158 SZLACHTA
Nobility. Membership of the estates was largely hereditary. Social mobility
between the estates was fraught with obstacles. Economics counted for less than
the law, heredity, and custom. Indeed, socio-economic classes could not possi-
bly come into being until the legal framework of the former social estates had
been dismantled.
Contemporary observers had never heard of class analysis. During the cur-
rency of the Republic of Poland-Lithuania, neither 'Feudalism' nor 'Class' had
yet been invented. Contemporary descriptions were habitually based on tradi-
tional functional or legal criteria. Martin Kromer, the historian, was content to
write that people were divided into clergy and laity, and the laity into noble and
ignoble. One of the few exercises which required a more detailed breakdown
was undertaken by officials of the Royal Treasury for the purpose of assessing
the poll-tax. In 1520, for example, the Capitation Register listed forty-nine
social categories grouped by estates under the main headings of Crown, Clergy,
Nobility, Rural population, City population, and Jews. (See Diagram la.) In
this, it is interesting to note that the clerical estate was judged to include all aca-
demic personnel and students as well as all ecclesiastical serfs and servants; the
noble estate was assumed to include most of the inhabitants of the nobility's
landed possessions; the burgher estate included all these peasants who lived on
municipal land or who otherwise had achieved municipal rights. In this case,
therefore, the so-called Rural Population was confined to those few elements of
the peasantry, such as village headmen, manorial craftsmen, hired labourers, or
the independent farmers who were free from serfdom.^1
Generally speaking, the number of people whose assignment to one of the main
social estates could not have been determined, was very small. Members of cer-
tain professions such as the doctors and lawyers, or the reformed clergy; of cer-
tain specialized communities such as the miners, or of various religious minorities
such as the Armenians or Muslim Tartars, could not be easily categorized. If in
doubt, contemporary jurists would probably have examined their legal privileges
in detail and might well have consigned them to separate, independent estates.
For reasons best known to themselves, modern scholars often reject contem-
porary practice, and invent new social groupings to meet the requirements of
their scientific preconceptions. An analyst intent on reconstructing 'social-
property structures', for instance, takes the estate-based categories of the
Capitation Registers mentioned above, and rearranges them into eight new tax
brackets. In this scheme, the top place in sixteenth-century society is taken by
the Archbishop of Gniezno, whose poll-tax assessment stood at 600 zl, and the
bottom place by the labourers, students, and apprentices, who, at 1/2 groszy per
head, were required to pay thirty-six thousand times less. (See Diagram lb.) This
sort of exercise is extremely interesting. For analysts who believe economic rela-
tionships to be the driving force of social life, it is absolutely vital. It has the dis-
advantage of being essentially unhistorical.^2
Among the autonomous estates, the Clergy possessed the longest history. The
jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic, Uniate, and Orthodox churches extended