Page 78 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Markéta Skořepová

war, it is clear that they suffered significant scars that deepened in the
decades that followed. Land registers from the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury show a high indebtedness rate of farms, and above all a growing in-
ability to repay these debts, although the nominal value of non-abandoned
homesteads remained more or less the same. No evidence was found that
the archbishops as manorial lords questioned the inheritance rights of
their subjects (unless they had committed some crime or misdemeanour).
The ancient entitlement to confiscate the property of childless subjects
completely disappeared and many old debts to the manorial treasury were
often repaid with only a third of the original amount. Although the land-
lords could intervene in the selection of the new householder, they did
not impose new financial requirements. From the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, transfers of rural homesteads took place only between the
new householder and his predecessor, or his family. However, the indebt-
edness of the homesteads had deepened.
One of the reasons for the permanent indebtedness that haunted large
homesteads was the high tax and dues debt,¹³ which some farmers were
unable to bear, even though they theoretically had the greatest resources
at their disposal. The high demands and uneven distribution of burdens
among rural people is particularly evident in the amount of the duty of
unpaid labour of subjects on the manorial property, recorded in the mano-
rial register of subjects’ duties from 1740. With regard to this obligation,
the population of the Zmišovice judicial district was divided into only two
groups – farm holders were obliged to work four days a week with draught
animals (which, practically, meant feeding one pair of oxen and one adult
farm servant just to work on the manorial land), and inhabitants of home-
steads with minimal or no land had to report two times a week without
draught animals to the so-called on-foot labour. Two farmers substitut-
ed the fieldwork with trips to Prague, where they transported food for
the needs of the archbishop’s court. Only the municipal blacksmith in
Zmišovice and also a widow of a cottager from Svépravice were complete-
ly exempt from these duties. The four-day labour was in fact illegal in the
mid-eighteenth century; since 1680 it was only allowed to be set to three
days a week. In addition to labour, the subjects of course paid taxes in grain

¹³ The subjects in Bohemia were burdened by several types of taxes and obligations, paid by
cash, in kind or via their own work. Most of them were collected by landlords who passed
part of them onto the state. The amount of duties grew rapidly during wars and other crises.
The subjects were also obliged to contribute to the Church and pay for some village services,
for example for a herdsman or night watchman (Drozda 2024).

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