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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
The problem of the distribution of the agrarian product in feudalism is not at all new. It has been raised frequently by European historians and at the beginning of the 1930's led to a scientific controversy in Poland. The following article sets itself two tasks: first, to acquaint the American reader with contributions to the subject that may not be known in this country; second, to suggest an economic theory applicable to the problem. Not being an economist by profession, I will not attempt a theoretical analysis at length, but I hope, by a discussion of various approaches to the problem, to bring us closer to a solution.
1 Linguet, Simon, Théorie dts lois civile: ou principes fondamentaux de la société (London, 1767), II, 244Google Scholar.
2 A notable example is the literature dealing with the conditions of the French peasants on the eve of the Revolution of 1789.
3 Such sources are primarily the official investigations that were conducted in connection with the peasant reforms of enlightened absolutism in Austria and Prussia and with the later abolition of the feudal obligations of the peasants in Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Since the official inquiries in each of these countries applied uniform methods and included the territory of the whole state, they are more reliable and complete than any earlier sources such as the inventories of various estates or the very summary tax registers ot preceding centuries.
4 Cunow, Heinrich, Allgemeine Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Berlin, 1926–31), III, 331Google Scholar.
5 Inama-Sternegg, K. T., Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte bis zum Schluss der Karolingerperiode (Leipzig, 1879), III, 405Google Scholar.
6 Measuring unit of varying size; also a larger tenancy.
7 Linnichenko, I. A., Cherty iz istorii soslowij w jugo-zapadnoj (galickoi) Rusi XIV-XV v [Sketches from the History of the Estates in Southwestern (Galician) Russia in the 14th and 15th Centuries” (Moscow, 1894), pp. 205–7Google Scholar.
8 Gospodarcze znaczenie ciǫżarów ludności wlośdanskfe) w Polsce XVIIIw (Poznan, 1930)Google Scholar.
9 Roczniki dziejów spolecznych i gospodarczych [Yearbooks for Social and Economic History] (Lwów, 1935), I. 301–2Google Scholar.
10 This argument recalls Adam Smith's comparison of the laboring cattle to the agricultural laborer: “Not only his [the farmer's] labouring servants but his labouring cattle are productive labourers.”—Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Wakefield, (London, 1835–39), II, 243Google Scholar.
11 Since the cost or the price of the forced labor was naturally less than the value of its product, the forced laborer, by foregoing the use of his labor on his own fields, gave more than the peasant who was allowed to commute his labor into money payments, and his situation was really considerably worse than that of the rent-paying peasant.
12 Philip Kraus: “Uebersicht des Rustikalgrundertrages (Galiziens) und der wesentlichsten Lasten, welche derselbe im Jahre 1820 zu tragen hatte.” (Government Archives at Lwów, Publ. pol. ad. 5988 ex 1820). “The net agrarian product of the peasant holdings in Galicia amounts to 9,369,101 florins.
“Of this, the peasant has to give:
“Compare with this the remaining net product of only 653,058 florins. This amount is barely sufficient to cover the other peasant obligations, such as the tithes for the church, the compulsory supplying of relays, and the labor contributed to the building of churches, parishes, and schools. If the labor services to the landlord were evaluated at a somewhat higher price, the entire net product would be exhausted. Yet, this negligible sum is the sole livelihood of a population of more than three million people! For every one of the 336,888 peasant families shown in the census—not including the landless peasants—this is an annual income of 1 fl. 57 kr.”
The same figures, which were derived from the “Landregister” compiled under the government of Joseph II in the years 1785–89, were quoted by the Ukrainian scholar Ivan Zanevych in his study on “Peasant serfdom in Galicia” in the journal Zhytie i Slovo [Life and Word], Lwów, IV (1895), 400. He states that, according to this Landregister, the value of the peasant services for all of Galicia equaled 79.5 per cent of the net product of the peasant land, after deducting ground taxes, and for the districts of Tarnow even 100.75 per cent, of Stryj 107.34 per cent, and of Sanok 111.2 per cent. He concludes: “This shows that actually, about 80 per cent of the peasant land, and in the last named three districts, the entire peasant land, belonged to the landlord, and the peasant serfs were nothing else but manorial servants.”
13 Zarys rozwoju idei spoleczno-gospodarczych w Polsce od pierwszego rozbioru do roku 1831 [A Sketch of the Development of the Social-Economic Ideas in Poland from the First Partition until the Year 1831] (Cracow, 1903)Google Scholar.
14 The Russian historian Lyashchenko uses a similar method in computing the rate of exploitation of the Russian peasants in the sixteenth century: “What, then,” he writes, “was the extent of the peasant's exploitation under the barschchina [forced labor] system of that time? … Data from monastery estates reveal the following figures, illustrating the burden of the barschchina in the early sixteenth century. In Dmitrow County, for example, on the estate of the Troitsky monastery, a peasant who obtained five dessyatins of land cultivated one and one-half to two dessyatins. … In other words the barschchina deprived the peasant of about one-fourth to one-third of his time. … In 1590, on the same Troitsky monastery, the peasant had to plow five dessyatins in return for his plot, that is, one dessyatin for one. …”—P. I. Lyashchenko, History of the National Economy of Russia (New York: Macmillan Co., 1949). P. 186.
15 Also, the landlords demanded from their serfs frequently more labor than was necessary for the cultivation of their fields. “The increase in labor services,” we read in a report of the Austrian official Koranda from 1782, “has been initiated not only for the cultivation of the manorial land, but principally for the purpose of commuting a substantial portion of the labor into money payments. Thus, the wealthier serfs have to pay their labor services in money, while the poorer ones perform the labor.”—Rozdolski, R., Stosunki poddañcze w Galicji [Conditions of Peasant Serfdom in Galicia] (Lwów, 1939), II, 127Google Scholar.
