34
In 1522 Goštautas formed an alliance with the dynasty over the succession, but despite agreement that the grand duchy formed the patrimony of the Jagiellons, the rapprochement was brief. Bona was no natural ally of the council magnates in either Poland or Lithuania. In Poland, influenced by Łaski, she criticized breaches of the principle of incompatibility through the illegal accumulation of high office in the hands of figures like Tomicki and Szydłowiecki.1 Nevertheless, despite her association with Łaski, her enthusiasm for the introduction of Polish-style land courts in Lithuania, and her support of individual nobles in disputes with magnates, she was no champion of szlachta democracy. She was, however, a natural and determined reformer. From the late 1520s she began a sustained campaign to improve the agricultural economy on her Lithuanian estates, launching a radical transformation of the grand ducal domain, and eventually of the rural economy across the grand duchy. It brought conflict with members of the council elite, and in particular the Goštautas and Radvila families.
Bona first acquired land in Lithuania in 1519, when Sigismund granted her the duchies of Pinsk and Kobryn. She realized that the most effective way of establishing a firm power-base for her son in Lithuania was to strengthen and restore the grand ducal domain, which was in a pitiful state. The domination of the council families and long periods of absentee rule had meant that no sustained campaign of restoration of the kind undertaken in Poland after 1504 had been attempted. In 1514 Sigismund wrote to all leaseholders of grand ducal manors in the palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai stating that he received no income whatsoever from his properties, and that all the revenues were used to their, and not his benefit.2 This was an exaggeration, but grand ducal income had suffered considerably from years of neglect. The poor state of central records and the lack of any desire to investigate or reform the domain on the part of those who held so much of it meant that Bona faced formidable obstacles.
Sigismund had already begun experimenting on estates in Samogitia. Decrees issued in 1514, 1527, and 1529 initiated audits, and began removing estates from the hands of the tivuny, their traditional administrators.3 Bona, however, provided the driving force after 1529, bringing to the task considerable administrative skill and an excellent head for business. Using her private wealth, and the gradually increasing revenues from her estates, she began accumulating property. In 1533 she bought the wealthy starosties of Kaunas and Brest from Jurgis Radvila and several Podlasian estates from Goštautas. Three years later Sigismund gave her permission to purchase mortgaged grand ducal land. By the 1540s her holdings extended across the grand duchy, from the starosties of Kremenets and Kovel in Volhynia to Platelē in Samogitia and Palanga on the Baltic coast. She controlled a huge strip of wilderness, 240 kilometres long, from the upper reaches of the Narew to the Niemen at Kaunas. With her holdings in Poland and Mazovia, the proceeds made her wealthy indeed.4
Bona was not content simply to own property. From July 1533 she spent three years in Lithuania, with a two-month break in 1535, returning for long stays thereafter. She ran her estates with consummate efficiency, sending auditors to inspect her holdings, investing in them, and energetically litigating in boundary disputes. She standardized rents and obligations, converting the often bewildering array of payments in kind into a consolidated cash rent or, where she established manors, labour rent. She was shocked by the extent to which lesser nobles were oppressed by wealthy magnates, and she decided to break the grip of the Goštautas and Radvila families. She bought out grand ducal estates in their possession and litigated against them. In a 1536 case, the fraudulent behaviour of Mikalojus Radvila concerning a 1515 privilege issued by Sigismund confirming his possession of lands abstracted from the royal domain was revealed. A commission under Piotr Chwalczewski ordered the return of a strip 69 kilometres long and from 12 to 24 kilometres wide that constituted half the Goniądz and Rajgród estates.5 She did not thereby endear herself to the oligarchs, but won respect from many lesser nobles, who appreciated the fair way in which she approached audits of royal estates: if wealthier nobles saw their holdings confiscated when they could not produce documentary proof they were entitled to them, poorer nobles were often allowed to continue in possession of their tiny holdings.6
