| in
practice, have been treated as slaves. Reduction to a servile state
(“servitus'*) constituted a punishment (CDB 1: 379, 353:9—15, confected in
13th Century but with reliable earlier information), could have been
ac-cepted voluntarily (e.g. CDB I : 156, 161:6—8, years 1143—1148) or
followed after the purchase of the person in question (CDB 1:19, 84: 13, year
1078). In charac-terizing this social stratum, the above commented “here-des“
designation is probably of some consequence as a social labeL It does not
seem likely that it would have specified the rural strata as against the
eilte ones, as members of high society undoubtedly retained their inheritance
rights. The designation may thus have applied “downwards”, that is, towards
the underprivileged strata. In this Vision, they would have been deprived of
their capacities to inherit (landed) property and would thus have to earn
their bread either by auxiliary work or by the performance of nonagrarian
tasks as, for instance, various arts and crafts. In fact, a number of
qualified specialists in various industrial branches can be found among them
(Sasse 1982, 257). In some instances, performance of a specialized activity
could have been imposed as the servile Obligation (for instance, CDB 1: 310,
282A : 22—24, year 1186 — the duke gives “servum... in pellificem”) and such
situations may even find reflectton in archaeological sources. A case in
point could be the iron-mining and iron*smelting district around the Moravian
town of Blansko in which a definite discontinuity in the quality of
metallurgical work has been observed between the 9th— lOth and 1 Ith— 12th
centuries to the detriment of the latter period (Souchopovä 1986, esp. pp.
81—82). The interested and well-motivated 9th— lOth-century Professionals
could have been succeeded by craftsmen feeling no attachment to the menial
tasks imposed upon them. Members of the underprivileged groups obviously held
personal possessions and lived in nuclear families; in the instances where
these are fully enumerated in the Charters (Sasse 1982, 264, 298), all the
sons and daughters are referred to, and as for the work force, the fair sex
was certainly not discriminated, It also seems that these people did maintain
a certain amount of genealogical information pertaining to them. This follows
out of the fact that in some cases, legal procedures were put on written
record decades and centuries after their implementation when the people who
had been originally donated to the recipient institu-tions must have been
dead for a long time. Registration of names of originally donated persons
thus had any sense only if a pedigree linking the ancestor in question to
persons living at the time of writing out the particular docu-ment was
available and could be verified. The fact that the names of underprivileged
persons transferred with the donations actually pertained to the transaction
time and not to the recording time, as well as the existence of at least
rudimentary genealogical information circulating among the rural folk, are
borrte out by a clause from an endowment charter for the Premonstratensian
canons of Litomysl, confected at the end of 12th Century but containing the
original donation of duke Bfetislav II (1092-1100; CDB 7:399, 412:32-33).
Duke Bretislav originally gave the canons a baker named Jan. “Subse-quently”
(postea), his son Nemoj bought a slave named Valdik “cum uxore et filiis et
filiabus” and transferred |
| The
society of llth—12th-century Bohemia may be broadly conceived in four large
component groups: the dukes and their retinue, the “well-born” strata, the
Commoners and the undeprivileged groups (the modern notion of freedom being
notoriously difficult to apply to a number of pre-industrial societies). The
dukes who were the largest proprietors and the richest Bohemians of the
period (but by no means the only well-to-do ones) had to rely on members of
their retinue, especially on the ducal guard corps of picked warriors, to
implement their rule. It is supposed that the ducal entourage was at first
entirely dependent on the dukes as their incomes flowed from re-distribution
of the sum total of goods and Services which the dukes were entitled to claim
from the population. It seems that individual nuclear families, vying with
one artother for power, wealth and prestige, strongly patriarchal, with
developed warrior ethics and cult of the mili-tary virtues but relying on
marriage as on one of the means to secure socially desirable positions and
contacts, were originally characteristical of the ducal entourage milieu. In
later times, this society appears to have merged to a considerable degree
with that of the “well-born" families. The “well-bom” social stratum
probably included a large number of groups identified by names composed of a
personal name with the suffix -ici (quite like the Western -inga names, the
cases in point being “Merovin-gians”, “Carolingians” and the like). Within
these patri-linear and probably patrilocal groups, women seem to have played
again the role of mediators of socially desirable contacts. The personal
names after which these groups called themselves are likely to have belonged
to the respective ancestors and I see no reason why these groups could not
have represented lineages. Landed property held by their individual members
was easily transferable within the groups but relatives of the group members
had the right to revindicate property alienated across the groups' boundaries
(for instance, to Church institutions). A review of the representation of
Settlement names ending in -ici (and likely to have corresponded, at least in
the foundation phase, to such groups) in written sources of this period of
time indicates that in the course of the 11 th— I2th centuries, approximately
one-third to one-half of the population of Bohemia lived in such Settlements.
Unfortunately, we have no means to disdnguish which of these belonged to
“well-born” lineages and which were held by commoners. These groups underwent
historical development which may be called atomization and auto-nomization.
Since the end of 12th Century, the -fei suffix marked only members of the
first generation of descen-dants of given fathers (quite in the manner of
present Russian “otchestvo” patronymics) and no longer were all those who had
Sprung forth from one distant ancestor meant by it. As to autonomization,
there is a distinct trend towards the increasing significance of Status of
originally subordinated family members such as women |