Chapter 20
Bronislav Chocholáč
Introduction
Since the end of the 20th century, as mentioned in the preface of this book, there has been a significant expansion of research into the financial management of the subject population in Moravia. The research focused mainly on a comprehensive analysis of records of various forms of property transactions with tenant farms, while the most frequently used source for this study was land registers (Procházka 1963). However, there has not been a deeper comparison of the achieved results from several manorial estates in Moravia or the Czech lands which would affect the existence and scope of the instalment system, farm holding prices, size of earnest payments, farm money, and credit business of individual subjects and institutions operating in the rural milieu (or the milieu of small towns) in a long time frame without the comparison being limited to a short period of the Thirty Years’ War (Chocholáč 2017). The aim of the chapter is to generalize the achieved knowledge with this broadly conceived comparison.
Nevertheless, it is also necessary to draw attention to the limitations and parameters of the comparison conducted in the Introduction. Research on individual estates was carried out in the form of a probe at different number of localities (one to five), one of which was usually a small town. Namely, they were the estate Pernštejn and villages Černovice, Chlébské, Olešnička, Sejřek, and the township Štěpánov (Chocholáč 1989, 1990), the estate Telč and villages Doupě, Nevcehle, Strachoňovice (Valůšek, 1998), Hostěnice, Růžená and the township Mrákotín and the estate Žďár (nad Sázavou) and the villages Počítky, Radešín, and the township Dolní Bobrová (Chocholáč 1999); the estate Bojkovice with the homonymous small town (Janík 2002); the estate Brumov and the villages Lipina, Mirošov, Smolina, Tichov, and the town Valašské Klobouky (Odehnal 2007, 2011) and the estate Nový Světlov and the villages Sehradice (partially), the estate Boskovice and villages Krhov, Skalice, Sudice, and Žďárná (Vaněk 1997) and the estate Dřevohostice with the homonymous small town (Vohnický 2014). With regard to the preservation of the sources (especially land registers) there was no research on the individual estates in precisely limited periods despite the fact that three basic time intervals could be defined for comparison which showed the highest frequency of research conducted: the Pre-White Mountain Period (from the 1580s to 1618), the Thirty Years’ War and the second half of the 17th century. Possible overlaps into the earlier or later periods were independently taken into account for the individual examined issues.
Prices of farm holdings and the instalment system
Before proceeding to the actual comparison, it is necessary to emphasize the property rights of the examined properties. In all cases without exception, these were purchased farmsteads (Procházka 1963, pp. 95–105). At these farm holdings in the 16th century, there was an instalment system of their prices. Its beginnings likely reach back to the late Middle Ages (Chocholáč 2007, p. 300). The expansion of this system was aided by the frequent alternation of the farmers at the farmsteads (especially at the smaller farm holdings), the lack of cash on the part of the purchaser, with which he could pay for the purchase of the homestead immediately or in the short term, and the overall price increase due to the price revolution. Its accompanying phenomenon was an increase in the prices of agricultural crops and wage labour of subjects and, in terms of financial penetration, of highly inflationary tendencies into the money circulation which were caused by the use of large amounts of small coins with low silver content (Vorel 2000, p. 145). Practically, this meant that the buyer did not have sufficient funds to pay the homestead immediately and therefore the agreed price was distributed (for the prices of farm holdings, their creation, and difficulties in interpretation, see Chocholáč 2005, pp. 98–103; Štefanová 2009, pp. 86–94). The first part was the earnest money, that is usually the largest instalment paid immediately after the property transaction or shortly after it took place; the remainder was divided into several annual instalments (Procházka 1963, pp. 308–9, 314–21). These instalments of the prices of farmsteads, from which interest was never paid, were usually labelled as vejrunky (annual payments), annual or farm money (for other labels in Czech and German, see Procházka 1963, p. 318). They were mainly paid to the creditors by the farmer working on the farm holding, less often the widow or the village headman as the so-called money deposited on the right. The recipients of the farm money were most often individuals, less often institutions, such as the orphans’ cash boxes and church endowments, sporadically guilds, municipalities, etc. Part of the means were also acquired by the manorial lords, for instance, as money of fugitive subjects, etc.
