The differences between the two categories were, however, smaller in practice than on paper, for while the eingekauft peasant’s freedom was far from absolute, the man who had not ‘bought in’ was in practice seldom evicted except for grossly unsatisfactory conduct, and his heir (who by custom was his youngest son)152 usually succeeded him without question. The possibility of reducing or dividing a holding, beyond certain limits, was limited by the fact – a most important one for the whole peasant question in the Monarchy – that it was the custom in most Lands, and the local law in many, that the farmhouse and sufficient land with it to form a viable farm had to be kept intact, failing special reason to the contrary. On the other hand, while buying in did not relieve a peasant of his obligations towards his lord, the latter usually maintained that it did relieve him of his counter-obligations. Consequently the transaction, besides itself costing the peasant money, was apt to leave him materially worse off.
Buying in was therefore fairly common among the thrifty Germans, but in the Bohemian Lands it was the lords who were in favour of it, as they said ‘to be quit of the endless demands for seed and money’153 and of the expense of doing-up cottages left in a state of dilapidation by unthrifty peasants; while the peasants refused to make the change. Maria Theresa favoured the buying-in system, but was unwilling to apply compulsion. She did abolish certain forms of tenure, widespread especially in Carinthia, which precluded it, but beyond this, confined herself to recommending it and urging the landlords to make the change. The results were, however, meagre.154
In the early 1770s one of the Empress’s chief agricultural experts, Frh. von Raab, evolved a more radical plan. The landlord was to cede the dominium utile of his dominical lands to tenant farmers, who were then to pay cash rents for their holdings. In 1775 Maria Theresa introduced this system on a couple of estates confiscated from the Jesuits, and extended it afterwards to all such estates and to others over which she had direct control, including those belonging to the Royal Free and leibgeding boroughs. She was, however, again defeated (her son again leading the opposition) when, on 1 January 1776, she tried to get the system made compulsory in Bohemia. A few landlords, however, adopted it voluntarily, and these ‘emphyteutic’ tenants (as they were called even in common parlance) came to constitute an important category of the peasantry.
A landlord leasing a dominical holding to a ‘contractualist’ was not, on paper, allowed to impose on him harder terms than those in local usage for the rustical peasants. His landlord’s rent was usually higher, since the peasant was not subject to some other obligations. The land tax, if any, was included in the rent and paid over by the landlord to the State. Here, again, the rent could be taken out in cash, kind or services. It was regularly paid in cash where the lessor was a municipality or other corporate body,155 and cash rents were very common in the German-Austrian Lands, where many of the dominical estates were in the hands of Beamtenadel, who did not want to farm them themselves and were glad of the money rents. The monasteries also leased most of their lands, but took more of their rents out in services, partly out of conservatism, partly because they often owned big vineyards, for the cultivation of which this form was obviously appropriate.
The landlord also made his own terms with his full-time labourers, and with rustical Innmänner who did more work for him than their obligatory stint. Such a man usually got a minute wage in cash, made up by an infinite variety of payments in cash or easements.
