The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  109 In 1374 Louis, who at that time was doubling the Crowns of Hungary and Poland, issued the ‘Privilege of Kassa’, under which he conferred on the nobles of Poland the same rights as the Hungarians’. The Poles maintained their equality more completely even than the Hungarians, for Polish constitutional law did not legally recognize titles at all, and although here too the Sejm divided ultimately into an Upper and a Lower House, the former, the Senate, was exclusively composed technically of the holders of certain offices, for which any Polish noble was eligible.

  110 According to Feigl, op. cit., p. 10, there were in 1848 2,645 exercisers of manorial rights in Lower Austria.

  111 The total number of ‘nobles’ (men, women and children) counted in Galicia was 95,000, three-quarters of the number in all the Western Lands together.

  112 In some areas small nobles were allowed to lease rustical holdings, against a rent.

  113 Even then, the votes were seldom ascertained by counting of heads. One practice was for the supporters of each candidate to retire behind a screen and to shout his name, the loudest shout being judged the winner. For a highly entertaining description of a Hungarian election, see Eötvös’s famous novel, The Village Notary.

  114 Their discretion in this respect was, however, not unlimited. The Landesfürst not infrequently ordered a Council to admit an applicant, or even, any person belonging to a certain occupational category.

  115 The Hungarian Diet of 1687 petitioned Leopold I that ‘since in consequence of the recovery of Hungary’ (i.e., from the Turks) ‘the number of Royal Free Boroughs, etc., had so increased that this Fourth Estate not only equalled but perhaps exceeded the others’, he should not, unless in exceptional cases, grant any more charters.

  116 The native burghers had not as a rule the necessary capital to found considerable enterprises. Sometimes a foreign expert was invited into the country for the purpose, when, if successful, he was often ennobled. Another factor telling against the towns was the preference (on social grounds) of the authorities for siting factories in country districts, where the population was thought to be less liable to moral infection.

  117 See below, p. 110 ff.

  118 Rectors of Universities always sat on the first Bench of the Estates of their Lands. The Rector Magnificus of Prague University and the heads of the two non-theological faculties were entitled to buy landtäflich estates. The Rector of Vienna University enjoyed the unique privilege of being entitled to demand audience of the Emperor whenever he wished; he was not even required to give advance notice of his visit.

  119 Endres, op. cit., p. 68 describes the life of a village teacher in the Vormärz, when it was certainly not more uncomfortable than fifty years before. He was teacher, verger and organist (ability to play the organ was actually one of the requirements for the post, and the organ was taught in the Normalschule). He also had to shave the priest on Sunday morning. The average stipend of a full elementary schoolmaster was 130 fl. a year; of an assistant, 70 fl. At this time a town magistrate was receiving 300 fl., his assistant, 150, and a servant, 50.

  120 The censuses of the 1770s give only about 20,000 ‘Beamte et honoratiores’ for the entire Monarchy, a figure which leaves little enough for the professions when one deducts the public and private employees. 4,750 of the 20,000 were in Austria (Lower and Upper) and about 3,200 in Bohemia. Carniola could show only 427, Croatia only 438, Transylvania, with its total population of 1,500,000, only 771.

  121 The best known of these are the Transylvanian Saxons, who had been assured their freedom as early as 1224. Most of the eighteenth-century colonists on neo-acquistica land were free. In 1842 about 70,000 heads of peasant families in Inner Hungary, or one in eight, were free.

  122 These included the Szekels of Transylvania and the inhabitants of the Cuman-Jazyge Districts between the Danube and the Tisza, of the Hajdu towns, etc. Some of these had lost part of their freedom, but not all traces of it.

  123 These included the class of ‘saltycze’, who, although not noble, were exempted from taxation in return for military service.

  124 Some of the Hungarian communities were governed for the Crown by the Palatine or a special officer designated by him.

  125 See below, p. 127.

  126 Common lands partook in some sense of the qualities of both categories, their benefits being enjoyed both by the lord and the peasants.

  127 The service did not have to be taken out in field labour: it could take the form of carting, etc., for building, or even of industrial work: the textile enterprises founded by many Bohemian landowners got most of their material from their peasants, who took out their service by spinning or weaving in their homes.

