The Manorial Estate

The evolution of the manorial estate (latifundium) was directly related to the rise of neo-serfdom in Poland. On the estates of magnates and gentry, and sometimes on royal and church lands, the large manorial farm known in Ukrainian as the fil'varok (from the Polish folwark} was organized.

The fil'varok itself was generally divided into three parts: (1) the demesne fields, or the lands belonging to the landlord, consolidated through the acqui­sition of smaller peasant holdings; (2) the lands belonging to the soitys, a village administrator of the landlord; and (3) strip holdings belonging to individual serfs. Generally, the village was in the center of the fil'varok, where the land­lord’s manor house, the residence of the sotfys, peasant dwellings, and the tavern were located. Near the village center was a common pasture; surround­ing it were the demesne fields; and beyond them were the lands belonging to the soltys and the serfs’ strip holdings.

In return for their labor (corvee), serfs and their descendants had the security of possessing some lands or, as it were, of eventually belonging to them. As long as the conditions of serfdom w'crc tolerable, such ‘attachment’ to the land seemed an improvement on a cash economy in which a serf could become bankrupt during bad economic times and be evicted from land and home.

The amount of labor owed by a serf was related to the size of his or her land allotment. Whereas on royal estates there was a uniform system of labor obli­gations, on magnate- and gentry-owned estates (which by the late sixteenth century accounted for 78 percent of holdings in Ukraine) the number of unpaid work days w'as determined by the landlord or his estate administrators.

As long as Poland’s grain trade was growing, the fil'varok manorial estate system played a positive role, in increasing the landlord’s wealth and providing indirectly for the minimal well-being of peasant serfs. But with the leveling- off and eventually the decline of the grain trade in the second half of the seventeenth century, landowners tried to make up their losses by increasing the number of serf work days and by expanding the manorial estate system into Poland’s recently acquired Ukrainian lands in the east.

century, there was a density of approximately 36 inhabitants per square mile (14 inhabitants per square kilometer) in the more western regions of Poland, includ­ing Ukrainian-inhabited Galicia, Belz, and western Podolia, whereas farther east, in the palatinates of Volhynia, Kiev, and Bratslav, the density was as low as 8 per­sons per square mile (3 persons per square kilometer). Thus, whereas by the end of the sixteenth century serfdom had become widespread in the more densely inhabited western Ukrainian lands, farther east, where large manorial estates (latifundia) were being formed, the peasants had not yet been enserfed, although they were being subjected to an increasing number of duties.

The situation in eastern Ukraine generally evolved in the following manner.

Whereas the nobility made concessions in order to attract settlers to the east, from the beginning they either owned outright or controlled the local mills for processing grain. They also retained the exclusive privilege of distilling and sell­ing alcohol. The Polish and polonized Rus' magnates and gentry were often not willing, however, to run the huge estates over which they had control. Instead, they relied on leaseholders (arendars), mostly Jews, who eventually became the linchpin of Poland’s arenda (leaseholding) economic system.