘Was life so bad for peasants in the sixteenth century?’, and to argue that the picture was not nearly as black as historians had assumed, even after the construction of the legal framework of subjection from the late fifteenth century. He concluded that Polish peasants were vigorous economic subjects in their own right rather than simple victims of szlachta oppression, and that they were perfectly capable of reacting to market stimuli, despite Kula’s theoretically driven conclusion that peasant farms were ‘no more’ than subsistence units isolated from market forces.12 Wyczański posed the vital question of whether fifteenth-century governments with limited means of enforcing their will could transform a vast rural economy simply by willing it, while a growing number of detailed empirical studies led scholars to question the formative role of statute law in the development of the manorial economy.
These conclusions have been confirmed by a new generation of scholars, released in 1990 from any requirement to toe the Marxist line. In reality, across east central Europe the trend towards labour rent—as opposed to labour-service—and manorial farming preceded the subjection of peasants to their lords, often by a considerable period. It is therefore difficult to argue that the decrees and statutes of governments and parliaments were the main cause of the spread of the manorial system. Although some still emphasize the role of legislation, others have increasingly drawn a distinction, using the German terms, between Gutswirtschaft—an economy based on demesne farming—and Gutsherrschaft—the system by which lords exercised a greater or lesser degree of authority over their rural ‘subjects’ (Untertanen in German; poddani in Polish). Subjection was, however, not the equivalent of full serfdom, since it was tenurial, based on plots of land, rather than the hereditary bondage that lay at the heart of true serfdom.13 Hagen argues that the term ‘peasant’, with its negative connotations, should be abandoned, since the German word Bauer denotes a farmer, not a peasant; there is a similar debate among Polish scholars over the use of the term chłop (peasant), which was pejorative in origin, and was not used in official sources, where the term kmieć (plural: kmiecie; Latinized as kmethonis, kmethones), the equivalent of the German Bauer, was used for the tenant farmers who formed the backbone of the system.14 The use of ‘peasant’ to cover the whole of the non-noble rural population lumps it together into one amorphous category and obscures the distinctions between groups of vastly different economic condition and social status: the relatively wealthy tenant farmers (kmiecie) at the top, the zagrodnicy, who farmed smaller plots in the middle, and the impoverished, smallholder-cottagers (chałupnicy) and landless labourers (komornicy)—at the bottom of a complex system.15
It is important to bear these distinctions in mind when considering the fifteenth-century origins of the early modern Polish rural economy, which owed less to noble domination of the political system than to economic conditions. The legal framework of subjection had not yet been constructed, and the dominant trend was the development of Gutswirtschaft, not Gutsherrschaft.16 To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to consider the interests and actions of the rural population as a whole: historians have criticized traditional accounts which survey the problem from the perspective of the lords and analyse the condition of the peasantry on the basis of a priori assumptions derived from the Marxist concept of class struggle. The rural population—and in particular the kmiecie—were as much economic actors as their landlords, and Hagen’s advocacy of studying ‘the view from the village’ has been widely adopted, with historians using empirical evidence to undermine traditional claims, in which the pre-manorial village was often idealized in order to sharpen the contrast with what followed.17
The system’s origins lay in the period after 1350, although it was not really until after 1400 that labour rents—‘pańszczyzna’ in Polish, literally ‘that which is owed to the lord (pan)’—began to grow at the expense of rents paid in cash or kind. Labour rent was nothing new in a rural economy in which the balance between different forms of rent had always fluctuated in response to changing economic conditions. The Polish economy had always been sensitive to the market for agricultural products, and had adjusted in response to market forces.18 While the fifteenth century did mark a watershed, as labour rent spread across Poland, and the number and acreage of demesne farms grew, in the period of economic expansion before 1350 the trend had been in the opposite direction, as the emphasis shifted in favour of rents payable in cash or kind, and the use of unfree labour, previously substantial, declined significantly. The notion that bondage had been unknown in Poland before the fifteenth century, and that a free peasantry lived in some prelapsarian paradise with strong communes successfully defending their rights until noble domination of the political system expelled them into a dark, cold world of misery and oppression, is fundamentally misguided. There had been a considerable unfree population in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of them slaves captured on raids; they were known as naroczniki, or, in Latin, decimi or ascriptitii, with various degrees of unfreedom determined by custom or charter. The trend in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was for the distinctions in charters between free [liberi] and unfree to be eroded, with the free increasingly subjected to seigneurial authority on the same basis as the unfree, as the Piast dukes excluded the rural population from the ducal courts for almost all cases, reserving jurisdiction to seigneurial courts.19
By 1350 the spread of German law, and its influence beyond settlements founded upon it, meant that most peasants were legally free, while rents in cash or kind dominated. Change came after 1400, as the rural economy stagnated: prices for wheat and rye showed no significant rise between 1389 and 1498.20 Noble landholders struggled with the effects of partible inheritance in a rural economy in which labour was in short supply, tenant farmers struggled to pay their rents and taxes in a system starved of specie, while princes exacerbated the problems by manipulating the currency to cover their growing obligations: between 1300 and 1480 the amount of silver in the Prague grosz, which circulated widely in Poland, fell from 3.65 to 1.26 grams; the fall in the Polish grosz was even greater, from 3.65 to 0.67 grams. The most important cause of the trend towards labour rent was the response of tenant farmers to these changes. As demand shrank, the prices of agricultural products rose only gradually before 1440, and then fell: by 1490, they had reverted to the levels of 1380; they then doubled between 1480 and 1530.21 As price incentives diminished, so did the area of land under cultivation. Farmers took the initiative, reducing the size of their holdings to what was necessary for feeding their family, and paying rents that were forced downwards in real terms. This development was in part stimulated by the deal on the land tax, the poradlne, agreed in the 1374 Koszyce privileges. Reducing their landholdings to what was required to support their household and to reflect reduced market demand was rational economic behaviour designed to cut rent and tax obligations.22
The number of ‘vacant hides’ (łany puste) on land designated by settlement charters as ‘farmland’ (literally ‘farmer hides’—łany kmiecie) grew rapidly as farmers drew their own conclusions from the miserable economic climate. In the Lublin district the proportion of tenant holdings of one hide on noble estates fell from 93.5 per cent before 1450 to 43.8 per cent in the 1490s; by 1517 the average holding was just under three-quarters of a hide.23 In the gradual economic revival after 1490 some vacant hides were reoccupied by tenants, but the return of better economic conditions was offset by the rising rural population, and consequent rising demand for good farmland. Thus the average tenant farm remained smaller than it had been a century earlier. Three-quarters of the holdings in the starosty of Sochaczew in Mazovia between 1496 and 1510 measured half a hide (8.4 hectares), while in 12 villages on the royal estate of Osieck in Mazovia in 1571, of 303 tenant farmers 45 held a full hide (known as a włóka in Mazovia), 8 held three quarters of a hide, 172 held half a hide, and 78 held a quarter of a hide.24 Actual holdings may have been larger, since the hide was a fiscal unit, and in practice was an approximate measure: lords and their tenants had a common interest in under-declaring the size of holdings for tax purposes.25 Nevertheless, the general trend is clear.
