219 10. The peasant land market in late medieval and early modern Poland, ifteenth and sixteenth centuries Piotr Guzowski I. Introduction in Polish historiography the subject of peasant landholding and the land market has mainly been approached from the legal side. Legal historians have deined the character of late-medieval peasant landholdings in the Polish rent economy, in which peasants’ economic independence increased while their personal dependence on their lords diminished, as ‘hereditary holding which took the form of customary property, similar to feudal property on the level of an inferior vassal’ (Bardach, 1964: 198). Also in the early modern period Polish peasants, according to legal historians, ‘[…] were generally free to dispose of their holdings which were, in practice, their hereditary customary property’ (Ihnatowicz, Mączak & Zientara, 1979: 115). The legal aspects of the transfer of land rights and land use have also been studied in detail (Bortkiewicz, 1970). The economic aspects of these phenomena, however, have not so far been researched, even though Andrzej Wyczański has several times called for such a study in his works (Wyczański, 1998: 109-116). The aim of this paper is to ind out whether there was a peasant land market in Poland in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, how well developed it was, and what its role was in the peasant economy. The material for the paper comes from the oldest Polish village court rolls. The origins of village court rolls go back to the time when so-called German law was introduced in Poland, resulting in the development of peasant self-government. The Sołtys (Lat. advocatus) was the village head and, together with the aldermen (scabini), he carried out its legal functions. The rolls in question document village court sessions and contain records of land transactions made by local peasants, which constitute about 70 per cent of all recorded transactions (Słowiński, 1990: 26). Although similar village courts functioned all over the country, the only existing records of ifteenth- and sixteenth-century proceedings are for Little Poland (Grodziski, 1960: 85-139; Łysiak, 1962: 175-194; Wiślicz, 2007), and there are very few of them. Village court rolls survive for only about two hundred villages between the end of the fourteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries. The rolls are the basic, and