Thanks to several land registers, which were kept regularly already from the 1540s, research in these localities on the Pernštejn estate have proved a permanent growth of the prices of farmsteads in all size categories for the second half of the 16th century; on the contrary, their slight decrease by about a tenth of the previous value was observed at the beginning of the 17th century (Chocholáč 1989, pp. 67–73, 81). A different price development was recorded at the end of the 16th and at the beginning of the 17th century at the Boskovice and Telč estate because the prices of farm holdings stagnated here or even rose slightly (Vaněk 1997, pp. 34–46; Chocholáč 1999, pp. 79–80). From this, it is clear that there was no continuous rise in farmstead prices everywhere at the turn of the 17th century as the older literature postulated for Bohemia (Petráň 1964, p. 25). Whether and to what extent the differentiation in the development of farmstead prices in individual estates was related to the current level and state of the serf economy, however, cannot be determined at present and is a question for further study.
The comparison of price data from the pre-White Mountain period with the war period, which could be realized for the Boskovice, Dřevohostice, Telč, and Žďár regions, provided interesting information. There was a significant drop in the price of the farmstead if the farm holding was directly hit by the looting of soldiers, a fire and subsequently its desolation. In such cases, however, of which a small number was recorded (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 77, 89–90), the price set in the next property transaction was only a fraction of the original value.
If the farm holdings were not directly affected by the above-mentioned interventions, the decrease of their prices on the mentioned estates were zero or only minimal, at most a tenth of the original pre-White Mountain value (Vohnický 2014, p. 55; Vaněk 1997, p. 35 f.). It is even still possible, in the first war years (the beginning of the 1620s), to observe a slight increase of the price with some farm holdings (Valůšek 1998, pp. 63–7). It was similar also at the Mělnik estate in Bohemia (Koumar 2011, p. 88). Unfortunately, it was not possible to determine whether the inflationary moves of the coins were projected in the rise of the prices (Kostlán 1985, p. 285 f.). The absence of a distinct reduction of the prices of the majority of the farmsteads indicated that the actual fact of an ongoing military conflict did not influence the value level of the villagers.
In the framework of the property transactions in all of the examined localities, further data with an influence on the instalment system of the farmsteads besides the prices – the earnest money and annual (vejrunkové) instalments – were also negotiated. The solvency of those interested in the farmstead can be seen in the size of the proportion of the really paid earnest money (without the values of the hereditary shares of the new farmer on the farm holding or his wife, gifts of relatives, permanent burdens, etc.) as compared to the price of the farmstead (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 98–9; Janík 2002, p. 65). In the pre-war period, the share was around (Bojkovice, Kuřim region, Pernštejn region, Telč region, Žďár region) 10 to 16% of the price on average (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 100–2; Janík 2002, p. 66). The share of earnest money in the price of a farmstead was similar (18%) in localities on the Brumov estate, even though the methods for processing the data were different – all found amounts of the earnest money were included (Odehnal 2007, pp. 98–9, 213). In contrast, a high share of earnest money in the price was proved in the research of small towns on the Pardubice estate where it reached 40% in the period between 1601 and 1621. Despite a small decrease in the following years, the share remained high (between about a quarter and third of the price) until the end of the 17th century which probably reflects less serious damage of the localities during the Thirty Years’ War (Siglová 2017, pp. 202–4). Considering practically stable prices of homesteads in small towns throughout the whole 17th century, buyers must have had quite large amounts of cash in order to acquire them.
Other than the municipalities from the Kuřim region, Hostěradice on the Telč and Počítky on the Žďár estates, with which the statistical processing of the comparison could not be carried out because of the absence of sources or the limited number of data, there was a decline in the share of the earnest money in the price in all the examined localities on the Bojkovice, Telč, and Žďár manorial estates in the course of the war (Chocholáč 1999, p. 100). With the small town of Mrákotín in the Telč region, the reduction was minimal; similar values were found also on the Mělník estate (Koumar 2011, p. 90), whereas with Bobrová in the Žďár region, the drop was the greatest where the paid earnest money only reached a fifth of the pre-White Mountain values (Chocholáč 1999, p. 100). A larger amount of financial means from the earnest money in the pre-war period gave the seller (if he received it) a greater change of a new purchase on another farmstead. In this way, it was possible to support the exchange of farm holdings in the surveyed localities and a certain trade approach of the subjects to the farm holding is observable on the estates of West Moravia in the pre-White Mountain period, especially among holders of smaller-property farms. The farm was held to the extent that it was beneficial to the landlord and the size matched to the abilities and energies of his own family. If the owner of the homestead felt he could handle ‘more’, it was not usually possible to buy more fields so he sold the old farmstead and bought a larger one for it (it was similar in the opposite case) (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 155–6). Nevertheless, the decline of the actually paid earnest money in the course of the war while maintaining farmstead prices almost unchanged significantly reduced these options.
