Page 77 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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

to face. However, most householders who took over smaller homesteads at
the turn of the eighteenth century were more or less able to pay off their
debts. Individual cases where even a small homestead was transferred sig-
nificantly indebted reflect the rising value of cottages and thus also the
demands for their maintenance and payment of inheritance claims, which
beganto becomparableto the requirements placed on theownersoflarge
full-sized farms.

Conclusions
The situation in the Červená Řečice estate, more precisely in the villages of
Zmišovice judicial district, roughly corresponds to the development com-
monly described in Czech agrarian historiography. The period at the turn
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be characterized as a peri-
od of prosperity for the rural population. It was terminated by the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–1648), which stopped the positive development of pop-
ulation numbers and thus also sloweddownthe expansionofvillages by
smaller homesteads with (almost) no land. A comparison with various pre-
viously investigated regions of Bohemia has shown that in other estates,
the post-war increase in the number of homesteads began earlier than in
the Zmišovice judicial district. In the South Bohemian parish of Kapličky,
located in the mountainous, forested region of Šumava (Böhmerwald), the
number of small homesteads rose from 12 to 21 as early as between 1653
and1682(Zeitlhofer2014,72).IntheHorní PoliceestateinNorth Bohemia,
the number of homesteads without land had already distinctly increased
at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.¹¹
In the West Bohemian Šťáhlavy estate, the main wave of founding small
houses came in the first third of the eighteenth century, the next between
1784 and 1816.¹²
Sources that would have shown the degree of war damage to individual
farms of the Zmišovice judicial district have unfortunately not been pre-
served. Although all of the existing farms were settled shortly after the

¹¹ Pražáková Seligová compares the Tax Roll (1654) and the tax declaration (fasse)ofthe There-
sian Cadastre from the 1710s and finds that the number of homesteads without land in-
creased by 131.5 (from 54 to 125), and in the same period, the number of homesteads with
at least a minimum portion of land increased by 14.3 (from 91 to 104) (Pražáková Seligová
2015, 86).
¹² In the villages studied by Velková, 85 homesteads existed in 1654, whereas in 1720 there
were 136 homesteads, in 1770 already 184, and in 1820 there were 267 homesteads (Velková
2009, 61–62).

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