From vicinia to communitas. The evolution of village organisation and government in the eleventh- to fifteenth-century Poland

Abstract

This chapter presents the evolution of the organisation of social life in Polish villages in the context of current discussions about the degree of village powers. The dominant view in the historical writing about village communities in late-medieval and early-modern Europe is that of a profound difference between its western and eastern parts, with the former being characterised by well-organised and strong communities, whereas villagers in the latter were stifled by second serfdom and feudalism. German peasant migrants arriving in Silesia from the end of the twelfth century, and then the Polish settlers of newly established villages in the lands forming the Kingdom of Poland in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, created a relatively uniform village model for the whole country. Village court records were not introduced immediately after the introduction of German law in Poland. The oldest surviving records come from the early fifteenth century, 200 years after the first villages were located on German law in Polish lands.