Stagnant market conditions encouraged a widespread if gradual move towards labour rents in a development that seems to have suited both lords and tenant farmers. Labour rent was nothing new, and had been common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Settlement charters under German law, while largely based on rents paid in cash or kind, often specified labour service as part of the overall dues owed to the lord, in the form of specified annual obligations during harvest time and other periods of high demand for labour, or a practice known as jutrzyny, jugery, or morgi, in which a certain amount of land was set aside for tenant farmers to plant and harvest for the lord.26 What was new was the introduction of labour rent in the form of a weekly obligation. The earliest accounts of weekly labour rents come from the late fourteenth century, from ecclesiastical estates. At this stage they were not extensive, with one day per week from a holding of one hide being the norm.
Although demesne farming developed steadily after 1400 it by no means became universal. Decisions to introduce it or to retain a rent-based system depended on local conditions, and, crucially, on the nature of the estate. The larger, wealthier estates pioneered the introduction of weekly labour rents, with the church leading the way: by the 1470s, the evidence of the Liber beneficiorum drawn up by Długosz for the Cracow diocese between the 1440s and the 1470s, shows that weekly labour service was performed in 83 per cent of 275 villages surveyed.27 Yet if the classic manorial system began to develop in royal, ecclesiastical, and some magnate estates it never came to dominate: wealthy landlords practised a mixed economy, maintaining manors or rents in cash or kind depending upon local circumstances and economic fluctuations over time. Initially, ordinary nobles proved less willing to introduce labour rent, and there is little evidence of their doing so before 1450: at the time of the Nieszawa privileges, rents in cash or in kind still formed the basis of the income of ordinary nobles in the Sandomierz palatinate.28 Once the ordinary nobility began to establish manors it was rare for them to depend entirely on labour rent, which was more common in Małopolska than in Wielkopolska, where as late as 1511–12, it was levied in only 36 villages owned by the archbishopric of Gniezno. Of 1,940 royal estates across the kingdom surveyed in 1563–4, only 591—less than a third—were organized into manors.29
The creation or extension of manors was not achieved through the expropriation of tenant farmers—which was rare—but through absorbing farmland abandoned since 1350 into the manor, or through new settlements.30 Vacant hides of farmland dropped from 15.1 per cent in Małopolska between 1500 and 1550 to 4.7 per cent between 1551 and 1580, and from 33.9 per cent to 8.1 per cent in western Wielkopolska. The largest rise in manors came in eastern Wielkopolska, though vacant hides only dropped from 11.6 per cent to 10.7 per cent.31 Where expropriation of farmers took place, it was mostly the result of action by poor nobles who, often because of subdivision of their own holdings through partible inheritance, ended up with too few tenants to provide enough labour to make the estate viable. Since they often could not afford to hire labour, many farmed their tiny estates themselves.32 Thus emerged a social group that was to become increasingly numerous: the impoverished nobleman clinging to his status despite being poorer than many among the supposedly oppressed ‘peasantry’. It was by no means uncommon for tenant holdings to exceed those of poor noblemen.33
Where manorial farms were introduced, although tenant farmers paid labour rent, they did not, on the whole, undertake labour service themselves, either sending their children—if they were not required to work the family farm—or hiring cottagers or day labourers. This rural proletariat did not simply serve the manor. Rising prosperity meant that it became common for tenant farmers to hire labour to work their own plots: half of tenant farms in Małopolska in 1590 used hired labour.34 The bulk of the labour for the manor was provided by the new class of zagrodnicy (or ogrodnicy in Mazovia), who held a plot of land known as a zagroda or ogród. Literally this meant a ‘garden’, but the term’s true significance was functional. Some of these ‘gardens’ were relatively large: up to half a hide in extent, although a quarter of a hide was more usual. Some zagrodnicy therefore held plots that were as large as those of the kmiecie, but they were typically settled on land that was not as fertile, and was not designated as farmland. They had less time to work their plots, for it was from among the zagrodnicy that the manor’s basic labour-force was drawn: where villages were not attached to manors, there were no zagrodnicy. They generally formed a minority within the village community: of the twelve villages attached to theOsieck estate in Mazovia, eight had ogrodnicy in 1564; altogether there were twenty-five, an average of 3.1 per village.35 They paid only a symbolic cash rent—if any at all—and the form of labour rent they paid was different to that of the tenant farmers: they served ‘on foot’ (pieszo), providing the manual labour necessary for agricultural production, while the tenant farmers largely performed ‘pańszczyzna ciągła’ or ‘wołowa’—the latter literally means ‘oxen service’, providing draught animals to plough and drag carts in the service of the manor, which therefore did not have to bear the costs of maintaining its own. Various artisans lived in the village, including millers and innkeepers, who also held plots that were not usually designated ‘farmland’, since the rent and obligations were different.36
The pattern of labour service varied. Most estates of the middle and lower nobility were relatively small, as were their manors. By the sixteenth century the average size of manors in Małopolska was 3.5 hides (58.8 hectares); in western Wielkopolska and Mazovia it was 3.3 hides (55.44 hectares); in eastern Wielkopolska it was 2.4 hides (40.32 hectares). The average size of manors across all four regions was 3.1 hides (52.08 hectares).37 Szlachta manors were usually based on one village; this pattern differed from that of the larger magnate latifundia and royal estates—the manor of the royal estate at Medyka near Przemyśl in the sixteenth century was served by no fewer than ten villages—or ecclesiastical estates, where tithe obligations continued to be paid in kind and it was common to have one large demesne served by three to five villages.38
The balance in terms of landholding following the move to demesne farming shifted slightly in favour of the landowner, but by 1500, it had largely settled down. Although manors grew in size in the sixteenth century by an average of 18 per cent across the four regions, this figure is distorted by a 44 per cent rise in eastern Wielkopolska, with the figures for Małopolska and western Wielkopolska being 14 and 6 per cent respectively. Proportions varied across the kingdom. Wyczański calculated on the basis of tax assessments from the palatinate of Sieradz that by the sixteenth century, discounting years in which no new tax assessment was made and allowing for under-declaration, the average amount of land held by tenant farmers in the 202 villages for which he had data ranged between 6.27 hides (105.34 hectares) in 1496 and 5.12 hides (86.02 hectares) in 1576.39 By the second half of the sixteenth century, the average noble landowner held 8.1 hides (136.08 hectares), of which tenant plots constituted 4.5 hides (75.6 hectares) or 55.6 per cent and the demesne farm constituted 3.6 hides (60.48 hectares), or 44.4 per cent.40 The actual amount of land in peasant hands was greater than this, since the assessments only included holdings classified as farmland, and did not take account of common land, or plots held by zagrodnicy and cottagers. The typical nobleman was no absentee; he lived close to his tenants in a village that was smaller than those that serviced the great royal, ecclesiastical, and magnate latifundia. The extent to which he was able to impose his will upon his tenants was rather less than that of great landlords controlling their estates from afar through a network of administrators.
