Introduction
The historian Karin Friedrich once quipped that “The rural economy in Brandenburg-Prussia has not had a good press.”Footnote 1 Starting with the pioneering work of the German social scientist Georg Friedrich KnappFootnote 2 and the polemics of Friedrich EngelsFootnote 3 in the late nineteenth century and continuing for around a hundred years thereafter, rural Prussia has been portrayed as a landscape of peasant suffering and mistreatment. Subordinated into bondage by the ascendent east-ElbianFootnote 4 nobility prior to the Thirty Years War (1618–48), Prussian peasantsFootnote 5 were forced to endure a legacy of unfreedom that would not abate until the nineteenth century. Serfs strained under the mandatory labor services they were coerced to perform on lordly demesnes, and were quickly disciplined by their superiors for the slightest recalcitrance. Haughty aristocratic JunkersFootnote 6 patrolled the agricultural operations on their manors, squeezing their peasants for maximum profit. The noble domination of the Prussian peasantry was made all the more complete by the Junkers’ usurpation of not only economic authority on the manor, but sundry other types of authority as well. In historian Hans Rosenberg’s description, the Prussian noble had become “not only an exacting landlord, hereditary serf master, vigorous entrepreneur, assiduous estate manager, and nonprofessional trader, but also the local church patron, police chief, prosecutor and judge.”Footnote 7 Thus, seigneurial power had grown to a sufficient extent by the eighteenth century such that Prussian peasants were dramatically disadvantaged in their struggles against the Prussian nobility.
This bleak picture of lord-peasant relations in the Prussian countryside has been vigorously disputed by a wave of revisionistFootnote 8 scholarship which emerged in the 1980s. The most prominent figure advancing an alternate interpretation has been the historian William Hagen, in a number of articlesFootnote 9 and in his Ordinary Prussians,Footnote 10 a microhistory of the Stavenow lordship in the Brandenburg region of Prussia. Hagen downplays the structural constraints that the previous historiography emphasized, arguing instead that outcomes emerged from a “tug-of-war” between the various equally capable forces in the Prussian countryside. Peasants, he avers, possessed sufficient agency, organizational ingenuity, and capacity for resistance such that they were able to effectively defend their interests in the contest with the nobility. The revisionist approach has been elaborated by subsequent authors who concur that the traditional focus on peasant victimhood has been misplaced. One particularly bold revisionist, S. A. Eddie, has written that “Even at its origins […] the Prussian manorial system was not just about oppression. A century and a half later, in the late eighteenth century, it was arguably not even about oppression.”Footnote 11 Judging from the historical literature which has been produced on Prussia over the past several decades, the revisionist claims about the relative unimportance of structural constraints on peasants and the misguided portrayal of peasant victimization have been widely accepted.
This article reconsiders this interpretive dispute between traditional and revisionist perspectives, largely using the very evidence from the Prussian countryside that the revisionist scholars have used. Despite the revisionist posture that differing positions in social structure did not affect the outcomes of struggle between lord and peasant, revisionists (and others) have provided abundant evidence that it, in fact, did. Noble landlords availed themselves of advantages not available to peasants in order to further their claims against the latter, and peasants’ leeway to retaliate was severely circumscribed. Therefore, I argue that scholarship has erred in accepting the revisionist positions at face value. The earlier interpretive tradition which stressed the importance of structure in determining the outcomes of lord-peasant conflict should be revived as the more substantiated approach.
The Revisionist Approach
The revisionist standpoint supplements and critiques an earlier tradition that may be called the “liberal critique”Footnote 12 or “manorial dominance”Footnote 13 view. This approach, originating with the late nineteenth-century work of Georg Friedrich Knapp, painted the manorial system of the eighteenth century as, in the words of Hagen, the “high noon of Junker domination of the villages and the darkest night of their rural subjects’ legal degradation, material impoverishment and cultural despair.”Footnote 14 Knapp’s approach reached the Anglophone world in the twentieth century largely through the works of the German emigrant historians Hans Rosenberg and F. L. Carsten. Rosenberg wrote that the Junkers’ ascendency was the flip side of “the legal and social degradation, political emasculation, moral crippling, and destruction of the chances of self-determination of the subject villagers.”Footnote 15 The literature that originated out of the German Democratic Republic hewed to the basic interpretive approach pioneered by Knapp, although it reformulated his outlook in a Marxist-Leninist idiom.Footnote 16
Revisionist scholars object that the traditional approach to early modern east-Elbian Germany, in Hagen’s words, “disable[s] the villagers as historical subjects.”Footnote 17 By “resorting to the reductive tactic of interpreting all developments in the political sphere as reflections of the interests of the landed nobility,”Footnote 18 the historical literature “exaggerate[s] the landlords’ powers.”Footnote 19 Instead, the revisionist literature stresses agency, contingency, and the role of historical actors other than the nobles, arguing that rural history “steered not toward ineluctable, structurally determined outcomes, but rather traced a course defined […] by the multi-sided rivalry of manor, village, Crown and town.”Footnote 20 Revisionists have counterposed the traditional approach of “the view from the manor house”Footnote 21 with their own perspective of “the view from the village”Footnote 22 which seeks to mine manorial archives to fill out the perspective of everyday rural life.Footnote 23
The discussion of agrarian social relations in various works by scholars of Prussia indicates that the revisionist perspective has gained wide currency. Christopher Clark writes in a well-received history of Prussia that “The historiographical black legend of Junker tyranny has been remarkably tenacious,” but that, due to revisionist historiography, “In recent years, a rather different picture has emerged.”Footnote 24 Karin Friedrich, in another recent history of Prussia, assesses that revisionist research has made implausible the “traditional picture of the East-Elbian landed economy in the grip of the Junker class, who imposed an ever stricter regime of ‘neo-serfdom.’”Footnote 25 In a recent survey of European economic history, Robert Duplessis writes: “Several decades of detailed studies have modified much of the interpretation of what is now often referred to as demesne lordship […] no more than their counterparts in the west were eastern peasants simply victims of change.”Footnote 26 Tim Blanning, in a recent biography of Frederick II (r. 1740–86), dismisses the pre-revisionist interpretation: “The old image of downtrodden rural masses oppressed by omnipotent Junker landlords was exploded long ago.”Footnote 27 Thus, there seems to be a consensus among recent interpreters of Prussian history that the “manorial dominance” viewpoint has been significantly weakened, or perhaps entirely overturned.