In the post-war period, if the instalment system did not disappear on the estate (as, for instance, in the Pernštejn region) and payment of the earnest money was maintained, the pre-White Mountain values of its share in the price were not mainly (with the exception of Mrákotín) renewed. Their amount was low and almost the same as the data from the period of the Thirty Years’ War. Completely different amounts of earnest money were found for the town of Valašské Klobouky. In spite of different methods for processing the records (all found amounts of earnest money were included) in comparison with previous studies, the share of earnest money in the price increased throughout the whole 17th century with the exception of the period 1660–1679. It was due to a growing tendency to buy homesteads in the town for cash, in such a case, the earnest money equalled the price of the homestead (Odehnal 2007, pp. 211–12). This practice, if compared with findings from other estates in Moravia, where the price of farmstead paid in cash was lower than the price of the same farm holding paid in instalments, apparently decreased the prices of farm holdings, disrupted the instalment system in the town, increased the number of paid homesteads and secured the payment of financial means to the seller (creditor) but required the buyer to have quite a large amount of cash. When these financial means did not suffice as a result of the worsening economic situation in the town, which was caused by frequent invasions from Hungary to East Moravia during the 17th century, the number of gratuitous transfers increased and accounted for as much as one quarter of all exchanges (Odehnal 2007, p. 221). In order to ensure that the farm had a holder, all claims of creditors were lost.
In the course of the entire period in question (for the Pernštejn region already from the middle of the 16th century) on the estates where data comparisons were possible (Dřevohostice, the Pernštejn region, the Telč region, the Žďár region), there was a reduction of the annual (vejrunkový) instalments set within the conditions of the property transaction. If this fact was accompanied by a more significant decrease in really paid farm money, this led to an extension of the ideal and mostly real maturity of the farm holdings. As a result, the number of long-term or permanently indebted farms with instalments increased in those localities.
The researches carried out so far have generally confirmed the very good payment discipline of farmers for the pre-White Mountain period which was reflected both in the amount of the instalments and in their regularity of their use. Despite that, the extent of indebtedness with farm instalments was different at the individual estates. In the Pernštejn region in the period from 1550 to 1580, only not quite 45% of the farm holdings were in debt (Chocholáč 1989, data from graphs Nrs. I, III, V, VII, and IX), on the Nové Hrady estate, it was even only 39% of the farmsteads in the middle of the 16th century (Holakovský 1993, pp. 77–8). The Telč region at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries (1580–1619) showed roughly half of the farm holdings to be in debt (Valůšek 1998, pp. 83–5), the Pernštejn region, at the same time, was already two-thirds of the farmsteads (Chocholáč 1989, data from graphs Nrs. I–X). It was similar at the Mělník estate (1584–1620), where 67% of farms and 61% of cottages were indebted with instalments (Koumar 2011a, p. 38). So far, the greatest indebtedness of farmsteads with instalments before White Mountain at a level of 71% was found at the Český Krumlov estate in the first quarter of the 17th century (Holakovský 1993, pp. 77–8). When interpreting the growth of the indebtedness of the farm holding with instalments, it is not possible to settle for the primary reference to the worsening economic conditions of the subjects, it is necessary to put this phenomenon in the broader context of ongoing property transactions. The indebtedness was influenced not only by the ideal maturity, which reflected the negotiated terms of the transaction between the buyer and the seller or the acquirer of the farm holding and heirs concerning the amount of the price, the earnest money and annual payments, but also the actual maturity of the farm holdings. It reflected both the payment discipline of the farmer which depended on the actual yield of the farmstead and the number of people it had to existentially and socially secure as well as the frequency of the exchanges of the farm holdings. The frequent alternation of the farmers (especially at the smaller farm holdings) in the pre-White Mountain period, on the one hand, maintained or increased the indebtedness of settlements with instalments, on the other, reflected the trade access to these properties on the part of their holders.
