The Social and Economic Structure of the Old Regime 319an established church—approximately 10 percent of a
harvest—and taxes to the government, which fre-
quently took between 30 percent and 40 percent of the
crop. Studies have found that serfs owed 73 percent of
their produce in Bohemia, 75 percent in eastern France,
83 percent in Silesia, and 86 percent in parts of Galicia.
Such figures changed from year to year, but the burden
remained crushing.
Variations within the Peasantry: Free Peasants
The free peasants of western and central Europe had
been escaping from the burdens of serfdom since the
fourteenth century. The evolution of a money economy
reduced the importance of feudal services by enabling
some peasants to commute robotor corvéewith cash. To
increase revenues from import and export tariffs, some
governments had encouraged a shift to livestock pro-
duction by allowing aristocrats to enclose their own,
and sometimes their tenants’, lands. As a result, the cap-
italization of land was far advanced in the west by
1700, though most families still owed at least some feu-
dal obligations to the landowning aristocracy. Whereas
eastern serfs were fortunate to keep 25 percent of their
harvest, free peasants could expect to keep more than
half. Two different studies of Old Regime France have
found that peasants owed between 33 percent and 40
percent of their total production in feudal dues, taxes,
and tithes.
The condition of free peasants varied according to
the forms of land tenure. The most prosperous peasants
were landowners themselves. Studies of the French
free peasantry found that nearly four million peasants
owned some land and their own home (see illustration
17.3) in the eighteenth century, though most families
owned so little land that they could not afford to mar-
ket any of their harvest. Although most free peasants
were landless, one group of them found relatively com-
fortable lives. The most successful of the landless
French peasants were usually tenant farmers, about
10 percent to 20 percent of the landless population.
Tenant farmers rented land, typically for a long term—
such as nine years—for a fixed money payment, andDOCUMENT 17.2
A Traveler Observes the Life of Russian Serfs
One of the difficulties facing social historians is that the surviving
records of the past were (by definition) written by literate, educated
people. The illiterate masses could not record the conditions of their lives
for posterity. Historians must therefore rely on the indirect evidence pro-
vided by observers (and their deductions from other sources). Alexander
Radishchev (1749–1802) was a Russian writer who opposed serfdom
and wrote about it, resulting in his exile to Siberia. The following ex-
cerpt is Radishchev’s description of his meeting with a serf, as published
in his A Voyage from St. Petersburg to Moscow(1790).
The corduroy road tortured my body; I climbed out of the
carriage and (walked). A few steps from the road I saw a
peasant ploughing a field. The weather was hot.... It was
now Sunday.... The peasant was ploughing very care-
fully. The field, of course, was not part of his master’s land.
He turned the plow with astonishing ease.
“God help you,” I said, walking up to the plough-
man....
“Thank you sir,” the ploughman said to me, shaking
the earth off the ploughshare....
“You must be a Dissenter, since you plough on a Sun-
day.”
“No, sir, I make the true sign of the cross,” he said,
showing me the three fingers together. “And God is mer-
ciful and does not bid us starve to death, so long as we
have strength and a family.”
“Have you no time to work during the week, then,
and can you not have any rest on Sundays, in the hottest
part of the day, at that?”
“In a week, sir, there are six days, and we go six times
a week to work on the master’s fields; in the evening, if
the weather is good, we haul to the master’s house the hay
that is left in the woods.... God grant that it rains this
evening. If you have peasants of your own, sir, they are
praying to God for the same thing.”
“... But how do you manage to get food enough, if
you have only the holidays free?”
“Not only the holidays: the nights are ours, too. If a
fellow isn’t lazy, he won’t starve to death.”
Radischev, Alexander. A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow.Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.