It is understandable why the revisionist perspective has gained such wide acceptance, both because of the abundant historical findings which prominent scholars of this persuasion have produced, as well as the lack of present-day dissenters from the revisionist approach to early modern east-Elbian German history. One lonely note of skepticism, however, has been sounded by the economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie, who questions whether the unarguable presence of peasant agency and decision-making, emphasized by revisionists, entails that the manor did not impose any constraints on how those decisions were made. She criticizes the revisionists for, after finding evidence of peasants making some decisions in which the manor did not intrude, leaping to the conclusion that manorial restrictions exerted no influence whatsoever on any kind of peasant decision.Footnote 28 Thus this view holds that the revisionists, in their quest to detail the everyday experience of peasants, have neglected to fully weigh the impact of manorial authority on village life. This article will develop this line of criticism below.Footnote 29
A Fair Game of “Tug-of-war” Between Lord and Peasant?
The revisionist approach holds a particular view of social relations in the manorial system. Hagen’s recurrent metaphor for the relationship between actors in agrarian Prussia is a “tug-of-war.”Footnote 30 Each entity in the countryside sought to appropriate a maximal portion of the peasant product which was the wellspring of all income in the society, as lords and the state were, economically speaking, purely non-productive. Thus Prussian manorialism was the site of a “continual and unpredictable […] multi-directional tug-of-war between landlords, villagers, and civil, military, and religious authorities.”Footnote 31 In this “profoundly divided society,”Footnote 32 Hagen maintains that the social relations within the context of demesne lordship were actually quite malleable: “[T]here was no fixed and stabilized manor-village relationship, but rather continual struggle for freedom of movement and material advantage on both sides.”Footnote 33 Strikingly, Hagen believes that no player in this tug-of-war had an advantage over any other; in the conclusion of Ordinary Prussians he summarizes: “[E]ach of these three sets of actors [lords, peasants, and state] exerted roughly equal force in the struggle, and likewise shaped the outcome with rough equality.”Footnote 34 The “three-cornered tug-of-war”Footnote 35 is thus Hagen’s basic model for understanding social relations on the manor.
Conceptualizing Prussian agrarian social relations in this way has both benefits and drawbacks. To its credit, this model recognizes the fundamentally material interests driving the economic and political behavior of lords, peasants and the state. Additionally, it rightly portrays the contest over the peasant product in conflictual terms: as a zero-sum dilemma in which each actor strives to grab the maximum possible share of the social surplus. However, the tug-of-war model falls short in two aspects. First, the structural advantages that some parties enjoy over others is completely erased in this model. Most notably, the superior power that lords wield vis-à-vis peasants disappears when they are conceptualized as equally capable actors in a struggle. Second, these power imbalances on the lord’s estate were relatively fixed. While undoubtedly lords, peasants and the state all maneuvered for advantage, there was no instance in which peasants eliminated or displaced the structural position of the lord or the state. In this game of tug-of-war, peasants were incredibly unlikely to emerge as victors. I will elaborate on both of these shortcomings of the model in turn.