  128 From the Slavonic word robota=work.

  129 The propinatio, as this right was known in Galicia, was, owing to the Galician peasants’ extreme addiction to strong liquor (see below, p. 96), actually the most lucrative of all the landlords’ rights there. When an estate was to be sold, the first question asked by the prospective buyer was ‘cos czyni arenda?’ (how much does the sale of liquor bring in?). Here the right of keeping the tavern was almost always leased to a Jew. In other Lands the right was less important, and in Lower Austria distilling was forbidden altogether.

  130 In wine-growing districts peasant vintners were also allowed to retail their own wine, but each family only for a certain number of weeks, during which a bush was put up over the door. One complaint made by the vintners of one Hungarian village was that the lord’s wine was so good that their fellow-villagers preferred to drink it even when alternatives were available. More often, indeed, the complaint was that the landlord’s wine was inferior.

  131 These rights, again, had fallen into desuetude in many of the German-Austrian Lands.

  132 In Bohemia, for example, the land tax had increased by twenty-nine per cent in the last years of the seventeenth century while the robot had remained unaltered (Kerner, p. 240). When Maria Theresa was arguing over her Robot Patent for Bohemia, the Estates repeatedly made the point that it was the State’s exactions that were at the root of the trouble. The Hungarian Estates argued the same case.

  133 The series, nearly all of which constituted revisions of earlier enactments, began in the Hungarian Lands, where they were known as urbaria. The first of all, for the three Slavonian Counties, was issued in 1756, replacing an earlier enactment still, which had been issued in 1737, but had remained a dead letter. The urbarium for Inner Hungary was issued in 1767, by Rescript, the Diet having refused to collaborate in producing a Law. The Hungarians therefore regarded it as not possessing legal validity, but perforce obeyed its provisions. At that time Maria Theresa seems to have thought that it was only in Hungary that conditions were bad enough to call for her intervention, but in 1769 the peasants in Silesia struck against the robot. She set up a Commission of inquiry, and then instituted similar inquiries in Bohemia and Moravia. These revealed that conditions, at least in Bohemia, were no better than in Hungary. The Robot Patent for Silesia was issued in 1771, and Patents for Lower and Upper Austria in 1772. That for Bohemia followed in 1775 (extended to Moravia in the same year). Styria and Carinthia got their Patents in 1778, Croatia and the Bánát in 1780, Carniola in 1782. No urbarium was issued for Transylvania, where the authorities did not get down to making a survey, but regulations limiting the robot were issued in 1747 and 1768. No Patent was thought necessary for the Tirol or the Littoral, where robot was practically non-existent, nor for the Netherlands or Milan-Mantua. A provisional Patent was issued for Galicia in 1775, in advance of the survey, and confirmed in 1786, but this was left incomplete as regards its most important provisions, and the gaps were, in fact, never filled in.

  134 No surveys were carried out in Transylvania or Galicia, where the distinction continued to rest on local usage.

  135 The converse process was legal, and cases of it were not unknown, although a landlord not wishing to farm his demesne land directly more often preferred to lease it under one of the systems describ
ed below.

  136 A full holding was originally supposed to constitute the area on which a peasant could support himself and his family, while fulfilling his obligations. It varied slightly, in accordance with local custom, in each Land, and even locally inside a Land. In the West it was usually of the order of 22 yokes of arable plus 6 of ley (later, the criterion of size was replaced by that of the amount of land tax for which it was assessed). In Hungary it ranged from 16 hold (=yokes) arable plus 6 of ley for good land near the Austrian frontier to 38 plus 16–22 for poor land on the Tisza. Each holding also contained one yoke for house, outbuildings, garden, etc.

  137 The same figures were imposed at the time in the adjacent Salzburg and Passau. It is interesting for the development of the problem that when the Interim Relatio was issued, fourteen days constituted an aggravation of the peasants’ obligations.

  138 This did not mean that the Bukovinian peasants were well situated. An inquiry undertaken into their conditions in 1804 showed that the landlords there found devices to reduce them to an exceptional state of servitude. See Meynert, Kaiser Franz I, pp. 321 ff.

