Page 59 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

The Family Economy in the Bohemian Rural Milieu in the Long-Term Perspective

until the full payoff of the homestead, and the value of the still outstand-
ing older inheritance shares) and the remaining assets were divided equal-
ly among the heirs. The homesteads were thus essentially permanently in
debt: with each generation, a new group of heirs came into play, and the
incoming householder often actually owned only a fraction of the farm’s
value. The repayments were made regularly once a year during the annual
court in the presence of a representative of the manorial authority and rep-
resentatives of the rural self-government, who jointly decided which debts
should be repaid in priority. Only from the end of the eighteenth century
did the repayments of inheritance claims become a matter for the family,
and the authorities only confirmed and recorded them (Chocholáč 1999;
2001).
Czech historiography has paid a great deal of attention to the inheri-
tance law and the generational transfer of homesteads. Sons were gener-
ally preferred as the main heirs, but the husband of the daughter or of
the widow of the original farm’s holder could also become the household-
er. The institution of temporary farming was also applied, which meant
the temporary management of the homestead, usually by a relative or the
stepfather of the rightful heir. Among brothers, priority was given to the
youngest, but this was not a strict rule. The other siblings of the house-
holder usually left the native farm in connection with founding their own
family but they needed to be paid their inheritance share to start an inde-
pendent existence. Rural homesteads thus used to be interlinked not only
by kinship bonds, but also by financial ones, such as outstanding claims of
unpaid inheritance shares and dowries (Velková 2009; Skořepová 2016).
Following the fates of the inhabitants of the early modern Bohemian ru-
ral space is easiest at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In the rural environment, parallel to the strengthening of the personal
rights of subjects, the number of preserved documents and also the accu-
racy of their records were increasing. Wills and detailed marriage contracts
appeared for the first time, and the state-controlled records of births, mar-
riages and deaths, which parish authorities had been ordered to keep since
the beginning of the seventeenth century, achieved perfection at this time.
The possibilities of researching older periods are significantly limited by
the level of care with which land registers recording the changes in the
ownership of subject homesteads were kept at the local manorial offices. In
principle, attention was focused on the large full-sized farms carrying the
main tax burdens. Over time, smaller homesteads also emerged, referred
to as cottages (chalupa), if they had at least some land, or simply as small

57