Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:49:43.511Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Peasant Stem Families in Early Modern Austria: Life Plans, Status Tactics, and the Grid of Inheritance*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Hermann Rebel
Hermann Rebel*
Affiliation:
The University of Iowa
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

And you know the story about a son whose wife disliked her father-in-law so much that she denied him a place at the table. Nor was he allowed to sleep in a separate room but had to make do with a place under the stairs. When winter came and the father asked the son for a cloak because he could no longer bear the cold, the son gave the father two yards of cloth to mend his torn old coat or cover himself otherwise. The son’s little son also asked for two yards of cloth and, when his father asked him why, he replied: he would keep them until the time when his father was weak and old and would give them to him as father had just done with grandfather. The father came to his senses, took his son’s words to heart and sent the boy to the old father with a fur coat and an invitation to return to the table. He also provided his father with a room of his own. (anecdote from a German evangelical sermon, 1586)

The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , Summer 1978 , pp. 255 - 291
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1978 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to faculty-student colloquia at the University of Iowa, to the Family and Community History Center at the Newberry Library in Chicago and to the 1977 meeting of the American Anthropological Association at Houston. I especially wish to thank Natalie Brody, Henry Horwitz, Dan Smith, Bill Silag, David Gilmore and Ralph Giesey for their help and support.

References

Notes

1 Cited in Wolf, Herbert, “Erzähltraditionen in Homiletischen Quellen,” in Bruckner, Wolfgang, ed., Volkserzählung und Reformation (Berlin, 1974), 741–42.Google Scholar

2 I am indebted to Michael Katz’s work for making me aware of this question. See his The People of Hamilton, Canada West (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 213.

3 Brooke, Michael Z., Le Play: Engineer and Social Scientist (London, 1970), 107.Google Scholar

4 Laslett, Peter, “The Comparative History of Household and Family,” Journal of Social History, 4 (1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and idem., The World We Have Lost (Cambridge, 1971). Berkner, Lutz, “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth Century Austrian Example,” American Historical Review, 77 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the developmental cycle concept see Goody, Jack, ed., Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge, 1958)Google Scholar, especially in introduction by Meyer Fortes.

5 Laslett, Peter and Wall, Richard, eds., Household and Family in Past Time, (Cambridge, 1972), 16–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 21n36 and also 55n72, and 150–51.

6 Berkner, Lutz, “The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structure,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1975).Google Scholar

7 For a critical and limited but successful use of the Cambridge Group’s categories see Katz, op. cit., chap. 5, but see also Jan de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1974), 14. The fact of the matter is that, as even some of Laslett’s contributors show, the stem family and other extended forms do indeed appear in a number of places under several different historical circumstances and for a variety of reasons. This is true even in England where Laslett finds the ideal type of the early modern nuclear family. On the medieval roots of the English stem family see Coulton, G. G., The Medieval Village (Cambridge, 1925), 25Google Scholar and Homans, George, English Villagers in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1975), 119–20Google Scholar (see Laslett, Household and Family, 19n33 on Homans). Raftis, J. A., Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the English Village (Toronto, 1964), 42–46Google Scholar and James, Mervyn, Family, Lineage and Civil Society (Oxford, 1974), 20, 22–23Google Scholar add important information. A significant recent contribution to the debate about the early modern English family is to be found in Margaret Spufford’s article “Peasant inheritance customs and land distribution in Cambridgeshire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,” in Jack Goody et al., eds., Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800 (Cambridge, 1976).

8 See, for example, Household and Family, 36–37.

9 Berkner, “Use and Misuse,” 726.

10 Spufford, op. cit., 173–76.

11 Mitterauer, Michael, “Zur Familienstruktur in ländlichen Gebieten Österreichs im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Helczmanovski, Heimold, ed., Beiträge zur Bevölkerungs und Sozialgeschichte Osterreichs (Munich, 1973), 172Google Scholar. For his views on the stem family see 167–70 and his “Der Mythos der vorindustriellen Grossfamilie,” Beiträge zur historischen Sozialkunde, 3:3 (1973), 43. He modified these views considerably in his recent and important article “Familiengrösse—Familientypen—Familienzyklus. Probleme Quantitativer Auswertung von österreichischem Quellenmaterial,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 1: 2–3 (1975).

12 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstruktur,” 197, 210; Berkner, “The Stem Family,” 407. Berkner does not count widows living in a child’s household and therefore claims only 13 percent of his households consisted of stem families. According to the theoretical calculations by E. A. Wrigley and D. V. Glass cited in the same article by Berkner, 407n25, the Austrian percentage of stem families had (in the early modern period) reached the maximum possible.