Her robust approach outraged the oligarchs, who sought support from her opponents in Poland and attacked her for supporting the introduction of Polish-style land courts. Goštautas argued in 1529 that the introduction of Polish law would not work, since in contrast to the consolidated villages with clearly delineated boundaries found in Poland, Lithuanian villages were dispersed, and peasants farmed amid a confusion of homesteads, fields, pastures, and meadows.7 It was not a particularly coherent argument in favour of Lithuanian custom, and Bona ignored it. Rents were based on the sluzhba, which was not on a measure of land, but a group of households. They comprised various levies, most commonly the diaklo, a payment in kind, or the prisevok, the harvest on a portion of the land held by a leaseholder. The system was neither very remunerative for the lord, producing around 30 groszy per sluzhba in the early sixteenth century, nor very satisfactory for the villagers who saw the commercial value of the produce they surrendered rising sharply.8
There was an alternative. Polish and Mazovian settlers in Podlasie introduced the hide system (system włóczny), based on the Polish łan or, as it was known in Mazovia and Lithuania, the włoka (voloka). The Radvila family appreciated its benefits, and were already introducing it on their Podlasian estates. Bona followed suit. After experimenting in Podlasie, from 1533 she started converting villages to the hide system across her Lithuanian holdings, sending in surveyors to measure the land and reorganize villages along Polish lines. The surveyors established fields in hides of 21.3 hectares, divided into 30 morgs. Units of one hide were divided into three fields of 10 morgs each; lands outside the designated fields, known as zastenki (zaściańki)—literally ‘beyond the wall’, referring to the baulks that marked their boundaries—could be rented by peasants for additional payments, although occasionally they were distributed free of charge. The surveyors also marked the boundaries of the common lands used for pasture and haymaking.
Reorganization of village farmland into three fields facilitated the introduction of proper crop rotation. Villagers were required to sow one field with grain, one with winter grain, and leave one fallow every year. The fields were divided up between peasant households. In principle this was done on an equal basis, with each household assigned one hide, but the actual distribution depended on the wealth and capacity of individual households. Some lacked the labour or inventory to farm this much land, and surveyors were flexible, assigning land according to the capacity to farm it. The wealthiest might receive as much as 2–3 hides (43–64 hectares), although the average holding was 0.75 of a hide (16 hectares). Some households were allowed to pool their resources to farm one hide together.9
Bona’s reforms were systematized in a 1549 decree.10 By now their benefits were obvious. In 1547 Sigismund August followed Bona’s lead, preparing the way for comprehensive reform of the grand ducal domain by ordering an audit of castles and starosties across much of Lithuania proper, Podlasie, and Samogitia. In 1556 he established a commission chaired by chancellor Mikołaj Radziwiłł Czarny that examined audits undertaken since 1547. Finally, on 1 April 1557 he issued his hide decree (ustawa na włoki) which, together with four supplementary decrees (20 October 1557, 20 May, 20 June, and 20 October 1558), constituted one of the most radical pieces of reforming legislation in Lithuania’s history.11 He ordered the conversion of all grand ducal estates to the hide system, stipulating a hide of 33 morgs (23.5 hectares), slightly larger than that used in Bona’s reforms, which meant that farmland was divided into three fields of 11 morgs each (7.8 hectares), although the decree allowed use of the smaller hide or a larger hide of 36 morgs to suit local conditions.12
The reforms were based on a growing Polish literature on the principles of agricultural improvement, including Andrzej of Łęczyca’s 1555 treatise, now lost, on the science of measurement, and were carried out on a massive scale.13 Under the direction of Piotr Chwalczewski, brother of Jerzy, bishop of Lutsk, surveyors were despatched with their measuring equipment—little more than primitive cruciform surveying instruments, marked wooden measuring poles, and fathoms of oiled rope—across the grand duchy. Of 64 known surveyors, 35 were local Lithuanians or Ruthenians, five were local Jews, and the rest were Poles or Mazovians—or at least of Polish or Mazovian descent.14
