Rosa CONGOST, Rui SANTOS (Eds.) (2010), Contexts of Property in Europe. The Social Embeddedness of Property Rights in Land in Historical Perspective

Rural History in Europe 5
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normative nature or of societal importance.
Contexts of Property in Europe
The Social Embeddedness of Property Rights in Land
in Historical Perspective
Edited by Rosa CONGOST and Rui SANTOS
H
F
EDITORIAL BOARD
Gérard Béaur, director
Rosa Congost
Anne Lise Head-König
Socrates Petmezas
Vicente Pinilla
Jürgen Schlumbohm
Bas van Bavel
This publication is supported by COST.

It is the result of the work launched in the working group 1 ‘Landed Property’ of the COST Action A35.
It came into existence thanks to the funding of the ESF (COST), with the support of the Portuguese Foundation
for Science and Technology (FCT) through the base funding of CESNOVA-FCSH-UNL and project POCTI/
HAR/56210/2004, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through project HAR2008-02960/
HIST.
We are grateful to Anne Varet-Vitu (UMR 8558, EHESS-CNRS) who created the final layout of the book.
Cover: Carta Agrícola de Portugal [Agricultural Map of Portugal] 1:50,000, by Gérad Péry, Direcção Geral de
Agricultura, 1891. We thank Maria José Roxo and E-GEO-FCSH-UNL for kindly providing the picture out of
their map library.
Printed on acid free paper.
© 2010 Brepols Publisher n.v., Turnhout, Belgium and COST

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CONTENTS
List of Contributors 7
List of Figures 8
List of Tables 9
The series Rural History in Europe 11
Foreword 13
1. Working out the frame: From formal institutions to the social
contexts of property
Rosa CONGOST, Rui SANTOS 15
2. Institutional changes and peasant land-transfers in the Czech lands,
from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century
Markus CERMAN, Dana ŠTEFANOVÁ 39
3. The evolution of property rights in Tuscany, from the end of the
Middle Ages to the nineteenth century
Giuliana BIAGIOLI 61
4. The social embeddedness of common property rights in Navarra
(Spain), sixteenth to twentieth centuries
José Miguel LANA BERASAIN, Iñaki IRIARTE GOÑI 83
5. Inheritance, land market and social reproduction in an egalitarian
system (Vernon, Normandy, 1750-1830)
Fabrice BOUDJAABA 105
6. An English or a continental way? The great agrarian reforms in
Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein in the late eighteenth century
Carsten PORSKROG RASMUSSEN 125
7. Land reform and reallocation in interwar Europe
Paul BRASSLEY 145
8. From capitalism to ‘neo-feudalism’? Property relations, land
markets, and the Nazi state in the German province of Niederdonau,
1938-1945
Ernst LANGTHALER 165
9. Securing access to England’s uplands: or how the 1945 revolution
petered out
Richard W. HOYLE 187
10. The governmentality of land ownership in south-eastern Europe.
Romania and Yugoslavia: a comparison
Dietmar MÜLLER 211
5
11. Changing property structures in central European agriculture during
decollectivization: the social aspects of appropriation
Maria HALAMSKA 229
12. Family farm ideology and the transformation of collective farms in
East Germany, 1989-2005
Jeong Nam CHOI, Axel WOLZ, Michael KOPSIDIS 247
13. The post-Socialist transformation of land ownership in Hungary
Zsuzsanna VARGA 267
6
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Giuliana BIAGIOLI Università di Pisa, Italy

Fabrice BOUDJAABA CNRS (CERHIO-UMR 6258), Rennes, France
Paul BRASSLEY University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Markus CERMAN Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Jeong Nam CHOI Leibniz-Institut für Agrarentwicklung in
Mittel- und Osteuropa (IAMO) Halle (Saale),
Germany
Rosa CONGOST Universitat de Girona, Spain
Maria HALAMSKA Warsaw University, Poland
Richard W. HOYLE University of Reading, United Kingdom
Iñaki IRIARTE GOÑI Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain
Michael KOPSIDIS Leibniz-Institut für Agrarentwicklung in
Mittel- und Osteuropa (IAMO), Halle (Saale),
Germany
José Miguel LANA BERASAIN Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, Pamplona,
Spain
Ernst LANGTHALER Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten, Austria
Dietmar MÜLLER Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum Geschichte
und Kultur Ostmitteleuropas, Leipzig,
Germany
Carsten PORSKROG RASMUSSEN Aarhus Universitet, Denmark
Rui SANTOS Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon,
Portugal
Dana ŠTEFANOVÁ Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria
Zsuzsanna VARGA Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest,
Hungary
Axel WOLZ Leibniz-Institut für Agrarentwicklung in
Mittel- und Osteuropa (IAMO), Halle (Saale),
Germany
7
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1. The area of the historical Czech Lands within late medieval east-central
Europe
Figure 2.2. Peasant land transactions in the villages of Háj, Luh and Visoský, Frýdlant
estate, 1558-1750
Figure 3.1. Tuscany
Figure 4.1. Navarra
Figure 5.1. The villages in the region of Vernon
Figure 5.2. Age makeup of market actors by type of participation in the market in
Vernon, 1750-1828
Figure 6.1. Denmark and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
Figure 7.1. Extent of land reform in European countries
Figure 8.1. The German Reich in 1942
Figure 9.1. The Pennine uplands
Figure 10.1. Romania and Yugoslavia in the interwar period
Figure 12.1. Location of interviewed farmer managers in the Federal State of Saxony-
Anhalt
Figure 13.1. Distribution of ownership and use of land in Hungary per legal status of
entities, 1990-2005
Figure 13.2. Distribution of farms and of land in Hungary per farm size, 2005
Figure 13.3. Distribution of land in Hungary per farm size (Lorenz curve), 2005
8
LIST OF TABLES
Table 2.1. Property transfers by kin relationship in the villages of Háj, Luh and
Vysoký, estate of Frýdlant, 1558-1750
Table 2.2. Family and kin relationships in property transfers in the villages of Háj,
Luh and Vysoký, estate of Frýdlant, 1558-1750 (relationship of seller to
buyer)
Table 4.1. Environment and habitat in Navarra, according to area
Table 4.2. Selected features of communal systems in Navarra, according to area
Table 4.3. Changes in commons in Navarra, according to area, 1860-1935
Table 4.4. Population distribution and growth in Navarra, according to area,
seventeenth to twentieth century
Table 4.5. Social attributes of the communities in Navarra in 1787, according to area
(per thousand population)
Table 4.6. Modes of appointment of local authorities in Navarra in 1787, according to
area (per cent population)
Table 4.7. Proceedings for legal confirmation of local bylaws at the Royal Courts of
Navarra, 1520-1833, according to area (number of trials)
Table 5.1. Value of owned land by the type of transfer through which it was acquired
in 8 villages in the region of Vernon, 1774 (values in livres tournois)
Table 5.2. Value of owned land by the type of transfer through which it was acquired
in 8 villages in the region of Vernon, 1774 (values in livres tournois)
Table 5.3. Genealogical identification and percentage of land transactions between
relatives in the region of Vernon, 1750-1828 (transactions of the B sample
of buyers)
Table 5.4. Distribution by age and value of land transactions in Vernon, 1750-1828
(B sample)
Table 5.5. Regression for patrimonial situation, 8 villages in the region of Vernon,
1774
Table 7.1. Areas subject to land reform as a percentage of the agricultural area per
country (an estimate)
Table 8.1. Number of Heir Court proceedings by types of concern in Stade, 1933-
1945, and Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Table 8.2. Results of Heir Court proceedings by types of concern in Eggenburg, 1938-
1945
Table 8.3. Distribution of landed property in the communes of the court district of
Eggenburg according to land use, 1939
9
Table 8.4. Number of Heir Court proceedings by types of concerns and according to
land use in Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Table 8.5. Number of sold or bartered parcels of hereditary farmland by types of land
use in Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Table 11.1. An overview of the legal foundations for the privatization of collective
farms
Table 12.1. Patterns of farms and land use in the German Democratic Republic, 1989
Table 12.2. Development of farm businesses in East Germany, 1992-2005
Table 12.3. Farms in East and West Germany according to legal entity, 2005
Table 12.4. Major topics of external advice needed by farm producers according to
legal entity of farms, 1990
Table 12.5. Regional origin of the (important) external advisors at the time of
transformation according to legal entity of farm
10
The Series Rural History in Europe
Sometimes viewed as the producer of foodstuffs and raw materials, as a garden

