Taverns and Inns in the German Countryside: Male Honor and Public Space

TAVERNS AND INNS IN THE GERMAN COUNTRYSIDE: MALE HONOR AND PUBLIC SPACE Marc R. Forster By the late seventeenth century there was at least one tavern in every village in southwest Germany. Taverns and inns of course performed many functions in the countryside. They were centers of sociability, communications nodes, meeting places for business, and stages for local politics, social con icts, and even rebellion. Not surprisingly, the local courts of the smaller principalities, like the Hochstift Speyer and monasteries of Salem and Rot an der Rot, handled a steady ow of court cases involving disputes in and around taverns. Several aspects of these cases stand out. Most obviously, law cases remind us how village taverns, like their counterparts in cities, were theaters where notions of male honor were played out. More indirectly, however, the archives show that taverns tied villages to the outside world, but were even more important for local communications. The place of taverns in local life is the focus of this paper. I will begin with the story of two men and a tavern . Hans Schön and Hans Pfalzer In the 1650s, Hans Schön was the tavern keeper, the Taffern Wirt, in the village of Berkheim. Berkheim lies between Biberach and Memmingen in the valley of the Iller, right on the major road that ran between Kempten to the south and Ulm to the north. The village was partly under the jurisdiction of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Rot an der Rot, and partly under that of the Benedictine monks at Ochsenhau- sen. Schön leased his inn from the monks at Rot, to whom he paid an annual fee and taxes on each measure of wine and beer sold. By all indications, Schön was a man of some substance in Berkheim. The inn also seems to have stayed in the family; in the 1730s and 1740s a Frederick Schön was innkeeper in Berkheim.1 1 Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (= HStASt.) B487/Band 138 (Rot Rechnungen). 230 marc r. forster For at least a decade Schön appeared regularly at the sessions of the local court presided over by of\ cials from the monastery, almost always in con ict with Hans Pfalzer, the headman, or Amman (Amtmann in High German), of Berkheim.2 Schön’s appearances at court are not surprising, since innkeepers were frequently witnesses of (and sometimes partici- pants in) the verbal disputes and drunken brawls that loomed large in the work of these Niedergerichte. The business of providing drink, food, and lodging was also of interest to the authorities, and they regulated it carefully, keeping a close eye on all innkeepers. We rst encounter Schön and Pfalzer in December 1653, in a dispute over Pfalzer’s duty to inspect the innkeeper’s wine cellar in his role as wine inspector (Weinspener). On this occasion, Schön was ned a small amount for protesting the inspections too vociferously. Schön admit- ted objecting to the inspections, but claimed he only became abusive when the Amman asserted that the wine the innkeeper was selling was of poor quality and that Schön was overcharging his customers. Schön claimed to have been poorly used: “It hurt me most of all that the Amman criticized me publicly in front of the people.”3 A year later, during the post harvest period as well, Pfalzer once again appeared to inspect the inn’s cellars, and once again there was trouble. Schön was quoted as saying “he should not have the power to go into his (Schön’s) cellar.” Furthermore, according to the innkeeper, the Amman did not come back up from the cellar until he had tasted not one Mass (1/2 a liter) of wine, but rather six. Pfalzer, he claimed, was “now in a state of complete drunkenness (in voller weiss)” and, in his drunken state, wanted to set the tax rate. Despite the fact that Schön was in other legal trouble at this court session, the judge did not \ ne him for this altercation.4 Did monastic of\ cials know something about the drinking habits of the Amman of Berkheim? Perhaps being wine inspector was not a good job for Pfalzer, for he seemed to enjoy his wine rather more than was a good for him. In early March 1656, Pfalzer was drinking together with Hans Erma, the baker, and both their wives in Schön’s tavern. The men’s drinking got them into an ugly altercation with their wives. According to the court minutes, “while drinking, the men behaved in an unseemly manner, and 2 HStASt. B488/Band 13 (Rot Protokolle). 3 HStASt. B488/Band 13 (Rot Protokolle), pp. 9r–v. 4 HStASt. B488/Band 13 (Rot Protokolle), pp. 53r. .

Load more