It has become fashionable for certain elitist circles to try to denigrate Polish nationalism by pointing out that the idea of the “Polish nation” was for years restricted to the upper classes. The transparent intent is to take the air out of the nationalist balloon that had pumped up the rather overly pleased egos of some nationalists hailing from the plebeian classes – whether “worker” of “farmer” (though the former, if you look back a couple of generations, almost always leads to the latter). (An analogous mechanism is at work where similar elites throw various Jesus quotes at self-professed Christians with the putative aim of exposing hypocrisy and teaching Christians how to be better Christians but, where one suspects, the more immediately satisfying goal is that of deflating – by means of a “burn” – some bloated evangelical egos).
There is no doubt that Poland, for many years, was quite an inequitable place. On the one hand, the gentry was much larger than the Western European aristocracy and benefitted from privileges not accorded its western counterpart. On the other hand, the serf class existed in what became increasingly a slave-like system of land management.
Yet, is the above-cited claim correct? Were these serfs really not Poles in the full sense of the word? This writer would beg to differ.
One could point to the fact that, whatever the definition of the “nation” was in the 16-18th centuries, if we look back further in time we see that matters were initially different. Thus, for example, we could note that the peasant enjoyed more freedoms under the Piasts than under the Jagiellons and elective kings and more still under the earlier Piasts.
But aside from substance, there are other, symbolic, indications that the serfs were in fact seen as part of the nation no less than the non-landed Americans were seen as American by the U.S.’ Founding Fathers. The mistake here is to regard the right to vote as determinative of whether someone belongs to the Nation. That kind of an approach would redefine Nation to mean no more than the upper class (or caste).
For one thing, we have the foundation stories of the Poles (and the Czechs) which take great care to speak of the founders of the first dynasty such as Piast (and Premysl) as tillers, farmers. Even in the PVL’s take on the history of Kievan Rus, the indigenous Kievan Polans’ leaders – Kyi, Shchek, Khoryv and their sister Lybid – appear to have had no great claim of an aristocratic heritage.
But there is another reason to think that Poles – in the sense of a Nation – were, well, just Poles. When the sermon speaks of Nos, enim Poloni, tres deos habemus, scilicet Lada, Nya, Iassa – we note that these “Poloni” that the writer is referring to were not the writer’s own social niveau. They could not have been because the royal, priestly, warrior, bureaucrat and, likely also townsperson, classes, must have been, by the 15th century, mostly Christianized.
The people that the writer is referring to as the “Poloni” were the peasants with whose serious Christianization the Church was becoming concerned first in the 14th/15th century. And, indeed, the reports of the Polish Gods – Yassa, Lado and others (incidentally, Deos – not Deas – whether that interpretation was right is another matter) – come from the countryside. What is surprising about this is that – even in the 19th century – Polish ethnographers were recording the Names – Jasień and Łado – in peasant songs. In other words, even half a millennium later, the Church, in substance, failed to persuade the masses of the attractiveness of the “original sin” / “repentance” theology.
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