or a space for the production of energy; sometimes seen as a reservoir of manpower
destined to be subverted to the needs of cities and industries or as a peaceful haven
which welcomes weary city-dwellers; also regarded as a places of easily incensed
‘backward’ societies or as an idyllic spot, close to nature where societies act as guardians
of a certain conception of quality of life, the countryside has not ceased to be at the
centre of economic, social, political, and now environmental, concern of governments
and public opinion. Pulled between contradictory demands, the countryside of today
presents an image of a place and a society in clear transformation, which, in itself, is
difficult to decipher.
In Europe, the difficulty is that the countryside, which forms a complex and
evolving universe, is experiencing ruptures and also exhibits inertias. These complex
transformations of the rural world can only be fully understood if they are viewed
in a manner which transcends national boundaries and if the discrepancies, which
can only be observed by adopting a broad view, in fact at the continental scale, are
taken into account. These changes cannot be explained without reference to their
past. The question is how to create such a dialogue between researchers which goes
beyond national boundaries, crosses chronological barriers and breaks disciplinary
boundaries.
The main objective of the ‘Rural History in Europe’ collection is to provide just such
keys to unlocking the changes experienced by present-day European rural societies
in the light of their historical experience. It is to produce the historical knowledge
which will allow us to conceptualize the future of European country-dwellers, as
they face the kinds of problems which historians have grappled with in examining
societies in the past: under-employment and multiple occupations, migrations and
rural depopulation, distortion of competition by the marketplace or by the policies
established by political authorities, competition with non-European producers,
problems of resource allocation (land and water), distribution and redistribution of
heritages and land-holding, the future of owner-occupied farms and the function of
agriculture as employer, the tensions between private ownership and public access
to land, the changes induced by settlement of urban migrants, environment and
sustainable development, and so on.
In most European countries, rural society and long term change have been the
subject of intensive research. Over the last half-century, a lively historiography
has developed around questions concerning the factors of growth and systems of
agricultural production, as well as the periodization of growth and the impact of
agriculture on industrial development. As a result, a body of knowledge has built
up on techniques, forms of land-use, levels of production, the differing conditions
and nature of the peasantry and the strategies of economic agents. More recently
11
environmental concerns have made a dramatic impact on the consciousness of
historians in the field, while previous findings have been questioned in a critical way
and new perspectives have been drawn.
The field known as Rural History remains very much alive, despite the decline
of the agricultural sector over the last several decades. Rural History remains
fundamental in a Europe which has for so long been kept together by its Common
Agricultural Policy and which now has to face the heavy impact of Brussels-based
initiatives upon its rural regions, and an unprecedented revision of current agrarian
systems and systems of production in the countries which have recently joined the
EU. How can the changes taking place in present-day Europe be understood without
taking into account a past which is still very present, and which determines both
structures and behaviour?
The first volumes of this collection are the result of several workshops which have
been held during the past three years and which have mainly been supported by funds
of the European Action COST A 35 and by other institutions like CORN, GDR CNRS
Sociétés Rurales Européennes, Universities… The COST Action, which was initiated
three years ago, intends to extend the historical analysis of rural society over the
last millenium in order to envisage the problems of the countryside in an extended
timeframe and also to draw upon the commentary and expertise of specialists from
other disciplines (sociology, economics, anthropology). This will enable the first real
comparison of Europe from historians from all over the continent, from Scandinavia
to the Mediterranean and from the western frontier to the eastern limits. Papers
from these meetings will be published after a peer-review process, supported by the
editorial board and, of course, the work of the authors and editors of the volumes.
This collection will be constructed upon four main pillars: Landed property; The
management of rural land; Peasant societies; The state, government, politics and
peasants. Each of these will bring new perspectives and produce new tools to better
understand the changes which are taking place today. In order to ask the relevant
questions about the future of these peasantries and rural spaces in transformation,
the books of this collection will deal with the ‘longue durée’ and will present either
research in progress or a synthesis on a regional or national scale. The cumulative
effect of this approach will be to produce volumes, the geographical coverage of
which will be the whole of Europe.
The volumes will also, of course, take into account the role of history as an
explanatory factor for contemporary European Societies. If rural societies have
been overthrown, if rural landscapes have been profoundly transformed and if the
intervention of the State has considerably strengthened the regulation of production
and trade, the contrast between a contemporary rural world in rapid transformation
and a traditional rural world with frozen landscapes, petrified societies, immobile
economies and lethargic political contexts will be an illusion. It is important, therefore,
to detect, to measure and to interpret the range of recent changes by illuminating
those that have taken place in past centuries in a European context.
12
Foreword
This book and the workshop that gave rise to it resulted from the editors’ desire
to use the COST Action Working Group on landed property as a framework to
promote a discussion of the concept of property in rural societies. We started from
the assumption that property is a problematic concept in social science theory, in
historical analysis and especially regarding the interplay between the two. It seemed
only too fitting that we should take advantage of the unique opportunity provided
by the COST PROGRESSORE network to promote such a discussion through the
analysis of specific historical instances, and we are very grateful to the Working
Group and to the Managing Committee of COST Action A35 for having agreed to
include it in its academic programme. The workshop The social embeddedness of
property rights in land took place in Lisbon during three intense days in June 2007, at
the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH-
UNL), which we have to thank for the facilities and the logistics. It was co-organized
by the editors with the support of their respective research centres, CESNOVA at
FCSH-UNL and the Centre de Recerca d’Història Rural at the University of Girona.
Even though this volume originated in the conference, it is not a book of proceedings.
All authors at the workshop were invited to rewrite their papers taking into account
the discussions during the workshop and to resubmit them for publication. All
submitted papers were then reviewed by two anonymous referees and the twelve
finally accepted were redrafted according to the referees’ recommendations, and
afterwards extensively discussed and reworked in the course of the editorial process.
The first, introductory, chapter was also read and commented on by the Chair of the
Working Group, Bas van Bavel, and redrafted according to his recommendations.
This book is in many ways the result of team effort. The editors very much wish
to thank the Chair of the COST Action A35 and Director of the book series, Gérard
Béaur, for his patience and unrelenting support; all the participants to the Lisbon
workshop for their inputs to the discussion; all the referees for their hard work, their
recommendations and the hard choices some of them had to make; the authors for
their understanding and willingness to comply with editorial rules and to take in
criticism and suggestions; and last but not least, David Hardisty at ILNOVA, FCSH-
UNL, for the thorough English editing.
Rosa CONGOST, Rui SANTOS
13
1. From formal institutions to the social contexts of
property1
Rosa CONGOST, Rui SANTOS
This book reflects two interrelated concerns. The first is with the a-historical, taken-
for-granted notion of absolute, perfect, unitary and exclusive property that permeates
historical discourse – the Property as one might have it, as defined in nineteenth-
century European law and economic thought. Property arrangements in past societies
have tended either to be translated into this paradigm – with variations according to
national juridical traditions, namely between those of Common Law and Roman Law
– or treated as oddities standing in its way, which reason and economic efficiency
have wiped out of developed economies and will do so in developing ones. This
outlook often translates as a reification of the physical reality of land as the Property,
from which more or less explicitly follows, for instance, that the only conceivable
way to divide or to consolidate property in land is to physically divide or consolidate
the land plots themselves. We argue that such notions have, mostly implicitly and for
lack of critical awareness, undermined our ability to understand the social workings
of property and their historical changes.
The second concern was that even though it is arguably one promising way out
of the former problems and certainly one that flourished in economic history, the
conceptualization of property rights by new institutional economics largely remains
teleological and too centred on legal and state-enforced institutions to grasp the
historical, social and cultural contexts and dynamics of property in its concrete
appropriations. Put simply, we intended to push the debate on property rights in land
further towards the arena of social history, sociology and anthropology.
In order to provide a framework for this attempt, we have turned to a broad

notion of ‘the social embeddedness’ of the economy and used it to extend the basic
definitions within economics literature concerning property rights, so that they
generate meaningful problems for historical and social research. We will then move
on to explore how certain relevant issues concerning past and recent European history
may be seen in this light, as exemplified by the essays in this book.
1
We thank Bas J. P. van Bavel for his most useful criticism and suggestions. All the remaining faults
and mistakes are our own.
15
Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property
I. Social embeddedness
The notion of social embeddedness of the economy basically represents an