13 Grüll, Georg, Der Bauer im Lande ob der Enns am Ausgang des 16. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1969), 92–100.Google Scholar

14 Household inventories have been used as a historical source for illustrating extinct ways of everyday life at various social levels. See, for example, Ramsauer, Wilhelm, “Das Inventar eines deutschen Marschbauernhofes aus den letzten Jahren des dreissigjährigen Krieges,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 7 (1909)Google Scholar; Kenyon, G. H., “Kirdford Inventories, 1611 to 1776,” Sussex Archeolgoical Collections, 93 (1955)Google Scholar; Cornford, Barbara, “Inventories of the Poor,” Norfolk Archeology, 35 (1970)Google Scholar. Inventories have also served as sources for describing and understanding the long-term development of past rural economies and social relationships. Thus, for example, in Wopfner, Hermann, Die Lage Tirols zu Ausgang des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1908)Google Scholar, and idem, “Bauerliches Besitzrecht and Besitzverteilung in Tirol,” Forschungen und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte Tirols und Vorarlbergs, 11 (1907). When these interests have been pursued with some basic statistical techniques such valuable studies as Walter Achilles’s Vermögensverhältnisse braunschweigischer Bauernhöfe (Stuttgart, 1965), and de Vries, op. cit., chap. 6, have resulted. Oscar Lewis’s article, “The Possessions of the Poor,” Scientific American, 211:4 (1969), is also relevant to inventory research. See also Holderness, B. A., “Credit in English Rural Society Before the Nineteenth Century, with special reference to the period 1650–1720,” Agricultural History Review, 24: pt. 2 (1976)Google Scholar.

15 These were all located at the Upper Austrian State Archives in Linz. Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv (henceforth OÖLA), Herrschaftsarchiv Aistershaim, “Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 90, 91; Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, “Brief-und Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 248, 249, 250, 252, 253, 254, 260, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269; Herrschaftsarchiv Schaunberg, “Brief-und Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 278, 279, 280, 281; Stiftsarchiv Schlägl, “Brief-und Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 434, 435, 436, 437; Herrschaftsarchiv Windhag, “Brief-und Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941.

16 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstruktur,” 180.

17 On the problem of ideal family forms that may not actually exist in the societies that hold such ideals see Goode, Wm. J., The Family (Englewood Cliffs, 1964), 49–50Google Scholar. Berkner and others (including, suprisingly, Laslett, Household and Family, 144n19) cite in this connection, Levy, Marion J. Jr., “Aspects of the Analysis of Family Structure,” in Levy, et al., els., Aspects of the Analysis of Family Structure, (Princeton, 1965), 40–63Google Scholar. On the related distinction between the family seen as a universal measuring stick of social evolution and as a mutable and mutating cultural artifact see Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 42–48.Google Scholar

18 Berkner, “Use and Misuse,” 733–35.

19 Michael Mitterauer is presently engaged in just such studies of early modern and modern villages in Austria. He discusses the problem of individual and family interaction in “Familiengrösse,” 244–45. See also Katz, op. cit., chap. 5.

20 Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Ghosts, Kin and Progency: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 106:2 (1977), 108.Google Scholar

21 Manuel, Frank E., “The Use and Abuse of Psychology in History,” in Gilbert, Felix and Graubard, Stephen E., eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), 227Google Scholar. For a pioneering work on life cycle theory and its relevance to family and social history see Else Frankel-Brunswick’s 1936 work, “Studies in Biographical Psychology,” which has been republished as “Adjustments and Reorientations in the Course of the Life Span,” in Bernice Neugarten, ed., Middle Age and Aging (Chicago, 1968). The works of Erikson and others on this and related subjects are discussed in Hareven, Tamara K., “The History of the Family as an Interdisiplinary Field,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1972), 403, 404–07Google Scholar. Note also the closing remarks by Lasch, Christopher, “What the Doctor Ordered,” New York Review of Books, 22: 20 (December 1975), 53–54Google Scholar and Geertz, op. cit., 52–53.

22 Hareven, Tamara K., “Family Time and Historical Time,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 106:2 (1977), 58.Google Scholar

23 qBerger, Peter, The Homeless Mind (New York, 1974), 72–73.Google Scholar

24 Zimmer, Heinrich, The Philosophies of India (New York, 1956), 157–60.Google Scholar

25 Goode, op. cit., 55.

26 Atchley, Robert C., The Social Forces in Later Life: An Introduction to Social Gerontology (Belmont, Calif., 1977), 25.Google Scholar

27 Other common Austrian synonyms for Auszügler are Austräger, Ausdingler, Nahrungsmann (-frau). See Georg Grüll, op. cit., 92–93 and Mitterauer, “Familiengrösse,” 233–34.