The trend towards demesne farming was already well established by 1454, and long before the legislation of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries that was previously seen as crucial to its formation. Wyczański found very few new manors established after 1500, although in some areas consolidation of land into existing manors did continue.41 The legislation did not call the system into being; it sought to regulate a system that already existed.42 A 1426 decree aimed to protect peasants by limiting annual labour service to a maximum of fourteen days in succession to ensure that lords could not simply demand unlimited service ‘on demand’ (kiedy każą).43 Acts of the sejmiks of Chełm (1477), Podlasie (1501), and Wieluń (1518), and of the sejms in Thorn (1519) and Bydgoszcz (1520) indeed allowed nobles to fix labour service at a minimum of one day per week per hide, but not as an extra burden. The legislation sought to establish an equivalent between labour rent at this rate and rents in cash or kind. It was designed to regularize the burdens of the rural population, and thereby to hinder the widespread practice of encouraging tenant farmers to move through offering low rents, or exemptions from dues for a set period, both popular means of persuading tenants to change their lords.44 While the 1519 act left it up to nobles to decide which form of rent to demand, with no mention of any need for reaching agreement with their tenants, it is unlikely that it had any major impact on actual practice. As Kutrzeba observes, it probably worsened the position of very few among the rural population.45
Despite the common assertion that Polish peasants were deprived of access to the royal courts in 1518, there was no statutory stripping of rights from the rural population; all that happened was that Sigismund I stated in that year that he would no longer interfere in cases between peasants and their noble landlords. If the binding nature of this declaration on Sigismund’s successors is open to question, a reluctance on the part of rulers to involve themselves in such disputes was nothing new: Poland’s princes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries delegated judicial authority to the seigneurial courts in all but a few reserved matters. The removal of peasants from the jurisdiction of non-seigneurial courts was not always contrary to their interests: the 1496 act which stipulated that kmiecie could no longer be pursued for debt in city courts is often presented as part of the supposed stripping of legal rights from the peasantry; in a rural economy in which tenant farmers were actively engaged in a market economy that was beginning its long upturn, however, this measure was probably welcome to them, although it doubtless affected their ability to raise credit from the towns.46
It would be naïve to suppose that the royal courts offered any great protection to peasants before 1518, or that Sigismund’s decision made it easier for nobles to force their tenants to accept labour rent against their wishes. Changes to the structure of rent on individual estates, far from being a unilateral decision of the lord, were usually effected on the basis of a formal contract, as in 1387, when Bodzęta, archbishop of Gniezno, introduced labour rent at the level of one day per week in Modrzew alongside payments in cash and oats. The tenants made a shrewd decision: evidence from 1512 suggests that there was no significant change in their obligations over the intervening 120 years. In Turo, a property of the provostry of St Michael, the labour rent demanded per hide between 1388 and the 1470s was two days, alongside similar payments in cash and a different set of obligations in kind; when compared with the widely varying rental agreements in other villages owned by the provostry it is clear that labour rent was not imposed on the farmers as an extra burden, but was an equivalent for rents payable in cash and kind, and that burdens were calibrated according to the circumstances of individual villages, and usually instituted in agreement with them.47 That is not to say that the power of landlords was insufficient to ensure that the agreement favoured their interests to a greater or lesser extent, but the general picture is nonetheless one of consent and negotiation towards agreements that suited the interests of both farmers and landlords. Older customary arrangements often survived. Despite the 1477 law passed by the Chełm sejmik allowing lords to impose labour rent of one day per week, the system known as dworzyszcza, in which the amount of land held by individual tenant farmers was not specified according to the usual norms based on hides, survived in many Ruthenian villages. Tenants’ rental obligations remained relatively low, and they sometimes farmed considerable plots. In 1600 this form of tenure survived in 76 villages out of 280 (27 per cent) studied in the regions where it was customary.48
The balance of advantage did not always lie with the lord. Scholars who exaggerated the independence of the village commune and peasant wealth before the introduction of the manorial system often gave the impression that rents in cash and kind could not be raised under the terms of settlement charters. If the nobility was so powerful, however, why was it unable to force rises in such rents, yet was apparently able to impose a complete revolution based on labour-service and the curtailing of peasant freedom? In reality, settlement agreements were generally respected where they continued to reflect economic realities; if they were to be altered, the balance and the nature of obligations was a matter for negotiation between the lord and his tenants.49 The fifteenth-century economic slump, the shortage of specie, and the devaluation of the currency meant that changes in tenant obligations were unavoidable; indeed they were necessary for all parties. Although tenant farmers often welcomed a move to labour rent, in order to secure acceptance of changes to settlement charters or to long-established customary arrangements, lords frequently had to introduce labour rents at a level below that of the rents in cash and kind they were replacing.
The growth of the manorial economy was a more consensual process than was once supposed, and while there were indeed cases of resistance, they were usually provoked by discontent over terms of agreements, and not by opposition to the principle of labour rent: there was no hint of the Bauernkrieg that ravaged southwestern Germany in the 1520s and 1530s, or, indeed, the revolts seen across the border in what became Ducal Prussia on the secularization of the Ordensstaat in 1525.50 Resistance, it was traditionally argued, largely took the form of peasant flight, with peasants supposedly expressing their opposition to the imposition of serfdom by running away. Yet as the economy recovered from the late fifteenth century, the szlachta faced increasing competition for labour from magnate and ecclesiastical estates, the pioneers in introducing demesne farming, whose lords enticed farmers to move in return for accepting favourable labour rents rather than rents in cash or in kind.51 Inevitably, the middling and lesser nobility had to offer similar conditions to persuade their peasants to stay, but as owners of small estates they did not have the flexibility of landowners who controlled large latifundia.
