To aid comprehension of the following work by Wolff, I must preface it with a few words.
Germany east of the Elbe and north of the Erzgebirge and Riesengebirge is a country wrested in the latter half of the Middle Ages from the invading Slavs, and Germanised once again by German colonists. The conquering German knights and barons to whom the land was allotted set themselves up as the "founders" ["Gründer"] of villages, laying out their district in village lands, each of which was divided into a number of smallholdings or hides of equal size. To every hide there belonged a house plot with yard and garden in the village itself. These hides were distributed by lot to the newly arrived Franconian (Rhenish Franconian and Dutch), Saxon and Frisian colonists; in return the colonists had to render very moderate, firmly fixed dues and services to the founder, i.e. the knight or baron. The peasants were hereditary masters of their hides as long as they performed these services. In addition they enjoyed the same rights of usufruct to timber, grazing, pannage, etc., in the forest of the founder (the subsequent landlord) as the West German peasants possessed on their common land. The cultivated village land was subject to compulsory crop rotation, being chiefly cultivated in winter fields, summer fields and fallow fields in accordance with the three-field system; fallow and harvested fields were grazed jointly by the cattle of the peasantry and the founder. All village affairs were settled in the assembly of the manorial inhabitants, i.e. the hide-owners, by majority decision. The rights of the noble founders were restricted to collecting the dues and participating in the fallow grazing and stubble pasture, to the surplus from the yield of the forests, and to taking the chair at the assembly of manorial inhabitants, who were all personally free men. This was the average condition of the German peasants from the Elbe to East Prussia and Silesia. And this condition was on the whole considerably much better than that of west and south German peasants at the time, who were already then engaged in a violent, continually recurring struggle with the feudal lords for their old hereditary rights, and had to a large extent already succumbed to a form of dependence that was far more oppressive, threatening to or even destructive of their personal freedom.
The feudal lords' increasing need for money in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries naturally led to attempts to oppress and exploit the peasants in contravention to agreements in the north-east as well. But certainly not on the same scale and with the same success as in South Germany. The population east of the Elbe was still sparse, the wasteland was still extensive; the reclamation of this wasteland, the spread of cultivation and the foundation of new tributary villages here remained the surest means of enrichment for the feudal landlords too. Furthermore, here, on the imperial border with Poland, larger states had already been formed — Pomerania, Brandenburg, the Electorate of Saxony (Silesia was Austrian)—and for this reason the peace of the land was better observed, the feuds and depredations of the nobility were more forcefully suppressed than in the fragmented areas on the Rhine, in Franconia and Swabia. But those who suffered most from the permanent state of war were precisely the peasants.
Only in the neighbourhood of subjugated Polish or Lithuanian-Prussian villages did the nobility more frequently attempt to force the colonists settled there in accordance with German manorial law into the same serfdom as the Polish and Prussian subjects. This occurred in Pomerania and in the Prussian area of the Order,[218]
more rarely in Silesia.
As a result of this more favourable position, the peasants east of the Elbe remained almost untouched by the powerful movement of the south and west German peasants in the final quarter of the fifteenth and first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, and when the revolution of 1525 broke out it found in East Prussia only a faint echo, which was suppressed without great difficulty. The peasants east of the Elbe left their rebelling brothers in the lurch, and they received their just deserts. In the regions where the great Peasant War had raged, the peasants were now made serfs without further ado, subjected to unlimited labour services and dues dependent solely on the arbitrary power of the landlord. Their free land was simply turned into seigneurial property, on which they only retained the usufruct accorded to them by the landlord in his bounty. This, the very ideal state of feudal landlordship, to which the German nobility had in vain been aspiring all through the Middle Ages and which it had finally attained now that the feudal system was decaying, was then gradually extended to the lands east of the Elbe as well. Not only were the peasants' contractual rights of usufruct in the seigneurial forest (in so far as they had not previously been curtailed) transformed into revocable concessions bestowed at the grace of the landlord; not only were labour services and tributes unlawfully increased; but new burdens were also introduced, such as the "laudemien" (dues to the landlord on the death of the peasant smallholder) which were considered characteristic of serfdom; or traditional, innocuous services were given the character of services rendered only by serfs, but not by free men. In less than a hundred years the free peasants east of the Elbe were thus turned into serfs, at first in fact, and then also in law.
