THE POLISH GRAIN TRADE 215The social effects of the Vistula Trade form the subject of a continuing contro-
versy, whose contradictory findings can give no clear guidance to the general
inquirer. It would be invidious with the present level of research to state
unequivocally that Poland-Lithuania witnessed a phenomenon called 'Export-
led Serfdom', where the intensification of feudal services was caused exclusively
by the economic pressures of the Grain Trade. At the same time it would be
foolish to deny that the spectacular growth of the export trade in grain was
accompanied by an equally marked rise in the conditions of serfdom, and that
in one way or another these twin socio-economic developments of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries were closely connected. According to one plau-
sible line of argument, rising prices in Danzig created a sustained demand for
grain, which in turn put increasing pressure on the one element of the rural
economy, labour, which was capable of more intensive exploitation. In order to
meet the demand, the noble landowners exacted more work and harsher condi-
tions from their peasants. As the only enfranchised social estate, they could per-
suade the King and the Sejm to change the law to their advantage, and could
administer existing law at their own convenience. The peasants, unable in gen-
eral to compete on the open market with the larger producers, gradually found
that acquiescence in the new terms of serfdom was preferable to swimming
against the tide in the old, free, but insecure and increasingly hungry manner. It
is not that the Vistula Trade created serfdom. The panszczyzna or the 'lord's
right to unpaid labour services' was known much earlier. What the Grain Trade
did was to stimulate tendencies already in evidence. Like the Cotton Trade in
America, it drove existing inequalities between landowners and workers to
extremes, and as the absolute control of the one over the other was perpetuated
by law, turned a casual phenomenon into the basis of social and economic life.
Serfdom in Poland—Lithuania was regularized during roughly the same period
as slavery in America; and it lasted almost as long. In the wider context, it
belongs to that second wave of serfdom which has been identified in various
parts of East and Central Europe and which has been given the generic title of
'Neo-serfdom'.^18
From the peasant's point of view, the key to serfdom lay in the security of pos-
session which it promised to families unable to support themselves in a cash
economy. By putting his labour at the disposition of the lord, the peasant was
guaranteed possession of the family plot which otherwise he might have been
obliged to sell. So long as the conditions of his submission were tolerable, serf-
dom was seen as an improvement, not to say a progressive development, in the
peasant's fortunes. Whilst the lord could discipline the peasant by the threat of
eviction, the peasants could easily damage their lord's fortunes by idleness,
drunkenness, sabotage, arson, and ultimately by the threat of flight. A noble-
man who offended his serfs, or who drove them away, was heading for disaster.
It was clearly in the best interests of both lord and serf to work together in an