The problem of peasant mobility lay behind the legislation attempting to standardize labour rents across the kingdom, and other measures that sought to control the phenomenon. The term ‘peasant flight’ is something of a misnomer. Although some peasants undoubtedly left their native villages to escape conditions they found oppressive, the emphasis on flight as a manifestation of resistance to the imposition of the manorial system obscures the extent to which it was motivated by economic considerations, and the extent to which the farmers leaving their home village were not fleeing the system, but merely changing their lord within it.52 The relative shortage of labour meant that kmiecie—and, indeed, zagrodnicy—enjoyed in practice substantial security of tenure.53 Good tenants were highly valued. Their rights to bequeath their plots to their children, or to sell them, were rarely challenged, and plots could even be subdivided for such purposes, subject to the lord’s consent.54 Sale of land by tenants was common, although it required the consent of lords; the substantial land market demonstrates the extent to which peasant plots were in practice treated as private property. Customary tenant rights were usually respected: landlords were not, as was traditionally supposed, hostile to a dynamic peasant market in land, since the only reason they could, under customary law, deprive a tenant farmer of his holding was if he was not meeting his rental obligations or was farming his plot poorly.55 A lively peasant land-market was in the lord’s interest. It meant that he was not obliged to seek a new tenant personally when, for whatever reason—advancing age, a lack of heirs, or a desire to leave—individual peasants wished to surrender their plot.
The differing levels at which rent—whether labour rent or rents in cash and kind—were levied in royal, ecclesiastical, and noble estates encouraged peasants—and in particular the highly prized kmiecie—to move to estates where rents were lower. The problem for lords was that while it had been relatively difficult for peasants to leave under traditional Polish law, which demanded large exit fines to compensate the lord for his capital investment, the spread of German law made it easier for peasants to leave, and many did so. Casimir III’s statutes sought to limit departures without the consent of the lord to two per village per year, to ensure that village economies remained viable, but lords were free to allow more to leave.56 Nevertheless, a sense of a tenant farmer’s rights to his plot remained strong: under the 1423 Warta statute, passed by a noble assembly at which Jagiełło was not present, a landlord had to issue no fewer than four summonses to a tenant farmer who had left the village before he could settle a new tenant on his plot.57 Ordinary nobles, who could ill afford to lose their precious labour force, were increasingly hard hit, while ecclesiastical landlords were concerned at the way in which the relatively low rents levied on royal estates tempted their tenants to up sticks and move. With even royal estates sometimes unable to absorb the influx, and their holders concerned to stop the drift from their allodial estates, there was broad support for an attempt to regulate the situation through the standardization of labour rent.58
The legislation establishing a minimum of one day per week labour service meant very little in practice, given the complexity of rental structures across Poland. Yet the attempt to regulate rental levels reveals an important truth about peasant mobility: the legislation was not so much directed against peasants themselves, as the landlords to whom they fled. For peasants did not take flight to escape an abstract, oppressive ‘system’; they did so for many reasons, most often in the hope of bettering their condition. Individual lords could indeed be oppressive and cruel, but flight was as likely to be motivated by disputes within the village between tenant farmers, or because other landlords were offering better land to farm, or lower rents, or attractive inducements to move, such as exemption from rents—or artificially reduced rents—for a set period.
Study of the mobility of the Polish rural population was long distorted by an overemphasis on class conflict and the conceptualization of a countryside divided into implacably hostile camps of lords and ‘serfs’. In reality, peasants were generally happy to remain in one place, so long as the conditions of their tenure remained relatively stable, and they could pass on their plots to their heirs. Peasants were indeed required to pursue those who fled their villages, and could be fined for assisting fugitives, or for failing to report on those intending to flee.59 Yet peasants—or at least the wealthier tenant farmers—were not necessarily opposed to the tying of members of the village community to the land. Farming was a collaborative enterprise in which even relatively well-to-do farmers did not necessarily own all the draught animals or equipment required for much of the business of agriculture, especially ploughing—which required a team of eight oxen—or harvesting. The economy of a village, with its carefully balanced network of intersecting and dependent interests, was disrupted if its members could leave too easily. Labour rent and taxes were communal obligations: if peasants fled the village and were not replaced, the burdens on individual villagers increased, giving peasants, as much as their lords, an incentive to prevent flight. Thus peasants were frequently reluctant to aid those leaving, often collaborated in the pursuit and apprehension of those who did, and sometimes sought to prevent their fellow-villagers leaving on their own initiative.60 The departure of tenant farmers from their home village was usually carefully planned, and frequently exercised with the connivance of the landlord to whose village they were moving; sometimes they were assisted by villagers from the community in which they were to settle.61 In most cases, kmiecie departed with their whole household, complete with moveable possessions and livestock, thus inflicting a considerable loss upon their former landlord.
During the fifteenth-century slump, the problem of peasant mobility was not as great as the problem of the shrinking peasant economy, as farmers cut the size of their plots and curtailed their involvement with the market. As conditions improved at the end of the century, there were renewed incentives for lords—and, indeed, their tenants—to attract new productive forces into their communities. There had always been laws attempting to limit the mobility of the poorest villagers, many of whom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were unfree. There was a renewed concern with what were known as ‘loose people’ (ludzie luźni) from the around 1500, as landlords and kmiecie alike sought to ensure that their villages had enough of the casual labour necessary to perform labour service, and to assist at times of high demand, such as harvest.62 In an agricultural economy in which the demand for labour varied substantially across the year, however, it was very hard to prevent considerable mobility among those not tied to villages by property, and in practice, as elsewhere in Europe, the rural economy depended to a considerable degree on a mobile labour force. Thus laws seeking to curb peasant mobility—whose frequency suggests their ineffectiveness—might better be seen in the light of general attempts across Europe to regulate the mobility of the rural poor, and to return them to their own parishes to receive poor relief. It was by no means only Poles who sought to tie individuals to the village of their birth.
The 1496 statute, widely represented as the crucial watershed in the ‘enserfment of the Polish peasantry’, was not directed at the rural proletariat, but at tenant-farmers. It did not seek to tie them to the land, but to establish rules for the conduct of cases over those wishing to leave their home village. Far from banning departures, the legislation sought simply to limit them to one member of a tenant farmer’s family, who was allowed—with the lord’s permission—to leave in order to take up service elsewhere, or to be educated in ‘literary or manual pursuits’; other sons were to remain to ensure the viability of the village economy.63 Customary inheritance law among the kmiecie, which the szlachta showed no interest in regulating apart from one 1588 statute, sought to keep the basic holding together, to be inherited by one son, usually the eldest, who had to buy out his siblings, with cash sums to be paid to his brothers and smaller sums to his sisters in compensation.64 The 1496 legislation sought to ensure that there was some control over the number of those permitted to leave the village; if there was no plot available for them, and an adequate supply of labour for the demesne, they were generally allowed to leave. Sons of kmiecie did leave to study, some of them at university; others entered the church. There is nothing to indicate that the 1496 statute was effective in tying peasants to the land—which it did not explicitly try to do—and much evidence to suggest it was not.
