Page 189 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Innkeepers in Tyrol

Maria Felizitas Clammerin’s total entitlement as a widow, including her
dowry, was 3,000 gulden.
She arranged her future life in a widow’s contract (tla, vbi 1784, fol.
1021’–1023’),¹² which she concluded with her son Michael, who had inher-
ited the estate. Firstly, as was customary at the time, she stipulated that
her assets should remain in her son’s estate, but with the restriction that
they should remain there ‘as long as it pleases the mother.’ In return, she
was entitled to the interest due on her husband’s death, calculated at four
per cent. This amounted to 120 gulden a year. For the first year, she was
to be provided with ‘entirely free board and clothing’ in her son’s house-
hold, ‘without being obliged to do any housework.’ In other words, she did
not want to be obliged to do any work in return. This was an unusual ar-
rangement. In intergenerational property transfer agreements, the work
that the parents, the widowed father, or the widowed mother were willing
to continue to do – according to their abilities – constituted an important
contribution in exchange for the upkeep of the house, in a sense of reci-
procity. The son Michael Peintner, born in 1748, was 36 years old and sin-
gle at the time of the contract. It was only four years later that he married
the daughter of the local apothecary, Franzisca Aloisia Maria Rauscher von
Steinberg und Rauschenfels (stai, fb, p130, 1700–1900). In agricultural
as well as artisan or commercial households, especially if they were larger
businesses, both positions of the working couple should ideally be occu-
pied at the head – this was the assumption of historical family research
(Mitterauer 1991, 122) – in order to be able to cope with the demands of
work and the organisation of the household in the best possible way. Maria
FelizitasClammerinwas not preparedtodothis. She onlywantedtore-
ceive 50 gulden of the 120 gulden in interest for the first year. However,
this sum could be replaced by goods in kind, which were to be given to her
according to a list: certain quantities of wheat, rye, barley, poppy seeds,
peas, salt, smoked meat, bacon, lard, cheese, candles, oil, flax, wine and
milk.
In the contract that followed, she negotiated three residential and finan-
cial options, giving her a relatively wide range of choices and options for
the time after the first year of widowhood. The first option was for Maria

¹² In the eighteenth century, it was mainly wealthy women who concluded their own widow-
hood contracts. It was more common for the claims and conditions of the couple or parent
retiring from active economic management to be specified in a property transfer agree-
ment.

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