See summary of dissertation in English - Baltijos regiono istorijos ir ...

ent in cash). The fact that duoklininkai included the people of different
social status and professions shows that they made up a group of
manor personnel, who depended on the estate in some way but were
rather free and more qualified. Through their belonging to the group
of duoklininkai and paying the established rent in cash and a rather
small amount of labour (corvée), those people could not only subsist
on their activities but earn as well.
According to a number of historians, the free people, who had the
right to move, were neither a more numerous nor a separate group of
peasants at the manor. In the second half of the 16 th century, all peasant
categories included a certain part of free people, which had a right
to move out: lažininkai, činšininkai, daržininkai, families of poor nobles
and manorial familia. According to the inventories studied in the
research, the free people are mentioned in 14 manor estates, or around
14% of all economic objects. A rather low number of free peasants
and their specific characteristics show that the demand for hired labourers
and peasants was relatively low. Nevertheless, even if it was
not numerous but the group of free peasants, who could hire themselves
out to the manor, did exist. Such a phenomenon complied with
general tendencies of social manorial organisation in the region of
Central Europe at that time.
The fifth chapter of the dissertation Manor Production focuses on
the analysis of the structure of the 16 th century Samogitian manor
farms and their products. It is subdivided into three sections.
The first section Crop Production discusses one of the mostly
wide-spread and probably most profit-making branches of agriculture
at that time. The use and cultivation of land was of particular importance
to this branch. In the second half of the century, the division of
land into wallachs gradually found its way to private estates as well.
25 private manors under analysis witnessed the division of land into
wallachs at that time. However, the information on the use of threefield
system in them is rather scarce. Certain data show that varied
solutions of field cultivation and crop rotation could still prevail – that
was a usual practice in Europe at that time.
28