Page 109 - Changing Living Spaces

The Transformation of the Migratory Strategies of the Rural Population

As a result of the military events and mortality crises (such as plague,
famine and other epidemics) which occurred in the Czech Lands5 dur-
ing the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), an estimated 1.25-2 million people
died. Afterwards, many landlords’ estates lacked population and man-
power. This led to increased efforts by landlords to tighten control over
serfs’ mobility. Gradually, this generated a set of documentation which
included not only release letters but also serfs’ applications giving their
reasons for wishing to emigrate, and sometimes letters explaining the
circumstances under which migration would take place if permission was
granted.
Labour scarcity after the Thirty Years War thus motivated landlords
to exert greater control over people’s geographical mobility in the frame-
work of the ‘second serfdom’. Until the abolition of Bohemian serfdom on
1 November 1781, there was a rule that any serf who wished to leave his
or her lord’s estate permanently (e.g. for marriage) had to obtain a permit
from the lord. Most release letters authorized serfs merely to move from
one lord to another, not to be altogether free. If a serf wanted to marry a
freeman (somebody who was not the serf of any lord), take over a piece of
real estate in a town, or seek employment elsewhere without specifying a
target destination, he or she had to be set free. Apprentices and journey-
men who wanted to learn a craft or gain experience in their occupation
required a sort of recommendation letter in order to obtain a temporary
release from serfdom. Among individual estates, exchange of serfs took
place on the principle of reciprocity. On the estate of České Budějovice in
the second half of the eighteenth century, it was relatively rare for the
overlord to refuse to release serfs; refusals took place only in rare cases,
for example in the case of a craftsman who would be hard to replace. This
finding cannot be generalized to the entirety of Bohemia, where the situ-
ation differed across regions and time-periods. On the estate of Frýdlant
between 1583 and 1692, for instance, 21 per cent of applications for migra-
tion or emancipation permits were rejected by the overlord (see Ogilvie

5 The ‘Czech lands’ or the ‘Bohemian lands’ – in a historical context, Czech texts
use the term to refer to any territory ruled by the Kings of Bohemia, i.e., the
lands of the Bohemian Crown as established by Emperor Charles IV in the four-
teenth century. This would include territories like the Lusatias (which in 1635
fell to Saxony) and the whole of Silesia, all ruled from Prague at that time. After
the conquest of Silesia by the Prussian king Frederick the Great in 1742, the re-
maining lands of the Bohemian Crown – Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Sile-
sia – have been more or less co-extensive with the territory of the modern-day
Czech Republic.

107