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peasant’s status would never again
be so strictly categorised, so closely tied to birth, and so
influenced by rigid legal concepts. Economically, the classification was largely justified – and
not just in Slovene territory – by one’s status in production, especially in the division of the
agrarian units within a seigneury (into manors and mansi). The bondsmen were originally the
workforce at the manor that worked the seigneury (i.e. the demesne) land. This made them
more dependent than freemen, who worked on a more independent basis, and were therefore
freer. During the colonisation period in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the manors were
already losing their previous importance in terms of production, as the mansus system (hufe,
hube; cf. English: hide) began to dominate. The relatively standard production method on the
mansi, usually single-family agricultural units, became the basis for a more standardised
personal status among the peasant population. Instead of the previous differentiation based on
status at birth, peasants’ personal status was becoming defined in relation to the land they
worked. A bondsman was now anyone who accepted work on bonded land. The special social
stratum of kosezi went through the same social change in the Late Middle Ages: the status of
kosez was no longer determined by birth, and a kosez was simply someone who possessed a
parcel of land traditionally associated with kosezi (
koseščina). Around the middle of the
thirteenth century, land-related dependency in the sense of bondage began to predominate
over other criteria, although memories and traces of old distinctions lasted until the second
half of the fifteenth century. By then, the vast majority of peasants had been brought under the
standard status of bondage, which only came to an end in 1848 with the emancipation of the
peasants.
Peasants and their families represented the majority of the population in the feudal
period, over 80% by the fifteenth century. In those terms, Slovenes truly formed a peasant
nation, though that was by no means peculiarly Slovene or an attribute that would
differentiate them from other European people or environments. The stereotypes of a nation of
serfs and servants that arose during the nineteenth century, and that were even promulgated as
political mottos by Slovene politicians of the time (as though the moment had arrived to rise
up after a thousand years under the yoke), apply even less. The term serf is completely
inapplicable as a general designation for a peasant, as it only refers to peasants for whom the
bonded labour was a particularly onerous burden. Yet even at the height of the seigneuries’
power, bonded labour was not the main burden for most peasants, but just the most resented,
which they performed as poorly as they could. One specific characteristic of peasant life in
Slovene territory was that they combined their work with non-agricultural activities, first as
transporters and carters, and also as traders and craftsmen. How many peasants performed
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such work is difficult to determine, but it is clear that they were numerous. Many of these
people therefore did not fit the typical image of a peasant as much as those elsewhere in
Europe.
Peasants or the agrarian population in general, lived mainly, though not exclusively, in
villages, with some more isolated at outlying farms or clusters of dwellings. A village is
defined as permanent settlement that lives primarily from agricultural production. The core of
a typical village in this period would comprise a group of neighbouring houses (farms),
alongside which individual craft workshops might be found. Each village was surrounded by
a set amount of village land with fields, meadows, waters and pastures and woods, part of
which was for individual use, and part for common use. Yet a group of farms standing
together does not automatically become a village, as there must be functional connections
between them. Common buildings and public spaces, such as gathering places (often beneath
a linden tree in the middle of the village), paths, wells or a church, are therefore as much
constituent elements of a village as the common regulation of economic and legal matters that
stood above individual farms. A community of village neighbours of this kind – regardless of
the dispersed nature of the seigneury land system in the Late Middle Ages, when a number of
different seigneurs would have mansi in the same village – linked by common economic
interests and the need for common management of village land are referred to as a soseska
(from Slov. sosed – neighbour). A similar term that came from common usage is srenja, which
derives from sredina or centre (in the sense of the centre of the village where villagers would
gather). Sometimes, terms such as commune, deriving from Latin, the German word
Gemeinde and the Slovene word gmajna derived from it, are also used to refer to a soseska.
The soseska enjoyed a certain level of self-governance or autonomy, which was relatively
small in scope yet of exceptional importance to villagers as it included matters such as
making binding resolutions on the time and place for certain agrarian duties, on letting
otherwise cultivated land be used as pasture (in relation to triennial fallow rotation), and
managing shared village equipment and land.
Most villages in modern-day Slovenia grew up during the period of intense
colonisation from the tenth century onwards. It was from this time on that the cultural
landscape formed by economic use and the building of human settlements began to take
shape. This form, which remained well into the modern era, was essentially complete by the
Late Middle Ages. Austro-Hungarian urbarial records – and other sources – indicate that the
number of villages in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries multiplied rapidly and in
favourable locations reached the same number as found today, even exceeding today’s figures