The transformation of the countryside was dramatic. The dispersed hamlets defended by Goštautas all but disappeared, replaced by orderly villages at the heart of the field system, with cottages along one side of a central street opposite the farm buildings, to minimize the danger of fires spreading from wooden homesteads to wooden byres full of hay and straw.15 The surveyors nominated one of the wealthier and more respectable villagers as headman (wójt) to oversee payment of rent and taxes, to inspect and maintain external and internal field boundaries, and keep order. In return he received two hides free of all obligations and the right to lease another hide if he so wished. Two to three hides were assigned to the parish church, whether Catholic or Orthodox. Grand ducal servitors such as the boiare putni—service boyars who carried letters and messages—received 1–2 hides rent free, while artisans, including millers, smiths, and beekeepers, received various amounts of land or relief from rent: smiths received two hides rent free, while bobrovniki (beaver-hunters) received one hide, which was rent-free during the hunting season.16
The hide reform was a massive undertaking that casts a favourable light on the capacity of the grand ducal administration. Between 1547 and 1566 almost all the domain in central and western Lithuania proper was reorganized. A cadastre classified land according to four categories: good, medium, poor, and very poor. In Samogitia and the palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai alone, 57,636 hides and 9 morgs were surveyed and reorganized: between 1,227,646 and 1,354,446 hectares. This exceeded cultivated land in Małopolska and Wielkopolska put together (59,350 hides), given that the Polish łan was smaller than the Lithuanian voloka.17
It was not until the end of the century that the reforms were introduced in the annexed territories, but the treasury, whose income from the grand ducal domain had been under 20,000 kop groszy before 1547, soon saw the benefits. By 1588 its revenue from reorganized villages in Samogitia, Podlasie, Volhynia, part of Ruthenia, and the palatinates of Vilnius and Trakai had risen fourfold to just under 82,000 kop groszy per annum, some 200,000 Polish złoties.18 These spectacular results encouraged private landowners to follow suit. One of the earliest was Radziwiłł Czarny, who, along with Piotr Chwalczewski and the Ruthenian Ostafi Wołłowicz, formed the commission that prepared the 1557 decree. Czarny quarrelled with his fellow commissioners over details of the reform, but from the early 1560s he reorganized his estates along the lines established in 1557. Others followed suit, as did the Catholic Church, after Walerian Protasewicz, bishop of Vilnius (1556–79) initiated the process in his diocese.19
It was long argued that the hide reform worsened the position of the peasantry, by depriving peasants of their plots and granting them smaller plots or worse land; by spreading manorial farming and introducing serfdom and labour rent; and by raising rents. The position of the rural population certainly changed dramatically after 1557, but the comprehensive nature of the reform, the way it was conducted, and the rapidity with which it was completed, cast doubt on this simplistic picture. The negative view of the manorial economy formed in later centuries was not shared by contemporary observers, while the replacement of straggling, dispersed hamlets by orderly, consolidated villages attracted approving comment: a Spanish traveller through central Lithuania in 1570 observed that the fields were just as well-cultivated as in Mazovia, and divided up in the same way.20
This impression is confirmed by the most remarkable feature of the reforms: they took place without substantial or organized peasant resistance, in stark contrast to the experience of south-western Germany or Ducal Prussia earlier in the century. Picheta even claimed that the reforms were anti-noble in nature, rather than antipeasant.21 The surveyors were not accompanied by troops, and the flexibility with which they approached their task suggests that the changes were achieved largely through negotiation and compromise, not force. Drozd claims that the peasants mostly came off worst, being deprived of ‘well-cultivated land’ which was incorporated into manors, in exchange for lower quality or even fallow land, but offers no evidence to support her generalization, or explanation as to why, if this was so, and if peasant interests really were damaged by the introduction of labour rent, the reform was achieved so quickly and with so little resistance, which in itself is remarkable considering how many of the surveyors were Polish or Mazovian outsiders.22 Drozd herself quotes one of the surveyors, Jakub Łaszkowski, who claimed that the aim of the reorganization of villages was to produce a more just measurement and apportioning of the land within the village; each was to receive land according to ‘what he rightly holds in accordance with justice and the law’.23
