EN
The aim of this article is to present the socio-economic situation of the zagrodnik peasants in the Przemyśl district in the 1630s. The group of peasants known by this name was regarded, besides regular peasants, as the most numerous and it participated considerably in the manorial system of the described Crown lands. The manorial system, which had been developing dynamically until the 1620s, was stopped by recurrent Tartar invasions between 1620 and 1629, which ruined the population and economic potential. At that time the number of the zagrodniks decreased; in some villages they were not even recorded by the royal estate managers or tax collectors. The zagrodniks were similar to the chałupniks (serfs – owners of a simple dwelling and not more than that), which sometimes made it difficult to distinguish between them. There were villages in the Przemyśl district where the zagrodniks were a largest group or almost equal in number to the regular peasants. A characteristic feature of the zagrodniks was possessing land consisting of 1/4 lan, which was hardly ever revealed during inspections or in tax registers. As the zagrodniks did not have enough money to maintain their own farms and the farms were very small, they would hire themselves out for work in the landed estates, especially during harvest time; they would also get employed in the farms of richer peasants. Out of the obligations for the landed estate corvée was the hardest; the zagrodniks from the Przemyśl royal estates worked 2-3 days a week, additionally watching over farm buildings, repairing roads and bridges, spinning flax and hemp, scything, raking, bringing in hay from the field and binding it in sheaves. One of the major obligations towards the lord was rent; paying rent in kind, hardly present in the sources, was not very important in the zagrodniks’ case. The fact that the size of the zagrodnik farm is hard to estimate, as it is largely missing from source materials, has not helped this research. It needs to be said that the zagrodniks from the Przemyśl district, like in other royal estates of that kind, were an integral part of the developing manorial system economy, indispensable manpower, bending under the burden of the lords’ politics.