In recent time in polish media i can observe many exaples of theses that a peasant from Old Polish Republic (Commonwelth) times was a slaves similar to, for example, black workers in cotton plantations in the USA. In this short article i will try to describe how it really looked like in the 15th and 16th centuries - the golden period of the Commonwealth.
Was the peasant a slave under the law?
The answer is obvious and it is quite incomprehensible to me that it has to be pointed and even discus (they where not slaves). I think that no historian will honestly sign under the thesis on slaves peasants and it is usually pronounced by people who have graduated from such areas as sociology or anthropology and their theories form separate from the methodology of the scientific work of the historian. Of course, there are works by historians that explain this in detail, but they are usually ignored, maybe they are to hard to absorb. I will try to explain all this in a synthetic and simple way.
A slave is first and foremost the legal status of a human being. So what does it mean that someone is a slave? First of all, it has its owner, who has full authority over "it", including over his property and even his life. In ancient Rome, the slave was a “movable” living thing, an object that was in the possession of the Roman. Was the situation of the Polish peasant at least similar to that? No, because every peasant had his own legal personality, he was not, as an individual, nobody's property (he was a subject, but also a nobleman was subject to the king only on other rights), he could acquire and dispossess property, he could, under certain conditions, climb into the social hierarchy, he had his jurisdiction and his own authority. Of course, the peasant had practically no political rights at that time, so he was discriminated against in this respect. Moreover, for this reason, the law discriminated against this and other groups of inhabitants against the nobility in many areas, such as taxes and access to authorities. Looking at these discriminatory laws, as the most "slave" and most often indicated by modern critics of old times, we can distinguish: serfdom, which we will discuss in the paragraph about the well-being of peasants, and the attachment to the land law.
Attachment to the land or limited mobility?
The law we are talking about, and which is commonly referred to as attachment to the land law, dates back to the deep Middle Ages, but as far as the period concerned is concerned, it has its origins in the Statutes of Piotrków, adopted in 1496.
The law established at the time, in addition to indicating how to judge the “fugitive” also defined what extent of freedom the peasant had in the matter of change of place of residence. This law stipulated that one farmer(kmieć) could move from a certain village to another in a given year (which probably meant his whole family as well), so we can see that this “attachment” was not absolute and concerned not so much a person as the collectivity attributed to a given village. In addition, each family from a given village could send one son to school or to the army if he was not the only son. So we see that the law did not so much put the decision to move into the hands of the "owner", but rather regulated the scope of mobility of this social class. Was it a wise law? I can't say, but there were important reasons behind it, which I will write about below. Was it a liberal law that gave freedom? Of course not, but at the same time it does not mean turning this group of people into slaves.
Let's take a closer look at why such a law was established at least in the time of rule by Kazimierz Wielki (polisch King at 1333–1370). Poland, for various reasons, was struggling with a serious shortage of working hands, which is why, first of all, this law was intended to prevent a situation in which Polish people as a whole society would be exposed to starvation. There are also other problems, which we can read well from the justification of the law concerning the abandonment of families by rural youth: (...)by remedying the mischief of the plebeian youths, as well as the devastation of the estates, because when young people leave the villages and their own parents, the villages are devastated for lack of workers who could be placed on the land, and, moreover, some who leave their fathers under the pretense of learning crafts, enlist they join the army and get into bad company, they steal, rob and succumb to corruption of morals (...)”.
I think we can assume that this law, apart from the nobility, served well the adult or elderly peasants themselves, who would have had a very hard time if they had been abandoned by their offspring.
Secondly, this law was directed against the nobility, who, wishing to develop their grange farms very fast, had the desire to conquer (also with power) peasants from their neighbours.
This is clear, first of all, from who was to be tried for a fugitive peasant: "(...) for fugitive peasants (...) one should sue whoever it is appropriate to sue in the land courts," i.e. a nobleman, because the land courts were a court for the nobility , not for peasants.
In conclusion, there was no “land attachment” but a reduction in the mobility of the rural population for economic and social reasons. It was not intended to deprive the peasant of his liberty, but to protect the farmers themselves also from (a) the frolics of the nobility who took the workers to their farms, (b) the youth’s frolics, who wanted to take advantage of the shortcomings of the administration of the Kingdom to feed on robbery rather than work.
Let us add to this the fact that, despite this law, there were so often illegal movements of peasants as a result of such criminal cases in land courts. Given that even today the detection of crimes is far from complete, one can assume that whoever would actually want to move and if he had where, he could do it.
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Here the answer is already much more difficult because the state of the peasants was very far from homogeneity. Both horizontally /territorially (other was the situation, let's say, in Wielkopolska, other in Rus) and vertically / hierarchically (other is the situation of a wealthy farmer(kmieć), and another of a crofter(zagrodnik), a bailiff(komornik) or finally “loose”. Moreover, a more competent farmer could even accumulate in the lease considerable lands, which possessively placed him above several small nobles. The largest group of Polish peasants were farmers, which also distinguished Poland from other European countries. In general, farmers who owned (leased) land accounted for about 80% of the state, in Western Europe this was only about 40%.
And so the average peasant farm in Wielkopolska measured one ranch (about 18 hectares, today in Poland it is only 11.5 ha and yet to the average today we include large modern grange farms) and had 4 horses, 8 cattle, 5 sheep and 3 goats, the largest peasants' farms were in Pomerania where they reached 2-3 ranches.
What is more the example of Klemens Janicki can also bear witness to the wealth of the peasants. He became famous for his poetry throughout Europe, which was possible thanks to his peasant parents, who could afford to send him to the College of Bishop John Lubranski.
It is also worth mentioning the possible estimated calorie content of the diet of the peasants working at the nobels grange farms. According to the study of Professor Wyczański, it was between 3500 and 4500 calories depending on the region (from the online review that I did concludes that for an intensely physically active man it is recommended today about 2500-2600 calories!). So there is no question of malnutrition, on the contrary - they ate nutritiously.
This, in turn, that polish situation and the well-being of peasant in Poland was much better than in the west (as well as in the east) may be attested by the very large immigration of peasants to Commonwelth ( for examples “Olendrzy”- Olenders).As well as the absence of peasant uprisings witch accured for example in Hungary or Germany.
To sum up, in Poland the peasant lived rather well and prosperously for the conditions of the time we are talking about. Unfortunately, over time, this situation has worsened, as has the nobility of the middle class, but this is a subject for another post.
In my article i mostly used great work of Andrzej Nowak "Dzieje Polski
Ilustration produce by GAB.AI
This is translation of article writen by @sarmaticus