In the meantime the feudal nobility became more and more bourgeois. To an ever increasing extent it became indebted to the urban money capitalists, and money thus came to be its pressing need. Yet there was no money to be had from the peasant, its serf, but to begin with only labour or arable produce, and the farms, tilled under the most difficult conditions, would only yield a minimum of such produce over and above the most meagre livelihood for the working owners. Alongside, however, lay the lucrative estates of the monasteries, worked by the labour services of dependents or serfs under expert supervision at the expense of the lord. Hitherto the petty nobility had almost never been able to practise this kind of management on their domains, and the larger among them and the princes only in exceptional cases. But now, on the one hand, the restoration of the peace of the land made large-scale cultivation possible everywhere, while, on the other, it was increasingly forced on the nobility by its growing need for money. The running of large estates with the labour services of serf peasants at the expense of the landlord gradually became the source of income which had to compensate the nobility for the loss of the now outmoded robber-knight system. But where could they obtain the necessary land area? True, the noble was landlord of an area large or small, but with few exceptions this was entirely allotted to hereditary copyholders,[219] who had just as much right to their farms and hides, including the land rights, as the noble lord himself, as long as they performed the stipulated services. This had to be remedied, and what was necessary above all was the transformation of the peasants into serfs. For even if the expulsion of serf peasants from house and farm was no less a breach of the law and an act of violence than the expulsion of free copyholders, it was still far easier to extenuate it with the aid of the now habitual Roman law. In short, once the peasants had been successfully turned into serfs, the necessary number of peasants were chased away or resettled on seigneurial land as cottagers, day labourers with a cottage and small garden. While the earlier strongholds of the nobility gave way to their new ones, more or less open manor houses, for this very reason the farms of formerly free peasants gave way to the wretched hovels of bond servants, on a much wider scale.
Once the seigneurial estate — the dominium, as it was called in Silesia — had been established, it was then simply a matter of setting in motion the labour power of the peasants to work it. And this is where the second advantage of serfdom showed itself. The former labour services of the peasants as laid down by contract were by no means appropriate for this end. The vast majority of them were restricted to services in the public interest — road and bridge building, etc.—building work on the seigneurial castle, the labour of the women and girls at the castle in different branches of industry, and personal servants' duties. But as soon as the peasant had been turned into a serf and the latter had been equated with the Roman slave by Roman lawyers, the noble lord changed his tune entirely. With the assent of the lawyers at the bench he now demanded from the peasants unlimited services, as much, whenever and wherever he pleased. The peasant had to do labour service, drive, plough, sow and harvest as soon as he was summoned to do so, even if his own field was neglected and his own harvest ruined by rain. And his corn tribute and money tribute were likewise raised to the extreme limits of what was possible.
But that was not enough. The no less noble reigning prince, who was present everywhere east of the Elbe, also needed money, a lot of money. In return for his permitting the noble to subjugate his peasants, the noble allowed him to impose state taxes on the same peasants — the nobleman himself was of course exempt from taxation! And to cap it all, the same reigning prince sanctioned the spreading transformation of the landlord's former right to preside at the — long since abolished — free manorial court of the peasants into the right of patrimonial jurisdiction and manorial police, according to which the lord of the manor was not only chief of police but also the sole judge over his peasants — even when personally involved in a case — so that the peasant could only indict the lord of the manor through the lord of the manor himself. He was thus legislator, judge and executor in one person, and absolute and supreme lord of his manor.
These notorious conditions, which are not matched even in Russia — for there the peasant still had his self-governing commune — reached their peak in the period between the Thirty Years' War and the redeeming defeat at Jena.[220] The terrible hardships of the Thirty Years' War allowed the nobility to complete the subjugation of the peasants; the devastation of countless peasant farms allowed them to be added without hindrance to the dominium of the manorial estate; the resettle-ment of the population forcibly driven into vagabondage by war devastation provided the nobility with an excuse to fetter them to the soil as serfs. But that, too, was only short lived. For scarcely had the dreadful wounds of war begun to heal in the following fifty years, the fields again being tilled, the population growing, than the hunger of the noble landlords for peasant land and peasant labour once again made itself felt. The seigneurial dominium was not large enough to absorb all the labour that could still be knocked out of the serfs—"knock" being used here in a highly literal sense. The system of degrading peasants into cottagers, bond day-labourers, had worked magnificently. From the beginning of the eighteenth century it assumes ever greater momentum; it is now called "peasant expropriation [Bauernlegen]". One "expropriates" as many peasants as possible, according to the circumstances; first one leaves as many as are necessary to perform the draught labour, turning the rest into cottagers (Dreschgärtner, Häusler, Instleute[221] or whatever they are called) who have to sweat away on the estate year in, year out in return for a cottage with a tiny potato patch, a wretched day-wage in corn and only very little in cash. Where his lordship is rich enough to provide his own draught-animals, he "expropriates" the other peasants too, adding their hides to the seigneurial estate. In this manner the entire large landed property of the German nobility, but particularly east of the Elbe, is composed of stolen peasant land, and even if it is taken away from the robbers again without compensation, they will still not have got their just deserts. Really they should pay compensation as well.
