Preliminary Programme

One of the hypotheses explaining the emergence of fifteenth-century manors relying for their existence on labour services provided by peasants is concerned with monetary crisis. It presupposes that the shortage of ready cash on the market led nobles to give up money payments made by their peasants and replace them with labour dues. My presentation will focus on the process of creation of new economic relations between lords and villeins in the context of changes in the money system and money market in the Kingdom of Poland. My discussion of the problem will be based on sources produced by administrators of large ecclesiastical and royal manors. (Show less)

It has often been stated that mobility restrictions originated during the late medieval crisis when lords and Estates lobbied on diets to restrict tenant movement in order to prevent the abandonment of tenant farms and further desertions. Indeed, the oldest measures can be traced to the fourteenth century and debates occurred throughout most East-Central and Eastern European territories during the fifteenth. A more careful inspection, however, reveals that these early regulations in fact confirmed the rights of villagers to leave their holdings. Rather than questioning this liberty, they only repeated and specified conditions according to which tenants could leave: after they had paid all rents, prepared the fields for a new tenant and, in some regions, after they had found a replacement. Only at a later stage of the development, Estates used such legislation as a basis for a new interpretation. It took considerable time, before regulations that clarified conditions to leave were re-interpreted as measures that could be used to limit the movement of the rural population. As a new default principle, lords gradually acquired the authority to decide over tenants’ applications to leave. And even given this restrictive interpretation it is important to consider that renewed regulations did not ban movement of the rural population per se, but linked it to prior seigniorial consent.

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The empirical research of recent decades has revealed slavery to be a very varied institution, occupying the extreme end of a range of asymmetric power relations rather than a separate and singular position in the social universe. This view of slavery encourages – and has been in part promoted by – comparisons that, until recently, would have been considered outlandish by many. The present paper forms part of one such comparison: an analysis of the slave-master relation on plantations in antebellum South Carolina and the subject-lord relation on manorial estates in the Old Prussian Kurmark east of the Elbe River.

Using plantation records, manorial archives, and printed sources, the paper shows structural similarities as well as characteristic differences between the plantation and manorial landscapes. First, the layout and built environment of plantations and manors reflected not only the power of masters and lords, but also the dimensions in which they conceived their relations with slaves and subjects respectively. Second, the rural landscapes in South Carolina and Brandenburg were not only the sites of continual power struggles between big house and slave quarters or manor and peasant village. They were also the objects of symbolic contests. (The paper will not consider conflicts over land as an economic and social resource.)

Masters and lords as well as slaves and subjects knew how to read the symbolic topography of rural estates. This crucial aspect of the plantation and manorial landscapes is all too often lost at sites marketed today as the heritage of the plantation and manorial eras.
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In the medieval Kingdom of Denmark, neither was the legal situation of villagers precarious nor was the seigniorial demesne economy particularly developed. This is also true for the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, on which this paper will focus. However, the territorially compact estate properties in the Eastern part of Schleswig and Holstein formed a basis for the development towards harsher forms of the seigniorial system and for the rise of a commercial demesne economy. The final structure did not occur before the sixteenth century. (Show less)