Page 118 - Changing Living Spaces

Josef Grulich

Migrants' Reasons for Relocating
It is very unlikely that the rural population wandered randomly around
the country. If a serf applied for release from serfdom, he or she already
had an idea about what they wanted to do by migrating.16 It was possible
to give only one reason in the application, but to increase one’s chances
of a positive response, it was not exceptional for an applicant to provide
multiple arguments (Grulich 2019, 153–66).

Marriage
The key to understanding migration in this region of South Bohemia be-
tween 1750 and 1787 is marriage, which was the reason for migration in
nearly two-thirds of applications (677 cases, comprising 63.1 percent of
the total).17 The reason is simple – labour mobility was typically tempo-
rary, so rural people changed their place of sojourn without obtaining the
prior consent of the landlord. There was no need to obtain a release let-
ter for short-term labour mobility. The situation got complicated when a
serf found a life partner in his or her new place of work. Entering a mar-
riage in the marriage register required writing down the serf’s feudal al-
legiance. Marriage then legalized a person’s present sojourn.
Marriage migration was usually associated with the process of tak-
ing over a landholding arising from the retirement of the parental gen-
eration. It was also sometimes connected with release from the army.
Through the medium of marriage, particularly in the case of the town or
its suburbs, a long-term working sojourn away from the individual’s lo-
cality of origin was legalized. Among the reasons for entering into mar-
riage given in serfs’ applications were death of their parents, poverty, em-
ployment opportunities, and the related earning of a livelihood.

Death of Parents
The second most important argument used in applications for change of
feudal allegiance was the death of parents.18 Here it is necessary to bear
in mind that in Bohemia during the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the age of death for adults varied between 54 and 57 years (Fialová

16 Research into reasons for migrating is limited by the richness of the sources, see:
Hayhoe (2016, 101–24) (‘Migrants’ Reasons for Moving’).
17 Marriage migration in the parish of České Budějovice (1750–1824) was analysed
by Josef Grulich (2006).
18 The number and age of orphans have been examined in Skořepová (2016, 115–
20).

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