Consolidation of land by certain wealthy men had another, more pervasive and better documented, effect. For some men to expand their holdings, others had to lose theirs. To be sure, with the colonization of new lands this need not have been a zero-sum game, especially given how much of the Czech Lands was still unsettled in the twelfth century. Nevertheless, people were needed to work the newly cleared territory, creating conditions of abundant land and scarce labor resources. The demand for labor must have increased dramatically as forest areas were settled.137 And as some landowners gained more and more land, they must have begun to dwarf their neighbors; ordinary freemen were probably less able to defend themselves and their lands from the encroachment of wealthy and powerful magnates. Consolidation and colonization thus had two profound social consequences: some men of middling rank, more capable warriors perhaps, became knights of other magnates and settled on their land, as we have seen; meanwhile the poorest freemen, most of whom must have been farmers and craftsmen with small plots, became the subjects of lords and thus progressively indistinguishable from the unfree peasantry.
The dearth of information about the peasantry—free or unfree—makes it difficult to trace with accuracy their fate in the late twelfth century. One reference, however, from as early as the 1140s, provides an intriguing clue. The foundation of Strahov includes the duke’s grant of:
his court at Radonice with all its appurtenances, namely villages, unfree men and women, and other various pertinent things of theirs. The names of the unfree are these: Bus, Milan, Blas, Onata, Všan, Ban, Druhan, Jakub, Bohdan, Ostoj, keeper of horses, Čelek, cobbler, Modlak, Nedoma, Lubata, Radosta, blacksmith, Dedon and Straž, makers of pitch-huts. In the same village these voluntarily subjected themselves to servitude: Hradata, Sudar, Bohdan, Božepor, Gogul, a gardener, Vilkon, Bohuta, Soběstoj.138
Assuming tentatively that all the heads of household in Radonice are listed here, two-thirds of the inhabitants were unfree, including several craftsmen. Without more information about legal privileges or attendant obligations, it is impossible to know what led eight more to alter their status voluntarily from free to unfree. One can imagine plenty of incentive for the lord, lay or ecclesiastic, to bribe, cajole, or compel them to become his subjects, thus ensuring complete control of the village with its appurtenances. Small-time farmers, owning modest plots and wishing to maintain their independence, must have been under extraordinary pressure in a village largely controlled by a single landlord. The indication that freemen willingly became subject to Strahov at the time of the grant contrasts with the two documents from the end of the eleventh century cited at the beginning of this chapter: the description of servitude by “fee” in the Hradiště foundation charter from 1078 and Němoj’s manumission of members of his familia around the turn of the century. The Strahov charter issued fifty years later reflects a clear shift, people moving into servitude rather than out of it.
The charter recording Strahov’s foundation is noteworthy too in that it deliberately names those subject individuals included in the grant. Only a few extant documents considered genuine and datable to the eleventh or twelfth centuries contain such lists but, tellingly, they appear quite often in forged documents from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.139 Such forgeries are especially revealing, in particular since several are alleged foundation charters, purporting to date much earlier, and their purpose was clearly to list the bulk of the institution’s holdings. In the four versions of the forged foundation charter for the chapter at Vyšehrad, the listing of names of subject peasants shows the most variation.140 In the A version, additions made in other hands and inks are quite obvious, and most of these provide the names of subject peasants. In three of the four versions, an addition of several lines is made at the bottom, following what was obviously the original end of the text (after “Amen” in the B versions):
These are the names of the familia of the church: From the village Podlesín the wife of Svohboh named Tulna with three sons and a daughter named Radohna; from the same village Tehna with a son and a daughter named Hostena; there also a quaz named Krabava with a daughter named Nebraha, another named Ziznava, and a third Čejka. From the village Libušín Milica, her daughter Rozneta with daughters Kojs, Visemila, and Mutina; Milehna the sister of the aforesaid Milica with her two daughters, Svatava and Bohumest; Sirava with son; Malovia the wife of Scit; Deucik with two daughters Radohna and Ubicest.141
Whereas the persons enumerated in the genuine charters were often men, with their professions noted, this appendix to the Vyšehrad foundation charter consists almost entirely of women’s names, mothers with their daughters. These forgeries were drafted approximately one hundred years after the chapter’s foundation. By that time none of the named individuals would have been alive, but the church could presumably lay claim to their descendants; for that women could be as important as men. (Local and family memory must have preserved the names of previous generations, or such references would have been entirely meaningless.) While these spurious documents cannot be dated more accurately than ante 1222, evidently at the time of the forgery it had become as important to lay claim to people as lands.
The Vyšehrad forgeries are not the only charters to have names added. The donation made to the collegiate chapter at Litoměřice by Duke Spitihněv circa 1057 survives both as an original eleventh-century charter and as copied into a charter of confirmation, issued by Přemysl Otakar I in 1218.142 The latter is virtually identical to the original until the end, where the names and occupations of thirty-five men have been appended; most are small landowners, whose property forms part of the donation.143 In some instances, only professions are noted.144 The original charter also includes three additions to the bottom: the first, according to Gustav Friedrich, written in a hand aping the original, is the grant of a man, his sons, and brother, and includes witnesses; the second, inserted over an erasure, lists the names of nine peasants “from this civitas”; and the last, written in a thirteenth-century hand, partly in Latin and partly in Czech, records several grants of land, the last including two peasants.145 Again, it is striking to find that, by the time of the early thirteenth-century confirmation of the chapter’s holdings, the names of individuals who could not have been alive had been added to the charter. Whether intended to lay claim to their descendents or, perhaps, to the men in specific professions in the villages in question, remains uncertain. Taken together with the Vyšehrad forgeries, this charter too provides ample reason to assume that the long lists of names in several forged charters represent not some version of the original donation, but interpolations made in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries to lay permanent claim to lesser free and unfree individuals.
At times, ambitious freemen employed more heavy-handed tactics to pressure their weaker neighbors. Gerlach of Milevsko comments that Duke Soběslav was zealous to prevent excesses, perhaps of this very sort:
It always was his care to free the poor and helpless from the powerful, to whom he was not a supporter, giving judgment to all those suffering injury and to all the people of the land without regard to person. He so gave his heart to those needing defense that he did not shrink from offending the nobles on account of the poor, and was commonly called prince of the peasants. ⋯ What more can I say: all his efforts and his whole mind were to protect the poor and preserve the