Page 64 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Markéta Skořepová

ment, where ageing parents were helped by the family of an adult, married
son, who later became the householder in place of his retired father. On
a practical level, the need to accommodate a larger number of household
members could be solved by setting up new, individual rooms and perhaps
even small houses, which, however, did not form separate economic units
and whose management fell completely within the authority of the house-
holder. Siblings and other relatives of the family head and even unrelated
lodgers could be allowed to establish their own household in a separate
room or little house and to use a part of the land and agricultural facilities,
but they remained tied and subordinated to the original farm.
A wave of official registrations of new, independent houses occurred in
1714 and 1715, i.e. immediately after the new tax declarations (na, apa i,
inv. no. 2609). The so-called fasses of the Theresian Cadastre were created
in 1713, in connection with the preparation of the state tax reform. At that
time, eleven new cottages appeared in the land register and the relevant
taxes and duties were also assessed for them. For several of the new cot-
tages, it is explicitly stated that they were built and in use a few years be-
fore their official registration. In 1722, the estate welcomed a delegation of
officials who were charged to make an ocular visitation, which means an in-
spection and revision of figures reported in the preceding tax declaration.
The delegation detected 61 persons having something to declare: besides
33 farmers, two cottagers and a gamekeeper, another 25 men were record-
ed – usually without any specification of their position. Some of them it is
possible to identify as farmers’ siblings or retired parents using a part of
the familial estate (14 persons held only a head of cattle and no fields), and
five practised a craft for their living (two smiths, a wheelwright, a butcher,
and a weaver) (na, tk, inv. no. 3056, 886).
The manorial register of subjects’ duties from 1740 had to reflect the re-
sults of the state registration but it recorded four units less, only 57 home-
steads, among them 22 small houses. Six of them were not yet assigned
any further information from land registers. For this reason, they have
been left out of further research, as we can assume that the inhabitants of
these houses never managed the independent homesteads (na, apa, vs
,inv.no. 1).
Around 1740, the land registers included 47 individual farms and cot-
tages in the five villages under study. The final version of the Theresian
Cadastre alreadyregistered51taxpayers by 1757 (na, tk,inv.no. 4).Six
small houses were newly recorded in the land registers in the 1760s, but the
highest increase occurred between 1784 and 1800 when 25 buildings were

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