To aid comprehension of the following work by Wolff, I must 
preface it with a few words. 

Germany east of the Elbe and north of the Erzgebirge and 
Riesengebirge is a country wrested in the latter half of the Middle 
Ages from the invading Slavs, and Germanised once again by 
German colonists. The conquering German knights and barons to 
whom the land was allotted set themselves up as the “founders” 
[““Grinder”] of villages, laying out their district in village lands, 
each of which was divided into a number of smallholdings or hides 
of equal size. To every hide there belonged a house plot with yard 
and garden in the village itself. These hides were distributed by lot 
to the newly arrived Franconian (Rhenish Franconian and Dutch), 
Saxon and Frisian colonists; in return the colonists had to render 
very moderate, firmly fixed dues and services to the founder, i.e. 
the knight or baron. The peasants were hereditary masters of 
their hides as long as they performed these services. In addition 
they enjoyed the same rights of usufruct to timber, grazing, 
pannage, etc., in the forest of the founder (the subsequent 
landlord) as the West German peasants possessed on_ their 
common land. The cultivated village land was subject to compul- 
sory crop rotation, being chiefly cultivated in winter fields, 
summer fields and fallow fields in accordance with the three-field 
system; fallow and harvested fields were grazed jointly by the 
cattle of the peasantry and the founder. All village affairs were 
settled in the assembly of the manorial inhabitants, i.e. the 
hide-owners, by majority decision. The rights of the noble 
founders were restricted to collecting the dues and participating in 
the fallow grazing and stubble pasture, to the surplus from the 

yield of the forests, and to taking the chair at the assembly of 
manorial inhabitants, who were all personally free men. This was 
the average condition of the German peasants from the Elbe to 
East Prussia and Silesia. And this condition was on the whole 
considerably much better than that of west and south German 
peasants at the time, who were already then engaged in a violent, 
continually recurring struggle with the feudal lords for their old 
hereditary rights, and had to a large extent already succumbed to 
a form of dependence that was far more oppressive, threatening 
to or even destructive of their personal freedom. 

The feudal lords’ increasing need for money in the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries naturally led to attempts to oppress and 
exploit the peasants in contravention to agreements in the 
north-east as well. But certainly not on the same scale and with the 
same success as in South Germany. The population east of the 
Elbe was still sparse, the wasteland was still extensive; the 
reclamation of this wasteland, the spread of cultivation and the 
foundation of new tributary villages here remained the surest 
means of enrichment for the feudal landlords too. Furthermore, 
here, on the imperial border with Poland, larger states had already 
been formed— Pomerania, Brandenburg, the Electorate of Saxony 
(Silesia was Austrian)—and for this reason the peace of the land 
was better observed, the feuds and depredations of the nobility 
were more forcefully suppressed than in the fragmented areas on 
the Rhine, in Franconia and Swabia. But those who suffered most 
from the permanent state of war were precisely the peasants. 

Only in the neighbourhood of subjugated Polish or Lithuanian- 
Prussian villages did the nobility more frequently attempt to force 
the colonists settled there in accordance with German manorial law 
into the same serfdom as the Polish and Prussian subjects. This 
occurred in Pomerania and in the Prussian area of the Order,?! 
more rarely in Silesia. 

As a result of this more favourable position, the peasants east of 
the Elbe remained almost untouched by the powerful movement 
of the south and west German peasants in the final quarter of the 
fifteenth and first quarter of the sixteenth centuries, and when the 
revolution of 1525 broke out it found in East Prussia only a faint 
echo, which was suppressed without great difficulty. The peasants 
east of the Elbe left their rebelling brothers in the lurch, and they 
received their just deserts. In the regions where the great Peasant 
War had raged, the peasants were now made serfs without further 
ado, subjected to unlimited labour services and dues dependent 
solely on the arbitrary power of the landlord. Their free land was 

simply turned into seigneurial property, on which they only 
retained the usufruct accorded to them by the landlord in his 
bounty. This, the very ideal state of feudal landlordship, to which 
the German nobility had in vain been aspiring all through the 
Middle Ages and which it had finally attained now that the feudal 
system was decaying, was then gradually extended to the lands 
east of the Elbe as well. Not only were the peasants’ contractual 
rights of usufruct in the seigneurial forest (in so far as they had 
not previously been curtailed) transformed into revocable conces- 
sions bestowed at the grace of the landlord; not only were labour 
services and tributes unlawfully increased; but new burdens were 
also introduced, such as the “laudemien” (dues to the landlord on 
the death of the peasant smallholder) which were. considered 
characteristic of serfdom; or traditional, innocuous services were 
given the character of services rendered only by serfs, but not by 
free men. In less than a hundred years the free peasants east of 
the Elbe were thus turned into serfs, at first in fact, and then also 
in law. 

