Page 58 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Markéta Skořepová

by the direct deployment of armies and by combat operations, but also
by a brutal economic collapse. In many regions, economic and population
losses led to the disintegration of the emphyteutic system, which did not
bring very many advantages to the owners of paid-off farms compared
to the subjects who remained only the tenants of their homesteads by
that time. It began to be restored as late as during the eighteenth centu-
ry on the initiative of both landlords and subjects (Procházka 1963; Maur
1974; Tlapák 1974; 1975). The renewal of the war-ravaged countryside took
a very long time as the condition of rural farms was constantly aggravat-
ed by considerable tax burdens and demands of the state, landlords and
Church. In 1680, the cheerless situation resulted in a large-scale uprising
and the first widespread intervention of the monarch in the relations be-
tween landlords and subjects, which meant, among other things, the reg-
ulation of labour duties (Mikulec 2011; David 2018). Other legal changes
were brought about by the Enlightenment reforms in the eighteenth cen-
tury, the most important of which was the abolition of the personal de-
pendence of subjects in 1781, sometimes inaccurately referred to as the
abolition of ‘serfdom.’ At the same time, all subjects were also granted the
right to bequeath their property through a will, which definitively abol-
ished the distinction between homesteads that were under emphyteutic
contract and those that were not. These vital changes did not bring about
a formal modification in the studied sources, but they made them more
detailed.
From at least the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
many feudal lords, including the archbishopsasthe landlordsofČervená
Řečice, tried to motivate the villagers to better manage their economic
activities by strengthening their ownership rights to homesteads. They
supported their efforts to get the farms under the emphyteutic contract
and interfered with their tenure rights only in the case of serious mis-
demeanours and the inability of the householder to keep the farm in an
acceptable condition. Farmland in most agricultural regions was officially
indivisible; the possibility of separating one part of the fields was feasible
only exceptionally, usually in the case of large farms. However, the children
of the householders still had equal inheritance rights; they were entitled
to corresponding shares from the property of their parents, which could
be paid both during the life of the father and also after his death by the
new holder of the homestead (Procházka 1963; Maur 1996; Velková 2005).
When the householder changed, existing debts were deducted from the
set price of the homestead (including the landlord’s claim, which remained

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