attempt to ‘bring society back into’ the study of economies. As initially formulated
by Polanyi, it stood for a ‘[…] correct procedure for studying economic life [which]
involved examining the concrete institutions that structure empirical economies’
(Krippner, 2001: 779). Polanyi’s grand narrative of modernization depicted a ‘great
transformation’ in which the prevalence of self-regulated market exchange had
disembedded the economic sphere of human activity from social institutions. The
whole of human life and society thus had become progressively regulated by market
forces and by the acquisitive rationality of ‘our obsolete market mentality’ (Polanyi,
[1944] 2002, [1947] 1996). Contrary to its ideological justifications, with political
economy at the forefront, this was not a natural process but rather one imposed by
violence and coercion and driven by organized social interests, ideology, and the state
– so that, in a somewhat ironical way, the disembedding of the economy was itself
socially embedded (Krippner, 2001: 782).
Even though the tradition of economic and social history is rife with references
to social contexts of property, these were mainly case-specific approaches with little
effort at theorization. Marc Bloch’s was perhaps the first fully systematic attempt
to analyse historical property forms within the complexity of their concrete social
contexts. His comparative perspective, grounded in his own work on French rural
history in the medieval and early-modern periods and on the advancement of agrarian
individualism, led him to conceive modern property as a ‘great achievement’ largely
constructed through social relations (Bloch, [1930] 1997, [1931] 1987). Yet it may
be argued that Bloch’s complex account of property relations was passed on to later
economic and social history in a way that somehow reinforced the modern liberal
model, emulating Polanyi’s views on the disembeddedness of modern economies
in contrast to pre-modern ones. Much of the economic and social history which
looked into feudalism, capitalism and the transition between them saw the latter as a
shift from ‘relative’ and ‘imperfect’ to ‘absolute’ and ‘perfect’ property, a stereotype
that Brenner’s influential essays and the ensuing debate did not manage to avoid
(Brenner, 1976). Pierre Vilar’s call for theorising across case studies and to pluralize
the ‘principle of property’ and its socioeconomic outcomes was rather an exception
in his day (Vilar, [1973] 1982), matched by E. P. Thompson’s explorations in law and
common right usages, their relationships and conflicts (Thompson, 1977, 1991).
In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Mark Granovetter reutilized the notion of

‘embeddedness’ to revive the theoretical agenda of economic sociology. For this
purpose, he departed from Polanyi’s dichotomy and generalized the notion to include
16
Rosa Congost, Rui Santos
markets in advanced capitalist societies. According to him, all markets and economic
institutions are socially constructed, resulting from the social networks in which
economic actors and transactions are embedded. The variations in the structure of
networks and in the positions of particular individuals within that structure ultimately
explain the markets’ workings, as well as the economic behaviour of the actors within
them (Granovetter, 1985).
This view soon came under criticism by other sociologists. Its emphasis on social
networks was deemed too narrow an account of the economy’s interweaving with
society, bypassing institutions in Polanyis’s holistic sense (Krippner, 2001: 799;
Nee and Ingram, 1998: 22). The immersion of the economy in social life entails its
consideration as a ‘total social fact’; even if one must use abstract models to analyse it,
they must be historical models (Bourdieu, 2000: 13). Wider forms of embeddedness
should thus be considered besides (albeit related to) social networks, namely: political,
pertaining to the power relations which set and enforce social rules and differentially
empower and constrain actors; cultural, pertaining to values, beliefs, norms and
models; and cognitive, pertaining to the conceptual frameworks and knowledge that
mould experience, economic action and organizations (see Smelser and Swedberg,
2005: 15-16, for a synthesis and references).
New economic sociologists, however, were hardly concerned with property from
the start, mainly focusing on markets and organizations. As the first systematic
synthesis on the subject by economic sociologists acknowledges, ‘[…] contemporary
sociology has said much less about property than its centrality warrants, largely ceding
the topic to economics and law’ (Carruthers and Ariovitch, 2004: 23) – to which we
should add anthropology. In fact, the anthropological approach to the ‘embeddedness
of property’ proposed by Hann (1998b) converges with sociological perspectives on
the economy in its mix of power, culture, cognition and social relations, adding its
own emphasis on property grounded in specific social and cultural contexts.
II. Property rights: basic definitions from neo-institutional

economics
Even though the socially and historically contingent character of property

was a premise of the institutionalist tradition in economics, and it was expressly
acknowledged by Knight in his classical writing on risk and uncertainty (Knight,
[1921] 2005: 353-354, 359-360), the systematic theorization of property in the new
institutional economics stemmed from the seminal propositions by Coase ([1960]
1990: 155-156), who introduced economic theory to insights from earlier work on the
philosophy and the historical ethnography of law (e.g. Cohen, 1927; Maine, [1861]
17
1917: 105). This comparatively recent tradition in economics, as well as its approach
to economic history, was a major step in connecting the economic notion of property
to the theoretical outlooks and debates in other social sciences and in history. At
least potentially, it challenged the liberal property paradigm with a far more flexible
concept that made issues like power, institutions, culture and agency endogenous to
the theory of property, along with historical change and path-dependence.
Let us dwell for a moment on a few basic definitions. According to Coase, standard
economic theory was hampered by
‘[…] a faulty concept of a factor of production. This is usually thought of as a physical
entity […] instead of as a right to perform certain (physical) actions. We may speak of
a person owning land and using it as a factor of production, but what the land-owner in
fact possesses is the right to carry out a circumscribed list of actions’. (Coase, [1960]
1990: 155)
Accordingly, property came to be defined as the social legitimacy of specified kinds

of actions with respect to assets: ‘An owner of property rights possesses the consent
of fellowmen to allow him to act in particular ways’ (Demsetz, 1967: 347), so that
‘[w]hat are owned are socially recognized rights of action’. Thus the commonsense
notion of ownership of things in fact ‘[…] masks the variety and complexity of the
ownership relationship’ (Alchian and Demsetz, 1973: 17).
Two major theoretical developments stemming from these assumptions concern us

here. The first is that once it has been defined as above, the unitary and absolute notion
of property is exploded. Property rights are defined as discrete sets of possible actions
and thus they may be restricted (i.e., some actions may be forbidden), partitioned,
distributed and transacted as separate bundles: ‘It is not the resource itself that is
owned; it is a bundle, or a portion of rights to use the resource that is owned’ (Alchian
and Demsetz, 1973: 17, emphases in the original). One major property right (which
may be conceded in different degrees, or not at all) is precisely ‘[…] to transfer all
rights in the asset through, e.g., sale, or some rights through, e.g., rental’ (Furubotn and
Pejovitch, 1972: 1140, emphases in the original). Therefore, property rights in an asset,
such as land, may be distributed among several parties through customs and contracts,
without the physical asset itself being partitioned (Alchian and Demsetz, 1973: 17).
The second development is that the analysis of property as a set of social relations
becomes theoretically inescapable:
‘[…] property rights do not refer to relations between men and things but rather, to the
sanctioned behavioral relations among men that arise from the existence of things and
pertain to their use. […] The prevailing system of property rights in the community can
be described, then, as the set of economic and social relations defining the position of each
18
individual with respect to the utilization of scarce resources’. (Furubotn and Pejovitch,
1972: 1139, emphasis in the original)
Their inherently social-relational character and the fact that they depend on
acknowledgement, consent and enforcement means that
‘[…] property rights are not absolute and can be changed by individuals’ actions […]. The
past failure of economists to exploit the property rights notion in the analysis of behaviour
stems from a tendency to consider rights as absolute’. (Barzel, 1997: 4)
This makes property rights contingent on action and social relations, and also renders
them necessarily historical in the deeper sense of the word, that is, subject to change
brought about by wider processes in the societies within which they are embedded.
However promising such definitions may appear for a coalescence of research

programmes between economics, social history and other social and behavioural
sciences, their use in economic history has fallen rather short of their promise. On the
one hand, despite the fact that the theory differentiates in principle between economic
property rights as the ‘ability to enjoy a piece of property’ in a factual sense, and legal
property rights as ‘essentially what the state assigns to a person’ by formal rulings
(Barzel 1997: 4), and that it includes informal constraints within the definition of
institutions (North, 1990: 4, 36-45), historical work by new institutional economists
has tended to concentrate on formal institutions and on ruling and enforcement by the
state and the legal system. That ‘property rights are specified, enforced and altered
by the state’ was one of the main tenets of North’s early research programme for
economic history, and the study and theorizing of the state and political systems in
this respect was its major assigned task (North, 1978: 975; cf. criticism in Greif,
2005: 7; Hopcroft 1998: 227). Even if ‘legal rights play a primarily supporting role’
in relation to economic rights, this role is considered ‘a very prominent one, however,
because they are easier to observe than economic rights’ (Barzel, 1997: 4). Dwelling
primarily on the state and equating visibility with theoretical prominence has led to
neglect of local and context-specific institutional variance (Hopcroft, 1998) as well
as the interplay between formal and informal rules, beliefs, modes of enforcement,
and resistance (Nee, 2005: 65).
On the other hand, the theoretical assumption that disputes over rights are settled
and new rights are delineated by rational parties at the lower settlement cost (Barzel,
1997: 96-99) masks the uneven distribution of power both to influence institutions
and to delineate, appropriate and enforce actual rights through effective everyday
behaviour and social relations (Ellickson, 1998: 59 ff.). Recent historical reviews
counter both the liberal view of private property as natural social order and the
institutionalist perspective that sets the state and formal ruling techniques apart from
19
society, arguing for an emphasis instead on the ‘politics of property’ comprising the
‘[…] struggles and confrontations among different actors, including administrative
ones, for control over the use as well as the revenue of land’ (Islamoglu, 2004b: 9).
Once these aspects are brought to the fore, it becomes clear that the actual historical
configurations of property rights vary well beyond their legal specifications (Congost,
2003: 74; Hopcroft, 1998: 282, 297-298; Santos and Serrão, forthcoming).
New institutional economics and the related economic history literature is a