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For a clear picture of the condition of the peasantry we should need to know many things more, such as the relationship between the areas of dominical and rustical land, and between the populations on them, the extent of the common lands, the average acreage actually held by a peasant cultivator, the proportion of cultivators to landless men, etc. Unfortunately, much of the information necessary for such a survey is lacking. No figures, for example, have survived of what counted respectively as dominical and rustical land in the Alpine Lands, and if they had survived, mere global percentages would be fairly meaningless, since those lands contained very much forest, much of which was unsuitable for peasant cultivation, and was, in fact, chiefly in the hands of the Crown or of big landlords.156 They would, moreover, probably be misleading, owing to the large amount of concealment, especially of dominical land, practised by the lords in order to evade the land tax.157 In this respect the censuses are only of partial help, since on the one hand they allow the title of ‘peasant’ to any person cultivating the required minimum of land, whether rustical or dominical;158 on the other, they count as dwarf-holders or cottars not only all agriculturalists whose holdings fall below this minimum, again irrespective of the legal quality of their holdings, but also persons following a large number of occupations, not all of which are even rural.159
In general it may be said that in the areas with dense populations and long records of uninterrupted cultivation, such as the Vorlande, the Italian-speaking areas and the Viennese Basin, a very high proportion, sometimes as much as ninety per cent, of the arable land and vineyards was rustical,160 while most of the rest was leased, often for money rents. In other Lands the proportion was lower. In Bohemia fifty-eight per cent of the total area and nearly eighty per cent of the arable land was rustical; the area of arable dominical land in the province was about sixteen per cent of the total. About ten or twelve per cent of this was leased.161 The figures for Moravia and Silesia were probably much the same. In Galicia as a whole 66·5% of the arable land was under ‘rustical’ cultivation (although the proportions varied considerably in different districts), but only a very small amount of the forests.162 The great exception was that part of Hungary which had been recovered from the Turks round 1700, when large tracts of it had been almost uninhabited and there was practically no traditionally reserved urbarial land. Part of this, as we have seen, the Crown had reserved for itself, and settled with free peasants, but it had bestowed enormous tracts on great private beneficiaries. These landlords had to import labour from north and west Hungary, or abroad, and some of them established villages of urbarial peasants, but more usually, they kept most of their estates as sheep or cattle ranches, or alternatively, leased them to ‘contractualists’, sometimes via middle-men, such as municipalities. Thanks to these special conditions, Inner Hungary, the area of which was over 30 million hold, contained, according to Maria Theresa’s urbarium, the abnormally low figure of only 153,528 whole sessiones (fractions being added together) totalling 5,639,029 hold.163 This exceptionally high ratio of allodial to urbarial land, which did not alter greatly in subsequent decades,164 proved a large factor in Hungary’s later agrarian problem, since it meant that relatively little land was distributed under the 1848 reform. In the north and west of the country, however, where the population was denser, the relation between the arable and vineyards under the two types of tenure was probably not far from that prevailing in the Bohemian Lands and Galicia.
In Croatia the figures were round sixty per cent rustical to forty per cent dominical. In Transylvania a high proportion of the total seems to have been dominical, but there again, the forests were very extensive.
The population was obviously denser on rustical land, since a lord cultiving his land for profit would employ as little labour as possible (and require little, on a forest or cattle-ranch). We must, of course, make allowance for the lease-holders,165 but it is probable that three-quarters of the peasants in the Monarchy as a whole were rustical.
The average size of the holdings actually occupied again varied considerably, but in general, it is clear that by 1780 it was already the exception for either a rustical peasant or a leaseholder to hold a full sessio, still rarer, for him to hold more.166 Here, again, it is possible to give figures for only a few Lands, but in Moravia, at the end of the century, there were 7,699 peasants holding whole sessiones, 4,375 with three-quarters each, 25,906 with half, and 25,616 with a quarter.167 The figures for Bohemia and Silesia were probably similar. In Galicia the ‘full’ and ‘half’ peasants constit
uted only sixteen per cent of the total.168 In Hungary (including Croatia and Slavonia), the statistician Schwartner found that in 1805 of the 1,426,579 non-noble holdings, dominical or urbarial, registered, 226,000 were whole or half, and 417,215 quarter.169 The dwarf-holders and the even poorer classes of cottagers (Keuschler, Gärtner, házas zsellerek, etc.) who possessed their own cottages, normally with the conventional acre of allotment, and totally landless men (Innmänner, házatlan zsellerek) who had not even so much, formed the largest category of all: in 1781 they outnumbered the ‘peasants’ by three to one in the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands together,170 the proportion being more favourable in the Tirol and the Littoral, where the figures were nearly equal, about two to one in Styria and Carinthia, and nearly four to one in Bohemia. In Hungary and Croatia the respective figures in 1784 were 509,823 ‘peasants’ and 788,993 zsellers. Of these the poorest class of all, the totally landless men, may have numbered ten to twenty per cent according to the district.171 For Galicia the figures were 89,824 ‘peasants’ and 406,450 Haüsler, Gärtner und beim Provinziale beschäftigte.