SerfdomFootnote 36
First, lords had many structural advantages over peasants by mere virtue of how the “society of orders” was constituted in rural Prussia. Fundamentally these advantages originated in the privileges that lords had won as a result of the introduction of peasant bondage into the Prussian countryside during the “second serfdom” (roughly 1400–1600). Peasants were tied to the land by law and could be caught and compelled to return if they dared to flee their assigned manor. Peasants could secure their release via payment of an exit fine to the lord, but release was contingent on the lord’s approval as well as the securing of a replacement to take up the peasant’s vacated farmstead. The choice of a marriage partner was also subject to lordly veto. The Junker had the right to conscript the children of peasants into service on the manor (Gesindezwangsdienst). Lords enjoyed monopolies on certain protected activities, such as milling and brewing. Lords also enjoyed other more symbolic benefits, including the right to reserved pews in church, the right to appoint the local church pastor and village schoolmaster, an oath of loyaltyFootnote 37 from the manor’s residentsFootnote 38 and the curious privilege of receiving a smoked chicken annually from each peasant subject.Footnote 39 One privilege bitterly resented by peasants was the noble’s exclusive right to engage in hunting on the manor, which often damaged peasant crops in the process of pursuing game.Footnote 40 Lords also innovated in inventing rights which even the generous provisions under Prussian law did not entitle them to; for instance, lords in the Altmark region mandated that their peasants supply offerings on the occasion of a wedding of a member of the manor’s noble family.Footnote 41
But the most onerous imposition that serfdom foisted upon Prussian peasants was the duty of providing significant rents to the lord, often in the form of labor service. The nature and the extent of these burdens varied widely over the Prussian countryside, but full peasants generally seem to have provided two to three days of labor service per week.Footnote 42 However, it was also common for some peasants to be assigned an unlimited (ungemessen)Footnote 43 labor service burden,Footnote 44 depending on their status, property rights, and location. The peasants themselves did not necessarily carry out this labor; the wealthier ones were often able to send hired workers to carry out their labor services for them.Footnote 45 Extracting labor services frequently became a point of contention on the manor: for the lord, they were the wellspring of his estate’s profits, but for the peasant (or the proxy worker), there was little advantage in dutifully performing this coerced labor.
The reciprocal benefits that lords provided to peasants were quite limited in comparison. The major protection was a kind of insurance scheme (Konservation) that entitled a peasant to financial support from the lord if he lapsed into a truly penurious condition.Footnote 46 Any other benefits of physical protection had largely faded away with the rise of the absolutist Prussian state; the medieval intra-lordly feuding of the “robber barons”Footnote 47 or the chaotic plundering of the Thirty Years War was but a distant memory by the eighteenth century. Indeed, the Prussian state decrees enshrining the policy known as “peasant protection” (Bauernschutz) were an attempt to shield peasants against the depredations of their lords.Footnote 48
Thus, even from a cursory overview of the benefits and drawbacks of lordship and serfdom, it is clear that Junkers maintained a dominant position over the rest of rural Prussian society. Enjoying both significant and trivial advantages by virtue of their noble position, Junkers held the legal right to intrude on the mobility, family, and economy of their subjects. Peasants’ ritual demonstrations of obeisance to their landlords left no question about which party reigned over the manor. Before the reform period (i.e., pre-1806), peasants never made any meaningful progress in eroding these lordly privileges, however much they may have maneuvered to keep their rent levels in check. The lord-peasant relationship was, in short, highly asymmetrical.
Patrimonial Court
Inevitably, conflicts arose between various parties in rural Prussia, and the initial institutional recourse for settling disputes was the patrimonial court. Like every other institution on the noble estate, this court was dominated by the Junker. Earlier in Prussian history, the lord himself, or an arbitrary individual that he appointed, was able to sit as judge and rule as he saw fit. Only after 1747 did the state mandate that trained jurists preside over patrimonial court proceedings.Footnote 49 Nevertheless, there were still many routes by which the impartiality of the jurist could be compromised, as was pointed out by contemporary critics of the Prussian legal system.Footnote 50 The jurist was still appointed by the lord, received a salary from him, ate at his table on court days,Footnote 51 and presided over proceedings that were physically located within the lord’s manor house.Footnote 52
Undoubtedly, much of the business of the manorial court was taken up by matters that had no straightforwardly political content, much less bore on the structural advantages of lordship. Often the court was merely the enforcer of the peasants’ own social norms in, for instance, disputes between the peasants themselves, which accounted for the majority of manorial court cases.Footnote 53 However, when lord-peasant conflict was adjudicated in the patrimonial court, there were a number of structural constraints that tilted the playing field in the Junker’s favor. Most egregiously, it was generally prohibited for peasants to sue the lord in his own patrimonial court.Footnote 54 And the aggregate outcomes of these court cases also speak to the court’s lack of impartiality: in Monika Wienfort’s monograph on the Prussian patrimonial court system, she failed to uncover single instance in which a patrimonial court ruled against an east-Elbian lord.Footnote 55
Hagen’s work on Stavenow has provided a revealing account of how the patrimonial court was used to enforce discipline on a Junker estate. Peasants falling afoul of the lord’s favor would be tortured in the “Spanish overcoat [spanischer Mantel],” a “heavy barrel-like device” which inflicted “muscle-pulling and back-bending torment” on the peasant while he stood on public display.Footnote 56 This punishment was regularly meted out to peasants as a judicial sentence in the manorial court.Footnote 57 The comparable punishment for women was to be shackled in the “fiddle,”Footnote 58 a similar, apparently gender-appropriate device.Footnote 59 Hagen finds that the fiddle was used only a handful of times, although threats to use it were pervasive.Footnote 60 Less spectacular a punishment was throwing villagers into the Stavenow dungeon, featuring a “pillory with neck-irons,” which happened often enough.Footnote 61 Whips were regularly used to flog disobedient manorial servants, as well as on those suspected of crime.Footnote 62 Sometimes farm workers were whipped as judicial punishment.Footnote 63 But the brunt of the violence arose in more quotidian fashion, as a result of everyday clashes between villagers and the lord’s functionaries (or even the lord himself): “Some of the worst violence ordinary people suffered came at the hands of bailiffs and huntsmen, and even […] Junker landlords.”Footnote 64 Hagen, of course, can only relate what abuse appears in the Stavenow manorial records; he is aware that most lordly coercion escapes documentation: “[T]he coercion on which noble landlordism rested, in Brandenburg as elsewhere in Europe, was unlikely to leave many traces in seigneurial records, if only because its everyday applications seemed self-evidently right and necessary.”Footnote 65 One might draw the logical inference that peasants likely suffered more mistreatment than the surviving records detail.
