The evolution of settlement and colonization during the Middle Ages is of historical importance. Settlement on the land helped to bring about that mingling and stratification of the peoples from which the European nations sprang. Decisive incidents in the social evolution of medieval society were intimately associated with economic use of the land. Landownership, which took the form of landlordship and the disposal of the forces of a multitude of dependants, became the basis of personal political power. The princes and other great landowners of Slavonic Central Europe had remained uninfluenced by German rural economy so long as it was characterized by the manorial type of organization. The relation of the townsmen to the land was not quite uniform. Some townsmen were agriculturists, others drawers of agricultural rents. Both types are to be found in other regions in the same period.

This chapter presents the agrarian history of Poland, Lithuania and Hungary in the Middle Ages by focusing on the landownership, economic organization of the great estates, the burdens of the rural population, and the colonization under the German law. Post-1386, Lithuania was constantly under Polish influence. Poland and Hungary have many features in common both in their political and in their economic structure. In Lithuania, the economic organization of the great estates is found to be in the main similar to that which prevailed in Poland, only that in the former country the characteristic forms appeared a few centuries later. In Poland, the burdening of the rural population with imposts and duties was the most important change in the social structure brought about by the rise of large estates. Again, in Poland, the system of villages under Polish law gave way in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to colonization under German law.

This chapter talks about the lands to the east of the Elbe and the German colonization eastwards. During the later Middle Ages, from the twelfth century onwards, rural economy of Central and North-eastern Europe was transformed, mainly as a result of German immigration. Existing developments were caught up and absorbed into the transformation. But the East German rural colonizing process, which gave direction, form and power to it, was only part of the wider so-called German East Movement. The internal colonization of Germany had furnished varying, but well-tested, types of field, of village and of law. Urban life had gradually developed to a point at which the main lines of town layout and town law were established. Surveying the course of events in the agrarian history of the lands east of the Elbe from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, what first strikes one is the extraordinary extension of the cultivated area, which was accompanied by a growth of population.