twelfth centuries it was not uncommon for freemen, especially wealthy ones, to own lands scattered throughout Bohemia or Moravia. (It seems to have been rare, however, for a freeman based in Bohemia to own lands in Moravia, and vice versa.) For even the most prominent magnates, this dispersion of lands meant that neither individuals nor families had a local base of power, isolated from the events and influences which shaped society in the Czech Lands as a whole. The freemen’s identification as a community remained centered around the duke and his capital at Prague, and their increasing local influence as wealthy landowners translated into greater leverage at that level only slowly. The occasional use of place-name designations, and their routine employment in witness lists during the thirteenth century, reinforces the impression that the consolidation and colonization of land was the means by which certain individual magnates, and others who followed their example, made themselves rich and prominent—and thereby less dependent upon the duke. At the end of the twelfth century, neither laymen nor ecclesiastics were banking their fortunes on the duke’s favor alone, but working instead to exploit their own properties more actively and to amass sufficient resources to continue to do so.
Warriors and Servitude
Hroznata’s foundation charter for Teplá from 1197—virtually the last charter issued in Bohemia during the twelfth century—refers strikingly to “warriors, who hold my estates from me.”126 Here, then, is a hint that prevailing conditions of military service were beginning to change, whether by limiting participation to specialists or by connecting military activity to landholding. Certainly, at the end of the twelfth century, lesser freemen still were capable and expected to participate in military activities. The German merchants of Prague, we recall, were obligated to fight pro patria and to contribute “shields” to the city’s defenses when the duke was away. In his chronicle, Gerlach could still describe armies made up of both warriors and “rustics” (“milites et rusticos”) in the last quarter of the twelfth century—even as such a description simultaneously points to a new meaning for the term miles.127 Soběslav II’s insistence upon having pauperes in his army at all times was noteworthy perhaps because it ran against the trend.128 Vincent, who gives a vivid description of peasants turning in their ploughs for swords in eagerness to join the imperial campaign to Milan in 1158, provides a clue to the beginnings of more restricted military participation: “For the selection of an army against Milan, a court at Prague was announced to the Czechs, at which suitable warriors were chosen.”129 Not everyone who volunteered was allowed to take part. One can imagine Vladislav II surveying the assembled men and immediately selecting all those better-trained and better-armed and ordering many part-time warriors home. However far it may have progressed at the turn of the century, the increasing limitation of military tasks to specialists surely contributed to widening the gulf between ordinary free farmers and wealthy magnates, especially in conjunction with consolidation and colonization.
This begs the further issue of whether the emergence of specialized warriors’ activities might have begun to alter the relationship between military service and landholding. Hroznata’s charter points to a new group forming in the growing gap between smallholders and landed magnates, for it speaks of men “who hold my lands from me.”130 Differentiated in the document from Hroznata’s unfree familia, they held whole villages but were not the owners of the land, as the redundant “my lands from me” emphasizes. Certainly, when Hroznata donated all his property to Teplá these lands were included. Because such warriors, like Hroznata himself, would have been obligated to muster at the duke’s call, it is difficult to imagine a military rationale for Hroznata’s maintaining his own knights. One possible explanation for this apparent infeudation is that, in the general land-grabbing atmosphere, Hroznata felt the need to secure his relatively broad territory with warriors who would defend it as their own. Elsewhere, usurpers seized lands belonging to the German monastery of Waldsassen, who turned to the duke to have them returned.131 Hroznata perhaps took measures to assure that such problems did not arise, infeoffing (or something like it) men who would assist his colonization efforts—effectively promoting, even farming out, the hard work of landclearing and settlement. For this reason then, even after ownership was transferred to the new monastery, the warriors living on Hroznata’s lands in the forest, that is, the newest lands, were entitled to keep them without the payment of any fee.132
The infeudation of poorer warriors necessarily lagged behind the consolidation and colonization of lands that made it feasible. Of all the men listed in the witness lists from the twelfth century, and even into the first quarter of the thirteenth, only three are named as the “warriors” of other men. The charter, in which one Dethleb grants land to Plasy from his and his brother’s holdings, concludes: “Klusen with his brother Baviar, Dluhomil, and Peter their miles.” 133 The ducal confirmation of Milhost’s foundation of Mašt’ov similarly lists: “Agna and Peter, sons of Milhost, Conrad and Siegfried his warriors.”134 Although the reference to “their” in the first charter is obscure, the two knights listed here are clearly attached to Milhost.135 That only one or two men are named in both cases and the fact that they fall at the very end of the witness lists are suggestive.136 The striking coincidence that the same men, like Milhost and Hroznata, who held broad lands and established monasteries should have been those with whom knights can be associated may, as usual, be a function of the sources. Yet it also reflects something more, because the crucial innovation appears not in the association of middling and lesser warriors with, or even their employment by, the most prominent magnates, but the role of land as a means of permanent, or at least long-term and formal, bond between them.
Consolidation of land by certain wealthy men had another, more pervasive and better documented, effect. For some men to expand their holdings, others had to lose theirs. To be sure, with the colonization of new lands this need not have been a zero-sum game, especially given how much of the Czech Lands was still unsettled in the twelfth century. Nevertheless, people were needed to work the newly cleared territory, creating conditions of abundant land and scarce labor resources. The demand for labor must have increased dramatically as forest areas were settled.137 And as some landowners gained more and more land, they must have begun to dwarf their neighbors; ordinary freemen were probably less able to defend themselves and their lands from the encroachment of wealthy and powerful magnates. Consolidation and colonization thus had two profound social consequences: some men of middling rank, more capable warriors perhaps, became knights of other magnates and settled on their land, as we have seen; meanwhile the poorest freemen, most of whom must have been farmers and craftsmen with small plots, became the subjects of lords and thus progressively indistinguishable from the unfree peasantry.
The dearth of information about the peasantry—free or unfree—makes it difficult to trace with accuracy their fate in the late twelfth century. One reference, however, from as early as the 1140s, provides an intriguing clue. The foundation of Strahov includes the duke’s grant of:
his court at Radonice with all its appurtenances, namely villages, unfree men and women, and other various pertinent things of theirs. The names of the unfree are these: Bus, Milan, Blas, Onata, Všan, Ban, Druhan, Jakub, Bohdan, Ostoj, keeper of horses, Čelek, cobbler, Modlak, Nedoma, Lubata, Radosta, blacksmith, Dedon and Straž, makers of pitch-huts. In the same village these voluntarily subjected themselves to servitude: Hradata, Sudar, Bohdan, Božepor, Gogul, a gardener, Vilkon, Bohuta, Soběstoj.138
Assuming tentatively that all the heads of household in Radonice are listed here, two-thirds of the inhabitants were unfree, including several craftsmen. Without more information about legal privileges or attendant obligations, it is impossible to know what led eight more to alter their status voluntarily from free to unfree. One can imagine plenty of incentive for the lord, lay or ecclesiastic, to bribe, cajole, or compel them to become his subjects, thus ensuring complete control of the village with its appurtenances. Small-time farmers, owning modest plots and wishing to maintain their independence, must have been under extraordinary pressure in a village largely controlled by a single landlord. The indication that freemen willingly became subject to Strahov at the time of the grant contrasts
