Where Can New Settlers Come From When Peasants Are Not Allowed to Leave Their Villages? The Development of Settlement in the System of Serfdom on the Example of The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th-18th Centuries

Piotr Guzowski, University of Bialystok

The serfdom system, which emerged at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, meant that the mobility of rural residents was severely restricted. According to the law, only one adult male was usually allowed to leave the village per year with the landlord's consent, and the possibility of sending children to school or to the city was also strictly regulated. In practice, however, there was large-scale migration, as evidenced by the early modern cities in the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which developed thanks to a steady influx of peasant migrants. The proposed paper will focus on rural migration. The basis of the economic system dominated by the nobility was agriculture, and all landowners were interested in bringing in new settlers, developing their economy and utilizing their potential on landlord’s manorial farms. In the first part of the presentation, the process of illegal peasant escapes from the estate of one landowner to another will be analyzed spatially, based on Polish court records from the 16th century and Lithuanian/Russian population censuses from the 18th century. The second part of the paper will deal with legitimate migration to royal estates at the end of the 18th century, based on inventories of royal estates in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 5. State Power