Gradually the reigning sovereigns noticed that this system was by no means to their advantage, however convenient it might be for the nobility. The peasants had paid state taxes before they were "expropriated"; but when their hides were added to the tax-free dominiums the state did not receive a farthing from them and scarcely a penny from the newly-settled cottagers. A proportion of the "expropriated" peasants were quite simply chased away as superfluous for the running of the estate, and thus became free, i.e. outlawed. The population of the plains declined, and since the reigning prince had started complementing his expensive recruited army through the cheaper way of conscripting the peasants, this was by no means a matter of indifference to him. Thus we find throughout the eighteenth century, particularly in Prussia, one decree after another which was supposed to put a stop to "peasant expropriation"; but their fate was the same as ninety-nine percent of the immeasurable amount of waste-paper that has been issued by German governments since the capitularies of Charlemagne.[222] They were only valid on paper; the nobility was not greatly burdened, and the practice of "peasant expropriation" continued.
Even the fearful example which the Great Revolution in France made of the stubborn feudal nobility only frightened them for a moment. Everything remained as before, and what Frederick II had not been able to do,[223] his weak, short-sighted nephew Frederick William III was least of all able to carry out. Then came the vengeance. On October 14, 1806 the entire Prussian state was smashed to smithereens in a single day near Jena and Auerstedt, and the Prussian peasant has every reason to celebrate this day and March 18, 1848 more than all the Prussian victories from Mollwitz to Sedan.[224] Now, finally, it began to dawn dimly on the Prussian government, which had been chased back right to the Russian border, that the free landowning French peasants' sons could not be defeated by the sons of serf peasants who were daily liable to be evicted from house and home; it finally noticed that the peasant was also a human being, so to speak. Now something was to be done.
But no sooner was peace concluded and Court and government back in Berlin than the noble intentions again melted like ice in the March sun. The famous edict of October 9, 1807 had admittedly abolished the name of serfdom or hereditary subjection on paper (and even this only from Martinmas 1810), but in reality almost everything had been left as before. That is how things remained; the King, who was as faint-hearted as he was bigoted, allowed himself to be led, as before, by the peasant-plundering nobility — so much so that from 1808 to 1810 four decrees appeared once again permitting the landowners to "expropriate"
peasants in a number of cases — in contravention of the edict of 1807.[225] Not until Napoleon's war against Russia was already in sight was it again remembered that the peasants would be needed, and the edict of September 14, 1811 was issued whereby peasants and landlords were recommended to come to an amicable arrangement within two years on the redemption of labour service and dues as well as the seigneurial property rights. A royal commission was then to implement this settlement compulsorily in accordance with fixed rules. The main rule was that after relinquishing a third of his landholding (or its value in money), the peasant should become a free proprietor of the part remaining to him. But even this redemption, so immensely advantageous to the nobility, remained illusory. For the nobility held back in order to obtain even more, and after the two years had elapsed Napoleon was back in the country.
No sooner had he been finally expelled from the land — to the frightened King's constant promises of a constitution and popular representation — than all the fine assurances were again forgotten. As early as May 29, 1816 — not even a year after the victory at Waterloo[226]—a declaration of the 1811 edict was issued which read quite differently. In it, the redeemability of feudal dues was no longer the rule, but the exception; it was only to apply to those arable estates valued in the land tax rolls (i.e. the larger ones) which had been settled by peasant occupiers back in 1749 in Silesia, 1752 in East Prussia, 1763 in Brandenburg and Pomerania,(1) and 1774 in West Prussia! In addition, a number of labour services at sowing and harvest time could be retained. And when the redemption commissions finally got down to serious business in 1817, the agrarian legislation regressed much faster than the agrarian commissions progressed. On June 7, 1821 there came a new redemption order, expressly laying down the limitation of redeemability to larger farms, so-called Acker-nahrungen,[228] and urging the perpetuation of labour services and other feudal dues for the owners of smaller holdings — cottagers,
Häusler, Dreschgärtner—in short all settled day-labourers. From now on this remained the rule. Not until 1845, the redemption of these kinds of dues made possible by way of exception for Saxony(2)
and Silesia other than through the joint assent of landlord and peasant(3)—for which, obviously, no law was necessary. Furthermore, the capital sum with which the services, translated into money or corn revenue, could be paid off once and for all, was fixed at twenty-five times the rent, and the instalments could only be made in sums of not less than 100 thalers[229] at once; while as early as 1809 the peasants on the state domains had been permitted to buy redemption at twenty times the amount of the revenue. In short, the much-lauded, enlightened agrarian legislation of the "state of intelligence"[230] had only one ambition: to salvage every bit of feudalism that could still be salvaged.
