A fact from Serfdom in Poland appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 April 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that at its extreme, serfdom in Poland required a peasant to work eight days a week for his feudal lord?
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It would be less silly to state that peasants were obliged to work eight 'man-days' per week, surely? Unless they had decimal weeks in Poland in those days...--feline1 (talk) 13:33, 13 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Those was actually man-days for each łan of ground that a peasants family farmed for his own needs (ground belonged to the landlord). E.g. if he had 0.5 łan (8-10ha) he should bring weekly himself + son + 2 workers (4 persons) for 1 day = 8 man-days/łan weekly. When he had 8-10ha he was actually quite reach in comparison to others, he was able to hire additional workers (poorer peasants or peasants without land). 05 January 2015r. 20:19 CET
Some of this is a bit outdated but still useful [1]. Also Domar partly attributes the appearance of serfdom in Poland-Lithuania to the acquisition of Ukraine [2] - basically peasants fled central Poland for relatively underpopulated lands in the Ukraine so nobles sought to restrict their movement. In Ukraine itself competition between lords for peasants initially drove up "wages" of the peasants but ultimately also led to political developments which restricted peasant freedom (particularly of movement). Finally, [3] (it's a blog post, but by a well known economist) Brad DeLong brings up the role of rising staple prices in Europe during this time. This might be a bit heretical, and it's my own OR, but the acquisition of Gdansk after the Second Peace of Torun by Poland - and hence the access to Western European markets - *might* have contributed to the re-emerence of serfdom (on the other hand, there were many other developments fueling this phenomenon).VolunteerMarek16:47, 18 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
"The origins of serfdom in Poland can be traced to the early days of Piast Poland in the 12th century."
The tense of the sentence suggests that serfdom in Poland still exists today as a real phenomenon. It should be something like "serfdom in Poland existed roughly from XXX to YYY. Its origins..."
In the early days of the Kingdom of Poland in the 10th and 11th centuries, under the Piast Dynasty, the social class of peasantry was among the several classes to develop.
A confused sentence which makes a trivial point - that there was more than one class present at the time. Giving it a bit more credit, it seems to be trying to say that during this period separate classes evolved, including the peasantry. First, I don't think that's actually true (and no sources). Second, there is a better way of describing the phenomenon. Volunteer Marek (talk) 04:51, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
There appear to be a few longstanding errors in the timeline of the abolition of serfdom, particularly regarding the Proclamation of Połaniec and the abolition of serfdom in Prussia by Frederick the Great. The Proclamation of Połaniec did not aim to abolish serfdom but rather to halve the labor obligations. Regarding abolition in Prussia, the source cited, Henderson, does not provide elaboration and is incorrect on this point. For comparison, see Sheehan. I’ll be replacing this with a more accurate source and will eventually rewrite the section. ro|3ek (talk) 11:42, 27 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