28 Langenscheidt’s New Muret-Sanders Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English and German Languages (Berlin, 1974), pt. 2, vol. 1, 69. The Austrian Auszug and Auszügler are discussed as a part of the more common German term Altenteiler. See also Wörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (Berlin, 1961), 1, 114.

29 For a discussion by one participant in this debate see A. von Miaskowski’s article “Altenteil, Altenteilsverträge” in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena, 1898), 1; especially 272–75; for the continuation of the debate in the 1920s see W. Wygodzinski’s revision of the original article in the 1923 edition of the Handwörterbuch, 252–57; see Donald Rohr, The Origins of Social Liberalism in Germany (Chicago, 1963), 110–111 for the earlier nineteenth century. Also, Rosenberg, Hans, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit (Berlin, 1967), chap. 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 Berkner, , “The Stem Family,” 401–05Google Scholar, cites Rosegger’s, Peter, Volksleben in Steiermark (Leipzig, 1914)Google Scholar and Rauscher’s, Heinrich “Volkskunde des Waldviertels,” in Stepan, Eduard, ed., Das Waldviertel (Vienna, 1926)Google Scholar. For Upper Austria there is a similar source in Laurenz Pröll’s Das Obermühlviertler Bauernhaus (Linz-Urfahr, 1902), 11–12 which takes, for the time, a socially conservative line and idealizes A uszug as an idyllic form of retirement.

31 Shorter, Edward, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), 31–39.Google Scholar

32 “Bericht eines bairischen Adlichen über die Bauerschaft in Osterreich ob der Enns [1641] Februar 14,” F. Stieve, ed., Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichte, 5 (1884) 626.

33 Demeny, Paul, “Early Fertility Decline in Austria-Hungary: A Lesson in Demographic Transition,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 97:2 (1968), 511, 514.Google ScholarPubMed

34 de Vries, Jan, Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600–1750 (Cambridge, 1976), 9–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstruktur,” 197, 200. By contrast, Berkner has found that in the eighteenth century there were some married children living in their parents’ household and that the age of first marriage had declined, with some notable exceptions, to about twenty-five, in “The Stem Family,” 405. Also, see the well-known article by Hajnal, H. J., “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Glass, D. V. and Eversly, D. E. C., eds., Population in History (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

36 Austrian peasants sought relief from sexual restraints in “clandestine” marriages or in pre-marital sex after an exchange of vows and the proclamation of the banns. See Czerny, Albin, Aus dem geistlichen Geschäftsleben in Oberösterreich im 15. Jahrhundert (Linz, 1882), 28–32.Google Scholar

37 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstrucktur,” 200.

38 Ibid., 199; Berkner, “The Stem Family,” 408.

39 Stark, Werner, “Die Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse der gutsherrlichen Bauern Böhmens im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Nationalokonomie und Statistik, 64, (1952)Google Scholar.

40 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstruktur,” 187, 197–200.

41 OÖLA, Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, Brief-und Inventurprotokolle,” vols. 249, 261. The amounts shown in the second inventory add up to only 414fl but the total is given as 445fl. This is a not uncommon occurrence in the inventories and it does not mean that the estate’s agents could not add. It usually means that a loan or a piece of property owned by the deceased was kept out of the official record but its value included in the final accounting. In all cases I have used the data found in the inventory and have not altered them.

42 Mitterauer, “Zur Familienstruktur,” 198–99.

43 On the maternal uncle-nephew relationship in traditional German society see Sabean, David, “Aspects of kinship behavior in rural western Europe before 1800,” in Goody, et al., Family and Inheritance, 100.Google Scholar

44 OÖLA, Stiftsarchiv Garsten, “Kaufprotokolle,” vols. 22–25 (1602–1648).

45 Grüll, op. cit., 60; idem, “Die Herrschaftsschichtungen in Österreich ob der Enns, 1750,” Mitteilungen des oberösterreichischen Landesarchives, 5 (1957), 314, 317. Grüll’s figures are discussed in Rebel, Hermann, “The Rural Subject Population of Upper Austria During the Early Seventeenth Century: Aspects of the Social Stratification System” (Berkeley, 1976)Google Scholar, Ph.D. dissertation; 41–44, see also 80–84.

