Page 69 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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

ers were parcelled out. The largest of the farms, Svépravice No. 12, with an
original area of 120 strych, was reduced three times during the eighteenth
century: first in 1714 when the householder sold a minor plot of land for a
small house, and then in 1788 and 1798, when the farm was divided among
three brothers (na, apa, vs , inv. no. 52, fol. 1–8). The mere size of the
homestead evidently did not guarantee that its holders would avoid eco-
nomic difficulties, which may have resulted in the sale of individual plots of
land, the division of the familial heritage, or even in the loss of the farm.
It is also necessary to consider non-financial reasons for dividing famil-
ial resources, for example personal relationships, the efforts of parents to
provide fairly for all their descendants, affection among siblings or, on the
other hand, their reluctance to live together. Nevertheless, the landlord
used to permit parcellation only in the case of really large farms whose
size permitted the support of more households or could even be difficult
to cultivate effectively by only one family unit.
At the beginning of the period under study, prices for homesteads were
expressed in kopas of Meissen groschen (kopa = 60 pieces [of coins]), at the
end of the eighteenth century in gulden (florins) of the so called Conven-
tion Currency, introduced in 1750, and after the state bankruptcy in 1811
in gulden of the Austrian Currency. The instability of the currency is the
reason why it is practically impossible to follow the development of home-
stead prices after the beginning of the nineteenth century. At that time,
rural people also used conversions into older monetary systems, and in the
case of family obligations, claims were often expressed in heads of cattle,
just to be sure. Of course, inflation had affected the value of rural prop-
erty in previous periods as well; subjects were hit by the devaluation of
currency (most significantly in 1659) and by the increasing tax burden im-
posed mainly by state war costs, as well as by numerous crop failures and
epidemics destroying the livestock farming.
The price and debts of the homestead were usually, but not always, ex-
pressed when the homestead was taken over by a new head, whether re-
lated to the elderly one or not. For 87 farms and cottages existing in the
Zmišovice judicial district around 1829, there were 564 transfers found in
thelandregisters. To beabletoassess thedevelopment ofpricesand in-
debtedness of rural homesteads within the analysed villages, the period
under study was divided into eight intervals of thirty years each, which
can be considered the time span corresponding to one generation. Set up
in this way, the timeline also approximately corresponds to the key mile-
stones in Czech history and the preserved sources of the region under

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