This did not mean that more than half the peasant population of the Monarchy was living in a state of chronic destitution. As we have said, the terms Haüsler, zseller, etc., covered many persons not wholly or mainly employed in agriculture (the high figure in Bohemia, for example, is largely made up of home-workers in industry), and even the small agriculturalist might be a vintner or market-gardener (of the 783,344 zsellers found by Schwartner in Hungary in 1805, almost exactly 200,000 were vintners). Only urban ‘intellectuals’ unacquainted with the facts of rural life imagine that all members of rural society ought to be self-sufficient farmers. Even a peasant engaged exclusively in agriculture could often live comfortably enough, by the standards of the day, on as little as a quarter holding, especially if his commune was one owning much common land, or extensive grazing rights. Indeed, agronomes often complained that the size of the holding had been calculated too generously, and that smaller holdings, by compelling more intensive cultivation, would have resulted in bigger production.
At the date of which we are writing, the rural congestion which was later to become so alarming a feature of the Monarchy was only beginning to appear in certain districts of it, and there the peasant often had his remedy of decamping. The general economic problem of the Monarchy was still rather one of under- than over-population.172
The peasants’ conditions were, however, greatly aggravated by their primitive methods of cultivation, and by the lack of storage facilities. If the harvest was bad, they were easily reduced to destitution. This had happened in Bohemia in 1771 and 1772, with the result that the population fell by fourteen per cent.173 In 1782, when the harvest failed again, 32,000 persons in Bohemia were in receipt of public relief. In Hungary, in the same year, 24,995 pauperes ostiatim mendicantes were registered, and one person in every eighty in Pest, and one in every twenty-five in Pécs, was receiving relief.
The worst weakness of the peasant’s position was his defencelessness vis-à-vis his lord and his lord’s agents. In the Western Lands the Courts of the Gubernia took over from the Patrimonial at a fairly early stage, and the Kreisant officials supervised the work of the manorial officials fairly closely. But even there, and even as late as 1846, a writer, as we shall see, budgeted three per cent of a peasant’s outgoings under the head of ‘illegal exactions by manorial officials’.174 In Hungary, where the local administration was even legally in the hands of the Counties, and still more, in Transylvania and Galicia, the supervision was hardly effective at all, and travellers in those districts have horrifying things to tell of the tyranny exercised by bad landlords and abetted by Courts mainly composed of those same landlords.
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At this date the Monarchy hardly possessed an industrial proletariat in the modern sense of the term. The craftsmen and journeymen of the guilds should be ranked rather as petits bourgeois (the apprentices were, indeed, sadly neglected and exploited). Many of the ‘factories’ were, as we have seen, minute enterprises, and the large ones, especially in Bohemia175 operated largely with homework done in their cottages by small peasants or their families; sometimes the robot was taken out in this form. When Charles VI first tried to get factories going on a large scale, he tried to impress the sturdy beggars, mainly discharged soldiers, who were then roaming the countryside, to work them; but the sturdy beggars proved unsatisfactory workers, and the towns objected to their presence – this was one cause of the failure of his experiments. The newer factories, especially round Vienna, employed large numbers of foundling and other destitute children; some of them had been even set up by the State for the express purpose of providing for these unfortunates, who were very numerous. Women were also largely employed. The male adult wage-slaves were thus relatively few; they were still far from the day when they could rank as a factor in the State.
Austria would have been a white raven among States had it possessed much workers’ protective legislation at so early a date, but it was not completely deficient in this respect. Apart from the guilds’ own regulations, Maria Theresa issued a large number of enactments relating to working conditions.176 Not a few of these were aimed at the difficult objective of compelling workers to honour their contracts, but a number were designed to prevent employers from exploiting them by imposing on them excessive hours of inadequate wages, and several laid down rules for the protection of young children.