There is much to suggest that this claim was no idle boast. Four amendments to the decree within a year demonstrate that the government took account of the experience of their surveyors, and adjusted the legislation accordingly: thus the original allocation of one hide of land rent-free for the wójt was increased to two hides on Chwalczewski’s recommendation, on the grounds that one was insufficient to persuade villagers to take up the burdens of the post.24 This flexibility and concern for a just settlement was evident in other ways. The decree laid down that the land in the new fields should be apportioned equally; this underlying assumption of equality undoubtedly appealed to peasants, even if in practice they received plots of different sizes according to their capacity. The sharing of strips in a common field was often an improvement over a situation in which, with scattered settlement, some peasants had a monopoly on better land. The assignation of land to individual households took account of the categorization into four classes achieved in the cadastre. Cash and labour rents were calibrated according to the quality of the land: Bona’s 1549 decree set rents at 80 groszy per annum for good land, 55 for medium-quality land, and 40 for poor land, with nothing charged for very poor land; these levels were raised in 1557 to 106, 97, and 83 groszy respectively, with a rent of 66 groszy introduced for very poor land. The equivalent figures for labour service were 40 days, 30 days, and 22 days in 1549, and 54, 45, and 31 in 1557; labour rent was not levied for very poor land under either decree. Even in 1557, the labour rent demanded for good land was just over one day per week.25 Peasants had the right to buy themselves out of labour service, and paid cash rents for part of their holdings, the expansion of labour rent to a standard level of two days in the first period after the reforms probably indicates that peasants preferred labour rent at a time of rising agricultural prices.
The sources do not reveal how division of the fields among peasant households was achieved, but they do reveal how exchanges of land were carried out with nobles to consolidate the domain by regulating boundaries and removing noble holdings from the heart of grand ducal estates. In the Liakhovitsky district, Jan Shenevsky exchanged 10 morgs 22 pruts of land divided into three sections, one of 2 morgs 10 pruts of bad land, and two of medium land (6 morgs 6½ pruts and 2 morgs 2½ pruts respectively) for 9 morgs 22 pruts of medium land. Nikolai Trofym Vasylevych exchanged a hayfield and 10 hides 26 morgs and 27 pruts of scattered land rated bad, for a consolidated block of 3 hides 1 morg and 27 pruts, most classed as medium-quality.26
Nobles had to evaluate the quality of the land they currently farmed, its location, and the merits of the exchange on offer. It is clear that bargaining went on before a satisfactory conclusion was reached. Such exchanges suited both sides: it was not just the grand duke who was inconvenienced by the confused pattern of landholding, while for individual nobles, as in Vasylevych’s case, the reforms enabled them to mitigate the consequences of a system of partible inheritance that could leave them with scattered strips of little value, or large holdings of poor land. The exchange of land with the domain enabled them to trade off a large but scattered holding for a smaller, consolidated plot that was easier to farm and, if of lower quality, had a lower rental value.27
It is likely that similar advantages were apparent to peasants: the size and configuration of their plots, the quality of the land, its location, and its rental value had to be taken into account. Bona, Sigismund, and Sigismund August were aware that their prosperity ultimately depended on peasant productivity, and they by no means always supported nobles against them. Bona’s reputation encouraged complaints from peasants against mistreatment, as in the 1532 petition from peasants on the estate of Borysovska in the Vilnius palatinate concerning the behaviour of the leaseholder, none other than Albertas Goštautas.28 While it would be foolish to assume that all peasants benefited from the reforms, or to doubt that nobles mostly held the upper hand in negotiations, it is by no means evident that the reforms had generally negative consequences for peasant farmers.
