Property Transmission, Generations and Social Change

This book deals with the changing patterns of transmission of land and houses in a pre-industrial rural community of Southern Bohemia. By linking different sources, such as land registers, census-like lists and a family reconstitution, the study focuses on both the demographic and the economic factors that influenced peasant transmission strategies as well as on the consequences of changing transmission patterns for access to land- ownership in the local society. Central chapters deal with the interrelations between marriage and property transmission and with retirement arrangements for the former land-owners as well as with the consequences for non-inheriting siblings. The results of this study show that patterns of land transmission changed profoundly in the beginning of the 18th century. Between 1651 and 1720 many houses with or without land were sold to non-kin as well as to kin, although in both cases a customary and not a market price was paid. After around 1720 transmissions of property from father to son progressively became the dominant pattern. The chances of the siblings (especially of women) to become property-holders diminished and it became extremely difficult for persons not born into house-owning families to acquire any houses or land. Despite the strict rule of indivisibility of land and farmstead, the rural society of the parish was not transformed into sharply divided social classes. At the local level, various possibilities to get access to small parcels of land existed.