V NATIONALITY
In the Hereditary Lands there had been no big shifts of population since the end of the great Völkerwanderung of the Dark Ages, and in 1780 the basic lines dividing the peoples were still approximately those on which they had halted nearly a thousand years before. All that the intervening centuries had brought had been some tidying-up through the natural assimilation of pockets of earlier populations which had survived the first arrival of the newcomers; and in the opposite direction, the establishment of a few outposts of one people in what still remained basically the territory of another. Nearly all of these came from the foundation of German or Italian towns in predominately Slovene areas.
The tidying-up had been nearly complete in the main areas of German settlement, so that the Danube valley down to the Leitha, and the northern and central parts of the adjacent Alpine chain, comprising Austria Above and Below the Enns, northern and central Styria, northern Carinthia, the Tirol as far south as Solurn, and Vorarlberg (with the intervening Salzburg) were now as near as no matter solidly German.177 In central and still more in southern Carinthia, where the early German colonization had been less intensive, enough Slovenes had survived to form, even so many centuries later, a perceptible minority, and in the southernmost third of Styria, all Carniola, Austrian Istria and the northern hinterland of Gorizia-Gradisca, the basic population was almost entirely Slovene, the German element being represented only in the towns.178 Trieste, the South of Gorizia-Gradisca, and the Trentino up to Salurn, were Italian.
If we assume – and the assumption is fair enough for our purposes – that the proportions of the different nationalities were the same as half a century later, then the national composition of these Lands must in 1780 have been approximately as follows:
Germans Slovenes Italians Others
Lower Austria 1,200,000 — — —
Upper Austria 600,000 — — —
Styria 480,000 265,000 — —
Carinthia 190,000 80,000 — —
Carniola 20,000 370,000 — 10,0003
Gorizia-Gradisca, Istria, Trieste 10,000 130,000 55,000179 5,000181
Tirol 310,000 — 220,000180 20,000182
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2,810,000 845,000 275,000 35,000
Czech and German historians dispute whether when the Czechs arrived – whenever that was – in Bohemia and Moravia, they found there remnants of an earlier German population. Whoever is right on this point, the general pattern which had emerged by the twelfth century was undoubtedly that of a Czech
majority inhabiting the central plains of both Lands, partially surrounded by an incomplete ring of German settlements, some or all of which may have been autochthonous, and studded with German towns which had certainly been founded by German colonists invited in, chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by various Kings of Bohemia. This was still the ethnic pattern of the two Lands in 1780, although the proportions of the two nationalities had probably shifted since mediaeval times in favour of the Germans, for while both nationalities had suffered severe losses in the Thirty Years War, those of the Czechs had probably been the heavier, and after the wars, there had been some infiltration of Germans into devastated areas. The towns, which now probably contained a larger proportion of the total population than they had in the mediaeval Kingdom, were still almost entirely German, and the only gap in the German peripheral settlements was now on the Moravian-Hungarian frontier. Elsewhere they formed a thin but solid ring ranging in depth from five to ten to fifty to sixty miles, being deepest in North-West Bohemia and Northern Moravia. The same assumptions as before regarding the relative proportions of the two nationalities give a rough figure of 1,600,000 Czechs and 1,050,000 Germans in Bohemia, and 910,000 Czechs and 400,000 Germans in Moravia. Bohemia-Moravia also contained about fifty thousand Jews, some half of them concentrated in Prague.
Silesia, which had been attached to the Bohemian Crown only in the fourteenth century, contained, roughly, 150,000 Germans, 90,000 Poles and 60,000 Czechs, the Germans predominating in the West of the province, while the Poles and Czechs inhabited the areas adjacent to the frontiers of Galicia and Moravia respectively.
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Ethnic conditions in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown were far more complex, for here a picture which had never been uniform had been further variegated by developments which in 1780 were still recent.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 10