During the war, there was a deepening of the indebtedness – it was almost 70% in the Telč region, nearly 80% in the Pernštejn region and more than 85% of the farm holdings in the Žďár region (Chocholáč 1989, graphs II, IV, VI, VIII, and X; 1999, pp. 113–5). This trend (if the entire instalment system did not collapse) then continued even in the post-war period and reached 90% indebtedness of the farm holdings. The research on the Mělník estate in Bohemia also came to the same results (Koumar 2011a, pp. 38–39). At the end of the 17th century, the existence of paid-off farmsteads was already an exception (Chocholáč 1999, graphs pp. 113–5). The long ideal maturity, little or no earnest money and almost non-payment of the annual instalments practically precluded the payment of the farmstead and, at the same time, created conditions for the actual collapse of the instalment system (on the reasons of the collapse of the system, see Chocholáč 2005, p. 117), as happened, for instance, in the Boskovice, Pernštejn or Strážnice regions. In the case of a long-term absence of the instalment system in the locality (at the estate), the awareness that the farmsteads had been purchased may decline.
The indebtedness of the farm holdings with instalments at the Světlov estate (specifically in the village Sehradice) in the east of Moravia at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries was resolved in other ways: gratuitous acquisition of the farm holdings, or payment of a farmstead with cash (neither case required the existence of an instalment system), or setting low prices of farm holdings (only to 50 Moravian gulden) in maintaining a certain level of the instalment system of the farm holdings (Odehnal 2011, p. 47).
On the contrary, a completely different state of the payment system of tenant farms in comparison with research in Moravia or with the research in the Mělník region was presented by Dana Štefanová for several villages of the Frýdlant estate in North Bohemia because the farmers there in the second half of the 17th century paid their annual instalments very regularly and systematically. They acquired enough financial means not only from their agricultural products, but also through participation in protoindustrial domestic production (Štefanová 2009, pp. 122–4).
Sale/purchase of farm money
The existence of a repayment system was linked to a credit transaction in which unpaid financial stakes in farmsteads were traded. The sellers were individual subjects – holders of the shares (creditors). The range of entities on the buyer side was more diverse. Most often, farm money was bought up by the farmers on their farmsteads but, besides them, not only other subjects, including village headmen, could be involved in the transaction, but also municipalities themselves, guilds, orphans’ cash boxes and church endowments, the manorial lords’ administrators, or even owners of the estate (Valůšek 1998, pp. 89–90; Chocholáč 1999, p. 136). If the farmer bought the farm money on his farmstead, he thus lowered his indebtedness, or sometimes could even achieve its complete payment. In the case of the other entities, it was the placement of excess financial means into one of the forms of loan transactions that could provide large profits above even the period legitimate interest rate (6%). In all of the examined Moravian localities, including the smallest of them, the sale of farm money was recorded. That was also the case on the Mělník estate. The appearance of this transaction in the records of the land registers, which must be taken to be minimal (see below), was possible to determine for localities in the Telč region. At each farmstead there in 1580 through 1700, there were, on average, almost three sales (Chocholáč 1999, determined from the values on pp. 118, 119, 126). The same value was found for small towns on the Pardubice estate in the period 1576–1700 (Siglová 2017, pp. 230–1). On the contrary, this transaction is entirely absent on the North Bohemian Frýdlant estate. The cause could be the legal situation on the domain, because, at some farms, these transactions were forbidden in the effort mainly to protect the financial shares of the orphans.
Before actually comparing, it is also necessary to realize what the data is. Mainly credit transactions, which led to the debt settlement of the homestead, that is mainly the purchase of money by a farmer on his own farm holding, were recorded in the land registers. In the case of purchases of money for the benefit of other entities, the amount of the indebtedness of the farmstead did not change, therefore the records of these transactions were only important in knowing to whom the respective instalments are to be paid which was less important information than the amount of the indebtedness. This is one of the main reasons (besides the effort itself of the farmstead holder to relieve it of debt) that the owners of farm money were dominated by other farmers on their farm holdings over other entities on the examined estates farms.
