Second serfdom

Why did serfdom tighten in eastern Europe at the very time it was dissolving in the west?

Across western Europe, the late Middle Ages saw labour services commuted to rents, villeinage fade, and peasants drift into a market for wages. Across the same centuries east of the Elbe, the movement ran the other way: labour dues on the lord's own fields grew heavier, peasant mobility was restricted, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much of Poland-Lithuania, Bohemia, Hungary and Brandenburg-Prussia had a harder bondage than it had known before. Two halves of one continent, connected by trade and religion, moving in opposite directions. If serfdom were simply a stage that societies pass through, that could not happen.

Start with something a lord anywhere would want. He owns land. Land yields nothing without hands. If he can get those hands cheaply, he keeps more of the crop.

Now ask when hands are cheap. Where people are many and land scarce, they compete for tenancies and accept hard terms without anyone forcing them — the market does the work. Where land is abundant and people few, a free peasant can walk to unclaimed land or to a lord offering better terms, so wages rise and rents fall. Evsey Domar built the classic argument on that asymmetry: coercion becomes attractive to landowners precisely when labour is scarce, because that is when free labour is expensive.

That is a real insight, and it is not sufficient — as Domar himself saw. Wanting cheap labour is universal. What varies is the ability to take it. And here the same test disposes of the pure factor-ratio story: western Europe after the Black Death was the textbook case of scarce labour and abundant land, and what followed there was not enserfment but the collapse of servile obligations and a long rise in real wages. Same shock, opposite outcome. So the shortage cannot be the whole cause.

What did the east have that the post-plague west lacked? Two things, and they are about power rather than prices.

First, jurisdiction. On the eastern estate the landlord was typically also the magistrate, the police, and the collector of the state's dues over his own peasants — the arrangement historians call Gutsherrschaft, lordship over people rather than merely over land. A peasant with a grievance faced a court his opponent controlled. More importantly, a peasant who ran faced pursuit by a man with legal authority to pursue him, and neighbouring lords with every reason to cooperate rather than shelter him, because they faced the same problem.

Second, the absence of exit. In the west, towns were numerous, chartered, jealous of their liberties, and often willing to absorb a runaway. In much of the east, towns were fewer and weaker, and the nobility that dominated the diet legislated against peasant movement and against urban competition for labour. Where there is nowhere to run, binding people is cheap to enforce.

Now add the incentive. From the fifteenth century the Baltic grain trade grew, carrying rye and wheat through Danzig to the Low Countries and beyond — a large commercial market for grain the lord's own fields could produce. A lord with a market wants his demesne worked, and working the demesne means labour dues rather than rents.

Put the four together — scarce labour, a market for the surplus, jurisdiction in the lord's hands, and no exit for the peasant — and the reversal stops being paradoxical. Cheap coerced labour was worth having in both halves of Europe. Only in one half was it available.

The account above is a combination account, and each element carries a different weight of evidence.

The jurisdictional and political element is the best supported: eastern lords demonstrably held powers over their peasants that western lords had lost, and eastern towns were weaker. Robert Brenner's influential argument rests the whole explanation there, on the balance of power between lords, peasant communities and states, and treats market forces as secondary.

The grain-export element is genuinely contested. The correlation with the Baltic trade is striking, but enserfment in several regions began before the export boom and continued after it faded. Treat the market as an amplifier well evidenced in some regions and doubtful in others, not as the trigger everywhere.

Two further cautions. "Second serfdom" is a nineteenth-century coinage and a rough one: much of what appeared was new rather than a return, and the term flattens real differences between Livonia, Poland, Bohemia and Prussia. And the peasants were not passive — resistance, flight and litigation run through the whole period, so the outcome reflects who won those fights, not a mechanism operating over people's heads.

The falsification test follows from the structure of the claim. If coercion requires all four conditions, then finding heavy enserfment where peasants had accessible towns and rival jurisdictions to flee to would refute it, as would finding free labour persisting where all four held. The post-plague west is the case that already does this work against the one-condition version.

• How the Baltic grain trade shaped estate agriculture in Poland and Livonia specifically.
• Why nineteenth-century emancipations took such different forms across the same region.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.