Page 67 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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

mon land, but their owners soon bought fields from farmers, and 15 new
homesteads were separated from older farms.⁸
Before 1780, differences in building activities were also visible in the vil-
lages: Pobistrýce and Svépravice, unlike the others, had had quite vast plots
of common land at their disposal and were able to (or maybe forced to) of-
fer it to new dwellers. The reason why later construction activities moved
to private land was certainly the gradual exhaustion of the common land
reserves, but undoubtedly also the expansion of the rights of the holders
in the early 1780s, who became real owners of rural homesteads, and could
start to handle their property more freely (na, apa, vs , inv. no. 52, 53).

Prices for Homesteads and Debts
The price for a rural homestead was determined by the land and the live-
stock needed for farming, but also by the regional and familial tradition.
Of key importance was not only the extent of fields, meadows, pastures or
forests but also their quality, which could drop significantly within a very
short period of time if their care was neglected. The overall economic con-
dition of individual farmers was of course different and changeable; nev-
ertheless, the measurement of their fields could be used as a first criterion
of social stratification in the analysed villages. It must be underlined that
the first registers were based only on declared and estimated values; su-
pervision by independent observers did not appear until 1722 and precise
triangulation surveying only came with a new cadastre ordered by Joseph
ii in the 1780s.
A modern projection estimates that an area of fields of about 5 ha was
sufficient for the self-supply of an early modern rural family in Bohemia
(Cerman and Maur 2000, 749). The Berní rula cadastre from 1654 described
among 35 homesteads nine big properties with more than 100 strych (= 28.3
ha) of land and only two families having only tiny pieces of land at their
disposal. The measurement of fields averaged 71.5 strych (median 60 strych
= 17 ha). The tax collection inquiry from 1674 (Revizitace berní ruly)and the
manorial register of subjects’ duties from 1740 show the same number of
rural farms divided by size: 23 large full-sized farms (osedlý)with 30–90
strych of arable land, 1 so-called ‘half-size farm’ and 9 ‘three quarters-size’
farms with 30 or 40 strych of land. In total, 33 farmers and two cottagers

⁸ Among 21 cottages formed in 1710–1779 there is one unclear case. In 1780–1815, another
house serving as a manorial rental pub was established in Svépravice on the landlord’s own
land.

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