46 For a thorough and comparative discussion of how inheritance practices can overcome restraints of impartibility (or partibility, for that matter) see Cole, John W. and Wolf, Eric R., The Hidden Frontier: Ecology and Ethnicity in an Alpine Village (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, chap. 8; see also Sabean, David, Landbesitz und Gesellschaft am Vorabend des Bauernkriegs (Stuttgart, 1972), 40–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Giesey, Ralph E., “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Pre-Revolutionary France,” American Historical Review, 82:2 (1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 See Goody, Jack, “Strategies of Heirship,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 15 (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 For a role analysis of families see Levy, Marion Jr. and Fallers, L. A., “The Family: Some Comparative Considerations,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 61 (1959), 647–51Google Scholar; see the discussion by Smith, Raymond T., “Family: Comparative Structure,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 5 (1968) 303–04.Google Scholar

49 OÖLA, Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, “Inventurprotokolle,” vol. 262 (1630).

50 Sabean, “Kinship Behavior,” 108–10.

51 Sabean, Landbesitz und Gesellschaft, 40, cites an earlier example for rural Swabia in which residency was a criterion for sharing in inheritance.

52 “Class” is a term of social analysis which serves a special function, one that such other terms as “group” or “stratum” do not serve. As do these other terms, it describes and classifies social division according to various criteria. It also, however, introduces into the description and discussion of social groups a larger social world defined according to a theoretical model of society.

My own use of the term “class” is not derived from the classical Marxist model of social life. Instead, I am attempting to interpret the Austrian peasantry according to the social theories and definitions of Max Weber and the further elaborations of these by Ralf Dahrendorf both of whom focus discussion away from purely economic descriptions of “class” and concern themselves instead with the interrelationships among individual and collective life chances, authority, and power. Max Weber, in his essay “Class, Status, Party” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), 181–82 suggested that individuals live in what he called a “class situation” when they” had a “typical chance for a supply of goods, external living conditions, and personal life experiences, in so far as this chance is determined by the amount and kind of power, or lack of such, to dispose of goods or skills for the sake of income in a given economic order.” He went on to admit that “‘Property’ and’lack of property’ are…the basic categories of class situations” because, despite the differences in kinds of property, this distinction determined one’s fundamental position in the market. “But always this is the generic connotation of the concept of class: that the kind of chance in the market is the decisive moment which presents a common condition for the individual’s fate. ‘Class situation’ is in this sense, ultimately ‘market situation’.”

Ralf Dahrendorf, in his study entitled Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, 1959), 237–38, took a somewhat different approach toward a new definition of the term class, but one that complements the “market situation” view of Weber, especially if we interpret the term “market” widely. Dahrendorf borrowed this definition from Weber: “An association shall be called imperatively coordinated association insofar as its members are, by virtue of a prevailing order, subject to authority relations” and on this basis he developed a definition of “class” applicable to social situations other than those of industrializing Europe which had originally produced the modern idea of class. “By social class shall be understood such organized or unorganized collectivities of individuals as share manifest or latent interests arising from and related to the authorty structure of imperatively coordinated associations.” For Professor Dahrendorf this definition and its numerous corollaries lead to a reappraisal of the social structure of what he calls “post-capitalist” society. In my estimation, it is also applicable to the precapitalist social relations of seventeenth-century rural Austria.

The complementary definitions of class by Weber and Dahrendorf set up a polarity that describes perfectly the Austrian peasant stem family’s division between the social situation of dispossessed children on the one hand and that of tenants and elders on the other. The empirical evidence in this paper as whole is meant to demonstrate and explore various aspects of these differences in market siutation and authority relations. The problem of children and servants is one aspect of this class division of the Austrian peasant family. We must disagree somewhat with Lutz Berkner’s contention in “The Stem Family,” 401, that because servants were for the most part children of lodgers or disinherited children of tenant families they ought not to be regarded as a distinct social class. Servanthood was, perhaps, only a stage in the life course of the dispossessed but that does not alter the class character of that occupation. It is precisely the interchangeability of children and servants in the household’s labor force—something that Berkner demonstrates convincingly—which supports the class argument.

53 See Sabean, “Kinship Behavior,” 110–11 and idem, “German Agrarian Institutions at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century: Upper Swabia as an Example,” in Janos Bak, ed., German Peasant War of 1525, a special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1 (1975), 82–83.

