Peasantry in the Cheb Region in the Late Middle Ages. Social Mobility, Migration and Abandonment of Settlements
Abstract
European historians are able to describe in detail the system of reproduction, social mobility and migration of the early modern peasantry operating in conditions of long-term population and economic growth. However, we do not know the form of these social processes in peasant communities, which faced a fundamentally different environment of late medieval population stagnation and agrarian depression.
One of the few European regions where the social mobility and migration of the peasantry can be traced to the required detail and quantity for this period is the Cheb region, thanks to fascinating fiscal sources. They provide annual insight into the interior of 80-100 rural settlements, covering approximately 400km2.
The structure of the work was based on the notion that social stratification, mobility and migration of the peasantry were always and everywhere determined by several general and often contradictory forces, but their concrete impact, however, depended on historically variable factors. Thus, the situation of each peasant population was unique.
In the case of the late medieval Cheb region, it is important to note that the Cheb peasant communities were (1) only weakly monetized and the majority of family property transfers were material or in kind, (2) were subject to weak landlord control, and (3) were able to create a relatively large agricultural surplus, drawn only in part by feudal rent. The stability of the social system relied on migration, which, in an environment of population stagnation and abundance of free land, dampened the effects of polarizing forces.
Peasant communities were divided into a group (1) of dominating peasant families, controlling wealthy 'subject' or even 'free' farmsteads stably and in the long term, and often capable of materially securing all their descendants, and (2) poorer peasant and smallholders families, whose members fluctuated between the farmsteads and settlements, where migration was usually the route to social ascent.