prebendary, the nobles were quite ready to take advantage of it. In the sixteenth century, influenced and encouraged by the Reformation movement, the Polish nobles did not hesitate to resort to that method of dealing with ecclesiastical property, and of thus enlarging their own demesne estates.[398] Moreover, the revival of agriculture created a demand not only for more land, but also for more labor, and cheap labor. We have already noted that farming by tenant peasants was not any more profitable to the landlords in the sixteenth century, and that there was a strong tendency to annex the peasant leaseholds to the demesne estates. But as the demesne estates increased in size the labor problem grew more acute every day. To solve it, the noble landlords began to change the status of the peasants by legislation. Thus former free peasants became gradually, as a result of a series of legislative enactments, glebae adscripti. They were not any longer free to leave their masters at will; and if they did, their masters had the right to demand their return, or to pursue them and bring them back.[399] Of a family of peasant children, only one might leave the estate on which he was born, and go to the city into service, or for the purpose of study or of learning a trade.[400] An only child was forbidden to leave the land; he had to pass into the serfdom of his parents.[401] And if a peasant youth escaped, he was to be restored to his master under penalty of forty marks.[402] Not only were the Polish peasants bound to the soil in the sixteenth century, they were now also compelled to do forced labor on their masters’ estates. In 1477 the provincial diet of “Ziemia chełmska” established one day a week of forced peasant labor on the estate of the lord. In 1520 the General Diets of Thorn and Bydgoszcz extended this local provision to the peasants on all the manors in the country.[403] Thus what had hitherto been a matter of private arrangement was now made a statutory and universal obligation. And gradually as time went on the number of forced labor was increased to two days a week and more.[404] Worst of all, under the influence of Roman law, which recognized only masters and slaves, the Polish peasants lost also their standing before the law, and were subjected wholly to the jurisdiction of their lords.[405] This removed the last vestige of the peasants’ personal rights, and made them practically the property of the aristocratic landlords. Besides monopolizing agricultural production, the Polish nobles obtained exemption from export and import duties on all products raised on their own estates for export and on all goods imported for their own use and not for trade.[406] By this stroke they secured a monopoly advantage in trade also, and became the chief beneficiaries of all its benefits to the detriment and destruction of the Polish town population.