deliberately partial, highly abstract approach that obscures or oversimplifies social,
cultural and political aspects which, though they may be deemed irrelevant to the
core problems of economic theory, are most relevant to social-historical analysis. The
overall assumption that institutions evolve as rational responses to high transaction
costs was charged with failing to analyse the historical social structures and processes
by which they were constructed (Granovetter, 1985: 488, 505), ultimately taking
on a ‘Candidian appearance’ that obscures power and coercion and in which ‘[…]
all politics becomes a mutually beneficial, volunteeristic negotiation between
individuals’ (Wellhofer, 1990: 357-358). The corollary that perfect, individual and
exclusive property rights are a precondition for economic efficiency is far too linear
and teleological, and in the end reintroduces the Property if not as the sole paradigm,
at least as the yardstick against which all other, ‘imperfect’ forms of property should
be assessed – thus finally precluding the analysis of the plurality of rights and of their
social distribution in their own terms and contexts (Congost, 2003: 76).
III. Socializing and historicizing property rights
It is only fair to acknowledge that new institutional economic and historical

literature has come a long way to enrich the social dimension of its models, particularly
by more explicitly addressing informal rules, beliefs, coercion, bargaining power and
the ability to mobilize social support as drivers of institutional change or stagnation
(North, 1990, 2005, passim; cf. Wellhofer 1990: 358). Most remarkably as far as
property rights are concerned, major developments in the theory of institutions and
governance allowed Ostrom to address institutional diversity and to reframe the
debate on common-pool resources, well beyond the simplistic liberal argument for
exclusive individual property based on ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Ostrom, 1990,
2005; Ostrom, Gardner and Walker, 1994). In economic history, Kantor’s history of
livestock enclosure in the postbellum South of the United States introduced social
and political agency into the core of the argument, to conclude that
‘[…] broad predictions about the direction of institutional change become much more
complicated when the competing interests must resolve their differences in the political
arena’. (Kantor, 1998: 86)
20
Another example is Buoye’s narrative of the privatization of land in eighteenth-

century China, which evolves within a neo-institutional framework that draws
explicitly on North but builds into it an analysis based on Thompson’s concept of
moral economy to account for social struggle and violent resistance (Buoye, 2000).
We believe that fully taking advantage of neo-institutional insights for social

historical analysis will require a shift in emphasis from overarching macro-level
institutions, and particularly property rights as stipulated by the state, to their
interplay with lower level institutions and with culture, action and social relations
in specified historical contexts. This should make us delve deeper into how property
rights are diversely acknowledged, appropriated, enacted and reshaped by different
actors and social groups. It would also require a shift from grand theory to middle-
range comparative research, enabling the understanding and conceptualization of
concrete historical modes of economic relations and how they change over time – as
Pierre Vilar strove for in his empirical research and theoretical essays alike: ‘Only
the comparison of enough historical “cases” will demonstrate the validity, suggest
the variants, and situate in time the caducity of the economic “models” themselves’
(Vilar, [1960] 1982: 30). This is indeed a much needed task, if one is to take seriously
North’s recent caveat that ‘[u]nderstanding is a necessary prerequisite missing in the
economist’s rush to model economic growth and change’ (North, 2005: IX).
The contribution of social history to such a research framework can be grounded,

though by no means exclusively, in Bloch’s tradition of rural history, striving for
a balance between large scale problematic syntheses and problem-oriented detailed
regional studies, as well as in Vilar’s social approach to property relations in his
theoretical writings and his studies in early modern Catalonia (Vilar, [1962] 1977)
and in the ‘customs in common’ and the ‘moral economy’ lines of research in British
social history (Thompson, 1977, 1991: 97-351). More recent attempts to reset the
historical debate on property in a social, political and cultural framework are well
exemplified in the collective volume edited by Islamoglu (2004a). Examples of
anthropological contributions may be found among others in the cited collective
volume edited by Hann (1998a) and in Verdery’s ethnography of power and disputed
legitimacy in privatization processes (Verdery, 2003, esp. chs. 3, 4). From the
standpoint of sociological theory, Carruthers and Ariovitch suggested five topics for
an account of property rights: which objects are appropriated, who are the subjects
who may hold property, how the use of property is articulated, how property rights
are transferred, and how they are enforced (Carruthers and Ariovitch 2004: 26-31).
The following reflections will attempt to merge these varied suggestions into a few
problematic guidelines which cut across the essays in the ensuing chapters.
21
Once property is conceived as the socially acknowledged and sanctioned rights of

social entities to perform actions with assets, fundamental questions arise regarding
each given context. Who are those entities and how are assets defined so that they
may respectively become the subjects and the objects of meaningful proprietary
claims? How are social identities articulated in those rights or exclusion from
them? Conversely, how are existing definitions of rights manipulated in reference to
existing social identities? For instance, what is defined as a ‘grazing field’ – which
combinations of land, plants, and water, within which space and time boundaries, in
what sequence relative to other plots in a rotation system? Which rights are specified
in it? Which individual or collective entities – landowner, tenant farmer, family,
ethnic group, village community, cooperative, corporation – hold which rights, how
far do they overlap or exclude others? Conversely, which entities are excluded from
such rights?
The concept that the overall bundle of rights in a certain object (e.g. a given plot
of land) may be split into subsets owned by different entities expands the perception
of how property rights, rather than land itself, may be divided across society, and
of the institutional devices (trade and contracts, inheritance, donation, political
redistribution…) through which they may be transferred and allocated. This overcomes
the dichotomy of societies ‘with’ and ‘without’ the idea of property, allowing us to
look through a common framework without disregarding their different ideologies of
ownership and property systems (Béaur, 1998: 24-25; van Bavel and Hoppenbrowers,
2004: 15). It also makes it possible to articulate the concept of a plurality of markets
in land, distinguished by the different specifications of the bundles of rights transacted
in each, as well as the historical variability of contractual forms, of transactions and
of their social appropriations (van Bavel and Hoppenbrouwers, 2004: 17-20; Thoen,
2004: 49; Santos and Serrão, forthcoming).
Defining property as not simply a bilateral relationship between social entities

and things, but rather as a multilateral relationship among social entities concerning
things, means that an appropriated land can be understood as a ‘map of social
relations’ (Carrier, 1998: 92) linking contractual parties, family members, current and
past generations, and so on by claims, entitlements, obligations and transactions. This
definition of property rights questions the cultural and political definitions of which
actions are conceived as appropriable and enforceable rights (ploughing, grazing,
building, hunting, gleaning, passing through, excluding, trading, inheriting, collecting
rent, and so forth), and which are not. This relational and action-oriented perspective
implies that we should see property as the outcome not just of consensus, culture and
institutional constraints, but also of power relationships, agency within constraints,
and dispute about the social legitimacy of claims. Questions arise in this light as to
22
who acknowledges a given set of property rights, who contests them, and according
to which institutions, that is, sets of formal or informal, possibly competing ‘rules
of the game’. How and how far are property rights disputed and resisted against,
enforced and transformed by human agency? According to which distribution of
bargaining power and coercive capacity? Which contending sets of values and rules
strive to legitimize claims, and how are they argued by contenders as they attempt
to gather social worth, de-legitimize opponents and achieve favourable conventions?
(In the sense of ‘convention economics’ and the ‘economies of worth’ proposed by
Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006.)
IV. The volume: embedding property rights
The stereotyped a-historical concept of property resulted from a specific historical

context, which roughly spanned the second half of the eighteenth century to the first
half of the nineteenth century across several areas of western Europe, mostly irradiating
from France (with the discourse of the Physiocrats) and the United Kingdom (with
that of the Scottish liberals). From then on this ideal concept of absolute property,
with its emphasis on individuality and exclusiveness, has left a deep imprint on legal
frameworks, becoming one of the hallmarks of political modernity. This trend is
itself a part of the historical reality of the modern world. But as we have said, it
has also tended to naturalize the liberal notion of property in the discourse of the
social sciences concerning past, present and foreseeable future societies, as was the
case during the first liberal age in Europe and is currently so in western societies –
in which, however, zoning laws, eminent domain and production quotas display a
situation quite removed from absolute property – and in transitional societies in post-
Communist and in developing countries.
We believe that the essays collected in this book are valuable exploratory incursions
that counteract that tendency by retrieving the embeddedness of property rights in
land in specific historical-social contexts, viewed from a variety of vantage points
and grounded in very diverse empirical cases and methodological approaches. Even
though the contributors were only asked to address a broad set of questions related to
the above considerations, not to follow a specific theoretical framework, the previous
conceptual strands run throughout the chapters in this book and relate them through
research questions, if not full theoretical coherence. In this final section, we will first
highlight the chapters’ major relations to the conceptual questions we have posed,
and then contextualize their contributions within a few relevant issues and debates
about the history of rural societies in which the perspective on property rights in land
is of major significance.
23
IV.1. Conceptual strands

