Page 63 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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

went through a phase generally referred to as abandonment (zpustnutí, lit-
erally ‘going to ruin’), when they were either not inhabited and farmed
at all, or were in such a bad state that it was impossible to draw taxes
from them. The Berní rula cadastre declared four farms as renewed in 1654
and the population register from 1661 recorded all homesteads within the
Zmišovice judicial district as inhabited (na, tk, inv. no. 3056, 886; na, apa
i, inv. no 1751, b43/8). Since the documents for the entire second quarter of
the seventeenth century are missing, it is not possible to prove the contin-
uous transfer of homesteads and to decide whether they managed to main-
tain continuity or were occupied by new householders. Even a comparison
of the names of the householders will not help, because the new holders
quite commonly took over the surname belonging to the farm, even if they
were in no way related to its original inhabitants.
In the land register established in 1680, we can trace back all 35 origi-
nal homesteads (na, apa i, inv. no. 2609). It seems that the existing farms
were still sufficient to cover the demand of rural people for land, and essen-
tially no new homesteads were founded during the seventeenth century as
the Thirty Years’ War and the difficult decades of its aftermath brought a
significant population decline, which had only slowly been tempered. Ev-
idence from other regions shows that, on the contrary, the landlords had
to force their subjects to reoccupy abandoned farms and start families. It
is confirmed that by the end of the seventeenth century, the villages of the
Zmišovice judicial district saw the official founding of only a single new
cottage, whose inhabitants are first mentioned in the list of subjects from
1661.⁴
A rural homestead of that time was primarily an economic unit, man-
aged by one householder and fulfilling prescribed duties. However, full-
sized farms were able to support more than one family unit. The house-
holds usually accommodated the householder’s adult siblings, farm ser-
vants, and sometimes even unrelated lodgers, about whom, however, as
good as nothing is known.⁵ Also frequent was the stem-family arrange-

⁴ Sources from the turn of the sixteenth century mention 34 farms and a cottage. The Berní
rula cadastre in 1654 declared 29 farms, 4 renewed farms and 3 ‘gardeners’ (zahradník),
which means holders of a small house with a tiny plot of land called a ‘garden’ (na, tk,
inv. no. 3056, 886).
⁵ The only report on lodgers is dated to 1629 when six lodger families were added at the end
of an older population register from 1615 for the entire judicial district of Zmišovice. All of
them are young nuclear families. Unfortunately, it is not possible to find out where, or in
whose homestead, they resided (na, apa i, inv. no. 1751, b43/8).

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