In the meantime the feudal nobility became more and more 
bourgeois. To an ever increasing extent it became indebted to the 
urban money capitalists, and money thus came to be its pressing 
need. Yet there was no money to be had from the peasant, its serf, 
but to begin with only labour or arable produce, and the farms, 
tilled under the most difficult conditions, would only yield a 
minimum of such produce over and above the most meagre 
livelihood for the working owners. Alongside, however, lay the 
lucrative estates of the monasteries, worked by the labour services 
of dependents or serfs under expert supervision at the expense of 
the lord. Hitherto the petty nobility had almost never been able to 
practise this kind of management on their domains, and the larger 
among them and the princes only in exceptional cases. But now, 
on the one hand, the restoration of the peace of the land made 
large-scale cultivation possible everywhere, while, on the other, it 
was increasingly forced on the nobility by its growing need for 
money. The running of large estates with the labour services of 
serf peasants at the expense of the landlord gradually became the 
source of income which had to compensate the nobility for the loss 
of the now outmoded robber-knight system. But where could they 
obtain the necessary land area? True, the noble was landlord of an 
area large or small, but with few exceptions this was entirely 
allotted to hereditary copyholders,”’? who had just as much right 
to their farms and hides, including the land rights, as the noble lord 
himself, as long as they performed the stipulated services. This 

had to be remedied, and what was necessary above all was the 
transformation of the peasants into serfs. For even if the expulsion 
of serf peasants from house and farm was no less a breach of the 
law and an act of violence than the expulsion of free copyholders, 
it was still far easier to extenuate it with the aid of the now 
habitual Roman law. In short, once the peasants had been 
successfully turned into serfs, the necessary number of peasants 
were chased away or resettled on seigneurial land as cottagers, day 
labourers with a cottage and small garden. While the earlier 
strongholds of the nobility gave way to their new ones, more or 
less open manor houses, for this very reason the farms of formerly 
free peasants gave way to the wretched hovels of bond servants, 
on a much wider scale. 

Once the seigneurial estate—the dominium, as it was called in 
Silesia—had been established, it was then simply a matter of 
setting in motion the labour power of the peasants to work it. And 
this is where the second advantage of serfdom showed itself. The 
former labour services of the peasants as laid down by contract 
were by no means appropriate for this end. The vast majority of 
them were restricted to services in the public interest—road and 
bridge building, etc.—building work on the seigneurial castle, the 
labour of the women and girls at the castle in different branches 
of industry, and personal servants’ duties. But as soon as the 
peasant had been turned into a serf and the latter had been 
equated with the Roman slave by Roman lawyers, the noble lord 
changed his tune entirely. With the assent of the lawyers at the 
bench he now demanded from the peasants unlimited services, as 
much, whenever and wherever he pleased. The peasant had to do 
labour service, drive, plough, sow and harvest as soon as he was 
summoned to do so, even if his own field was neglected and his 
own harvest ruined by rain. And his corn tribute and money 
tribute were likewise raised to the extreme limits of what was 
possible. 

But that was not enough. The no less noble reigning prince, 
who was present everywhere east of the Elbe, also needed money, 
a lot of money. In return for his permitting the noble to subjugate 
his peasants, the noble allowed him to impose state taxes on the 
same peasants—the nobleman himself was of course exempt from 
taxation! And to cap it all, the same reigning prince sanctioned the 
spreading transformation of the landlord’s former right to preside 
at the—long since abolished—free manorial court of the peasants 
into the right of patrimonial jurisdiction and manorial police, 
according to which the lord of the manor was not only chief of 

police but also the sole judge over his peasants—even when 
personally involved in a case—so that the peasant could only 
indict the lord of the manor through the lord of the manor 
himself. He was thus legislator, judge and executor in one person, 
and absolute and supreme lord of his manor. 

