Serfdom and Servitudes

Abstract

Nothing so stamped the character of the Galician countryside as the long experience of serfdom. For a hundred years after its abolition in 1848, the basic elements of the Galician village—from landholding arrangements and the layout of buildings to the categories of inhabitants and relations among them—all remained fundamentally as they had taken shape during the previous centuries of serfdom. Even though the national movement did not, and could not, reach the peasantry under serfdom, nothing is as essential to understanding the emancipated peasantry’s embrace of that movement as an understanding of serfdom. It was first in the throes of liberation from serfdom, during the revolution of 1848–9, that peasants entered the national movement and that, as a corollary, the national movement began to enter that crucial second phase in which it developed a mass constituency. Although during the final struggle over the terms of emancipation, the servitudes conflict that dominated the 1850s and 1860s, the national movement was once again largely absent from the countryside, this struggle too contributed to the national movement’s popularity in the village after the 1860s.