The reader will find throughout this volume several instances of the plasticity with
which property rights lend themselves to different social appropriations, according to
which social groups and strategies gain control of them. Thus Markus Cerman and Dana
Śtefanová suggest that in early modern Czech lands the upper peasantry actually used
the reinforcement of seigniorial control on property to secure their own rights against
competing claims (Chapter 2). The long term study on Tuscany by Giuliana Biagioli
shows how a medieval contract such as the emphyteutical livello changed its economic
and social functions throughout history, as it was appropriated by wealthy social groups
to accumulate control over land (Chapter 3). Maria Halasmka draws attention to ‘the
social aspects of appropriation’ and their impact on the effective property outcomes in
her essay on post-Socialist privatization processes in Europe (Chapter 11), and such
social aspects of appropriation are addressed in contextual detail in the chapters on
East Germany by Jeong Nam Choi, Axel Wolz and Michael Kopsidis, and on Hungary
by Zsuzsanna Varga (Chapters 12 and 13), which demonstrate that the juridical change
of the property regime and the reallocation of former collective property to individual
landowners, far from being the ‘end of history’, was but the beginning of a complex
and contingent social-historical process of appropriation.
Processes of change in the categories of social entities holding property rights

in land are also questioned. This was of course the essence of the rise of agrarian
individualism in Europe, with the suppression of formerly acknowledged rights
of communities in favour of those of individuals, of which late eighteenth-century
Tuscany provides a clear example (Biagioli, Chapter 3). José Miguel Lana and
Iñaki Iriarte also address a classic case of law-induced change from communities
to individuals holding entitlements to land in Navarra (Chapter 4), while all
aforementioned chapters on post-Socialist transitions also speak of changes in the
social entities with legitimate rights in land, from collective production units and
labourer’s cooperatives to individuals, farming corporations and cooperatives of
landowners (Chapters 11 to 13).
The relationship between property rights and identities is questioned as well.

Fabrice Boudjaaba’s essay challenges current views concerning a strong link between
land and peasant family identity, in his case study in late Ancien Régime and post-
Revolutionary Normandy. He finds that in this context of egalitarian inheritance
custom, thin relationships between land and family identity allowed the former to be
treated as a commodity, relatively unconstrained by provisions for the continuity of
family property (Chapter 5). R. W. Hoyle’s essay on the dispute over the right to roam
on the uplands in twentieth-century northern England shows how class and political
identities were articulated through competing claims to the use of land, involving
24
gentry and patrician families, citizens’ associations, public utility corporations,

and government agencies (Chapter 9). Dietmar Müller writes about the definition
of ethnically based entitlements to land as a tool for ethno-national state-building
and governance in Romania and Yugoslavia (Chapter 10), in which he concurs with
Paul Brassley’s pointing out of a crucial link between nationalism and land reform
in twentieth-century interwar Europe (Chapter 7). A more recent example of the
delimitation of ownership rights based on national identity is found in the constraints
on who can buy Hungarian land during the transitional period of accession to the
European Union (Varga, Chapter 13).
Social identities are seen to be attached to land itself as well, which condition
the social relationships and the admissible forms of its appropriation. Thus in early
modern Tuscany, as elsewhere throughout Europe, Church and aristocratic land took
on institutional identities that put related property rights under specific constraints, as
mortmain and entails, respectively (Biagioli, Chapter 3). The political identification
of land as primordially the gentry’s private property, the citizens’ landscape heritage
or the cities’ water catchments eventually delimited the rights that might legitimately
be claimed in it (Hoyle, Chapter 9). The ethnic identification of a particular class of
land, the ‘hereditary farms’ attached to idealized German peasant lineages and ruled
to be inalienable, was part of the Nazi regime’s attempt to decommodify German
land, to freeze peasant mobility and to attach ‘the soil’ to ‘the blood’, of which Ernst
Langthaler writes in Chapter 8.
Most chapters address property as a bundle of rights. Brassley explicitly uses this
approach to frame his account of the multifarious processes of land reform which
swept across Europe after the First Word War (Chapter 7), and so does Langthaler
to deal with farm property law in Nazi Germany (Chapter 8). Biagioli shows that
the splitting of landed property into discrete bundles, tradable in different agrarian
contracts, underpinned the construction of the ‘sharecropping landscape’ in medieval
and early modern Tuscany (Chapter 3). It also accounted for the nineteenth-century
privatization of the rights of use in common lands, in the areas of Navarra where it took
place under usufruct contracts rather than full ownership (Lana and Berasain, Chapter
4), as well as for the nationalization of specific rights in land in postwar Britain (Hoyle,
Chapter 9), and for the rearrangement of scattered property rights into agricultural firms
and cooperatives by entrepreneurs in post-Socialist privatization processes (Halamska,
Chapter 11; Choi, Kopsidis and Wolz, Chapter 12; Varga, Chapter 13).
The definition of the kinds of actions admitted or restricted as discrete strands in

the bundle of property rights is dominant in Hoyle’s essay about the dispute between
the right to roam and the right to exclude roamers (Chapter 9), and it is also a key
25
concern in Cerman and Śtefanová’s argument that Czech peasants in fact retained
the right to trade land throughout the early modern period (Chapter 2), as well as
in Boudjaaba’s cited findings on how little the right to trade land was hampered by
family strategies (Chapter 5) and in Langthaler’s account of the suppression of the
rights to trade and to testate land in Nazi Germany (Chapter 8).
The link between land and social networks is nowhere clearer than in land de-
collectivization in former Socialist countries as it disseminated entitlements through
kinship networks to hosts of untimely heirs, after descent lines had been broken for
two generations. The three chapters on the processes and outcomes of privatization
also show how the distribution of bargaining power favoured specific segments of the
‘maps of social relationships’ interwoven in land, as many new landowners used their
own social networks to coordinate their property rights in joint agricultural enterprises,
or delegated most of those rights to managers who held important social relations with
direct producers and with state and market organizations – indeed Halamska suggests
in chapter 11 a new post-collective type of ownership based on network property
control. This often contributed to re-creating an agricultural landscape dominated
by medium and large scale agriculture in the new market environment (Halamska,
Chapter 11; Choi, Wolz and Kopsidis, Chapter 12; Varga, Chapter 13).
Discourses of justification to legitimize action and the distribution of entitlements

are shown to operate in controversies about landed property across a variety of contexts.
As Brassley puts it, land reform in interwar Europe took place ‘[…] as a response to
changing perceptions of what constituted social justice and which historical actors
possessed the political, economic or social power to decide where social justice lay’
(Chapter 7), a perception that is also highlighted in Müller’s account of interwar
land reform in Romania and Yugoslavia in Chapter 10. The same may be said of
the argument between diverging paths to land reform in late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century Denmark and the adjoining Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein,
about which Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen writes in Chapter 6. Further examples are
those of the competing and evolving arguments for the definition of public good
which structure Hoyle’s narrative of the controversy about access rights (Chapter 9),
and the political arguments about just compensation rules for redressing past injustice
in post-Socialist transitions (Halamska, Chapter 11; Varga, Chapter 13).
IV.2. Historical issues and debates

