178 SZLACHTAbetween them. The fertile birth-rate of Mazowsze together with the infertile soil
led to constant division and increasing impoverishment of the family plots.
From the sixteenth century onwards, the petty nobleman, incapable of equip-
ping himself, none the less perpetuated the military tradition of his caste by serv-
ing either in the professional regiments of the royal army or in the retinues of the
magnates.^20
In many ways, being both poor and insecure, the position of the petty noble-
man was worse than that of the serfs. In the eighteenth century, there are many
examples of their voluntary submission to serfdom. Yet even as serfs, or down-
and-outs in the towns, they did not lose their noble status or their legal rights. A
coat of arms hung over the porch of their cottages. They carried wooden swords
when they did not own a steel one, and they continued to attend the provincial
dietines and to demand a vote at the royal Elections. They attracted a variety of
pejorative epithets — as panek or 'little master'; as szarak or 'grey hare' (who
could not afford the nobleman's traditional carmine cloak); as zagolczyk or 'lit-
tle ploughman' (who had to work in his own fields); as chudy pacholek or 'the
lean page', who appears so often in the literature of the period; or as szlachta
chodaczkowa, milites in caligulo, the 'nobleman in clogs'. They were known to
Kadlubek in the thirteenth century, and had parallels elsewhere, like the
Bocskoros Nemes in Hungary. But they were a Polish phenomenon par excel-
lence, at once a cause for amazement and a pillar of the noble estate.
The later condition of the petty nobility was evoked by Adam Mickiewicz:
The hamlet of Dobrzyn has a wide reputation in Lithuania for the bravery of its gentle-
men and the beauty of its gentlewomen. It was once powerful and populous, for when
King John III Sobieski summoned the general militia, the Ensign of the palatinate
brought him six hundred armed gentlemen from Dobrzyn alone. But the family had now
grown small and poor. Formerly, at the courts of the magnates or in their regiments at
forays, and at the district dietines the Dobrzynskis used to find an easy living. Now they
were forced to work for themselves, like mere serfs, except that they did not wear peas-
ants' russet doublets, but long white coats with black stripes, and on Sunday the kontusz.
The dress of even the poorest of their women was different from that of the peasants.
They usually wore drill or percale, herded their cattle in shoes not of bark but of leather,
and reaped and spun with gloves on.
The Dobrzyriskis were distinguished among their Lithuanian brethren by their lan-
guage, and likewise by their stature and their appearance. They were of pure Polish
blood, and all had black hair, high foreheads, black eyes, and aquiline noses. They traced
their ancestors to the district of Dobrzyn in Mazovia and, though they had been settled
in Lithuania for four hundred years, they preserved their Mazovian speech and customs.
Whenever any one of them gave his son a name at baptism, he always chose the name of
a saint of the Kingdom, either Bartholomew or Matthias. The women were all christened
Kachna or Maryna. In order to distinguish themselves amid such confusion, both men
and women took various nicknames. Thus Matthias DobrzyAski, who was the head of
the whole family, had been called 'Cock-on-the-Steeple'. Later, after the year seventeen
hundred and ninety-four, he changed his nickname and was dubbed 'Hand-on-Hip'; the
Dobrzyriskis themselves also called him 'King Bunny';...