The practical result was "in keeping with these lamentable measures. The agrarian commissions understood the benevolent intentions of the government perfectly and, as Wolff drastically depicts in detail, they made sure that the peasant was soundly cheated in favour of the nobility in the matter of these redemptions. From 1816 to 1848 70,582 peasant holdings were redeemed with a total landed property of 5,158,827 Morgen, making up (4)/j of all the larger bond peasants. However, only 289,651 of the smaller occupiers were redeemed (over 228,000 of these being in Silesia, Brandenburg and Saxony). The total number of annual service days redeemed amounted to: draught service, 5,978,295; manual service, 16,869,824. In return the high nobility received compensation as follows: capital payment, 18,544,766 thalers; cash annuities, 1,599,992 thalers; rye revenue, 260,069 Scheffel[231] annually; and finally, peasant land relin-quished, 1,533,050 Morgen.(5) Apart from the other forms of compensation, the former landlords thus received a full third of what had been the peasants' land!
1848 finally opened the eyes of the Prussian backwoods Junkers, who were as narrow-minded as they were self-important. The peasants — particularly in Silesia, where the latifundia system and the concomitant downgrading of the population to day-labouring cottagers was furthest developed — stormed the manor houses, burnt the redemption documents that had already been concluded, and forced their lordships to renounce in writing all claim to any further services. The excesses — wicked even in the eyes of the bourgeoisie then in power — were, admittedly, suppressed with military force and severely punished; but now even the most brainless Junker's skull had realised that labour service had become impossible. Rather none at all than that from these rebellious peasants! It was now simply a matter of saving what could still be saved; and the landowning nobility really did have the insolence to demand compensation for these services, which had become impossible. And no sooner was reaction more or less firmly back in the saddle than it fulfilled this wish.
First, however, there came the law of October 9, 1848, which adjourned all pending redemption negotiations and the lawsuits arising out of them, as well as a whole number of other lawsuits between landlords and peasants. As a result the entire, much-praised agrarian legislation from 1807 on was condemned. But then as soon as the so-called National Assembly in Berlin had been successfully dissolved and the coup d'état was accomplished,(6) the feudal-bureaucratic ministry of Brandenburg-Manteuffel considered itself strong enough to oblige the nobility with a generous step. It promulgated the provisional decree of December 20, 1848, whereby the services, etc., to be performed by the peasants until further settlement were restored on the old terms, with few exceptions. It was this decree that prompted our Wolff to deal with the conditions of the Silesian peasants in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Meanwhile it was over a year before the new, final Redemption Law of March 2, 1850 was enacted. The agrarian legislation of 1807-47, which even today is still praised to the skies by Prussian patriots, cannot be more sharply condemned than it was, albeit reluctantly, in the motives for this law — and it is the Brandenburg-Manteuffel ministry that speaks here.
Enough: a few insignificant dues were simply abolished, the redemption of the rest was decreed by transforming them into cash annuities, and their capitalisation set at eighteen times this sum. To mediate the capital instalments annuity offices were established, which by means of well-known amortisation operations were to pay the landlord twenty times the amount of the rent, while the peasant was relieved of all obligation by fifty-six years of paying off the amortisation instalments.
If the ministry condemned in the motives the entire preceding agrarian legislation, the commission of the Chamber condemned the new law. It was not to apply to the left bank of the Rhine, which had long since been freed of all that rubbish by the French Revolution. The commission concurred in this because at most a single one of the 109 sections of the bill was applicable there anyway:
"While all the other stipulations do not apply there at all, rather they might easily create confusion and needless unrest ... because of legislation on the left bank of the Rhine having gone much further with regard to the redemption of real-property dues than it was at present intended to go",(7)
and they could not expect the Rhinelanders to allow themselves to be brought down again to the new Prussian ideal state.