Wienfort, also, seems to want to take a revisionist view of the patrimonial court, writing against the “conventional view that the patrimonial courts were nothing but instruments in the hands of the noble and non-noble estate owners who used them to ‘oppress’ the peasants and farm labourers living in their jurisdictional districts.”Footnote 66 The evidence that Wienfort presents, however, does nothing to dispel the notion that patrimonial courts were indeed instruments of lordly oppression in cases of disputes between lords and their subjects. In every case she details involving an east-Elbian lord (or his functionary) in which the verdict is recorded, the patrimonial court decides in the lord’s favor. For instance, an 1820 lawsuit brought by the estate management of the Silesian manor of Waldenburg against various peasants accused the peasants of not rendering the required services to the manorial brewery. In finding against the peasants, the judge was incredulous that peasants would even consider such recalcitrance: “It is unbelievable that peasants had the idea of contesting their duties.”Footnote 67 In another lawsuit from 1843, the estate manager of the Mittelwalde manor in Silesia sued a peasant for defamation since the peasant had complained about the “drudgery” of his labor services. For this infraction, the patrimonial court sentenced the peasant to two weeks in jail in addition to shouldering the responsibility for all the court’s legal costs.Footnote 68 The fact that, even at these late dates, the patrimonial courts were punishing peasants for insubordination to their superiors exhibits that the skewed justice of the patrimonial court survived well into the Vormärz (1815–48) era.Footnote 69
Wienfort does find, however, plentiful examples of rulings in favor of the lord prompted by grievances both significant and petty. A Brandenburg case from 1793 sentenced a servant to two hours in the Spanish overcoat for the crime of smoking tobacco. The same court dispensed a punishment of twelve lashes for insubordination in 1796, and a sentence of an hour in the Spanish overcoat for cutting down a tree in the lord’s forest in 1799.Footnote 70 In another case from 1802, the impoverished day laborer Gutschmidt, who admitted to stealing sheaves of grain from the lordly demesne during the harvest, found himself sentenced to two hours of public display in a neck iron, eight days in prison and payment to the lord to compensate for the pilfered material.Footnote 71 Decades later, a forester’s 1844 insult of the estate manager as a “cursed rogue” (verfluchten Spitzbuben) brought him four weeks in prison and payment of the plaintiff’s court costs.Footnote 72 The Miller Arnold trial,Footnote 73 the most (in)famous saga of eighteenth-century Prussian justice, began with a patrimonial court ruling in favor of the lord against a local peasant in a dispute over unpaid rents.Footnote 74 Regardless of the nature of the dispute and the merits of either side of the legal case, east-Elbian Prussian patrimonial courts invariably ruled for the lord (or his representative) and against whoever had the misfortune to oppose him.
Patrimonial courts can only be viewed as relatively benign institutions to the extent that they avoided intervening in lord-peasant conflict, and indeed there did exist some specific courts which served this role. Jenny Thauer’s monograph of the Schulenburg court in the Altmark documents the experience of one such court whose area of jurisdiction, due to the vicissitudes of land inheritance, did not coincide with a single lord’s land ownership. Thauer evaluates the Schulenburg court as a fair and impartial institution for peasants, arguing it provided an attractive venue for dispute settlement in part due to its independence from any individual landlord.Footnote 75 Crucially, however, conflicts over labor services were delegated to other patrimonial courts in which the authoritative lord’s landownership and area of jurisdiction were coterminous.Footnote 76 In these more typical patrimonial courts, in contrast to the Schulenburg court, peasants unsurprisingly had “no prospect of success”Footnote 77 against their lords. Moreover, the typical patrimonial courts ran a “lucrative business”Footnote 78 extracting fees from the local peasantry by functioning as the exclusive venue through which peasants had to conclude the necessary legal contracts regarding marriage, inheritance, farm transfer, and so forth. Thus, individual patrimonial courts such as the Schulenburg court may only be viewed as impartial if considered in isolation from the larger system of Prussian patrimonial courts, and peasants had no ability to escape the authority of the latter in cases of dispute with their lords.
