LInk to various Heimatblätter for Schlesien: https://wiki.genealogy.net/Kategorie:Schlesische_Heimatbl%C3%A4tter_und_Heimatzeitschriften
The Farmer
A picture from an old book.
By Josef A. Taubmann.
"The farmer is a man of honor, for he cultivates the field. Anyone who can mock a farmer is a poor hero to me!" Thus begins a German poet to sing the praises of the farmer, which he most rightly deserves. The peasant class is the class that nourishes all, from which, as Chamisso says, the tribe of giants sprouts. The peasant class is the boon of society, of the state. On this honorable class, on which far too many burdens still rest today, there once rested even greater ones. Our task in what follows will be to say a few words about this distinguished class and to briefly discuss its once so miserable fate
Let us go back to the foggy, gray days when our beloved northern Bohemian homeland was perhaps nothing more than a wilderness. A wilderness, terribly beautiful and eerie! Mighty forests might have stretched out under a misty sky, forests with gigantic giant trees, each of which was a forest within a forest, eerily dark, damp, but sublime and magnificent, and also alive with game of all kinds: bears, wolves, lynx, elk, deer, boars, capercaillie, and other feathered inhabitants. Alongside life, however, death also reigned: from the fallen giant trunks, bent by lightning and storms, young, flowering tree families shot forth again in rows, free by nature, without the artificial coercion of forest culture What perseverance it must have taken to conjure lovely gardens and fertile fields from these terribly beautiful and dreadful realms! Who did it? The peasant; in northern Bohemia, the German peasant! How hard his work was, too. The iron-clad knight, the lord of the land, left the land to the peasant's ancestor not as his own property, but as a fief, to which a gift came attached manifold burdens, practically capable of crushing the subsequent peasant. The burdens grew with the diligence and the yield of his estate; they grew with time. But not only the land, but also the most profitable businesses, breweries, distilleries, mills, and the like, the powerful lord retained for himself; he forced his subjects to meet their needs solely from these.
How did the landlord go about gaining subjects? He called German settlers to his fiefdom, making great promises, and designated the play for them, whose markings, mountain ranges, moats, and other natural boundaries formed the land. If the territory was suitable and sufficiently large, it was divided into peasant holdings. The smaller areas were called handholds, and their consideration for the lordship was handrobot, while the larger ones, called hauled holdings, required the landlord to haul with tractors and agricultural implements. Where the soil neither supported the establishment of the hauled holdings nor the Where land was allowed for subsistence, as was the case, for example, on mountainous slopes, so-called field gardens were established. All these subdivided fiefdoms, as already mentioned, were separated from one another by natural boundaries.
Some portions for public buildings such as schools, churches, etc. were temporarily reserved for these. Because the first settlements were mostly very extensive, and the farmers may have owned a fairly large livestock population, a communal pasture had to be provided, for which the most inhospitable lands were reserved. These communal pastures or cattle grazing lands were called "Vie h-bichte." Even today, a so-called Fiebicht still exists in this or that village or town, on which, however, houses were also built along with the larger population. The nature of such a settlement was, in its early beginnings, purely patriarchal, and the farmer who owned the largest property, which was allocated to him free of taxes, became the leader of the community and, as such, was called the hereditary mayor or hereditary mayor, or even hereditary judge. His property was sometimes called Kretscham (Kratschen).1)
1) Meaning: village tavern, because it was associated with the right to sell alcohol. The word comes from the Middle High German "Kretschem," which is from the Slavic (cf. Polish: Karczma: tavern). From this comes the surname Kretschmer (tavern owner), as well as the place name: Herrnskretschen. D. Schriftl.
Once everyone had been assigned their land, bounded by natural markers, their first task was to build their house there. This was usually laid out in the middle of their feudal estate. Even the ancient Tacitus says of our ancestors in his Germania: "They settle in isolation wherever a spring, a meadow, or a grove pleases them. They establish villages, not like us, with houses built one after the other. Everyone makes a clear space around their house, either to ward off the danger of fire or out of ignorance of architecture. They don't even use masonry stones and bricks. They use rude timbers for everything, without any consideration for embellishment."
But these dwellings of our ancestors, however simple and crude they may have appeared, still fulfilled their purpose. In the immediate vicinity of the dwelling, they cleared the land for fields and meadows by raking. Poorer areas remained as pastures for livestock They left the other, much larger portion of their robotic land covered with forest, which was gradually and completely cultivated with greater demands. However, where stony ground existed, or where hills prevented the establishment of fields, they remained, as anyone can still see for themselves today. Later, when the population had multiplied, hunger dictated the division of the property. Many a father divided his considerable estate among his two or three sons. From this originated the so-called half- and third-farmers. Each of the homeless sons, in turn, built his own home on his share. The yield was doubled in this way. Quarter-, fifth-, and sixth-farms also emerged in the following period. New additions Farmers, for whom there was insufficient land left to clear, had to make do with smaller portions left to them by the full, half, or third farmers. This gave rise to the cottagers. They built their homes wherever possible, along roads and waterfronts, and between the farmhouses. Through these smaller settlements, the originally sparse villages were forced to gain a cohesive structure, a rounded appearance. Many such villages were destroyed in the Swedish War and often disappeared completely from the face of the earth (for example, a village near the Black Forest, in the so-called Arltgraben). What thanks did the farmer have for transforming his lord's holdings into fertile gardens? It consisted of robot and serfdom, of being hardly treated as a human being. No one will doubt that even today the peasant still has to face many hardships, but this is hardly worth mentioning compared to the hardships and burdens that oppressed him during the time of serfdom, which would hardly be possible today.
