Page 106 - Changing Living Spaces

Josef Grulich

by Alois Míka, who examined the circumstances in which release letters
were issued by overlords to their serfs (Míka 1960, 187–226). As a Marxist
historian, Míka regarded the absconding of serfs from their overlords
as a form of class struggle carried out by the rural population. Another
Czech historian, Josef Petráň, analysed the resolutions of the Bohemian
Estates from the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning
of the seventeenth century, using them to study the control of serf mo-
bility (Petráň 1957; 1964, 188–208). Josef Petráň reached a compromise
conclusion: ‘there were overlords who tolerated somebody else’s serfs on
their manorial estates – and also the possibility for their own serfs to
leave for another estate’ (Petráň 1964, 208). Czech Marxist historians
debated whether absconding represented a form of class struggle. Josef
Macek called the absconding of serfs an ‘individual and hidden form of
class struggle during feudalism’. By contrast, Arnošt Klíma ruled this out
‘for its apparent passivity and the individual attitudes of the absconders’
(Klíma 1955, 56; Macek 1957, 299–301; Toegel 1960, 191). Most historians
of the Marxist era strove to ‘portray a hard and laborious life of our an-
cestors, common and brave individuals ... protesting in a distinctive and
sometimes determined way against their feudal oppressors and exploit-
ers’ (Šindelář 1949; 1981; 1985, 72).
A new perspective on the issue of the Bohemian ‘second serfdom’ was
formulated by some members of an international research project enti-
tled ‘Social structures in early modern Bohemia’ which was carried out
between 1996 and 1999.1 For the English-speaking scholarly world, the is-
sue of the ‘second serfdom’ in the Bohemian lands has been examined in
the work of Sheilagh Ogilvie, who had participated in this internation-
al research project (Ogilvie and Edwards 2000; Ogilvie 2005; Klein and
Ogilvie 2016; Šouša 2018).

Social Stratification
At the top of the Bohemian village hierarchy were the ‘peasants’
(Czech: sedlák or rolník, German: Bauer), who held enough arable land
to subsist entirely from agriculture, paid the highest manorial dues and
state taxes, and owed the largest quantity of forced labour to the land-

1 Cerman and Luft (2002, 353–67). In the conclusion of the latter book there is a
complete bibliography of publication output from the research project ‘Social
Structures in Early Modern Bohemia’ from 1996 to 2004. You can find basic in-
formation about this project, including the list of all publications, on the web-
site.

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