Page 79 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

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

(the so-called contribution for military purposes) and in money; lesser, but
unchallenged, claims were demanded by village priests.
The burden on homesteads with only a small portion of arable land or
no land at all was, of course, significantly lower. Their inhabitants made
a living by wage labour for the landlords and farmers; in the first half of
the nineteenth century, household textile production played an impor-
tant role. Evidence for a proto-industrial way of subsistence in the older
period has not yet been found. We lack, for example, the expected notes
about specific tools in the serf inheritance inventories. The proper term for
the way of subsistence that would explain the relative prosperity of small
homesteads has not yet been found. However, it should be emphasized
that the homesteads founded at the end of the eighteenth century did not
have to be mere ‘small houses’ without land – many of them evidently had
fields at their disposal, even though the records of their additional pur-
chase are neither complete nor systematic.
The economic stability of full-sized farms and later also cottages was
very fragile and depended on the ability of householders to remain in the
position of the head of the household throughout their productive peri-
od; the premature death of a father of young children usually led to the
management of the homestead by a temporary householder who had on-
ly limited duties and usually claimed a reward for the maintenance of the
farm, which became an additional burden. The obligation to pay inheri-
tance shares created an ever-renewing cycle of debts hanging on both large
and small homesteads, yet many relatives of the head of the household left
the house empty-handed or lived and died as unmarried uncles and aunts
of the householder. This ‘family strategy,’ where inheritance shares were
not paid at all or were paid only partially and were forgiven, may have led to
a settlement of economic conditions in the homestead. Due to the low life
expectancy at the time, many potential heirs died before they could claim
their share, so it is possible that the renewed increase in the indebtedness
of subject households in the first half of the nineteenth century could be
also related to the fact that more and more people lived to adulthood and
consequently more heirs appeared in families.
The original assumption that the Archbishop of Prague, as a powerful
and wealthy manorial lord, may perhaps also have managed his domain
more sophisticatedly, tending towards innovations and reforms, could not
be evidenced. Changes in the Červená Řečice estate did not come faster
and more efficiently than in other regions which were researched in de-
tail: the main reasons are the slow renewal of emphyteutic contracts for

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