They did to an extent encourage the development of the manorial economy, although they were by no means the primary catalyst for its expansion, which had been underway since the late fifteenth century. The spread of manors, however, was mainly confined to the river basins linked to the Baltic in central and western Lithuania proper. Even where manorial farming spread, it by no means pushed out other forms of cultivation, and in practice systems based on cash rent, or—as the 1557 decree—on mixed rental systems—survived across the grand duchy, where the manorial economy was never as widespread as it became in Poland. Manorial farms for the most part constituted a smaller proportion of the hides in the grand ducal domain than hides subject to cash rent: apart from the starosty of Knyszyn, where they constituted 66 per cent of the hides, they made up 43.4 per cent in Sarazh, 41.3 per cent in Hrodna, 31.4 per cent in Kletsk, 30.7 per cent in Kobryn, 20.5 per cent in Brest, and 18.4 per cent in Lyngmiany.29 The point of the hide reform was to increase agricultural production and grand ducal revenues, not to introduce the manorial system, and surveyors took account of local conditions in reorganizing villages according to the system that best suited them. Where they were introduced, they may well have suited the interests of the peasantry as much as the lord. The decree laid down that the ratio of hides measured where manorial farming was introduced should be one hide of manorial land for every seven hides assigned to the peasants, which meant that peasants, far from suddenly being made ‘land poor’ as Hrushevsky maintains, had plenty of farmland available to them to benefit from the rising prices for agricultural produce: he assumes, without producing any evidence, that since some land was taken from the peasants, they must have been left with ‘barely a third’ of their old holdings. This is to ignore the redistributive tenor of the reforms, which sought not to deprive peasants of land, but to redistribute and reorganize peasant holdings.30 It is true that where the manorial system was introduced, as in Poland, a new class of cottars with small plots of land was created to provide the labour service on the manor, but this did not mean that wealthy peasants were impoverished to create this class: cottars were either immigrants, impoverished peasants who had little land anyway, or former slaves: one of the results of the reforms was the end of slavery in Lithuania.
The transformation of the structure of peasant rents from a system largely based on obligations in kind to a mixed system of rents in cash and kind, or labour service, means that is difficult to compare the situation before and after the reforms, and attempts to demonstrate that the peasantry were impoverished by substantial rises in rent are dubious. Hrushevsky, for example, determined to show the negative impact of the manorial economy in the south, uses the lower rents in kind demanded of peasant households after the reform to claim that peasant productivity had suffered, an unwarranted assumption, since the reform had radically altered the structure of the rent paid, and lower rents in kind were offset by the introduction of other forms of rent, and in no way reflect the productivity of peasant farms.31 It is true that rents rose, and that the grand ducal treasury’s revenues increased substantially: the estate of Telšē in Samogitia, which in 1547 paid 478 kop groszy to the treasury, by 1588 was producing 1,136, an increase of 138 per cent. Yet simply to use the percentage increase of rent to conclude that peasants were thereby impoverished is unwarranted: if burdens rose by 20 per cent, the increased revenue to the treasury came largely from the surge in agricultural productivity that was the main aim of the reforms, not higher rents. Peasants, as well as lords, benefited from increased productivity, and rent increases did not reflect the increase in agricultural prices, which they were in a better position to exploit after 1557: the price of a barrel of rye in Lithuania rose by 140 per cent between 1529 and 1588.32 Many peasants prospered. The wealthy tenant in Zantolepce who owned 15 horses, 6 oxen, 7 cows, 200 sheep, 4 goats, and 8 pigs was not unusual.33 As in Poland, such tenants were in demand, and incidents of peasant flight did not necessarily indicate an inherently oppressive system. Landlords offered good terms to encourage settlement and the establishment of new villages. The two families who absconded from an estate in the Trakai palatinate in 1585 took with them 2 horses, 3 oxen, 4 bullocks, 12 mature sheep, 18 young sheep, 3 goats, 6 mature pigs, 12 suckling pigs, 20 piglets, 6 geese, 24 goslings, 20 hens, 4 barrels of rye, 6 of barley, 12 of milled rye, plus seedcorn, cloth, and 20 carts of hay. They must have prepared their move carefully; they would not have been hard to track down en route to their new home.34
Thus, as in Poland, it should not be assumed that because of the undoubted problems of the rural economy from the mid seventeenth century, the manorial system was flawed from the outset, and that its introduction marked a sharp deterioration in the condition of the peasantry. The introduction of manorial farming was not the point of the hide reforms, and it did not triumph as a consequence of them. The transformation of the rural economy took place at a time of buoyant demand for agricultural products, and this is the main reason why it was achieved in such a short period, in contrast to the slower change in the Polish system, which began in a period of agricultural depression a century earlier. The reforms helped complete the process by which the Lithuanian nobility defined itself. As rural society became more stratified, a large group of poor and service boyars found themselves in limbo, with their social status unclear; some were simply excluded from the nobility, emerging as part of the upper stratum of the village. It was they who often served as headmen, but their decline in status was indicated by the fact that the term ‘boyar’ by 1600—in sharp contrast to its use in Muscovy—no longer denoted a nobleman. Lithuanian nobles thought of themselves as shliakhta. Despite the exclusion of many boyars, it remained a numerous class whose voice was soon to make itself heard.
