Recent research on the development of peasant land markets and transfer patterns for central and east-central Europe concentrated on the early modern period. For the late Middle Ages, rural history still relies on older approaches studying the general development of ‘agrarian structure’ (Agrarverfassung) and peasant ‘inheritance’. This article seeks to establish the basis for a more systematic analysis of the formation and general development of peasant land markets in late medieval central and east-central Europe in a comparative perspective. Apart from changes weakening traditional manorial structures, secure peasant property rights of hereditary tenure developed and prevailed by the later Middle Ages. Possible institutional rigidities of transactions with peasant farmland, whose effects in practice would need further exploration, were undermined by the existence of reserves of land situated outside the measured open fields of peasant farms that could be traded more flexibly. These areas also formed important resources for the establishment of smallholders and cottagers who in turn added to the dynamics of developing peasant land markets. In the final section, the article offers a brief survey of developments during the early modern period and concludes that traditional images of an undermining of peasant property rights and of massive landlord powers due to the rise of ‘demesne lordship’ (Gutsherrschaft) must be seriously questioned, as recent empirical studies highlight enormous regional variation and a dominant pattern of continuity of secure peasant property rights and also indicate considerable land mobility.
The impact of the Thirty Years' War on the population of Bohemia has been overestimated, because research on a variety of sources for the period around the year 1651 suggests not only that there were long-term continuities in marital behavior (such as high proportions married) but also that some of the consequences attributed directly to warfare might well be explained by reference to inaccuracies of the source or to such population dynamics as emigration. A joint research project involving the University of Vienna, Charles University in Prague, and the State Central Archives in Prague is exploring socioeconomic dimensions of population change in mid-seventeenth-century Bohemia in order to test older assumptions and to develop new insights.
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