All told, regardless of what other functions it performed, the manorial court did intervene on matters where peasants clashed with lords (or their functionaries), and in these cases the court was undoubtedly biased against peasants. In this regard, the patrimonial courts operated essentially as a bulwark of Junker domination. Lords regularly used these courts to sentence their peasants to jail, whipping, or torture; peasants obtaining a judgment in the manorial court which meted out these same punishments to the lord was unthinkable.
Violence in the Villages
Of course, revisionists are not the only scholars who have documented east-Elbian German lords abusing their peasants. Many other authors, especially those who take a jaundiced view of the Junkers’ role in German history, have highlighted these lords’ sinister behavior towards their subjects. Lords devised innovative ways to torment their peasants for failure to perform their services, including locking them in a box in which they could neither stand nor lie.Footnote 79 Many of the punishments employed by lords (such as the Spanish overcoat and other esoteric torture methods like the “sharp donkey”) derived from similar forms of military discipline used in the Prussian army.Footnote 80 Outright theft of peasant property by lords was not unknown.Footnote 81 But usually, lords were content to resort to the intimate physical violence of beatings and whippings as coercive methods. Only those peasants that behaved in a servile fashion to their overlords, the historian Hartmut Harnisch writes, “could hope to escape all manner of harassment and molestation.”Footnote 82 However, there was evidently some limit to what cruelties lords could inflict on peasants: there are examples of lords outright killing their subordinates which result in sentences from higher authorities. One Countess von Gessler, for instance, received a sentence (notably, not in a noble court) for beating her servant Anna Deppin to death.Footnote 83 The Countess managed to escape punishment by fleeing abroad, at Frederick II’s suggestion.Footnote 84
Femininity provided no refuge from the lord’s depredations. In the Uckermark region of Brandenburg, the Junker von Redern’s bailiff broke into a peasant’s house and tied his two daughters together—for what reason is unclear—then marched them through the village and beat them until they could no longer stand. Then, not satisfied, the bailiff beat them some more and put them in the fiddle.Footnote 85 In 1753, maids were thrown into prison for going to a nearby market instead of fulfilling their manorial duties.Footnote 86 In the village of Quappendorf, widows and children asking for improvements in their status, due to their efforts reconstructing the village after a 1766 fire, were arrested and imprisoned for these modest attempts to better their situation.Footnote 87 Among the afore-mentioned Countess von Gessler’s many rampages was her tying up the unmarried subject Katharina Preelin for eight weeks and beating her for the infraction of becoming pregnant.Footnote 88
In the event that peasant resistance became too great for the lord to handle alone, he could always call upon the military to quell any unrest. There are plenty of examples of this, particularly from the unusually restive province of Silesia. In one instance, the later Prussian military reformer Gneisenau led a party that shot a cottager to dissipate a peasant riot.Footnote 89 Participants in these peasant strikes, upon capture, were often paraded through the villages to humiliate them and deter future resistance, were subject to various corporal punishments and prison terms, and perhaps forced to work in workhousesFootnote 90 or deprived of property and banished from the region.Footnote 91 For particularly severe cases of unrest, the military was quartered on the estates to prevent any further disruptions.Footnote 92 But the practice of calling in the military was by no means only used by Silesian Junkers; other Prussian lords availed themselves of this option as well.Footnote 93 Thus, if the lord’s quotidian violence and judicial system failed to subordinate his peasants, he could always call in state troops as a last resort. Apparently this practice intensified as the eighteenth century progressed.Footnote 94 Junkers were not above calling in foreign military units to quell unrest if they happened to be at hand, as occupying French troops occasionally were summoned for such purposes after 1806.Footnote 95
Not only the Prussian military, but other branches of the Prussian state could be called upon to strongarm peasants into submission. A dispute in the Brandenburg village of Alt-Quilitz saw the peasantry resisting various service increases from 1723 to 1728. After an initial military excursion to the village and punishments of forced labor failed to intimidate the ringleaders of the movement, the peasants Müller and Glietzing, a state commission was convened to adjudicate the dispute. Finding against the peasants, the commission greenlighted the service increases. Müller and Glietzing, who continued to resist the service increases despite the finding, were eventually removed from their farmlands by the military, and the service increases were applied to the entire village.Footnote 96 A half century later, peasants from the same village suffered a forcible relocation to inferior land, initiated by the lord, underwritten by a state court, and enforced by the military.Footnote 97
But not all scholars accept the picture of asymmetrical power in the lord-peasant relationship elaborated above. Michael Burleigh, for instance, while writing about an earlier period, rejects the idea of lordly domination in agrarian east-Elbian Germany:
Nothing is more misleading than the conventional picture—and this applies to historians of a liberal-democratic temper as well as their Marxist colleagues—of the Eastern European peasantry in the dawn of the re-enserfment as abjectly crushed under successive seignorial ordinances or as miserable fugitives from a monolithically oppressive feudal system. They might well have been threatened with having their ears nailed to the pillory, but they had mighty weapons of their own—inertia, deliberate incompetence and sullen indifference to the job in hand.Footnote 98
With this passage, however, Burleigh only unintentionally reinforces the account of a disparity in lord-peasant power by neatly encapsulating the relationship. If the lords had license to mutilate, torture and humiliate peasants, whereas peasants could only drag their feet when performing labor services for their lords in response, then the peasant measures were truly weapons of the weak, rather than “mighty” ones. The limited scope that peasants had for meaningful and open retaliation against their lords underlines their relative disempowerment.