1 Bogucka, Bona, 206.
2 Ludwik Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara włóczna’, AW, 4/13 (1927), 236.
3 Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 236–7; Jerzy Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna w dobrach magnackich i kościelnych w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim w drugiej połowie XVI wieku’, in Ochmański, Dawna Litwa, 176; Zofia Drozd, ‘Miernicy w pomiarze włócznej w Wielkim Księstwie Litewskim w drugiej połowie XVI wieku’, LSP, 13 (2008), 40.
4 Bogucka, Bona, 225–6; Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 88–9.
5 Pociecha, Bona, iii, 163–7; Sucheni-Grabowska, Zygmunt August, 96.
6 For a detailed analysis see Pociecha, Bona, iii, 109–44.
7 AT, vii, no. 214, 164.
8 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 39.
9 В.И. Пичета, ‘Волочная устава королевы Боны и устава на волоки’, in Пичета, Белоруссия и Литва XV–XVI вв (Moscow, 1961), 23–4; Jerzy Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie i Białorusi w XVI wieku’, in Ochmański, Dawna Litwa, 166–7; Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 47.
10 ‘Устава Королевое её милости на волоки в имениях её милости у Великом князтве литовскомъ мераные а наперед на волоки цыншовые’, published by Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 238–9.
11 Литовская метрика, RIB, xxx, 543–8; Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie’; Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 41.
12 Пичета, ‘Волочная устава’, 23; Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 241.
13 Andrzej z Łęczycy, O nauce mierniczej (1555); Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 241.
14 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 52–68; PSB, iv, 2–3.
15 For a visual representation of the transformation see the maps in Ochmański, Historia, 122–3.
16 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 44, 46, 49; Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 247; Пичета, ‘Волочная устава’, 32–3.
17 Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 249.
18 Kolankowski, 249–50. Kolankowski suggests an income of 10,000 before the reform, but Ochmański shows that his estimate was based on a poor year, and that between 1512 and 1514, the treasury’s income from the domainwas 18,500 kop groszy: Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie’, 169.
19 Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna w dobrach magnackich’, 177–8, 187–8.
20 Quoted by Ochmański, Historia, 124.
21 Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie’, 159.
22 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 50.
23 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 42; for the full quotation see Kolankowski, ‘Pomiara’, 244–5.
24 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 44.
25 Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie’, table 1, 168.
26 Пичета, ‘Волочная устава’, 25–6.
27 Пичета, ‘Волочная устава’, 26.
28 Pociecha, Bona, iii, 108.
29 Ochmański, ‘Reforma włóczna na Litwie’, table 3, 170.
30 Hrushevsky, History, vi, 159.
31 Hrushevsky, History, vi, 159.
32 Ochmański, Historia, 121.
33 Drozd, ‘Miernicy’, 47.
34 Śreniowski, Zbiegostwo, 26.