THE NOBLEMAN'S PARADISE 177
Wyczanski, who has reconstructed a theoretical model of these middling estates
from the juridical records of the 1560s, the average size was around 130 hectares
(321 acres). Upwards of 50 hectares, or roughly 40 per cent of the arable area,
was in demesne, and provided 94 per cent of the lord's revenue. The remaining
80 hectares, in peasant holdings, produced virtually no income but served to
support the serfs on which the exploitation of the demesne depended. Even so,
the serfs rarely sufficed for more than two-thirds of the labour required, and had
to be supplemented by salaried personnel and by a hired, seasonal work-force.
The average annual revenue worked out at 214 zl. gross, 185.7 zl. net. At con-
temporary prices on the market in Cracow, 186 zl would have bought 96 metres
of woollen cloth or 385 pairs of shoes or 35 oxen or 900 litres of Malmasian
wine. In general, the owner or leaseholder would reside in person, and manage
the estate without the help of a numerous staff or retinue.^19
In contrast to this 'average nobleman', who is no more than a faceless abstrac-
tion, the 'petty noblemen' was a very real animal for which several provinces of
the Republic were rightly famed. In Mazowsze, over half of the land was owned
by the szlachta zagrodowa. According to one estimate in 1571 they totalled
32,000 households, working 12,031 out of 23,361 lan or 51.5 per cent of the
arable land of the Duchy. Each household contented itself with 0.38 lan (6.65
hectares or 16.43 acres). In Podlasie, similar conditions prevailed. In 1528, the
ten parishes of the Ziemia Bielska contained 99 settlements of noble zascianki.
In 1775, in the same district, 5,811 out of 6,300 holdings, or 92 per cent, were
serfless. In the Republic as a whole, well over half of the nobility did not possess
land. In 1670, 400,000 noblemen, or 57 per cent, were landless, as compared to
300,000 or 43 per cent, who owned one village or more. These figures are incom-
parable. Nowhere in Spain, where the tattered hidalgo was a national joke, not
even in Navarre, Leon, or Burgos, where the nobility reached up to 10 per cent
of the population, was there anything to match Mazowsze or Podlasie. What is
more, in Spain in the eighteenth century, the petty nobility was severely pruned.
In the Republic, they were multiplying fast. Their sheer numbers defy any
attempt to regard them as an exceptional element in an essentially landowning
class. One has to accept that in the Republic it was the nobleman with land who
was the exception. Numerically speaking, the petty nobility dominated the
noble estate, providing both its distinctive colour and the material with which
its political and social customs operated. They seem to have first appeared in the
late fourteenth century in frontier areas threatened by the Teutonic Order. In
time they expanded both by further colonization into Podlasie and Red
Ruthenia, and by cellular division of the original settlements into constellated
villages. In 1699, they joined a memorable exodus to Podolia, to lands returned
to Poland from Turkey by the Peace of Karlovitz. Their original military role
quickly deteriorated. Although the levee-en-masse of Mazowsze might raise
20,000 knights, their quality was very poor. The fragmentation and pauperiza-
tion of the original holdings led to a situation where one village of zascianki
with perhaps twenty-five families could only equip one or two cavalrymen