When, after hard work and toil, his crops were green and abundant, the "noble sparker" would come practicing his hunting and trample them and his hurdles. How the bailiff often tormented the poor peasants more for his own benefit than for that of his liege lord. The farmer's crops often had to rot in the fields because the lord's grain and wheat had to be brought in first, and when these were finally cultivated by the farmer without pay, by the sweat of his brow, he could only think of his fields, that he would have to live off them and, in addition, pay the oppressive interest. When a storm of war swept across the land, it was again the poor farmer whose hut the rough soldier would take up residence, whom he had to feed What did the peasants' services to the authorities consist of, what did the so-called robots consist of? We will attempt to briefly explain below. As a basis, we will take the robots on the Bohemian-Aicha domain from the end of the 17th century. For a long time, this was under the rule of the nuns of the St. Jacob's Monastery in Vienna. At that time, the resident subjects of Oschiz and Niederoschis were divided into three classes: economic proprietors, hereditary gardeners, and commoners.
The economic proprietors had to pay their authorities annually, namely each one an interest in cash in two installments, at St. George's and St. Gallen's Day, a share of barley in kind, furthermore, they had to provide plowing and working days, as well as the processing and supply of a batch of firewood for the lordly brewery, and finally, they had to deliver a goose, two chickens, four to twelve eggs, and two reels of spun yarn
The hereditary gardeners paid the usual interest at St. George's and St. Gallen's, performed three working days, and delivered two reels of spun yarn, and two together one interest goose.
The common house owners paid only interest at St. George's and St. Gallen's dates, 12 groschen each
Each miller paid an annual interest of 10 to 16 Schock (one Schock = 70 kr.), also every six months.
All communities had to pay year-round: Schock from the community property, 2 Schock from the town hall; the bakers and shoemakers each paid 2 Schock, the tailors 45, the grinders 30 Groschen; the butchers paid 5 Stein (= 100 pounds) of Inselt (unschlitt).
The foodstuffs listed above (poultry, eggs, fish, game (leaf from the lordship's forests and ponds), probably also oats and grain, were sent to the nuns as far as Vienna. The lordship's subjects also had to bear the transport costs, especially at Christmas and during Carnival, i.e., during unfavorable times of the year when the roads were bad. According to the municipal accounts, Oschis contributed 18 florins to these transports. The trout from the lordship's ponds also had to be "marinated" for the nuns, which involved considerable expenditure. Even today, the Bohemian-Aicha Decembrist Archives contain a statement of the "marination costs" of the trout that had to be sent to the gracious authorities in Vienna. But that wasn't enough. Every serf who could lice had to perform driving duties for his gracious authorities on the hunt. No one was exempt, from the mayor to the night watchman and cattle herder. The Liebenau The town leaders, who were forgiven this obligation by the authorities, were quite pleased and mocked the Oschiz councilors, elders, and young judges quite a bit. This annoyed them, and they decided to petition the higher authorities for exemption from this servitude. The then plenipotentiary of the Lordship of Böhm-Aicha, Lukas Keil, and the canon master in Vienna agreed to their request, and on September 16, 1692, they actually received the privilege from the authorities that they, as Oschiz town leaders—namely the mayor, the councilors, the old judge, and the community elder—would henceforth be exempt from driving duties for themselves during official matters, so that, as they said,
their reputation in the community would not be damaged any further No one was allowed to drink anything but the lord's beer, no one was allowed to stay in a foreign place for any length of time. Was it any wonder that the peasant finally grew tired of such treatment, that he did more than sigh? That, since no one helped him, he wanted to help himself? Bloody peasant uprisings arose, through which he sought relief. But they harmed him more than ever; he was oppressed all the more terribly. But the peasants had achieved one thing through their unrest: namely, that they drew the attention of the noble-minded world to themselves. A man came to the throne who will live forever in our memory: Emperor Joseph II. His affability, his zeal to please everyone, especially the lowest of his children, made him unforgettable, immortal. His words: "Be patient, you good people! I will take off your linen smocks and clothe you in cloth!" have become universally known. But no matter how much Joseph II did, he could not do everything, and so many evils still remained to be remedied. It was a real man whose
A portrait of Hans Kudlich, who struck the decisive, powerful blow against this thousand-year-old injustice of the robots, and who, in the Reichstag in Vienna on July 26, 1848, submitted a motion for the relief of land and property in time, through which the farmer was completely freed from his servitude and his immovable property was transformed into his free property. Therefore, farmer, think of this man and also think of our much-loved monarch, who enacted Kudlich's motion into law. Rejoice in these achievements and sometimes think back to the hard, difficult torment of your ancestors!
Source: Yearbook of the German Mountain Association for the Jeschken and Jser Mountains.
Edited by
Franz Kübler, Imperial and Royal Professor at the State Middle School in Reichenberg.
9th Year 1899.
15th Year of the "Mitteilungen".
https://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/Content/127885/PDF/GSL_P_27200_II_1899_58213.pdf/