Now at last a serious attempt was made to deal with the abolition of feudal forms of labour and exploitation. In a few years the redemption of the peasants was effected. From 1850 to the end of 1865 the following were redeemed: 1. the rest of the larger peasant proprietors; there were by now only 12,706 left with an area of 352,305 Morgen; 2. the smaller proprietors, including the cottagers; but whilst not quite 290,000 had been redeemed up to 1848, in the last fifteen years all of 1,014,341 had bought themselves free. Accordingly the number of redeemed days of draught labour due the larger farms was only 356,274, the number of days of manual service, however, 6,670,507. Similarly the compensation paid in plots of land, and also due only on the larger farms, amounted to only 113,071 Morgen, and the annual annuity to be paid in rye to 55,522 Scheffel. On the other hand the landed nobility received 3,890,136 thalers in new annual cash annuities, and in addition another 19,697,483 thalers in final capital compensation.(8)
The sum which the entire Prussian landed proprietors, including the state domains, have lifted from the pockets of the peasants for the free return of part of the land previously stolen from the peasants — up to this century — amounts to 213,861,035 thalers according to Meitzen, I, p. 437. But this is far too little. For a Morgen of cultivated land is here "only" assessed at 20 thalers, a
Morgen of forest land at 10 thalers and a Scheffel of rye at 1 thaler, which is much too low. Furthermore, only "the compensation established with certainty" is taken into account, thus making no allowance for at least all the settlements reached privately between the parties involved. As Meitzen himself says, the redeemed services entered here, hence also the compensation paid for them, are only a "minimum".
We may thus assume that the sum paid by the peasants to the nobility and the treasury to be released from unlawfully imposed dues amounted to at least 300,000,000 thalers, perhaps a thousand million marks.
A thousand million marks, to get back free of dues only the smallest part of the land stolen over a period of 400 years! The smallest part, since the nobility and the treasury retained by far the largest part in the form of entailed and other manorial estates and domains!
London, November 24, 1885
Frederick Engels
Endnotes
[217] Engels wrote this article as part two of his Introduction to the separate edition of Wilhelm Wolff's series of articles on the condition of the Silesian peasants (see Note 74) published on his (Engels') initiative. Part one of the Introduction comprised a considerably abridged version of Engels' article "Wilhelm Wolff" printed in 1876 (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 129-71).
[218] The reference is to the Teutonic Order—a German Catholic Order of Knights founded in 1190 during the Crusades. The Order had vast possessions in Germany, and in the 13th-14th centuries it conquered extensive territories between the Lower Vistula and the Niémen (East Prussia). During the 15th century the Order gradually declined and lost a considerable part of its possessions; in 1525 the Order ceased to exist as a state. Only small areas scattered throughout Germany remained in its possession until the beginning of the 19th century.
[219] Hereditary copyholders—dependent peasants living in Germany, Bohemia and the Kingdom of Poland in the 13th-15th centuries. They enjoyed personal freedom, and had to pay quit-rent (in money or in kind) to the landlord for using their plots of land.
[220] The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) — a European war, in which the Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and the Catholic German princes rallied under the banner of Catholicism and fought the Protestant countries Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of the Netherlands and a number of Protestant German states. The rulers of Catholic France — rivals of the Habsburgs — supported the Protestant camp. Germany was the main battle arena and the object of plunder and territorial claims. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) sealed the political dismemberment of Germany. At the Battle of Jena (October 14, 1806) the French army, commanded by Napoleon, routed the Prussian army, thus forcing Prussia to surrender.
[221] Dreschgärtner, Häusler, Instleute—categories of landless peasants in Germany, who, in their status, were close to day-labourers. These peasants were obliged to render the landlord all kinds of services in return for a roof over their heads, a tiny plot of land and, sometimes, meagre remuneration in kind and money.
[222] See Note 35 and also this volume, p. 74.
[223] T 0 supply the Prussian state with material resources and ensure the recruitment of soldiers Frederick II of Prussia promulgated a number of laws, among them the Statute on the Peasants of 1764, which proscribed the eviction of the peasants from their plots of land. However, these laws were implemented only to a very small extent.
[224] At Mollwitz (Mahijowice, Silesia) Frederick II's army defeated the Austrians on April 10, 1741, during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). On September 1-2, 1870, the Châlon Army of the French was routed by the Germans near Sedan. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 brought about the collapse of the Second Empire in France.
[225] The reference is to the decrees of February 14, 1808, of March 27 and April 8, 1809 and of January 9, 1810. The decree of April 8, 1809 stated that abolition of personal hereditary dependence should not be interpreted as releasing the peasants from their feudal obligations.
[226] In the Battle of Waterloo fought on June 18, 1815, the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian forces commanded by the Duke of Wellington and Blücher defeated Napoleon's army.
[228] Ackernahrung—a plot of land sufficient to maintain a peasant family.
[229] Thaler—a silver coin equal to about three marks; it appeared in the 16th century in Bohemia and circulated in the 19th century in all North German states as well as in Prussia and Saxony.
[230] The expression state of intelligence, often used in an ironical sense, originates from a phrase in Hegel's opening lecture in Heidelberg University in October 1816.
[231] Scheffel—dry measure used in different German states. Its size varied up to 1872.