We will briefly present the empirical cases included in this volume in relation to
four historical issues in which property in land plays a significant role: the degree of
peasantries’ hold on property rights and the decline or strengthening of seigniorial
order in early modern Europe; the effects of liberal property laws in nineteenth-century
26
continental Europe; twentieth-century reforms, restrictions and challenges to the

liberal property model; and finally the revival of the liberal model in the post-Socialist
privatization processes in central and eastern Europe. We believe these approaches
will highlight the potential of the social-historical approach we have introduced in
the previous sections to reposition broader historical problems, besides each chapter’s
specific merits and valuable added knowledge regarding their own subjects.
IV.2.a. Feudalism and beyond: property and the socio-political order in early
modern Europe
The first two chapters cast a long term view on two European societies in very
different geographical contexts: the ‘historical Czech lands’ and Tuscany in central
Italy. It is interesting to take both cases together to question the dominant view in
the literature on the social and economic history of preindustrial Europe, which
tends to hold that a clear dichotomy developed from the late middle ages onwards
between western and central-eastern Europe. This view takes it for granted that out
of an earlier rather homogeneous situation, the power correlation between lords and
peasants led to a progressive breakdown of ‘feudalism’ in western Europe and to
‘second serfdom’, the hardening of servile conditions to the east of the river Elba. This
clear-cut dichotomy, which partly hinges on the literal interpretation of the control
of property rights as stipulated by law, is present in most historical syntheses and it
has influenced the outlook and the design of most case studies as well, and is one we
believe that the approach undertaken in this volume should contribute to relativize.
Markus Cerman and Dana Stefanova in Chapter 2 challenge that dominant view
about the peasants’ loss of property rights in central-eastern Europe since the crisis of
the late middle ages. The chapter brings forth quantitative and qualitative data about
the workings of the peasant land market in the Czech lands, focusing on the kinds of
transactions and the interplay between the involved parties, village communities and
seigniorial institutions. On the one hand, it rebuts the traditional view of hardened
seigniorial control over peasant life, highlighting the relative autonomy of local
organizations and of peasants in relation to seigniorial intervention concerning the
disposition of landed property. On the other hand, it shows evidence of continuity
in the peasants’ hold on property rights in land and the hereditary character of
peasant tenure. While acknowledging social and agrarian changes in the Czech
countryside, the authors do not see them as resulting in a wholesale dispossession
and disempowerment of peasants. The formal control by seigniorial powers, they
argue, was often brought about by peasants’ strategies for securing and enforcing
property rights in actual or anticipated disputes, rather than imposed on them by the
landlords’ power.
27
Giuliana Biagioli’s essay in Chapter 3 provides a synthesis about agrarian contracts

and the hold on property rights in Tuscany from the late middles ages to the Napoleonic
period. Tuscany was one of the earliest regions in Europe to have witnessed the decline
of feudal rule, much by way of the growing urban hold on the cities’ rural hinterlands,
which from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries progressively freed peasants from
feudal ties and from personal attachment to the land. However, such a precocious
development did not entail a triumph of absolute peasant property with the end of feudal
dues. The chapter clearly shows how emerging social groups appropriated centuries old
formal contracts that allocated rights to land and put them to use in new social relations,
in which new ties of peasant dependence were weaved. Both the change in the Tuscan
agrarian landscape and production relations and the rise of agrarian individualism,
which late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century reforms came to enshrine, were in
fact a long process that largely emerged from the strategic use of old formal contracts
regulating the transfer of property rights by new urban-based landowning elites.
The simple polarization of power relations between landlords and peasants in

respect to property, on which most studies of preindustrial European societies
leaned, falls short of a satisfactory interpretation of both processes. In Tuscany,
after feudalism was precociously abolished urban traders and bourgeois families –
some of which of peasant descent – gained control of property rights through the
strategic management of contracts and blocked the emergence of a significant peasant
landowning class. Conversely, in the Czech lands and in spite of the formal growth of
seigniorial control, the evidence suggests a process of peasant differentiation rather
than of overall dispossession, which the emphasis on seigniorial power has rather
tended to disregard.
IV.2.b. The liberal paradigm in its heyday: absolute property, relative outcomes
The principle of absolute and exclusive individual property was imposed on
continental western Europe during the course of the nineteenth century by laws and
codes that enshrined the liberal paradigm. The English case was then seen as the
epitome of both agrarian growth and the liberal property paradigm, which had served
innovation and profitability in agriculture with individual and exclusive property
rights, enclosure, and the prevalence of large scale capitalist tenant farming. Even
though there has been much discussion about the true distinctiveness of such features
of English agrarian structure (Broad, 2009) and their effective link to agricultural
growth (Allen, 1992, 1999; Clark, 1998), the exemplary nature of the English
property and farming regime as idealized in the popular writings of Arthur Young,
the Physiocrats and other continental reformists remains alive.
28
Yet the ways in which the liberal property paradigm was politically implemented
varied greatly even in its heyday, shaped by different past histories, balances
of power, cultural beliefs and norms. Thus the appeal to one general principle of
absolute property did not lead to homogeneous social outcomes. Firstly, because
the actual content of the new laws in fact differed significantly between countries,
according to their political implementation. For instance, in post-Revolutionary
France seigniorial rights were abolished and private property was largely allocated to
peasants, but collective uses were widely acknowledged, while in Spain liberal rule
secured the former landlords’ hold on the land with the new institutional devices of
private property and was much more radical in abolishing collective rights. Secondly,
because the socioeconomic consequences of homogeneous changes in property law
were refracted by the social and cultural conditions in which the actualization of
property was embedded.
In Chapter 4, José Miguel Lana and Iñaki Iriarte discuss the implications of the
nineteenth-century privatizing legislation in Spain for the fate of communal land in
distinct regions of the province of Navarra, showing that although liberal law tended
to homogenize the institutional framework, its outcomes led to rather divergent paths
with regard to both the extent and the modes of privatization of the commons up to
the early twentieth century. By matching historical conjunctures of demographical,
environmental, social and political variables to different privatization outcomes, they
argue that even at the relatively small provincial scale, property law was actualized
according to the very different sets of conditions in which property relations were
embedded, and as such led to strikingly different results – from a large expression of
privatization in full property in some areas to more widespread privatization of usage
rights through agrarian contracts in others, and to a low degree of privatization in
whichever form in yet other areas.
Fabrice Boudjaaba in Chapter 5 studies the behaviour and the strategies of peasants
concerning the disposition of land before and after the Napoleonic Civil Code, in
the French region of Vernon in Normandy, in which heredity rule was historically
egalitarian and petty owner-occupiers held most of the surface. He argues that in
this region household survival and reproduction depended on mustering a diversity
of resources through wages, leases and market sales during one’s life cycle, much
rather than on amassing land and keeping it in the family to become self-sufficient
owner-occupiers. Thus the peasants in Vernon did not try to bypass egalitarian rule
as reinforced by the Civil Code, unlike other societies where inegalitarian rules
prevailed, nor even to favour male descent lines as inscribed in the Norman Code
tradition. This kept a rather lively land market going, which however did not result
in a disembedding of landed property from social relations. This market orientation
29
was actually embedded in a largely wage based production regime backed by

complementary household subsistence farming, and in norms ruling inheritance and
household autonomy which defined land as either a productive or a tradable asset,
according to household needs and the family life cycle.
Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen in Chapter 6 tells how Denmark and the adjacent
Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth
century witnessed political debate regarding the way out of the manorial regime and
into a rural order based on modern property relations. Put simply, Porskrog Rasmussen
displays a scenario structured by the opposition of an ‘English’ path, which would
have turned manors into full property and paved the way to large tenant farming by
abolishing peasants’ tenure rights along with their servitudes, and a ‘continental’ one
which would partition manors and transfer fuller and more secure property rights to
peasants. The results ended up being rather pragmatic. In Schleswig-Holstein they
varied according to the strongest rights in place in the different areas, as they had been
established in previous historical developments. In the kingdom of Denmark, where
the weak political weight of the peasantry might have led to a fuller concentration of
property in the hands of landlords, reforms eventually favoured the high and middling
peasantry in exchange for rent to the landlords, apparently as the easiest perceived
way to uphold the latter’s interests, but also as the result of ideological belief in a
paternalistic role of the state and in the politically virtuous character of a strong peasant
middle class. The debate over the ‘continental’ and the ‘English’ way in Danish land
property reform goes beyond the mere difference in legal options, leading back to the
need to understand the concrete social, political and cultural contexts of the reformist
initiatives in order to be able to explain them and their outcomes.
All three cases show that in order to understand the historical changes and
continuities brought about by modernizing reforms of property institutions, one
must draw on a grounded analysis of concrete social realities and grasp the historical
diversity of existing social relations, practices and cultural norms which in each case
had regulated the rights that liberal property laws intended to regulate anew, and with
which the latter interacted to produce specific social and economic effects.
IV.2.c. Reforms, reallocations and restrictions: twentieth century challenges to