To sum up, the balance of power in Prussia was dramatically tipped in favor of the Junkers. Lords enjoyed plentiful prerogatives over their peasants, not least of which was the control of the manorial courts. The violence and humiliation meted out, whether through these patrimonial courts or otherwise, was overwhelmingly a one-way affair. A level playing field implied by the tug-of-war metaphor would see peasants enjoying comparable privileges as lords, or dispensing as much hardship to lords as they suffered from them. Clearly, that was not the case.
State Courts and “Judicialization of Conflict”
Patrimonial courts may have been hopeless venues for peasants, but some scholars have highlighted other institutions in the Prussian justice system which gave peasants a better chance to prosecute their interests against the Junkers. Prussian peasants had the ability, unusual in early modern Europe, to appeal to higher state authority in judicial cases.Footnote 99 Such a maneuver circumvented the (as illustrated above) patently biased patrimonial courts in favor of courts—the High Court of Brandenburg (Kammergericht) and the superior Royal Court of Appeal (Ober-Appellations-Gericht)Footnote 100—where peasants believed they might receive a fairer hearing. The fact that peasants had recourse to airing their grievances and perhaps winning a judgment against their lords in a higher court has been characterized as leading to a process of “judicialization”Footnote 101 of lord-peasant conflict in the decades prior to the reform period.Footnote 102
It does seem to be generally agreed that peasants gained increased access to the legal system after the mid-eighteenth-century legal reforms pushed through by Frederick II’s justice minister Samuel von Cocceji.Footnote 103 These reforms were not explicitly meant to help peasants, but apparently did so by virtue of streamlining and professionalizing a “disgrace” of a legal system that was “expensive, very slow, corrupt and arbitrary.”Footnote 104 This cheapening and accelerating of decision-making, as well as the reorganization of some cumbersome judicial structures bequeathed Prussian peasants, according to Hagen, a “powerful weapon of self-defence” that other European peasants lacked.Footnote 105 Late in the eighteenth century, the king of Prussia complained of an “unbridled passion for litigation” that had seized his peasant subjects.Footnote 106
Hagen’s detailed examination of one lord-peasant legal conflict narrates a paradigmatic example of these legal battles. Stavenow peasants brought a series of lawsuits against their lord from 1766–1797Footnote 107 in a “judicial campaign against their lordship that before 1740, though not wholly unthinkable, would have been procedurally and financially endurable only as an act of the greatest desperation.”Footnote 108 The dispute, originating in the lord’s attempt to force the peasants to perform wood haulage to the Elbe during their weekly manorial service, gradually expanded to encompass other issues before—thirty years later—being resolved by drawing up a state-brokered contract (Urbarium)Footnote 109 stipulating the rights and obligations of both parties.Footnote 110 The peasants forced the lord into an “embittered compromise”Footnote 111 through the use of the state courts, successfully minimizing what he attempted to extract from them.
Opting to challenge one’s lord in a state court was a significant effort for peasants, involving costly expenditure, a protracted timeframe often measured in years, and—even if peasants won—the challenge of enforcing the decision on the lord’s manor.Footnote 112 These obstacles ensured that peasants would only undertake this legal strategy only for the most serious cases. So, how useful, exactly, were the state courts in the peasants’ struggle against their lords’ aggression?
It is difficult to obtain a definitive answer to this question, in part because the rulings of the High Court apparently have not been comprehensively analyzed.Footnote 113 Peasants seem to have been filing lawsuits often enough for one to suppose that they thought that there was a reasonable chance of the state courts ruling in their favor. And indeed, one can find rulings both for and against peasant plaintiffs at this level. Although it does seem that the decisions of patrimonial courts, inevitably deciding in favor of the lord, that were appealed were usually reaffirmed rather than overturned by state courts.Footnote 114 And no less an authority than Frederick II, besieged by petitions from aggrieved peasants on his travels through Prussia, came around to the opinion that his state officials uncritically accepted the judgments of patrimonial courts, writing: “whatever a simple patrimonial judge says, that they believe.” The state judicial system’s habitual deference to Junker courts led to the result, as he observed, that “whenever peasants have disputes with [nobles], they lose.”Footnote 115 Thus, it seems likely that eighteenth-century judicial reforms did assist peasants, but—given the considerable resources required to file one and the uncertainty of the rulings of the state courts—only to a minor extent.
