§5 - Poland, Lithuania and Hungary

Summary

After the conclusion of the Union with Poland in 1386, Lithuania was constantly under Polish influence, which made itself felt particularly in the conditions under which the large landed estates were held, and in the whole agrarian structure. The relations between Poland and Hungary on the other hand were much looser. There were only two short periods in the fourteenth century and another in the fifteenth when these two states were under a common ruler. Neither country directly influenced the other, and yet they have many features in common both in their political and in their economic structure. It is accordingly permissible to present the agrarian history of all three countries in the Middle Ages in a single chapter.

Landownership

The earliest documents throwing any light on the agrarian structure of Poland date from the beginning of the twelfth century. The land was at that time in the possession of the monarch, of the Church, or of the rural population who had inhabited the country for several centuries and are called by the sources sometimes contributes, ‘fellow-tribesmen’, but more frequently haeredes, ‘heirs’. The growth of state organization led to a distinction between the general mass of the people and the knightly class, who later became the nobility and gentry and held the greater part of the land right down to the time when Poland lost its independence. There were both larger and smaller landowners among this class; but in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries there was not yet that wide difference between the farms of the peasants and the estates of the gentry that there was in later times.