the liberal property paradigm
If the above holds regarding property reforms in the very heyday of the liberal
paradigm, it certainly will for historical periods when the paradigm itself came under
political pressure, either from within by shifting definitions of justice and the public
good in liberal capitalist societies, or from without by competing political views on
30
the legitimate appropriation of land, economic efficiency and more generally the
social functions of agriculture and landholding.
In Chapter 7, Paul Brassley deals with multiple processes of reallocation of

property rights in land in twentieth-century interwar Europe, across eighteen countries
comprising nearly 70 per cent of the European territory. His object encompasses
both legal-constitutional changes in the allocation of property rights dubbed as
‘reforms’ and more indirect shifts produced by political change in incentives, as for
instance fiscal and state aid policies, guaranteed prices, and such. In most western
European countries, while in theory abiding by the same liberal property principle
that had hitherto protected the rights of large landowners, new conceptions of justice
and the social functions of landed property had been sharpened by the experience
of war, nationalism and the fear of Communism. Such conceptions relativized the
principle of absolute property rights by emphasizing property obligations. Reforms
were implemented that directly imposed or encouraged the transfer of ampler
and more secure property rights to smaller farmers. In some countries, namely in
southern Europe and in Poland, attempts at reform met with violent reaction and
landowning elites were shielded by fascist regimes. Overall, property rights in land
were reallocated in a variety of forms, reflecting the contradictory social outlooks
that imposed new restrictions and redefined the boundaries of property, as the case
studies exemplify.
In the very specific case of Nazi Germany, as Brassley notes and Ernst Langthaler
recalls in detail in Chapter 8, the liberal property principle was radically overturned
by the 1933 ‘Heredity Law’ concerning ‘ethnic’ German land, which imposed severe
restrictions on property rights by suppressing the owners’ rights to sell, testate or
otherwise alienate those lands from the ‘pure’ heredity bloodline. This expressly
aimed at exempting German land from dissolvent market forces and to consolidate
the idealized ethnic peasant basis attaching the Arian nation to its soil – even though
Langthaler shows that daily social practice and court decisions made general rules
much more pliant to strategic interests than formal codes would have led one to
expect, and that social relations structured the implementation of law quite as much
as they were constrained by it.
Towards the opposite end of the spectrum, in the very heartland of the liberal
property paradigm, Brassley tells us that most relevant transfers in Great Britain
before the Second World War obeyed market incentives rather than direct legal
change, although there was some direct legislation to favour owner-occupancy and
smallholdings already from the late nineteenth century, and tax laws favoured the
break up of large estates. R. W. Hoyle in Chapter 9 goes on to explain that even though
31
the British state always shied away from nationalising land itself, in fact wartime
powers continued by postwar acts, selective subsidies, price regulations, planning
law and advisory action by government agencies restricted private property rights in
agricultural activities, by which the latter became what the author calls ‘something of
a nationalized industry’.
The main object of Hoyle’s essay is a very distinct dispute over the allocation
of property rights and restrictions to individual property. The narrative is about a
century-long struggle, in which the bone of contention was the contradiction between
the freedom to roam about the Pennine uplands and the exclusive right of landowners
to preserve the moors, namely for the patrician sport of shooting grouse. Following a
half century of open conflict, as Labour came into power immediately after the Second
War the government moved to grant free access to open land, which amounted to the
nationalization of ‘the owner’s right to exclusive use’ – nothing short of a ‘revolution’,
according to the author, but one which eventually ‘petered out’. Paradoxically, the
ultimate champion of the private right to exclude was a publicly owned tertius
gaudens which managed to stay the ‘revolution’ by an effective counter-definition of
the public interest: urban water boards, later changed into utility companies, which
held reservoirs in the Pennine valleys and argued for the exclusion of ramblers from
gathering areas as a matter of public health (while still letting them out to shooting
parties). It was only in 2000 that a general right of access to open land was reinstated
by law. Thus during the second half of the twentieth century, the right to exclude
intrinsic to absolute property was safeguarded not for its own sake, but rather for that
of a competing form of collective interest which succeeded in establishing itself as
worthier than the right of free access.
In the cases of Romania and Yugoslavia, according to Dietmar Müller in Chapter

10, substantial redistribution of land after the First World War invoked the liberal
paradigm. In fact, it was subsumed in the ruling elites’ ethnonational project and
used as a tool for ethnic colonization and political domination, which belied its
purported aim to form the basis of liberal democratic citizenry. Paradoxically,
Müller argues, this eventually paved the way for the Communist transformation that
followed the Second War, as both periods shared the primacy of alleged interests of
collectives over those of individual options, so that ‘the decisive break in property
and agrarian history was not that of 1945-1949, but potentially that of 1989-1990’.
The author’s pessimistic overtone invites caution concerning the revival of the liberal
principle of absolute, exclusive and individual property in land in post-Socialist
decollectivization in central and eastern Europe, as well as its interpretation as a
return to a mythical statu quo ante that casts the Socialist period as something of a
historical interlude.
32
IV.2.d. The post-Socialist decollectivization of land in central and eastern Eu-

rope: a revival of the liberal paradigm?
In all appearance, the liberal property paradigm was resuscitated in its purest form
during the 1990s, in the processes of decollectivization of land in former Socialist
countries that followed the meltdown of the Communist regimes – which in most
of these countries was in fact the third major political attempt to reshape agrarian
structure and redirect agrarian evolution in the course of the twentieth century. The
three chapters dealing with those processes, plus the aforementioned one by Müller
that places it within a longer term perspective, show how much the discourse of liberal
property was ingrained in policy-making, incarnating the perfect opposite to the
model of collective control of property rights that was dismissed along with Socialism.
All essays show the need to look beyond this ideological construct to uncover the
practical modes of social appropriation that redistributed the property rights in land
according to the specific political processes, the different endowments of the actors in
power and in economic, social and human capital, and their experience in the available
organizational forms that shaped property rights into effective economic action.
Maria Halamska in Chapter 11 presents a comparative synthesis of such processes as

they took place during the 1990s in Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
and Poland, with a focus precisely on the social modes of appropriation. The general
principles of decollectivization and privatization of agriculture were implemented by
combinations of choices, stemming from different definitions of justice and political
priorities. Thus, redress to the heirs of the original owners whose land had been
expropriated, compensation for past land and labour inputs to collective agriculture
during the Socialist period, the overall goal of achieving economic efficiency in a
competitive market environment and the response of the social constituencies of the
political actors at play were all parts in each mixture of political solutions. The means
for reallocation also varied and these mixes certainly affected not just the distributional
consequences and the variety of recipient actors, but also the different incentives and
opportunities and the multiple ways of becoming a landowner. Many new landowners
faced economic, social and psychological barriers, as the lack of economic and social
assets and skills hindered the productive use of their property rights. This gave rise to
a second-order reallocation of property rights led by new categories of farm managers,
often originating from the Socialist technical and managerial apparatus, who took on
much of the effective control of landed property using human and social capitals as
their main assets. Some of these general conclusions can be scrutinized in more detail
in the two final chapters, on East Germany and Hungary, respectively.
Jeong Nam Choi, Axel Wolz and Michael Kopsidis in Chapter 12 deal with the
transformation of collective farms in East Germany since 1989. Contrary to the
33
prevalent ‘family farm ideology’ amongst western experts and policy makers, after
the initial boost the relative weight of family farms actually decreased as large scale
cooperative or corporate farming proved more competitive and came to dominate
the agricultural landscape. A degree of path dependence seems to have prevailed in
East German organizational ecology. The essay uses the memories and assessments
of managers and of individual farmers to understand the process, and its exploratory
results suggest that the reestablishment of large farms resulted from the strategies of
villagers facing the risk of the new economic environment, who put their trust in the
former managerial elites of agricultural cooperatives. The conclusions highlight the
role of knowledge and information sources in the setup of the new farming ventures,
the cognitive blueprints for organization on which novel property holders relied, and
the human and social capitals embodied in former cooperative managers. These gave
them an edge to dominate local markets and buy and lease the privatized property
under favourable terms, to broker share agreements in cooperatives, and in general to
act as institutional entrepreneurs who centralized the actual control of property rights
under new organizational forms, framed in the experience and the social networks of
the old collectives.
A common trend appears in Zsuzsanna Varga’s essay on the Hungarian case in