These notorious conditions, which are not matched even in 
Russia—for there the peasant still had his self-governing com- 
mune—reached their peak in the period between the Thirty 
Years’ War and the redeeming defeat at Jena.” The terrible 
hardships of the Thirty Years’ War allowed the nobility to 
complete the subjugation of the peasants; the devastation of 
countless peasant farms allowed them to be added without 
hindrance to the dominium of the manorial estate; the resettle- 
ment of the population forcibly driven into vagabondage by war 
devastation provided the nobility with an excuse to fetter them to 
the soil as serfs. But that, too, was only short lived. For scarcely 
had the dreadful wounds of war begun to heal in the following 
fifty years, the fields again being tilled, the population growing, 
than the hunger of the noble landlords for peasant land and 
peasant labour once again made itself felt. The seigneurial 
dominium was not large enough to absorb all the labour that 
could still be knocked out of the serfs—“knock”’ being used here 
in a highly literal sense. The system of degrading peasants into 
cottagers, bond day-labourers, had worked magnificently. From 
the beginning of the eighteenth century it assumes ever greater 
momentum; it is now called “peasant expropriation [Bauernlegen]. 
One “expropriates” as many peasants as possible, according to the 
circumstances; first one leaves as many as are necessary to 
perform the draught labour, turning the rest into cottagers 
(Dreschgartner, Hausler, Instleute**! or whatever they are called) who 
have to sweat away on the estate year in, year out in return for a 
cottage with a tiny potato patch, a wretched day-wage in corn and 
only very little in cash. Where his lordship is rich enough to 
provide his own draught-animals, he “expropriates” the other 
peasants too, adding their hides to the seigneurial estate. In this 
manner the entire large landed property of the German nobility, 
but particularly east of the Elbe, is composed of stolen peasant land, 
and even if it is taken away from the robbers again without 
compensation, they will still not have got their just deserts. Really 
they should pay compensation as well. 

Gradually the reigning sovereigns noticed that this system was 
by no means to their advantage, however convenient it might be 
for the nobility. The peasants had paid state taxes before they 

were “expropriated”; but when their hides were added to the 
tax-free dominiums the state did not receive a farthing from them 
and scarcely a penny from the newly-settled cottagers. A 
proportion of the “expropriated” peasants were quite simply 
chased away as superfluous for the running of the estate, and thus 
became free, i.e. outlawed. The population of the plains declined, 
and since the reigning prince had started complementing his 
expensive recruited army through the cheaper way of conscripting 
the peasants, this was by no means a matter of indifference to 
him. Thus we find throughout the eighteenth century, particularly 
in Prussia, one decree after another which was supposed to put a 
stop to “peasant expropriation”; but their fate was the same as 
ninety-nine percent of the immeasurable amount of waste-paper 
that has been issued by German governments since the capitularies 
of Charlemagne.” They were only valid on paper; the nobility’ 
was not greatly burdened, and the practice of “peasant expropria- 
tion” continued. 

Even the fearful example which the Great Revolution in France 
made of the stubborn feudal nobility only frightened them for a 
moment. Everything remained as before, and what Frederick II 
had not been able to do,” his weak, short-sighted nephew 
Frederick William III was least of all able to carry out. Then came 
the vengeance. On October 14, 1806 the entire Prussian state was 
smashed to smithereens in a single day near Jena and Auerstedt, 
and the Prussian peasant has every reason to celebrate this day 
and March 18, 1848 more than all the Prussian victories from 
Mollwitz to Sedan.”** Now, finally, it began to dawn dimly on the 
Prussian government, which had been chased back right to the 
Russian border, that the free landowning French peasants’ sons 
could not be defeated by the sons of serf peasants who were daily 
liable to be evicted from house and home; it finally noticed that 
the peasant was also a human being, so to speak. Now something 
was to be done. 

But no sooner was peace concluded and Court and government 
back in Berlin than the noble intentions again melted like ice in 
the March sun. The famous edict of October 9, 1807 had 
admittedly abolished the name of serfdom or hereditary subjection 
on paper (and even this only from Martinmas 1810), but in reality 
almost everything had been left as before. That is how things 
remained; the King, who was as faint-hearted as he was bigoted, 
allowed himself to be led, as before, by the peasant-plundering 
nobility—-so much so that from 1808 to 1810 four decrees 
appeared once again permitting the landowners to “expropriate” 

peasants in a number of cases—in contravention of the edict of 
1807.7 Not until Napoleon’s war against Russia was already in 
sight was it again remembered that the peasants would be needed, 
and the edict of September 14, 1811 was issued whereby peasants 
and landlords were recommended to come to an amicable arrange- 
ment within two years on the redemption of labour service and 
dues as well as the seigneurial property rights. A royal commission 
was then to implement this settlement compulsorily in accordance 
with fixed rules. The main rule was that after relinquishing a third 
of his landholding (or its value in money), the peasant should 
become a free proprietor of the part remaining to him. But even 
this redemption, so immensely advantageous to the nobility, 
remained illusory. For the nobility held back in order to obtain 
even more, and after the two years had elapsed Napoleon was 
back in the country. 