16 Cf. Suggenheim's, SamuelGeschichte der Aufhebung der Leibeigenschaft (Leipzig, 1861), p. 259Google Scholar: “Whoever knows anything of practical agriculture will admit that the costs of cultivating the fields, if done by hired free labor, amount under the most favorable circumstances to one half of the gross product. Under less favorable conditions, they are 60 or 70 per cent or even a higher percentage of the product. In Lombardy, the ‘Kolon’ still pays one half of all the products he harvests, as rent, as he did six centuries ago. This means that from the portion of the gross product which would be an equivalent reward for his labor, he has to give a part to the landlord, or, in other words, he has to work for a lower wage than hired laborers.”
17 An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on Sources of Taxation, P. I., Rent (London, 1844)Google Scholar. The italics are the editor's.
18 Ibid., pp. 44–45. Cf. also chap, vi of the same book, pp. 146–47:
“One important fact must strike us forcibly on looking back on the collective body of those primary or peasant rents which we have been tracing, in their various forms, over the surface of the globe. It is their constant and very intimate connection with the wages of labour. In this respect the serf, the métayer, the ryot, the cottier, are alike: the terms on which they can obtain the spot of ground they cultivate exercise an active and predominant influence in determining the reward they shall receive for their personal exertions, or, in other words, their real wages. … As they produce their own wages, all the circumstances which affect either their powers of production, or their share of the produce, must be taken into the estimate: and among these, principally, those circumstances which … distinguish one set of peasant tenantry from another. The mode in which their rent is paid, whether in labour, produce, or money; the effects of time and usage in softening, or exaggerating, or modifying, the original form or results of their contract; all these things, and their combined effects, must be carefully examined and well considered before we can expect to understand what it is which limits the wages of the peasant, and fixes the standard of his condition and enjoyments.”
19 Naturally, the length of the agricultural year varies in different countries with the climate and other conditions. Kirchhof, Friedrich, in Handbuch der landtuirtschaftlichen Betriebslehre (Dessau, 1852), p. 160Google Scholar, estimated that the work period in German agriculture ranged, according to the territory, between 170 and 215 days annually. (This does not include work such as transportation of various goods that can be done during the winter months.)
20 Pekař, , Kniha o Kosti (Prague, 1911), II, 201Google Scholar.
21 Similarly, a small peasant of today is often ready to pay in the price for the land a “premium for the independence” which prevents him from becoming a landless proletarian.
22 Pekař, Kniha o Kotti, II, 198.
23 However, Pekař's endeavor to compare the obligations of the peasant serf of feudalism to those of the peasant of modern times is very interesting and worth repeating. Pekař is certainly right when he claims that “the final purpose of historical science is to point out the difference between the past and the present” A comparison like this proves how much the peasant class on the European continent has gained by the abolition of serfdom and how wrong are those historians who try to gloss over the feudal past.
24 Cf. Inama-Sternegg, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte, II, 223.
25 Cf. Karl Marx. Das Kapital, III, chap, xlvi: “Genesis der kapitalistischen Grundrente.”
26 Cf. Gruenberg, K., Die Bauernbefreiung in Boehmen, Machren and Schlesien (Vienna, 1898)Google Scholar.
27 Pekař, Kniha o Kosti, II, 147, and I, 155.
28 This naturally does not include the numerous “intangible burdens.” The peasants were forced to buy every year from the landlord a certain quantity of very poor liquor and spoiled food, to send their children as domestic servants to the manor, and so on.
29 Pekař, Kniha o Kosti, II, 202. Whether it was possible for the peasant to have his forced labor commuted into money depended in all cases on the landlord.
30 R. Rosdolski, Stosunki poddancze w Galicji [Conditions of Serfdom in Galicia], II, 1–124.
31 1 loch = 1.43 acres.
32 This indicates that the cottagers and Inleute earned their livelihood almost exclusively as servants and artisans.
33 The “gross product” was estimated by the government officials compiling the Landregister for every peasant tenancy through investigation on the spot. The net product, however, was arrived at by applying a uniform formula to the gross product. See R. Rosdolski, Stosunki poddancze w Galicji, II, 29–31, and von Zanetti, S., Steuer und Urbarialregulierung Joseph det Zweyten in den Teutschen Erbländern und Galizien (Vienna, 1789), pp. 257–58Google Scholar.
34 Cf. the computation by Kraus (n. 12 above), according to which the road corvées and taxes amounted to 31 per cent of the net product of the peasant holdings in Galicia.
35 Cf. V. I. Semevski), Krestyane v tsarstvovaniye Yekateriny II [The Peasants under the Reign of Catherine II] (St. Petersburg, 1881–1901), I, 85. In his Tableau économique, Quefnay assumes that the produit net, by which he means that part of the national product appropriated by the landlords, amounts to two fifths of the gross national product of five billion livres. (Quesnay assumes further that the landowning nobility retains only four sevenths of the total rent of two billion, while it has to transfer two sevenths to the government and one seventh to the church.)
36 “Die Bauernbefrciung in Russland,” Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (3d ed.).
37 Nicolaïdes, Cleanthes, Mazedonien (Berlin, 1899), p. 88Google Scholar.
38 New York: Columbia University Press, 1949, pp. 146–47.
39 State and Economics in the Middle East (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1948)Google Scholar.
40 These tributes appear more burdensome than the ground tax which, according to Müller, A., Der Islam im Morgen- und Abendlande (Berlin, 1885), I, 467Google Scholar, was imposed in the eighth century on the Iraq peasants by the Arabians and which took only two fifths to one half of their gross product.
41 China Handbook., 1937–1943. Compiled by the Chinese Ministry of Information (New York: Macmillan Co., 1943), p. 608Google Scholar.