Thus the many disputes over peasant flight clogging up the courts from the late fifteenth century were not criminal cases, but civil actions in which nobles sued other nobles for the return of—or compensation for—absconded tenant farmers, and the welter of legislation concerning peasant flight was more to do with establishing the procedure and norms for such cases than with the supposed aim of tying peasants to the land. In these cases, peasants acted as witnesses; occasionally kmiecie were given the opportunity of choosing between the lords who were litigating over them.65 Much of the legislation was passed by local sejmiks, and there was a particular concern to prevent flight across jurisdictional boundaries, which—given Poland’s decentralized court system—made it difficult to secure redress.66
The level of mobility among the rural population, together with the lively land market, indicates that peasants were hard-headed economic actors and not passive victims of noble oppression. By the mid sixteenth century, the Polish rural economy was highly complex. Where rents were high, it reflected market conditions: landlords could demand more from villages in fertile areas where tenant farms were profitable, and local estimates of the value of labour rent differed: in the Sandomierz palatinate in the second half of the fifteenth century, one day’s labour service per week was the equivalent of half a mark (24 groszy) in rent when it was performed by a zagrodnik, whereas on the estate of Opatów, two days labour rent per week from a tenant farmer, which was more highly valued, was worth four times this figure at 2 marks 10 skojcy. In the villages noted in Długosz’s Liber beneficiorum, where labour service was performed, it was levied at one day per week in 50 per cent of cases, two days per week in 23 per cent, and at three to five days in 10 per cent. Levels of rent were higher in the Cracow palatinate, not because the local nobility was more powerful or rapacious, but because agriculture was more profitable: rents tended to be higher near cities or markets. Rents varied within villages, depending on the productivity and fertility of the land held by individual tenants.67 On royal estates in Mazovia in the mid sixteenth century rents varied substantially, depending on a range of factors, including the fertility of the soil, privileges granted to individual villages, or customary arrangements. Some villages were free of all rental obligations; less fertile villages tended not to pay rent in kind; elsewhere, the balance between cash rents, rents in kind, and labour rent varied substantially, from as low as one day per week to as high as four days per week—occasionally even more—though two days per week was the norm, and rents in cash or kind varied from the equivalent of under 10 groszy to as much as 48 groszy; most commonly they were in the range 20–30 groszy.68 The increase in rents between 1500 and 1550 is not surprising in a period when prices for agricultural produce rose substantially. The wide range of rental levels, and the variation in the balance between labour rents and rents in cash and kind shows that they took account of local conditions, including custom, settlement charters, and the fertility of the land, and that the balance between the various types of rent was usually agreed in negotiations between lords and peasants. In such a complex, calibrated system, historians have to be careful about treating rental levels in terms of days of labour service required as a simple index of oppression: in a period of rising prices for agricultural produce, peasants preferred to see a rise in their labour rent, rather than in their rents in cash or in kind, if the profits to be gained from selling their produce on the market were greater than the costs of providing labour rent on the manor.
For the shift to labour rent and the spread of demesne farming did not adversely affect the ability of the tenant farmers to respond to market forces. As economic conditions improved, so did the productivity and profitability of the peasant economy. The kmiecie were well placed to benefit. The view of Poland as increasingly dominated by the monoculture of grain in response to west European demand could not be more misleading. While manors tended overwhelmingly to concentrate on grain production, tenant farmers conducted a much more mixed economy. In addition to producing grain, they raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and poultry, and possessed vegetable gardens and small orchards, much of whose output was for the market. In the mid sixteenth century the average holding of livestock per tenant farmer in Słabomierz, owned by the Gniezno chapter, was 24 head of cattle, 11 horses, 36 sheep, and 12 pigs.69 The overall picture was not quite so impressive, even in other estates of the Gniezno archbishopric, where the average one-hide tenant farmer possessed 4 horses, 6 head of cattle, 34 pigs, and 11 sheep.70 It has been estimated that the average livestock holding of a one-hide holding across Poland was 2 horses, 8 head of cattle, 5 sheep, and 3 goats.71 Using the standard measure of one horse or two oxen as one draught unit, in the sixteenth century, on average 22.8 per cent of half-hide tenant farms possessed from 1 to 1.5 draught units, 58.3 per cent possessed 2–3, and 18.9 per cent possessed three or more.72 It was for this reason that lords retained a proportion of rent in kind, to ensure their household was provided with eggs, meat, and other products of the pastoral farming they did not pursue on their manors.
How productive was this system? The supposedly low yield ratios on manorial farms have been used as evidence of the low productivity and primitive nature of Polish agriculture, and of the negative effects of the introduction of demesne farming: western scholars usually suggest a figure of 1:4 for Poland around 1600, generally calculated as enough to feed a peasant household and provide a small surplus for sale.73 Yet yield ratios rose over the period in which demesne farming spread. The scanty data make it hard to be definitive, but an average yield-ratio of 1:3 is generally estimated for royal and ecclesiastical estates in the late fourteenth century, which was not substantially out of line with the rest of Europe.74 An exhaustive study of audits of royal estates carried out in 1564–5 and 1569–70 demonstrates that these ratios had risen substantially. Considering that the audits took place in years of poor harvest, the figures suggest a much less primitive economy than was traditionally assumed. The top quartile of manors surveyed had ratios of 1:6 and higher for rye, the staple grain; when the figures for wheat, barley and oats are included, the figure rises to 1:6.76, with a small minority of manors attaining ratios of 1:11 and 1:12.75 Considering that these audits were controversial, and that leaseholders and their administrators had an interest in obscuring the full productive capacity of the manors they held, these figures are impressive; they bear comparison to contemporary figures for the Netherlands and England, at 1:6, though scholars, more cautiously, have proposed an average figure across Poland and over the four main grains harvested, of 1:5 for demesne farms.76