No sooner had he been finally expelled from the land—to the 
frightened King’s constant promises of a constitution and popular 
representation—than al] the fine assurances were again forgotten. 
As early as May 29, 1816—not even a year after the victory at 
Waterloo **°—a declaration of the 1811 edict was issued which 
read quite differently. In it, the redeemability of feudal dues was 
no longer the rule, but the exception; it was only to apply to those 
arable estates valued in the land tax rolls (i.e. the larger ones) 
which had been settled by peasant occupiers back in 1749 in 
Silesia, 1752 in East Prussia, 1763 in Brandenburg and 
Pomerania,* and 1774 in West Prussia! In addition, a number of 
labour services at sowing and harvest time could be retained. And 
when the redemption commissions finally got down to serious 
business in 1817, the agrarian legislation regressed much faster 
than the agrarian commissions progressed. On June 7, 1821 there 
came a new redemption order, expressly laying down the 
limitation of redeemability to larger farms, so-called Acker- 
nahrungen,”* and urging the perpetuation of labour services and 
other feudal dues for the owners of smaller holdings—cottagers, 
Hdusler, Dreschgartner—in short all settled day-labourers. From 
now on this remained the rule. Not until 1845, the redemption of 

* Prussian perfidy is fathomless. Here it shows itself again in the very date. 
Why was 1763 chosen? Quite simply because in the following year, on July 12, 
1764, Frederick II issued a sharp edict ordering the recalcitrant nobles, under pain 
of punishment, to return the large numbers of farms and smallholdings confiscated 
since 1740, and particularly since the outbreak of the Seven Years’ war,?27 to their 
rightful occupants within one year. In so far as this edict had any effect, it was thus 
annulled in 1816 to the advantage of the nobility. 

these kinds of dues made possible by way of exception for Saxony ?* 
and Silesia other than through the joint assent of landlord and 
peasant °— for which, obviously, no law was necessary. Further- 
more, the capital sum with which the services, translated into 
money or corn revenue, could be paid off once and for all, was 
fixed at twenty-five times the rent, and the instalments could only 
be made in sums of not less than 100 thalers””? at once; while as 
early as 1809 the peasants on the state domains had _ been 
permitted to buy redemption at twenty times the amount of the 
revenue. In short, the much-lauded, enlightened agrarian legisla- 
tion of the “state of intelligence” had only one ambition: to 
salvage every bit of feudalism that could still be salvaged. 

The practical result was *in keeping with these lamentable 
measures. The agrarian commissions understood the benevolent 
intentions of the government perfectly and, as Wolff drastically 
depicts in detail, they made sure that the peasant was soundly 
cheated in favour of the nobility in the matter of these 
redemptions. From 1816 to 1848 70,582 peasant holdings were 
redeemed with a total landed property of 5,158,827 Morgen, 
making up °/, of all the larger bond peasants. However, only 
289,651 of the smaller occupiers were redeemed (over 228,000 of 
these being in Silesia, Brandenburg and Saxony). The _ total 
number of annual service days redeemed amounted to: draught 
service, 5,978,295; manual service, 16,869,824. In return the high 
nobility received compensation as follows: capital payment, 
18,544,766 thalers; cash annuities, 1,599,992 thalers; rye revenue, 
260,069 Scheffel‘?’ annually; and finally, peasant land relin- 
quished, 1,533,050 Morgen.* Apart from the other forms of 
compensation, the former landlords thus received a full third of 
what had been the peasants’ land! 

1848 finally opened the eyes of the Prussian backwoods Junkers, 
who were as narrow-minded as they were self-important. The 
peasants— particularly in Silesia, where the latifundia system and 
the concomitant downgrading of the population to day-labouring 
cottagers was furthest developed—stormed the manor houses, 

* For these statistics, see Meitzen, Der Boden des Preussischen Staates, I, p. 432 ff. 

Dienste in der Provinz Schlesien. Vom 31. Oktober 1845” — Ed. 

burnt the redemption documents that had already been con- 
cluded, and forced their lordships to renounce in writing all claim 
to any further services. The excesses—wicked even in the eyes of 
the bourgeoisie then in power—were, admittedly, suppressed with 
military force and severely punished; but now even the most 
brainless Junker’s skull had realised that labour service had 
become impossible. Rather none at all than that from these 
rebellious peasants! It was now simply a matter of saving what 
could still be saved; and the landowning nobility really did have 
the insolence to demand compensation for these services, which 
had become impossible. And no sooner was reaction more or less 
firmly back in the saddle than it fulfilled this wish. 

