The Agricultural Production and Its Amount in the XVIth Century Poland. An Essay on the Methods of Economic Research

Abstract

The quantitative description of agricultural production in early modern Poland has been hampered by the uneven survival and reliability of source material. Four methodological approaches have been proposed in the literature – research based on ecclesiastical tithes, on mill production, on the direct study of landed properties, and on alimentary consumption – but their relative strengths and weaknesses have not been critically assessed in a single methodological essay.

This article evaluates the four methods of economic research for reconstructing the character and amount of agricultural production in sixteenth-century Poland, and proposes the method of alimentary consumption as the most reliable approach for obtaining a probable picture of overall agricultural production.

The study draws on the author's own research in accounting material from the sixteenth century, summarized in the book Studies on the Alimentary Consumption in Poland in the XVIth and the First Half of the XVIIth Century (Warsaw 1969), supplemented by comparative data from Le Roy Ladurie and Polish studies on yield ratios by Rusiński and others.

The analysis shows that the ecclesiastical tithe method is unreliable due to monetary commutation and lack of crop-specific data. Mill production studies are limited to net grain consumption and remain methodologically underdeveloped. Research on great landed property – royal, ecclesiastical, and magnate – is distorted by the atypical character of folwark production, whose yield ratios and grain structure differ markedly from those of gentry manors and peasant tenures. The alimentary consumption method, proceeding from reconstructed individual daily rations through social and demographic corrections to aggregate alimentary needs, offers the most comprehensive and controllable estimate. Applied to Poland around 1580 with a population of 3,400,000 and cultivated area of 3,500,000 hectares, it yields a hypothetical register of agricultural production including approximately 968,000 tons of rye, 123,000 tons of wheat, and livestock estimates of 2,500,000 cattle heads and 2,700,000 pigs.