54 Lütge, Friedrich, Deutsche Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Berlin, 1966), 126–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Brunner, Otto, “Das ‘ganze Haus’ und die alteuropaische ‘Okonomik,’” Neue Wege der Verfassungs-und Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Berkner, “The Stem Family,” 411–12.

56 In this view the early modern Austrian peasant family is very similar to the Japanese ie as discussed by Nakane, Chie, Japanese Society (Berkeley, 1972), 4–7.Google Scholar

57 Shorter, op. cit.; Grüll, Der Bauer, 208–09.

58 All the sales data were taken from OÖLA, Stiftsarchiv Garsten, op. cit.

59 Grüll, Der Bauer, 99.

60 My sixteenth century examples are from ibid., 92–99 and the seventeenth-century ones from OÖLA, Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, “Protokolle,” vol. 265.

61 The inventories are discussed and analyzed at greater length in Rebel, op. cit., passim.

62 For a discussion of economic groups in Austrian peasant society see ibid., 174–207.

63 To test for the precise relationship between Auszug households and their households of origin we need to do family reconstitution studies using inventories and contracts. We have begun such a pilot study using a limited sampling of Austrian contracts and inventories and the computer facilities of the Laboratory for Political Research at the University of Iowa.

64 For illustrations of Auszug houses from the eighteenth century see Max Kislinger, Alte Bäuerliche Kunst (Linz, 1963), 14–17.

65 Credit for goods on consignment was what M. M. Postan called “Sale credits.” See his valuable article, “Credit in Medieval Trade,” in E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (London, 1954), 1: 65–71. The classic and, for a long time, the only work on English rural credit in the early modern period was R. H. Tawney’s “Introduction” to Thomas Wilson’s Discourse on Usury, (New York, 1925). Now there is also the excellent brief analysis by R. B. Holderness, “Credit in English Rural Society before the Nineteenth Century,” Agricultural History Review, vol. 24, pt. 2 (1976).

66 This compares favorably with the findings in Holderness, “Credit in English Rural Society,” 101, which were also based on a sampling of household inventories, and in which loans accounted for 13 percent of the aggregate total of inventory assets.

67 For an extended discussion of the economic and social implications of credit in Austrian peasant society, see Rebel, op. cit., 274–85 and passim. For interesting comparisons of the relationships between social groups and extended credit see also Holderness, op. cit., 102.

68 OÖLA, Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, “Inventurprotokolle,” vol. 268 (1636). For a discussion of the geographically dispersed nature of the Austrian peasantry’s credit market see Rebel, op. cit., 276–79 and idem, “Peasant Credit, Marketing and Rebellion in Southeast Central Europe,” Peasant Studies Newsletter, 4:3 (1975). The research by Oscar Lewis, op. cit., is also relevant to this question and further contradicts the persistently held belief that peasants and the marginal poor had no contacts with the larger world outside their communities.

69 Holderness, op. cit., 102, shows that in early modern England “widows and single people” had, collectively, 45 percent of their assets in outstanding loans while farmers had only 10 percent.

70 The Pearson’s correlation coefficients measuring the relationship between total wealth and loans are .66 for the Upper Austrian peasantry as a whole and .8 for the other specialized group of moneylenders, the inkeepers. For these and other statistical calculations based on the household inventories see Rebel, “The Rural Subject Population,” 258, 179, 241, and passim.

71 Ibid., 211–23, 265–70 for a more extensive discussion of the rural poor in early modern Austria.

72 Ibid., 227–31, 238–40, 270–74, 283–85 for descriptions of these groups.

73 OÖLA, Herrschaftsarchiv Frankenburg, “Inventurprotokolle,” vol. 262 (1630).

74 The remarks by Littlejohn, James, Social Stratification (London, 1972), 46Google Scholar concerning the family and the functionalist idea of stratification are relevant to this question.

75 Weber, op. cit., 181–83. For a Marxist view of classes in peasant societies which might also apply here but which offers a less empirically relevant explanation of the relationships I have found, see Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, Social Classes in Agrarian Societies (Garden City, New York, 1975)Google Scholar, chap. ii.

76 My data and historical circumstances do not allow a precise application of the model, but the kind of economic and social self-exploitation found among the Russian peasantry and analyzed in A. V. Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy, Daniel Thorner et al., eds., (Homewood, Ill., 1966), 90, chaps, ii and v is relevant to this discussion.

