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There was more to such fragmentation than sibling rivalry. Regional lords and the larger towns yearned for autonomy, and the trend towards devolution went hand in hand with a demand for wider power-sharing. Władysław of Wielkopolska, also known as Spindleshanks on account of his bony legs, made a valiant attempt to reassert his authority as Duke of Kraków, but powerful barons forced him to grant them substantial prerogatives by the Privilege of Cienia in 1228, thirteen years after a similar document, the Magna Carta, had been extorted from a king of England.

There was nevertheless a marked difference between the barons of England and the magnates of Poland. The power of an English or French lord at this time was held from the crown and fitted into a system of vassalage. This feudal system was never adopted in Poland, except with respect to some nobles who had migrated from western Europe. This set Polish society apart from the rest of the Continent in fundamental ways.

The highest estate were the gentry, the szlachta, who inherited both status and land. They were obliged to perform military service for the king and to submit to his tribunals, but they were the independent magistrates over their own lands. They upheld the customary laws of the country, the Ius Polonicum, based entirely on precedent, and resisted attempts at the imposition of foreign legal practices by the crown. Beneath the szlachta were a number of estates, including the włodyki, who were knights without noble status, and the panosze, who formed a kind of yeoman class. The peasants were mostly free and able to rise to a higher status. While the land they tilled belonged to the sovereign, they enjoyed defined rights. A small number were enserfed, but these gained greater personal freedom during the first half of the thirteenth century, and were not generally tied to the land as in western Europe. The adoption of the three-field system at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the agrarian boom it brought about differentiated between those who had land and those who did not. Those who did grew richer, those who did not were revealed to have nothing to offer except their labour. Thus while they gained greater personal freedom and legal protection, the poorer peasants were caught up in the mesh of economic bondage.

The cities were, literally, a law unto themselves. Most of them had been either founded by or endowed with special charters which gave them a measure of autonomy. As they grew, they attracted foreigners—Germans, Italians, Walloons, Flemings and Jews—whose presence served to increase this independence. The Germans imported with them the Ius Teutonicum, which was first adopted for Silesian towns in 1211, and subsequently, in the modified form of ‘Magdeburg Law’, for others all over Poland. These laws, which regulated criminal and civic offences and all trade practices, meant that the area within a city’s walls was both administratively and legislatively in another country from that lying without. The citydwellers evolved as a separate class having nothing in common with the others. The same was true of the growing Jewish community, which was granted a royal charter by Bolesław the Pious in 1264, the Statute of Kalisz. This recognised all Jews as servi camerae (servants of the treasury) and afforded them royal protection. It was the first of a number of such privileges which were to turn them into a nation within a nation.

Since there was no framework of vassalage there were no natural channels for the exercise of central authority. Royal control therefore depended not on a local vassal as elsewhere in Europe, but on a functionary appointed by the king. He was known by his function, and his title of Castellan (Kasztelan) derived from the royal castle from which he exercised judicial, administrative and military authority on the king’s behalf. There were over a hundred of these castellans administering the Polish lands by 1250, but their importance waned along with central authority when the country was divided. In terms of power, they began to be superseded by the ministers of the individual dukes, the Palatines (Wojewoda).