  139 Leopold’s language in publishing this Patent is extraordinarily similar to that used by the Hungarian Diet of 1514. It is remarkable how seldom attention is drawn to this correspondence.

  140 It is fair to point out that the robot attached to the land and not the person (beyond the cottager’s due). Thus a Vollbauer with three sons (or farm-hands) and eight yokes of oxen would still have seventy-five per cent of his labour force available for himself even on his robot days.

  141 The figures for the Austrian Lands of the robot redeemed after 1848 are given in L.U.F., I. 70. The days of hand robot redeemed were (in round figures, thousands): Galicia-Bukovina, 16·5; Bohemia, 7; Lower Austria, 6·2; Moravia, 5·25; Silesia, Styria, Carniola, 1 each; Carinthia, 0·15; Upper Austria, 0·1; the remainder, insignificant. The figures for haulage robot show approximately the same proportions.

  142 These are treated together here, for while the distinction between them became important after 1848, when those falling under the former heading were remitted altogether, while those under the latter had, outside Hungary and Galicia, to be ‘redeemed’, before that date it was, for the peasant, one without a difference. They had, indeed, become so mutually entangled that it sometimes took the Commissioners months or years to sort them into their proper categories.

  143 Thus in Hungary a peasant was bound to pay a ‘moderate and equitable’ contribution towards his lord’s ransom if he was taken in battle. This was a paper obligation, but one village in Bohemia still had to pay a levy for the maintenance of the seigneural wolfhounds, although wolves had long since been exterminated from the neighbourhood. It has been said that in Moravia, as late as 1848, 248 kinds of dues were being exacted (not all, of course, from the same holding), and in Carniola there were 71 possible dues in money and 52 in kind, including levies on fish, crayfish, martens, walnuts and chestnuts.

  144 To be distinguished from the Church tithe. It was not always exacted, and in some parts of Austria had become a marketable attachment to the land, and was sometimes bought by a working peasant on retirement to provide himself with a sort of pension. In Hungary it was called the ‘none’, the term ‘tenth’ having been appropriated by the Church. It had first been imposed there in 1351, when it had been supposed to constitute the peasant’s entire obligations towards his lord, but had been retained when other dues were added. Crops grown on the peasant’s ‘home acre’ were not subject to the tithe, and others could be exempted. Thus when the Government was trying to popularize the cultivation of maize in Austria, it declared it tithe-free (with very successful results).

  145 In some places he was under a specific obligation to provide treatment for his peasants if they were bitten by dogs, or contracted venereal disease.

  146 See below, p. 69.

  147 The 1848 redemption figures show no dues in kind at all for Lower Austria, the editors noting that they were nearly all commuted and were thus entered under the cash payments.

  148 See also below, p. 160, n. 2.

  149 Not counting, that is, the special form of tenure in the Italian-speaking areas, which was terminable only for repeated failures to pay the rent.

  150 This appears to have been a very old right: Grünberg (Bauernbefreiung I. 254) writes that it had ‘always existed’ in Bohemia. I cannot trace its beginnings.

  151 It was usual for a peasant to retire on reaching the limit of his working days. He then arranged with his successor for a sort of pension.

  152 If he was under age when his father died, the widow or a guardian appointed by the lord looked after the farm during his minority.

  153 Grünberg I. 311.

  154 A patent for Bohemia was issued on 25 January 1770, and was followed by others, for Moravia, Silesia and Carniola. Only a few hundred peasants bought in their holdings in consequence of them, and these were nearly all men of German stock; the authorities in Silesia complained that the Poles refused to buy in, out of ‘laziness’. F. Beidtel (I. 172) gives, indeed, a very different picture: he writes that during the next twenty years the peasants in the Bohemian Lands bought in their holdings so largely that by 1810 it was the exception to find one of the old type. I have been unable to find statistics on the point.

  155 In Hungary, in particular, the village towns leased for cash large areas of dominical land from neighbouring landlords, then sub-letting them in smallholdings, again for cash rents, to their civites. The technical status of these was ‘free lease-holders’.