The productive capacity of the Polish rural economy was, however, higher than this. Peasant farms constituted some 75 per cent of the cultivated land, and it is generally agreed that they were more productive than demesne farms. There were good reasons why this should be so. Although some attention was given to manuring demesne farms, it was tenant farms that held the bulk of the village’s livestock. Thus their plots were better manured, and therefore more fertile. On account of the higher level of manuring, they did not need to fallow such a high proportion of their holdings as was the case on manors.77 Problems with sources mean it is difficult to say how much more productive they were. Wawrzyńczyk estimates yield ratios of 1:8.75 for rye, 1:10.5 for wheat, 1:12 for barley, and 1:8.1 for oats, with an average for the four grains of 1:9.1 from tenant farms on royal estates in Mazovia in the mid sixteenth century, but these figures have been criticized as too optimistic.78 They may indeed be too high: her study is based on a relatively small number of villages and partly relies on a source containing peasant claims for attainable yields following the destruction of their crops by poor weather and insect damage, which were probably inflated; she subsequently gave more realistic figures for royal lands across the kingdom. The figures for Wielkopolska are low, at 1:3.1 (1564–5) and 1:3.7 (1569–70) for rye, but are better for Małopolska (4.9 in 1564–5 and 4.8 in 1569–70) and impressive in Mazovia (5.8 in 1564–5 and 5.4 in 1569–70). Figures for oats are in a similar range, but for the valuable crops of wheat and barley, they are higher, with ratios of 1:5.1 (Małopolska 1564–5), 1:6.6 (Mazovia, 1564–5), and 1:7.6 (Royal Prussia, 1564–5) for wheat, and 1:5.9 (Wielkopolska, 1564–5), 1:6.4 (Małopolska, 1564–5), 1:7.5 (Mazovia, 1569–70), and 1:8.0 (Mazovia, 1564–5) for barley.79 Wawrzyńczyk is aware of the problem of peasant exaggeration of the productivity of their plots, and is cautious in her extrapolations, emphasizing that these were attainable ratios in good years when weather and soil conditions were favourable. While some of the figures for the 1560s audits are relatively low, these were poor years for weather, and the overall picture is suggestive. Wawrzyńczyk was interested in what was obtainable in good years and in favourable conditions, and her work indicates what peasant farms were capable of achieving. Peasants undoubtedly put more effort into farming their own land than they did into working the lord’s demesne, manured it better, and were seen as having a better understanding of agriculture than their lords. Her general conclusions can be accepted, especially since the audits suggest that some manors, albeit a minority, were themselves capable of achieving such ratios: auditors testified in the 1560s in Mazovia that yields on peasant farms were fifty per cent greater than on the manors surveyed.80
There is good evidence that tenant farmers produced marketable surpluses, sometimes substantial ones, suggesting that these yield ratios are plausible. As prices rose, stimulated by rising internal demand more than by external markets, which were serviced overwhelmingly by the great latifundia, tenant farmers were in a good position to benefit. If in the fifteenth century they only involved themselves in the market to meet rent and tax obligations, and had very little reason to produce more than necessary to feed their family, the situation changed substantially after 1500.81 Guzowski’s detailed modelling of the average half- and one-hide peasant holdings for the first half of the fifteenth century and the second half of the sixteenth demonstrates that in the first period a one-hide holding produced a surplus of about 31.5 per cent of grain (after deduction of the tithe, rent in kind, and seed for sowing) to sell on the market, which, except in bad years, was enough to cover the farmer’s tax and rental obligations. The surplus was much lower for a half-hide holding, at twelve per cent, and was barely enough to cover the obligations.82 Thus at this stage the picture of a largely subsistence peasant economy is reasonable. After 1550, however, the large-scale move to a system of labour rent, improved yield-ratios, and the return of a buoyant market for agricultural produce had changed the picture substantially. The average one-hide tenant farm now produced a surplus of 45 per cent of grain for the market, while the surplus for a half-hide holding had risen to 20 per cent.83 While taxes had risen from an average level of 14–16 groszy per annum for a one-hide holding (7–9 groszy for a half-hide holding) before 1450 to 17–24 groszy (12–17 groszy) after 1550, with average nominal rents doubling from 24–48 groszy for a one-hide holding and 12–24 groszy for a half-hide holding in the same period, the growth in production, rising prices and the switch to labour rent left tenant farmers with larger surpluses to sell, and larger disposable incomes: the rise in rent and taxes lagged far behind the fourfold increase in grain prices.84 While farmers were, as elsewhere in Europe, vulnerable to fluctuations of climate and external factors such as warfare, the long period of peace after 1435 meant that in a good year, disposable incomes rose from 1–2 marks in the early fifteenth century to 10–20 złoties in the second half of the sixteenth century, a considerable rise in real terms.85
This disposable income was put to various uses. Apart from investing in land, tenant farmers needed cash to buy out their siblings on inheritance of their plots, or they might use it to purchase mills, inns, or the position of village headman. Payment for such purchases was usually made in instalments, without interest, over periods of up to twenty years—1.44 per cent of the transactions were for repayment over even longer periods—which indicates stable economic expectations, and a village legal system that could be trusted. Seventy per cent of transactions were of five marks and under.86 The average value of transactions, and of instalments, began to rise noticeably from the mid sixteenth century as grain prices rose sharply after a long period of steady growth. The number of transactions grew substantially, although the average value fell, which suggests a general extension of the practice beyond the wealthiest farmers.87 Farmers needed money to pay for hired labour—although part of the cost was usually paid in kind, often through board and lodging—and for purchases in local markets and inns. Kmiecie often held considerable sums in cash, the value of their plots was rated highly by their lords, and it was not unknown for them to lend money to their lords.88 They lived in a real economic world, not in Kula’s theoretical universe, bereft of contact with markets.
Far from undermining and destroying the peasant economy, the move to labour rent accompanied a substantial growth in the living standards of tenant farmers at least, although it is difficult to say how far—if at all—the living standards of the growing rural proletariat improved. It would be pressing revisionism too far to suggest that the move to labour-rent had caused this change, but the rise in prosperity cannot simply be explained by rising prices, and the fact that rises in rent and taxes lagged behind the rise in grain prices calls into question the assumption that this was a period of increasing oppression. The growing prosperity confirms that tenant farmers, as well as their lords, had a real interest in the changes to rental arrangements, and explains why the change could be made with so little opposition.
