THE FRAIL CERTAINTIES of the RURAL MILIEU Unlike Today, When

CHAPTER THREE THE FRAIL CERTAINTIES OF THE RURAL MILIEU Unlike today, when European agriculture employs a small percentage of the populace, whose production satisfies and sometimes even exceeds the overall social demands, the medieval situation was completely different. The vast majority of the population lived in the countryside and worked in the fields or pastures, but at the same time every fluctuation in their activity, caused by adversities of nature or horrors of war, soon revealed the fragile foundation of the entire system, which depended on relatively low profits and did not create sufficient reserves for the times of crop failure or for other crises. Knowledge of the medieval rural milieu has exceptional importance because of the agrarian character of society then, and information on the ‘silent majority’, on the world of villagers, forms a weighty component of every explanation of the transformation of medieval Europe. At the same time, it is definitely not a distant historical chapter closed once and for all. The legacy of the formation of the village has remained inscribed in our most valuable monument, in the landscape around us. After all, it is precisely for that reason that the study of today’s landscape becomes an indispensable part of the history of the medieval village. The existing research on the medieval village proves the importance of thoroughly studied examples, on which only then can generally formulated conclusions build. This demand arises again and again from surprising dif- ferences not only between individual regions but sometimes even between spatially and temporally close localities. We shall therefore often pause at individual villages, situated both in the Czech lands and in various places of Central Europe, because the explanation of the history of Czech villages cannot be separated from the wider Central European framework. We shall begin with medieval settlement, a process which was intimately connected with the history of the village. 1. The Long Slow Course of Medieval Settlement If we are to deal with medieval settlement, we have to begin with terminology. The Czech milieu uses the term ‘colonisation’, which the historical sci- ences there adopted in the nineteenth century. With its help, it created a scheme by which it attempted to cover the social-economic as well as ethnic 172 chapter three circumstances. In the first regard, it distinguished between rural, urban and mining colonisation and in the second aspect between internal and external colonisation. Internal colonisation came from internal sources of the Czech lands; external was borne by ‘German colonists’. The period understanding of internal and external colonisation was explained by historian Václav Novotný in 1937: ‘If we speak of colonisation, we usually mean the word in a rather narrower sense, not the settlement of the land in its full extent but that part of it which from a certain period was conducted by calling foreign immigrants, or put briefly, German colonisation’.1 In accordance with Czech tradition he also mentioned colonisation in its wider extent, which we can label as internal, for whose knowledge it is necessary to return to the earliest times.2 The bearers of this internal colonisation, uninterrupted even in the thirteenth century and continuing alongside external colonisation, were the domestic population. The emphasis on the role of ‘German colonisation’ was connected with the vivid relations between Czechs and Czech and Moravian Germans in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Czech historical reflec- tion emphasised its first-born position and identified ‘colonisation’ with ‘German colonisation’. This tendency has endured in the subconscious of Czech society to this day; the explanations of historians and archaeologists have not reduced it much. Even the term ‘colonisation’ itself is among the stereotypes with shifting meaning, because it should refer to deliberate settlement conducted normally in a foreign country. If this were the case, we would be dealing with a kind of reverse system, directed from the German side. It seems, however, that the Czech milieu does not feel any ‘colonial’ accent in the accustomed term, but it was precisely for this reason that German historiography itself abandoned the term ‘colonisation’ in the 1950s. In an attempt at a new beginning of the post-war dialogue, it started to prefer the neutral deutsche Ostsiedlung, i.e., German settlement in Eastern Europe.3 Measuring the significance of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ colonisation in the nationally complicated situation of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century became a sensitive task, which was in concord with the press- ing and later fateful relations of the Czech and the Czech and Moravian Germans. Both sides attempted to identify the medieval ethnic borders, in 1 Novotný 1937, 462. 2 Ibidem, the traditional concept of medieval colonisation was outlined by Jireček 1857. 3 The turning-point in the German post-war search came with the study by Schlesinger 1957; on the current terminology (which does not avoid the term ‘colonisation’), see Thieme 2008, 171. For the sake of completeness, we add that the Czech distinction between internal and external colonisation completely diverges from the German conception, according to which internal colonisation meant settlement growth within existing settlement areas, whereas external colonisation crossed their boundaries, see Gringmuth-Dallmer 2001..

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