  156 Most Alpine communes, however, contained considerable tracts of communally owned forest land, and many of them extensive Alpine pastures for summer grazing, which were either communally owned, or, if belonging to the lord, subject only to an almost nominal fee.

  157 See below, p. 130.

  158 Technically speaking, only the cultivator of a quarter holding or upwards in Austria, or an eighth or upwards in Hungary (the eighth-holders in Hungary are said to have insisted on the rank out of reasons of pride) ranked as a ‘peasant’ (Bauer, jobbágy); those holding smaller parcels of land, or cottages only, or not even so much, were known by a variety of names: Keuschler, Haüsler, Innmänner, etc.; in Hungary, házas (housed) or házatlan (houseless) zsellers. The distinction was important from the recruiting sergeant’s point of view, for a ‘peasant’ and his heir at law was exempt from military service, to which a dwarf-holder or landless man was subject.

  159 Under the instructions for Joseph II’s census in Hungary (and these seem to have followed the normal rule) the term zseller was made to cover:

  every married man, whatever his occupation, not entered as priest, noble, official, etc.,

  burgher, peasant or heir at law of a burgher or peasant,

  every widower with children,

  all smaller employees of private persons,

  regular workers in mines, salt-mines, shipping, road construction, felling and rafting of timber,

  all males aged over forty or persons physically incapacitated for military service,

  the sons of non-noble ‘honoratiores’ and of Protestant and Orthodox clergy.

  160 So in the Viertel unter dem Wienerwald, east of Vienna, 86·4% of the arable land and 95·6% of the vineyards were rustical. The total proportion of rustical land was only 63·4%, but this was because 59·9% of the forests and 32·2% of the rough grazing were dominical.

  In the two Austrias together, 79·8% of the arable land, 68·7% of the leys, 63·3% of the rough grazing and 20·4% of the forests were rustical.

  161 See Damian, op. cit., p. 75. Damian, working on 1792 figures, gives the total area of Bohemia at 7,769,601 yokes, of which 3,208,401 were dominical and 4,547,726 rustical. The figures for arable land alone were 3,608,205 total, 814,571 dominical and 2,793,633 rustical; for forests, 2,310,026 – 1,772,757 and 537,263.

  162 Brawer, op. cit., p. 59.

  163 Acsády, op. cit., pp. 389–90.

  164 Accord
ing to I. Szabó, op. cit., p. 14, the arable land in peasant hands in Hungary in 1828 covered 5,020,675 hold and the allodial, 9,832,051. A figure for 1842 gives 69·5% of all cultivable land as allodial, but this included forests, etc.

  165 An inquiry held in Hungary in 1803 showed 762,593 non-noble ‘houses’ on rustical land and 494,402 on dominical.

  166 In Austria it was illegal for a peasant to hold more than one holding in villein tenure. He could, however, lease additional land. In Upper Austria it was not rare to find a peasant farming 200 yokes. In Hungary there was no legal bar, and there were cases in South Hungary of a peasant’s holding up to six sessions.

  167 Grünberg, Bauernbefreiung, I. 52.

  168 Brawer, p. 23.

  169 Schwartner, Statistik, I. p. 204.

  170 The figures for heads of families were 555,000 and 1,596,810.

  171 The figures for Moravia gave 19,426 Gärtner, 71,086 Haüsler and 14,677 Ausgedingshaüsler, of whom only the last were entirely dependent on their labour.

  172 I have found only one case (and that in the Vorlande) where Maria Theresa recommended the establishment of industries on the specific ground that the population was too dense to support itself by agriculture only. Far oftener it proved impossible to industrialize because man-power was short, even for agriculture.

  173 Kerner, p. 278.

  174 See below, p. 270, n. 1.

  175 The great State woollens factory in Linz also operated exclusively with home-work.

  176 On these see Otruba, Wirtschaftspolitik, p. 182. His are almost the only pages on the subject known to me. Most writers tell us that Joseph II was the first ruler to introduce any protective legislation – even Brügel entirely ignores Maria Theresa’s activities in this field. But while Joseph’s enactments were far more extensive than his mother’s, hers were by no means negligible.