By 1550 conditions were, as Wyczański suggested, by no means unfavourable for peasants in Poland—or at least for the tenant farmers at the heart of the system. Noble domination of the legislature, far from acting against peasant interests, benefited them. Noble control over taxation meant that the overall burdens on the Polish peasantry compare favourably with those levied on their counterparts in western Europe. Tax levels rose in the sixteenth century, with levies of up to 30 groszy per hide in individual years.89 Taxation at this level did not constitute a particularly high burden in European terms. Estimates of the percentage of grain production an average peasant farm paid in rent and taxes in the fifteenth century suggest that a Polish one-hide holding (16.8 hectares) paid 12 per cent of its grain output in rent and taxes after payment of tithe, while a half-hide holding paid 9 per cent—another indication that it was worthwhile for tenant farmers to shift to farming half-hide plots. This was about the same as England where the figure was 10 per cent for a 7.28 hectare holding, but far more favourable than in Languedoc (20 per cent on a 6 hectare holding), Normandy (20 per cent on a 9 hectare holding), and the Île-de-France (25 per cent on a 6 hectare holding). Expressed in terms of the amount of grain a peasant holding had to produce to cover its obligations, a Polish holding of one hide had to produce 650 kilograms of grain, while one of half a hide had to produce 250 kilograms. This was considerably better than other areas where Gutswirtschaft was practised: the figure for Brandenburg was 1,000 kilograms (16 hectares) and 1,800 kilograms (16 hectares) for the duchy of Breslau. It was better than much of western Europe: the figure for England was 350 kilograms (7.28 hectares); for Languedoc 400 kilograms (6 hectares); for Normandy 800 kilograms (9 hectares); and for the Île-de-France 1,200 kilograms (6 hectares).90 The comparison looks even more favourable for the sixteenth century. Although the demands on the average Polish peasant had risen to 700 kilograms (20 per cent of production) on a one-hide holding, and to 350 kilograms (10 per cent) on a half-hide holding, the equivalent figures were 700 kilograms (23.5 per cent, 16 hectares) in Brandenburg, and 1,800 kilograms (40 per cent, 16.5 hectares) in Muscovy. In western Europe, the figures were 850 kilograms (15 per cent, 16 hectares) for England; 850 kilograms (25 per cent, 6 hectares) for Languedoc; and 1,250 kilograms (40 per cent, 6 hectares) for the Île-de-France.91 There were more efficient means of oppressing peasants than labour rent.
1 For example, Robert Brenner, ‘The agrarian roots of European capitalism’, in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985), 282–3. For an excellent analysis of the problems see Markus Cerman, Villagers and Lords in Eastern Europe, 1300–1800 (Basingstoke, 2012).
2 Marian Małowist, ‘Poland, Russia and western trade in the 15th and 16th centuries’, P&P, 13 (1958), 26–39; Marian Małowist, ‘The economic and social development of the Baltic countries from the 15th to the 17th centuries’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 12/2 (1959), 177–89; and Marian Małowist, ‘The problem of the inequality of economic development in Europe in the latter Middle Ages’, EcHR, 2nd ser., 19/1 (1966), 15–28.
3 Witold Kula, Teoria ekonomiczna ustroju feudalnego, 2nd edn (Warsaw, 1983); English version, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (London, 1976), tr. Lawrence Garner from the Italian edn.
4 Michael Bush, ‘Serfdom in medieval and modern Europe. A comparison’, in Bush (ed.), Serfdom and Slavery (Harlow, 1996), 205; Jerome Blum, ‘The rise of serfdom in eastern Europe’, AHR, 62/4 (1957), 807–36. For recent works that stress the role of the state and of legislation, see Schmidt, Leibeigenschaft, 126–44; Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Freedman and Monique Bourin (eds), Forms of Servitude in Northern and Central Europe (Turnhout, 2005), 6, 16.
5 Werner Rösener, The Peasantry of Europe (Oxford, 1994), 108.
6 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, i: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), 67–129. For a demolition of Wallerstein’s account of the Polish rural economy, see Jerzy Topolski, Przełom gospodarczy w Polsce XVI wieku i jego następstwa (Poznań, 2000), 41–5, 52–7.
7 Andrzej Kamiński, ‘Neo-serfdom in Poland-Lithuania’, SR, 34 (1975), 256. Polish historians tend to use the contemporary term ‘możnowładca’ for the medieval period, and ‘magnat’ for the early modern period. I use ‘magnate’ for both. As Kurtyka observes, the Polish terms are synonyms: ‘Posiadłość, dziedziczność i prestiż: Badania nad późnośredniowieczną i wczesnonowożytną wielką własnością możnowładczą w Polsce XIV–XVII wieku’, RH, 65 (1999), 163.
8 For this reason Żytkowicz omits data from royal estates when calculating his figures for yield ratios: Leonid Żytkowicz, ‘Grain yields in Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Slovakia in the 16th to 18th centuries’ APH, 24 (1971), 60.
9 Stefan Inglot, Z dziejów wsi polskiej i rolnictwa, 2nd edn (Warsaw, 1986), 174.
10 Andrzej Wyczański, Studia nad folwarkiem szlacheckim w Polsce w latach 1500–1800 (Warsaw, 1960), 5–6.
11 Wyczański, Studia, 115–16.
12 Andrzej Wyczański, ‘Czy chłopu było źle w Polsce XVI wieku?’, KH, 85 (1978), 627–41; Kula, Theory, 17, 49, 62; Topolski, Przełom, 18–19.
13 Cerman, Villagers, 11–13; Cerman, ‘Social structure and land markets in late medieval central and east-central Europe’, Continuity and Change, 23/1 (2008), 77–8; Tom Scott, ‘Economic landscapes’ in Robert Scribner (ed.), Germany: A New Social and Economic History, i (London, 1996), 10.
14 William Hagen, ‘Subject farmers in Brandenburg-Prussia and Poland: Village life and fortunes under manorialism in early modern central Europe’, in Bush (ed.), Serfdom, 309; Jerzy Wyrozumski, ‘Kmieć czy chłop w Polsce średniowiecznej?’, in Halina Manikowska et al. (eds), Aetas media, aetas moderna (Warsaw, 2000), 356–62.
15 For the sake of brevity, however, I shall use the terms ‘peasant’ and ‘peasantry’ when referring to the non-noble rural population as a whole, translating ‘kmieć’ as ‘tenant farmer’.
16 Wroniszewski criticizes Topolski for using the term ‘poddaństwo’ for this period, ‘when it did not yet exist’: Szlachta, 53.
17 Hagen, ‘Subject farmers’, 297. For a richly detailed study of the rural population as economic subjects in Brandenburg see William Hagen, Ordinary Prussians: Brandenburg, Junkers and Villagers, 1500–1840 (Cambridge, 2002).
18 For a trenchant attack on the concept of eastern European backwardness see Piotr Górecki, Economy, Society and Lordship in Medieval Poland, 1100–1250 (New York, 1992), 1–44. Górecki provides much evidence of the complex involvement of Polish villages with the market; for the structure of rent: Górecki, Economy, 85, 87.
19 Górecki, Economy, 78, 80–1; 91, 112–13; 164, 168, 171–8.
20 Wyrozumski, ‘Czy późnośredniowieczny kryzys feudalizmu dotknął Polskę?’, in Tomasz Jasiński et al. (eds), Homines et societas (Poznań, 1997), 110.
21 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 63.
22 Zientara, ‘Społeczeństwo’, 154.
23 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 77–9; Grzegorz Jawor, Ludność chłopska i społeczności wiejskie w województwie lubelskim w późnym średniowieczu (schyłek XI–początek XVI wieku) (Lublin, 1991), 20.
24 Alina Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo chłopskie na Mazowszu w XVI w. (Warsaw, 1962), 20, 41.
25 Alina Czapiuk, ‘O plonach zbóż w Polsce i w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim w XVI i XVII wieku’, in Cezary Kuklo (ed.), Między polityką a kulturą (Białystok, 1999), 236.
