Page 122 - Changing Living Spaces

Josef Grulich

was often used when someone wanted to learn a craft or study in the
Piarist Gymnasium (a grammar school).

Conclusion
In the second half of the twentieth century, Czech Marxist historiogra-
phy strove to paint a static picture of rural society,26 deliberately repre-
senting a picture of the ‘Dark Ages’ in which serfs were fully occupied by
forced labour services for their landlords, so that they were permanent-
ly tied to the land. Some versions of the concept of the so-called ‘second
serfdom’ assume that the nobility and gentry completely dominated their
serfs and made use of a variety of laws issued by the provincial authori-
ties and ordinances issued by the nobility to enforce their exploitation of
the serfs. Because of these laws and ordinances, it was argued, the spa-
tial mobility of serfs was strictly controlled and intentionally restricted.
From a Marxist perspective, the flight of the serfs was seen as one of the
forms of class struggle.
However, recent studies on the migration and mobility of the rural
population show a completely different situation. From the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries, manorial authorities did not enforce effective
control over their serfs did not completely limit migration and mobili-
ty in the countryside. Consequently, counter to the laws of the provincial
authorities and the ordinances of the nobility, serfs left their estates of
origin without permission in order to secure better livelihoods or higher
earnings. If the lord to whom these serfs were subject learned by chance
about their sojourn elsewhere, the general lack of manpower made it dif-
ficult to put them on trial for illicit departure from the estate. Usually,
once their absence was discovered, their stay in their new location was le-
galized or they were required to return home but were not punished.
In a situation in which the whole area of South Bohemia and even some
villages were divided among several different landlords, the noble land-
lords had no choice but to grant almost all applications by their serfs for a
change of allegiance or release from serfdom. The idea that the manorial
officers placed major obstacles in the way of issuing release letters is com-
pletely wrong, at least for this South Bohemian estate in the second half

26 Some western European historians defend the concept of a static rural society.
For example, Scarlet Beauvalet-Boutouyrie’s survey of French demographic his-
tory argues that France ‘was a country with very little mobility, of which popu-
lation was fundamentally stable. People lived in the parish in which they were
born or close by’ (Beauvalet-Boutouyrie 2008, 92).

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