The research conducted so far also showed that a large part of the records of the sale of farm money did not contain all of the required values − the amount of the purchased amount was missing or the amount of means paid out (or instead of money, the purchased amount was paid by domestic animals, cereals, beer, temporary lease of fields, work tasks, etc.) or both were absent. More often, money was bought up for farm animals and grains in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War in the Boskovice region which could have been caused by the decline of local markets and the rise in prices of agricultural products (Vaněk 1997, p. 115). Of the total number of the sales of farm money, all the data was contained on them in Bojkovice only with 17% of the transactions (Janík 2002, p. 81), it was approximately 35% in the Boskovice region (Vaněk 1997, p. 99), perhaps 40% in the Telč and Žďár regions (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 126–7).
Only these complete records made it possible to ascertain the percentage of the funds purchased in real terms. In the pre-White Mountain period, this value could be statistically ascertained for the villages in the Boskovice region and for the small towns of Deblín, Dolní Bobrová, and Mrákotín. In the West Moravian towns, the amount paid reached, on average, the amount of one-third of the bought-up means (Chocholáč 1999, p. 128) – the share of about two-fifths was in small towns on the Pardubice estate (Siglová 2017, p. 231) – but in the villages, it did not reach even one-fourth of the bought-up share (Vaněk 1997, data from the tables on pp. 101–4). The difference between the small towns and the villages could be caused by the fact that there was a larger number of solvent candidates in the first-mentioned settlement area. Increased competition between buyers may have enabled sellers to negotiate better terms of the transaction but this hypothesis needs further investigation. If it was possible to monitor the proportion of funds paid to the amount of bought-up money by farmers on their farmsteads and other entities, its amount was several percent higher for other entities. As in the case above, the seller of farm money, unless the farmer was not interested in the transaction, negotiated slightly more favourable terms of the transaction. Unfortunately, comparisons for the next period can no longer be made due to the lack of statistically relevant data.
Orphans’ cash boxes and church endowments
As already mentioned above in the buying up of farm money, not only the subjects, but also institutions that inter alia dealt with credit in the village and small town milieu were also present within the instalment system. These included orphans’ cash boxes and church endowments. Funds were given to the orphanages from the farmstead holders who paid the annual instalments for the inheritance shares to juveniles. These funds were usually kept here until they reached adulthood (earlier pay-outs could have occurred when the money was used, for example, to pay for the education of the child).
Only the amount of the financial means, which were transferred to the orphans’ cash box as covered annual instalments, can be investigated from the land registers. It is therefore not possible to discover the total amount of the means in them. In all of the examined localities in West Moravia during the pre-White Mountain period (with the exception of Radešín and Počítky on the Žďár estate where it was impossible to determine these values before 1618), several tens of Moravian gulden came to the orphans’ cash boxes in this way in the villages and several hundred in the small towns (Chocholáč 1999, pp. 133–4). Thus, the existence of funds in the orphans’ cash box gave farmers some hope of obtaining a loan (credit) in the event of an economic crisis on farmsteads caused, for example, by a natural disaster. It was thus possible to obtain money to repair the house, to buy grain, etc. During the war, the shift of these monies to the orphans’ cash boxes significantly declined and in the second half of the 17th century it was practically none with the exception of Bobrová. The provision of loans from these monies was thus impossible.
The financial means generated by the instalment system were also paid into church endowments. They were the annual payments, which ageing farmers or their wives willed, payments that children paid as requiems for the masses celebrated for their deceased parents or fulfilment of previous buying up of farm monies which were conducted in the name of the church endowment by the sextons who were to take care of their functioning.