26 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 50–1.
27 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 59.
28 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 64, 66.
29 Mikulski and Wroniszewski, ‘Folwark’, 31–2; Andrzej Wyczański, ‘O folwarku szlacheckim w Polsce XVI stulecia’, KH, 61/4 (1954), 182–3; Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 59, 67; Davies, God’s Playground, i, 218.
30 Cf. Cerman, Villagers, 58–61.
31 Wyczański, Studia, 51. For an attack on the view that manors were established through the expropriation of the peasantry, see Wyczański, ‘O folwarku’, 176–9.
32 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 75.
33 Wyrozumski, ‘Kryzys’ 113.
34 Anna Izydorczyk-Kamler, ‘Praca najemna na wsi małopolskiej w XVI i pierwszej połowie XVII wieku’, KH, 97/1–2 (1990), 11; Anna Kamler, Chłopi jako pracownicy najemni na wsi małopolskiej w XVI i pierwszej połowie XVII wieku (Warsaw, 2005).
35 Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 20, 41.
36 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 69–72; Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 12–16.
37 Wyczański, Studia, 84–5.
38 Wyczański, ‘O folwarku’, 181; Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 66–7. For ecclesiastical estates see Zbyszko Górczak, Podstawy gospodarcze działalności Zbigniewa Oleśnickiego biskupa krakowskiego (Cracow, 1999) and Jerzy Topolski, Gospodarstwo wiejskie w dobrach arcybiskupstwa gnieźnieńskiego od XVI do XVIII wieku (Poznań, 1958).
39 Wyczański, Studia, 44–6. Given that tax assessment was controlled by nobles, it is probable that under-declaration remained a problem even in years when formal assessments were made by local collectors.
40 Piotr Guzowski, Chłopi i pieniądz na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych (Cracow, 2008), 155.
41 Wyczański, Studia, 28–9.
42 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 61.
43 This decree may only have applied to royal estates; even if its scope was wider, the extent to which it was obeyed is unclear: Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 62.
44 VC, i/i, 328, 351; Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 62–3; Wyczański, Studia, 101. For the traditional view see Zdzisław Kaczmarczyk and Bogusław Leśnodorski, Historia państwa i prawa Polski, ii: Od połowy XV wieku do r. 1795 (Warsaw, 1966), 44.
45 VC, i/i, 328; Kutrzeba, Korona, 100.
46 VC, i/i, 71.
47 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 54.
48 Małgorzata Kołacz, ‘Powinności chłopskie w ziemi chełmskiej w XV–XVI wieku’, in Wijaczka (ed.), Między zachodem a wschodem, iv: Życie gospodarcze Rzeczypospolitej w XVI–XVIII wieku (Toruń, 1997), 44.
49 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 45, n.145, 56, 60.
50 Topolski, Przełom, 79–80.
51 Mikulski and Wroniszewski, ‘Folwark’, 31, 32–3.
52 For the view that flight was a protest against oppression, see Inglot, Z dziejówwsi, 274.
53 Inglot, Z dziejówwsi, 287.
54 See Guzowski, ‘System dziedziczenia chłopów na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych w świetle sądowych ksiąg wiejskich’, in Cezary Kuklo (ed.), Rodzina i gospodarstwo domowe na ziemiach polskich w XV–XX wieku (Warsaw, 2008), 29–48.
55 Cerman, ‘Social structure’, 59–60, 63.
56 Wyrozumski, ‘Kryzys’, 112–13.
57 Stanisław Śreniowski, Zbiegostwo chłopów w dawnej Polsce jako zagadnienie ustroju społecznego, 2nd edn (Łódz, 1997), 123.
58 Wyczański, Studia, 105–6.
59 Inglot, Z dziejówwsi, 274–5.
60 Wyczański, Studia, 119; Śreniowski, Zbiegostwo, 85, 90–1.
61 Śreniowski, Zbiegostwo, 110.
62 Śreniowski, Zbiegostwo, 62.
63 VC, i, 70.
64 Guzowski, ‘System’, 29–35.
65 Guzowski, ‘System’, 91, 121–2.
66 Guzowski, ‘System’, 50, 53–4.
67 Wroniszewski, Szlachta, 56–9.
68 Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 98.
69 Topolski, Przełom, 73.
70 Topolski, Gospodarstwo, 247.
71 Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja ekonomiczna chłopów polskich w XV i XVI w. na tle europejskim’, in Wijaczka (ed.), Między zachodem a wschodem, 13–14.
72 Guzowski, Chłopi, 119.
73 Jan de Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1976), 35.
74 Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja’, 9, 28.
75 Alina Wawrzyńczyk, Studia nad wydajnością produkcji rolnej dóbr królewskich w drugiej połowie XVI w. (Wrocław, 1974), 173–6.
76 Wawrzyńczyk, Studia, 7, 50, 114–15; De Vries, Economy, 36; Guzowski, Chłopi, 113–16.
77 Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja’, 10; Żytkowicz, ‘Ze studiów nad wysokością plonów w Polsce od XVI do XVIII w.’, KHKM 14/3 (1966), 475.
78 Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 84; Leonid Żytkowicz, ‘Badania nad gospodarką chłopską w królewszczynach mazowieckich XVI i początkach XVII w.’, ZH, 29/4 (1964), 28–37; Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja’, 9–11.
79 Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 76–7, 79, 81; Guzowski, Chłopi, 114–15.
80 Three and more kopy per korzec of seed compared with two on the manor. Wawrzyńczek reduced this to 2.5 for the purpose of her estimates: Alina Wawrzyńczyk, ‘Wsprawie gospodarstwa chłopskiego na Mazowszu w XVI w.’, ZH, 29/4 (1964), 41; Inglot, Z dziejów wsi, 178.
81 Andrzej Wyczański, ‘Uwagi o utowarowieniu gospodarki chłopskiej w dawnej Polski’, in Stefan Kuczyński and Stanisław Suchodolski (eds), Nummus et historia: Pieniądz Europy średniowiecznej (Warsaw, 1985), 303–4.
82 Guzowski, Chłopi, 127–31.
83 Guzowski, Chłopi, 131–3.
84 Guzowski, Chłopi, 154.
85 Guzowski, Chłopi, 123, 125, 134–5.
86 Guzowski, Chłopi, 44–62.
87 Guzowski, Chłopi, 65.
88 Wyrozumski, ‘Kryzys’, 113; Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 189–91.
89 Wawrzyńczyk, Gospodarstwo, 138–9; Guzowski, Chłopi, 149.
90 Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja’, 29–30.
91 Guzowski, ‘Sytuacja’, 34.