First, however, there came the law of October 9, 1848, which 
adjourned all pending redemption negotiations and the lawsuits 
arising out of them, as well as a whole number of other lawsuits 
between landlords and peasants. As a result the entire, much- 
praised agrarian legislation from 1807 on was condemned. But 
then as soon as the so-called National Assembly in Berlin had been 
successfully dissolved and the coup d’état was accomplished,* the 
feudal-bureaucratic ministry of Brandenburg-Manteuffel consi- 
dered itself strong enough to oblige the nobility with a generous 
step. It promulgated the provisional decree of December 20, 1848, 
whereby the services, etc., to be performed by the peasants until 
further settlement were restored on the old terms, with few 
exceptions. It was this decree that prompted our Wolff to deal 
with the conditions of the Silesian peasants in the Neue Rhevnische 
Zeitung. 

Meanwhile it was over a year before the new, final Redemption 
Law of March 2, 1850 was enacted. The agrarian legislation of 
1807-47, which even today is still praised to the skies by Prussian 
patriots, cannot be more sharply condemned than it was, albeit 
reluctantly, in the motives for this law—and it is the Branden- 
burg-Manteuffel ministry that speaks here. 

Enough: a few insignificant dues were simply abolished, the 
redemption of the rest was decreed by transforming them into 
cash annuities, and their capitalisation set at eighteen times this 
sum. To mediate the capital instalments annuity offices were 
established, which by means of well-known amortisation operations 
were to pay the landlord twenty times the amount of the rent, 
while the peasant was relieved of all obligation by fifty-six years of 
paying off the amortisation instalments. 

If the ministry condemned in the motives the entire preceding 
agrarian legislation, the commission of the Chamber condemned 
the new law. It was not to apply to the left bank of the Rhine, 
which had long since been freed of all that rubbish by the French 
Revolution. The commission concurred in this because at most a 
single one of the 109 sections of the bill was applicable there 
anyway: 

“While all the other stipulations do not apply there at all, rather they might 
easily create confusion and needless unrest ... because of legislation on the left bank 
of the Rhine having gone much further with regard to the redemption of 
real-property dues than it was at present intended to go’’,? 
and they could not expect the Rhinelanders to allow themselves to 
be brought down again to the new Prussian ideal state. 

Now at last a serious attempt was made to deal with the 
abolition of feudal forms of labour and exploitation. In a few 
years the redemption of the peasants was effected. From 1850 to 
the end of 1865 the following were redeemed: 1. the rest of the 
larger peasant proprietors; there were by now only 12,706 left 
with an area of 352,305 Morgen; 2. the smaller proprietors, 
including the cottagers; but whilst not quite 290,000 had been 
redeemed up to 1848, in the last fifteen years all of 1,014,341 had 
bought themselves free. Accordingly the number of redeemed 
days of draught labour due the larger farms was only 356,274, the 
number of days of manual service, however, 6,670,507. Similarly 
the compensation paid in plots of land, and also due only on the 
larger farms, amounted to only 113,071 Morgen, and the annual 
annuity to be paid in rye to 55,522 Scheffel. On the other hand 
the landed nobility received 3,890,136 thalers in new annual cash 
annuities, and in addition another 19,697,483 thalers in final 
capital compensation.* 

The sum which the entire Prussian landed proprietors, includ- 
ing the state domains, have lifted from the pockets of the peasants 
for the free return of part of the land previously stolen from the 
peasants—up to this century—amounts to 213,861,035 thalers 
according to Meitzen, I, p. 437. But this is far too little. For a 
Morgen of cultivated land is here “only” assessed at 20 thalers, a 
Morgen of forest land at 10 thalers and a Scheffel of rye at 1 
thaler, which is much too low. Furthermore, only “the compensa- 

* These figures have been arrived at by calculating the difference between the 
sum totals in the two tables in Meitzen, I, pp. 432 and 434.232 

draft Redemption Law of March 2, 1850. Italics by Engels.— Ed. 

tion established with certainty” is taken into account, thus making 
no allowance for at least all the settlements reached privately 
between the parties involved. As Meitzen himself says, the 
redeemed services entered here, hence also the compensation paid 
for them, are only a “minimum”. 

We may thus assume that the sum paid by the peasants to the 
nobility and the treasury to be released from unlawfully imposed 
dues amounted to at least 300,000,000 thalers, perhaps a thousand 
million marks. 

A thousand million marks, to get back free of dues only the 
smallest part of the land stolen over a period of 400 years! The 
smallest part, since the nobility and the treasury retained by far 
the largest part in the form of entailed and other manorial estates 
and domains! 

London, November 24, 1885 
Frederick Engels