Peasant Docility
So much for the first aspect of the tug-of-war: if there was a tug-of-war happening, the lords had many more hands pulling their end of the rope—and were often aided by the hands of the state—than the peasants did. But what about the second aspect of this metaphor? Was this tug-of-war a game from which the peasants could emerge victorious? Were there any possibilities of the peasants displacing, or at least significantly eroding, the power of the lordly class?
Unlike peasants elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, peasants in Prussia remained notably quiescent. While other countries saw peasants rise to stir a Great Fear, Pugachev rebellion, or Horea-Cloșca uprising,Footnote 116 no such peasant revolt occurred within the Hohenzollern lands. The failure to uncover mass agrarian disruptions from below cannot be blamed, as perhaps may have been true in an earlier era of historiography, on the patriotic disinclination of German historians to pass over events which may have appeared discrediting for national dynasties.Footnote 117 More recent efforts to scour the Prussian landscape for instances of rebellion have largely uncovered what historians in the German Democratic Republic referred to as “lower forms of class struggle”Footnote 118 by peasants: malperformance of labor duties, flight, and/or litigation. Some historians have been puzzled by this disinclination of Prussian peasants to organize large-scale revolt against their nobles; the historian C. B. A. Behrens writes: “The relative docility of the Prussian peasants in the eighteenth century is a phenomenon which has never been explained.”Footnote 119
Examined from a cost-benefit viewpoint of the average Prussian peasant, however, this disinclination to rebel seems less surprising. Junkers had plenty of tools at hand to quell any peasant organizing that grew unruly, and if their resources proved insufficient nobles could always call upon the state to crush any threatening peasant mobilization. The extreme resource differential between peasants and lords explains why no significant rural uprising in Prussia occurred between the seventeenth-century consolidation of the Prussian state and the nineteenth-century Napoleonic defeat.Footnote 120
Hagen’s account of the 1700–02 peasant protests in Brandenburg exemplifies how the Junkers and state had no tolerance for collective peasant insubordination.Footnote 121 In the wake of an early eighteenth-century seigneurial offensive, peasants in 130 villages drew up petitions to higher authorities detailing their grievances. A panoply of wrongs were alleged: lords were unjustly raising rents; lords were demanding onerous labor dues; lords were destroying peasant property; lords were subjecting peasants to painful punishments in jails; lords were skimping on their obligations to peasants; lords were wrongfully enclosing peasant land into demesnes; lords were abusing servants; and so forth. The ringleaders of this protest were rounded up and “perhaps tortured” to force their confessions and reveal their accomplices.Footnote 122 For their transgressions, the protest organizers were sent to a government fortress and sentenced to hard labor. The money the movement had pooled to cover their costs was seized by the state authorities. In short, the peasant protest was mercilessly crushed by an alliance of Junker and state, and the lords’ rent raises proceeded unperturbed. Such ineffectual results starkly illustrate why Prussian peasant revolt was unusual.Footnote 123
A further factor disincentivizing Prussian peasant uprisings could, ironically, be the very “judicialization of conflict” that revisionists have identified as providing an additional asset in the repertoire of peasant contestation. As an alternative to forcibly confronting the lords as a way to press their demands, peasants instead resorted to the less perilous strategy of suing nobles in court. As mentioned, this was often a time and resource consuming process, such that peasant aggrievement was diverted into legal labyrinths which were fundamentally unthreatening to the social order.
Another dimension mitigating the possibility of peasant revolt was the relatively robust living standards of at least the full peasant population in Prussia.Footnote 124 Scholars who have dared to venture an opinion on the ticklish subject of comparative peasant living standards have concluded that Prussian peasants seem to have enjoyed a more favorable economic situation than those elsewhere in Europe.Footnote 125 “East Elbian subjects,” Friedrich writes, “might have been less free, but not as poor as some of their rural contemporaries.”Footnote 126 This theory is further strengthened by the predominant exception to this pattern: Silesia. Silesia, more than any other Prussian region, was a recurrent epicenter of peasant unrest.Footnote 127 Not coincidentally, Silesia also featured a relatively high proportion of landless peasants.Footnote 128 Its population density was around twice that of other Prussian regions.Footnote 129 Furthermore, Silesia was the home of Prussia’s largest noble landowners and highest service obligations.Footnote 130 It is rather unsurprising that the “most impoverished and brutalized”Footnote 131 peasants in Prussia were the most prone to revolt,Footnote 132 even if the Prussian authorities never allowed the disturbances to escalate to uncontrollable proportions.