In West Moravia in the pre-White Mountain period, less money came into the church endowments than the orphans’ cash boxes – in the Kuřim and Telč regions, it was approximately only a fifth of the amount, not quite a third in Dolní Bobrová. In the post-war period, unlike the orphans’ cash boxes into which, with the exception of Dolní Bobrová, in fact no money from instalments came, the church endowments from all of the localities in the Telč and Žďár regions acquired more means that had been the case in the pre-White Mountain period. The growing share of church endowments in the purchasing of farm money in the second half of the 17th century was also visible in small towns of the Pardubice estate (Siglová 2017, p. 235). This situation was probably influenced by two factors. The first was increased activity of sextons, especially in small towns that bought up a lot of farm monies and thus expanded the property of the requiems. The second factor could have been the growing Baroque piety which could have led to a closer attachment to the Catholic Church and, consequently, to an increase in its support of wills on the part of the subjects.
Conclusion
The presented comparison of research results devoted to the basic financial aspects of property transactions with subject farmsteads enabled a greater generalization of the achieved findings. If it was possible to compare prices of settlements in the surveyed localities at the end of the 16th and early 17th centuries with the previous period (the Pernštejn region), their amount at that time stagnated or declined which did not confirm the conclusions of the earlier literature on their permanent growth. Apart from the prices that dropped significantly as a result of the destruction of the farmsteads by fire, looting by the soldiers, which led to their desolation, the prices of other farm holdings persisted and, in some places, they even slightly increased at the beginning of the 1620s. The value standard of the subjects was thus preserved even at the time of the conflict. On the contrary, it is possible to generalize in the research conducted (with the exception of Valašské Klobouky) that, during the war, there was a decrease in the payment of the earnest money in comparison with the pre-White Mountain Period. This payment, if it did not disappear with the collapse of the instalment system, remained low in the post-war period. Permanent decline was seen also in the amount of the annual instalments which was, moreover, accompanied from the war period by the declining ability of the holders of the farmsteads to realistically pay these instalments. The accessibility of these funds that allowed them to buy a farmstead or eased their life situations was thus extended and complicated for the recipients of the instalments, that is the creditors, especially if they were widows, orphans, subtenants (inquilinus) or retired farmers. On the contrary, the decline or even the end of the claims of their holding of the farmstead helped the debtors, that is the farmers working the farm holdings from whom the money was to be paid.
The decline in the purchase contracts of the set and subsequently actually paid earnest money and annual instalments increased the indebtedness of the farmsteads with these receivables, which was manifested on the estates to different degrees. Despite this, roughly a quarter of all the farm holdings managed to get rid of these debts at least for a short time at the end of the pre-White Mountain period. In the course of the 17th century, the indebtedness deepened and at its end it was possible to find a paid-off farmstead only in sporadic cases. If the worsening economic situation of the subject population was the likely reason for the increasing debt in the war and post-war period, in the pre-White Mountain period an increased exchange rate of farms was found on several estates, especially for less wealthy classes in which a certain trade approach to the farm holding could have been reflected on the part of their holders.
The sale of farm monies was also connected with the existence of the instalment system of the farmsteads. The trade with instalments was proved in all of the examined localities which indicates the common appearance of loan transaction in the milieu of the rural area in Moravia in the 16th century. The majority of the receivables were bought up by the farmers on their farmsteads who reduced the debt of the farm holding in this way, or sped up its repayment. For buyers from other entities, it was usually advantageous appreciation of the invested funds. The lack of full-fledged data for statistical processing on the individual estates makes it difficult to analyze this phenomenon more thoroughly. Despite that, it was possible to determine the share of the bought-up money for cash for several localities in the pre-White Mountain period. It was higher in small towns than in villages and the fact that the other entities paid on average slightly more for the same amount of bought-up money than the farmers on their farmsteads did.
Part of the receivables that arose under the instalment system were also transferred to orphans’ cash boxes and church endowments. Thanks to that, in West Moravia in the pre-White Mountain period, there was a reserve of funds in the orphans’ cash boxes from which it was possible to provide loans to farmers who found themselves in a difficult economic situation. During the war, the shift of receivables to orphans’ cash boxes declined until it ceased almost completely in the post-war period, thus the possibility for farmers to obtain credit from these monies also ended. With the church endowments, the development was the opposite. The relatively smaller amount of means in the endowments in the pre-White Mountain period increased in the post-war period, whether through the influence of the agile credit activities of the sextons or the activity of the growing Baroque piety of the populace in all of the surveyed localities.
Funding
The research was supported by the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University.
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