77 Weber, op. cit., 90–93.

78 Sabean, Landbesitz and Gesellschaft, 101 and idem, “Family and Land Tenure: A Case Study of Conflict in the German Peasants’ War (1525).” Peasant Studies Newsletter, 3: 1 (1974). See also Berkner, Lutz, “Recent Research on the History of the Family in Western Europe,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (1973), 401Google Scholar. In this connection see also the debate initiated by George Dalton’s article, “How Exactly Are Peasants Exploited?”, American Anthropologist, 76: 3 (1974) and 77: 2 (1975).

79 Grüll, Georg, Weinberg. Die Entstehungsgeschichte einer Muhlviertler Wirtschaftsherrschaft (Graz, 1955)Google Scholar.

80 This form of estate exploitation was first analyzed by Werner Stark, op. cit.; for Upper Austria, Alfred Hoffmann developed his own analysis. Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Landes Oberösterreich, (Salzburg, 1952), 1: 98–99 and idem, “Die Grundherrschaft als Unternehmen,” Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrargeschichte, 6: 2 (1958).

81 Stark, Werner, “Die Abhängigkeitsverhältnisse der gutsherrlichen Bauern Böhmens im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomik und Statistik, 164 (1952), 270.Google Scholar

82 Tremel, Ferdinand, Wirtschafts-und Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna, 1969), 129.Google Scholar

83 Österreichische Weistümer, (Graz, 1939-), see especially vols. 12–14. These are discussed in Rebel, “The Rural Subject Population,” chap. iii. An important comparative interpretation of these codes is the article by Stahleder, Helmuth, “Weistümer und Verwandte Quellen in Franken, Bayern und Österreich,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 2, (1969)Google Scholar.

84 See, for example, Weistümer, XII 280, 601; XIV 290, 296. Also Otto Brunner, “Die Freiheitsrechte in der altständischen Gesellschaft,” in his Neue Wege, 193–94.

85 Thompson, E. P., “The grid of inheritance: a comment,” in Goody, , et al., Family and Inheritance, 337.Google Scholar

86 Ibid., 340–41.

87 The definition of emphyteusis in Goody et al., Family and Inheritance, 400, does not adequately explain this important term.

88 Lütge, op. cit., 127.

89 Mitterauer, Michael, “Arbeitsorganisation und Altersversorgung nach dem Mittelalter,” Beitritge zur historischen Sozialkunde, 5:1 (1975), 6.Google Scholar

90 On the aristocratic origins of the early modern ideology of the “whole house” see Brunner, “Das ‘ganze Haus,’” 104–05 and idem, Adeliges Landleben und Europäischer Geist (Salzburg, 1959). Other writers have remarked as well on the benefits to estate management of extended families and household government; see Plakans, Andrejs, “Peasant Families East and West,” Peasant Studies Newsletter, 2:3 (1973), 12Google Scholar; also Blum, Jerome, “The Internal Structure and Polity of the European Village Community from the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of Modern History, 43:4 (1971), 565CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The classical economy as a setting for the “whole house” is discussed in Finley, M. I., The A ncient Economy (Berkeley, 1973), 17–21.Google Scholar

91 Sabean, Landbesitz und Gesellschaft, 115–19 and idem, “Family and Land Tenure.”

92 Georg Grüll, Der Bauer, 131–74 and passim.

93 Ibid., 208–09.

94 This and related documents appear in an Appendix to ibid., 240–54.

95 Ebeling, Gerhard, Luther: An Indroduction to his Thought, (Philadelphia, 1970), 196–99, 207–09Google Scholar. 96 Cited in Lazareth, William H., Luther on the Christian Home, (Philadelphia, 1960), 149.Google Scholar

96 Cited in Lazareth, William H., Luther on the Christian Home, (Philadelphia, 1960), 149.Google Scholar

97 See Bossy, John, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present, 47 (1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Natalie Z. Davis, op. cit., 92–96 and passim.

98 Thompson, op. cit., 346–47; Holderness, op. cit., 107–08.

99 Steer, Francis W., Farm and Cottage Inventories of Mid-Essex 1635–1749 (Chelmsford, 1950), 4–5.Google Scholar

100 Spufford, op. cit.

101 Thernstrom, Stephen, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (New York, 1970), 35–37.Google Scholar

102 Farber, Bernard, Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York, 1972), 192–93.Google Scholar

103 Ibid., 208–09.

104 Burguiefe, André, “De Malthus à Max Weber: Le mariage tardif et l’esprit d’entreprise,” Annales. Economies. Societes. Civilisations, 27: 4–5 (1972), 1137–38.Google Scholar

105 Levy, Marion J., Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton, 1966), 2: 416–18.Google Scholar