7
SZLACHTA:
The Nobleman's Paradise
By the time of the Union of Lublin, the social order had settled firmly into a sys-
tem of estates. Four such estates - the Clergy, the Nobility, the Burghers, and
the Jews - enjoyed a wide measure of corporate autonomy. Each exercised full
jurisdiction over its members in all those matters which did not infringe the priv-
ileges of other estates or the prerogatives of the Crown. The fifth estate - the
Peasantry - had lost much of its former independence and, with the exception
of a small sector of free peasant farmers, was largely subordinated to the con-
trol of the Crown, the Church, or the Nobility. Both from the constitutional and
from the social point of view, there is a case for regarding the Crown and its
dependants as a separate estate on its own. (See Diagram H(a).)
It must be stressed at the outset that the social estates of the early modern
period - in Latin status, in Polish Stan—were based on different criteria from
those which characterize the main social groups of later centuries. In particular,
they can not be equated with the socio-economic classes with which they are so
frequently confused. The social estates were defined neither by their relationship
to the means of production nor indeed by any other measure of their wealth,
income, or economic position, but rather by their intended function within soci-
ety as expressed in exclusive legal rights and privileges. It is a parody perhaps to
hold that medieval social theory intended the Crown to rule, the clergyman to
pray, and nobleman to fight, the burgher to trade, the Jew to be a Jew, and the
peasant to till the fields; but it is certain that some such assumption lay behind
the law-making which had created the estates in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries. Economic differences did exist, of course, and exerted a
powerful influence on social life; but they existed as much within each of the
estates as between them, and they played a much smaller part in the perceptions
of contemporaries than of present-day ideologists and social scientists. A land-
less noble family, for example, might well have sustained an existence which by
any economic yardstick was indistinguishable from, or even inferior to, that of
their peasant neighbours; but their poverty in no way impaired the fiscal, legal,
and political privileges to which their inherited noble status entitled them.
Similarly, a prosperous Jewish family might easily exceed many of its Gentile
neighbours in wealth and affluence; but nothing short of conversion to
Christianity could gain them access to the ranks of the Burghers or of the