(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

The governing classes in these towns were increasingly German and German-speaking. Indigenous Polish peasants were forbidden (ineffectively) to live in Krakow, since princes and landlords feared the drain of manpower from their own estates. In Silesia, by the end of the Middle Ages, Polish was above all the language of the peasantry, although even in the countryside it began to go into stubborn retreat. In larger towns, Germans, or Poles assimilated as Germans, made up a majority. Those most likely to resent germani-zation were, to begin with, the native Polish clergy, who, as they found their feet, increasingly opposed the intrusion of Germans into their ranks. At the synod of Lęczyca in 1x85, Archbishop Jakub Swinka of Gniezno warned that Poland might become a ‘new Saxony’ if German contempt for Polish language, customs, clergy and ordinary people went unchecked.

The local rulers of Silesia and western Pomerania were particularly exposed to German wealth and culture, whose charms outshone those of the impoverished Polish lands. It was only towards the later thirteenth century, encouraged by clerics like Archbishop Swinka, that Polish developed enough sophistication to be suitable for the delivery of sermons. As a literary medium, it could scarcely compare with German before the early 1500s. Henry the Bearded of Silesia had enjoyed listening to the fireside tales of Polish peasant storytellers; his great-grandson, Henry IV Probus ‘the Honourable’ (1257-90) spoke German by preference and was proud to compose and perform poetry and song in the language, a princely M'mnesdnger. Further east, German communities in the towns tended to be isolated islands. In the countryside, even in much of Silesia, German peasants were more likely to be assimilated by native elements. The same went for German knights and adventurers attracted to the courts of Polish rulers.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries also witnessed the transformation of the old Piast rulers’ erstwhile warrior-bands into ‘knights’, milites, in the western European mould. The old war-bands had been ruinously expensive. And, at a time when rulers accepted that there was little prospect of enrichment by the old plundering expeditions of the early Piasts, there was little point in trying to maintain them. Instead, those who served in a military capacity were increasingly expected to keep themselves from their own lands, conferred by the prince; but that, of necessity, both reduced the size of these forces and also gave the beneficiaries of ducal land grants a new interest in attracting settlers. Those who obtained enough land and peasants for themselves from their ruler to maintain a warhorse, weapons and armour, or who were sufficiently well placed to take part in the process of locatio, came to form a western-European style of military aristocracy. The less well-endowed, the wlodycy, tended to be absorbed into the peasantry.

In principle, the knights held land in return for service (although the kinds of feudal homage ceremonies widespread in France and England were little practised). But as the Piast states fragmented, their rulers found they had to concede immunities and jurisdictional rights to their mounted fighting-men, just as they had had to to the Church. Those with enough chutzpah and resources simply appropriated these rights, so that by the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, anyone who could plausibly claim to hold land by ins militare, that is, any rycerz, exercised jurisdictional rights over it (the terminology hints at the strength of German influences in the thirteenth century - rycerz derives from Ritter, German for knight). The dukes reserved, at best, the right to hear appeals. As the dukes gave away, or were obliged to give away, their powers of jurisdiction, they found they had to resort to cooperation and collaboration with their leading subjects. When, in 1128, Wladyslaw ‘Spindleshanks’ (r202-28) issued the Privilege of Cienia to the bishop of Krakow and the local barones, according them the right to be consulted at assemblies, wiece, which made laws and heard judicial cases, he was formalizing a situation that had been in the making at least since Wrymouth’s reign, in the early twelfth century.