Other contributory factors for the lack of peasant revolt in Prussia have been proposed by various authors. One locates the absence of rebellion in the stratification of peasant society itself. The abundant schisms within the social hierarchy of peasants made it “difficult, if not impossible, for class solidarity to develop.”Footnote 133 A further contributory factor may have been the limited degree of social mobility that existed in peasant society, making a strategy of personal advancement preferable to a strategy of class conflict.Footnote 134 Others point to the competent administration of Frederick II: his restraint on taxation, prevention of large-scale famine, and relatively inoffensive bureaucracy, this hypothesis goes, prevented severe peasant discontent with the state.Footnote 135 Yet still others have provided a cultural explanation which identifies Lutheranism as the source of peasant docility.Footnote 136 But such explanations seem to pale beside the brute force that could be wielded by Junker and state to disorganize the occasional incipient peasant efforts to mobilize against the nobility which intermittently appeared throughout the eighteenth century.
In sum, large-scale peasant protest in Prussia never appeared during the eighteenth century because even small-scale peasant protest was a highly fraught endeavor. The accounts of these episodes that have survived indicate that the most powerful actors in the Prussian countryside had a very limited tolerance for such activity, and moved to suppress it as soon as possible. The Junkers, usually resident on their estates and highly attuned to the social dynamics of their subordinates, could call on the forces of the most militarized state in Europe the moment any situation seemed it had a potential of spiraling out of their control. Whatever other contributory factors mitigating the likelihood of peasant protest may have existed in Prussia, the overwhelming force that was brought to bear against potentially threatening peasant organizing efforts seems sufficient to explain the lack of large-scale peasant protest during the eighteenth century. Thus, the “tug-of-war” in rural Prussia was a game that could never truly be won by the peasants.
Conclusion: Villagers as Victims
One of the most common interpretive claims of the revisionist literature is to assert that, pace earlier interpretations, villagers were not victims of aristocratic oppression. Hagen criticizes the deficiencies of the preceding literature, in which “east-Elbian villagers appear as their noble lordships’ victims, coerced into silent submission and demoralization.”Footnote 137 Such a portrayal, Hagen writes, “reduces to passivity” peasants who are ill served by the “one-dimensionality” of an account of Junkers dominating them.Footnote 138 In Hagen’s view, peasants wrongly appear as victims in the narratives of various historians of Germany, including Carsten,Footnote 139 Rosenberg,Footnote 140 Hanna Schissler,Footnote 141 and Knapp,Footnote 142 among others. Cerman repeats these charges frequently: he writes that “earlier approaches to research made the mistake of thinking that villagers were mere victims”Footnote 143 and later asserts, “villagers should not be regarded as powerless victims.”Footnote 144 Taking these arguments to the extreme is Eddie,Footnote 145 who regards serfdom as a “mutually beneficial relationship” struck between lords and peasants, who by no means should be regarded as the “oppressed serfs of historical myth.”Footnote 146
To its credit, this revisionist posture has gone in tandem with an ambitious research effort that has shed light on the previously obscured tapestry of Prussian rural life. Mining estate records for examples of peasant behavior and decision-making has enhanced scholarly knowledge of the everyday operation of the manorial system. More than ever before, the quotidian resistance of peasants to their superiors has been revealed in considerable detail. And it is understandable that revisionist historians might not want to dwell on the familiar theme of lords’ subordination of their peasants, a story that has been told by historians of various persuasions.
However, the revisionist orientation also has shortcomings. First is its exaggeration of the deficiencies of previous historiography. Carsten and Rosenberg, even if the emphasis of their works lies elsewhere, were nevertheless aware of peasant self-assertion in Prussia and the imperfect control that lords exerted over their subjects. Rosenberg, in the same work in which Hagen criticizes him for ignoring peasant struggle, writes of a widespread “silent guerilla war” (ein stiller Kleinkrieg) raging between lord and peasant over service obligations, involving insubordination and flight from the manor.Footnote 147 Carsten, too, related many instances of peasant unrest in his work on the Junkers.Footnote 148
But more importantly, the revisionist historiography fails to acknowledge that peasants were victims of the manorial system, to a significant extent. Villagers’ latitude was significantly limited by the servile and subordinated position they occupied relative to the lord, which involved restrictions on movement, their judicial proceedings being overseen at the local level by a patently biased lordly court, the forced conscription of their children into manorial servitude, their service obligations due to the manor, being forced to additionally pay the lord for essential services that he monopolized, marriages being subject to the lord’s approval, the physical violence that lords and their henchmen meted out with impunity, and so on. If victimhood—in its definitional sense of being wronged or mistreated by another party—can describe anything, surely it applies to the condition of Prussian peasants in the eighteenth century.
The claim of victimhood is to be distinguished from various other claims that are often conflated with it in the revisionist literature. Peasants being victims does not mean that they did not possess agency, or that they were economically unprosperous (by standards of the time), or that they were completely incapable of defending themselves, or that their quotidian experiences commonly appear in archives or historical accounts. It is completely possible for peasants to possess agency, a capacity for resistance and be relatively economically well-off but nevertheless degraded and politically disempowered by serfdom. Surely it is possible to construct an understanding of eighteenth-century rural Prussia that includes both peasant victimization and peasant resistance to it.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to John Torpey, Charles Post, Benjamin Hett, the participants in New York University’s Economic and Political Sociology Workshop, and the anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on previous versions of this article.
Daniel Colligan is a Ph.D candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