Chapter 13. The sediment of the previous decades of collectivization was an intricate
mix of state, cooperative and individual property entitlements, to which were
added those to redress injustice in past expropriations. It is no wonder that a rather
complex privatization process evolved from that starting point, which eventually
led to the pulverization of land ownership, and here too a stratum of medium and
large agricultural enterprises emerged from amongst that fragmentation. New
entrepreneurs, often former managers of disbanded cooperatives, combined technical
skills and assets with family and community networks to pool resources, buy land,
and enter into joint agreements and lease contracts, thus managing to condense
previously scattered property rights into new agricultural cooperatives and firms. On
the other hand, a massive amount of land remained in petty undercapitalized farms,
as a response to widespread agricultural unemployment which could not be tackled
in Hungary by generous state aid buffers as it had been in East Germany. The result
by 2005, seemingly still in a transitional phase, was a strikingly dualistic agrarian
structure and a decay in the overall output of Hungarian agriculture, once amongst
the most productive in Europe.
Despite the obvious differences in scope, methodology and data a general leitmotiv
emerges in these final chapters. The political and juridical privatization of property
rights in land was but the initial move in a process, the social and economic results
of which are contingent on how and by whom those privatized rights were actually
34
appropriated. This in turn depended on who was empowered by sufficient levels of

financial, human and social capitals to capture them in a variety of arenas of social
relations, including markets, and to shape them into new organizational forms. As
the most dynamic actors, social relations and organizational templates seem to have
originated from the collective farms in the Socialist past to take advantage of private
property, in something of an ironical twist to the Leninist theses, it looks as though
socialized agriculture has cast the social mould for advanced agrarian capitalism
– even though the apparent dominance of the cooperative model for the economic
management of property still lends itself to further research in this respect.
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2. Institutional changes and peasant land-transfers
in the Czech Lands, from the late Middle Ages to
the eighteenth century1
Markus CERMAN, Dana ŠTEFANOVÁ
I. Introduction
In contrast to existing studies on the early modern period, there has not yet been a
systematic analysis of peasant land-transfer patterns and the emergence of a peasant
land market in central and east-central Europe during the late Middle Ages (cf.
surveys in Cerman, 2007, 2008a). By reconstructing the institutional framework of
late medieval peasant land markets, this chapter is a first attempt to link the results
of recent studies on the early modern period to a longer term perspective on the
developments which took place since the later Middle Ages. The geographic focus
will be on the historical Czech Lands, which include the territories of Bohemia and
Moravia (nowadays forming part of the Czech Republic), Silesia (situated in south-
western Poland) and Upper Lusatia (situated in eastern Germany).
First, the chapter will focus on peasant property rights and on the institutional
arrangements of peasant land-transfers in the later Middle Ages. We will argue that
tenurial rights and the procedures for land transfers displayed remarkable continuity
over the late medieval and early modern periods, despite economic and social changes
in the agrarian structures. In this context, we will discuss two important institutional
changes which had a potential impact on peasant land markets and peasant land-
transfer patterns: the spread of written village or seigniorial land transfer registers for
peasant property transactions and the increase of landlord power after 1500. For the
periods before and after 1500, we will provide an empirical analysis of peasant land-
transfers, with a specific focus on the constraints on the development of a peasant land
market, whether institutional or imposed by the landlords, which the literature has
traditionally regarded as important. This will be based on microhistorical studies of
particular villages, which can be regarded as representative of the prevailing agrarian
structures in the Czech Lands in this respect. We will concentrate on the way the
peasantry made use of existing regulations and institutions to achieve their family’s
1
Research for this article was generously supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander-von-
Humboldt Foundation (FRG). Markus Cerman is indebted to the members of the Institut für vergleichende
Geschichte Europas im Mittelalter at Humboldt University, Berlin, in particular Michael Borgolte, for
their hospitality and support during the research fellowship. Both authors wish to thank Rosa Congost,
Rui Santos and two anonymous referees for their help and valuable suggestions.
39
Institutional changes and peasant land-transfers in the Czech Lands
aims and economic strategies. Empirical evidence for the later Middle Ages up to
about 1550 covers only preliminary results and will concentrate on the qualitative
analysis of specific cases, since the analysis of the primary sources for this period is
still at an early stage.
Figure 2.1. The area of the historical Czech Lands

within late medieval east-central Europe
Map by Gabriele Dorner.
II. The institutional framework of land markets in the later Middle

Ages
Peasant tenure in the late medieval Czech Lands was mostly hereditary. It
guaranteed secure peasant property and transfer by inheritance2. Landlords’ powers
included the exaction of rents from peasant properties, but did not extend to personal
bondage. The feudal lord-peasant relationship was thus constituted by the tenure
of land only (dinglich) (Procházka, 1963: 177-178; Rösener, 1992: 26; Šmahel,
2
For further details of the legal structure of hereditary tenure in the late medieval Czech Lands, cf.
CERMAN (2008a), GRAUS (1957), MÍKA (1960), and ṦMAHEL (2002). In general, see RÖSENER (1992: 26).
40
Markus Cerman, Dana Štefanová
2002: 456-457). Peasants had extensive disposal rights over their land, which they
originally received from their feudal (land-)lord. They could only be expropriated if
they failed to meet their levies.
Unlike other cases (e.g. customary land in England), landlords do not seem to
have been directly involved in the actual procedures of peasant land-transfers. We are
reasonably well informed about the formal structure of jurisdiction in rural society
during the later Middle Ages. Peasant property transfers belonged to the sphere of
lower jurisdiction – together with minor crimes and neighbourhood conflicts –, which
was the responsibility of village courts. According to the typical pattern in villages that
were systematically settled during the period of late medieval expansion of settlements
into the less densely populated areas of east-central Europe, lower jurisdiction
originally belonged to the villages’ peasant bailiffs (German Dorfrichter, Schulze;
Czech rychtař; Polish sołtys). As part of the privileges they received for their role as
initial settlement entrepreneurs (locator), they would preside over regular meetings of
the village court, which was constituted by village assemblies, and would be assisted
by a varying number of jurors and aldermen, who would usually be elected by the
village for a certain period. These rights were guaranteed by village settlement charters,
some of which even stated that inhabitants must not be called to court anywhere but
their own village for lower jurisdiction matters (Boelcke, 1969: 226-291; Graus, 1957:
135-141; Hinz, 1964: 15-16, 22; Hoffmann, 1989: 62-63, 77; Inglot, 1979: 75-79,
90-94; Menzel, 1977: 269-281, 457-458; Šmahel, 2002: 464). Even in villages settled
before this settlement movement, for instance in central parts of Bohemia and Moravia
from the thirteenth century onwards, peasants usually received hereditary tenure by
direct grants from their lords. Village courts and jurors existed in this context as well,
– even though they could not derive their privileges from formal charters or from a
locator – and they were responsible for exactly the same range of legal matters of
lower jurisdiction, in particular for peasant property transfers (Graus, 1957: 202-207;
Krofta, 1949: 142; cf. Boelcke, 1969: 262). Thus, this pattern of lower jurisdiction can
be regarded as universal in the Czech Lands. As opposed to the relative autonomy of
peasant property transactions within the lower jurisdiction of the village, landlords
in the late medieval Czech Lands succeeded in obtaining full control of the higher
jurisdiction of the peasantry (criminal justice over major offences and public legal
affairs), which is sometimes regarded as the key to the extension of their powers after
1500, in particular the increase in labour services.
One major institutional change was the rise and spread of written registers of rural
land transfers (German Grundbücher, Gerichtsbücher and Schöppenbücher; Czech
gruntovní knihy, konšelské knihy), which were kept either by village bailiffs and
courts or by the seigniorial administration. In these books, peasant land-transfers
41
were systematically recorded (Boelcke, 1969: 258-263; Cerman, 2007; Doubek and
Schmid, 1931; Grodziski, 1960; Guzowski, 2008: 44-47; Hinz, 1964: 4-5, 7-8; Meyer,
1967; Mitter, 1928: 16, 20-21, 51-52; Procházka, 1963: 5-64; Štefanová, 2003, 2009).
The oldest preserved registers date from the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Village land transfer registers provide evidence of a legal structure according to

which peasant property transfers were the responsibility of the villages – although
seigniorial representatives might have been present at some sessions of the village court.
As outlined above, this pattern can be regarded as universal in the context of hereditary
tenure in the Czech Lands. As far as the responsibility and autonomy of peasant land-
transfers are concerned, villages with separate village land transfer registers did not
display any special privileges vis-à-vis other villages (Boelcke, 1969: 262). Hence,
the examples that follow can be regarded as representative for the late medieval and
early modern Czech Lands. While written registers may have changed the way such
transactions were recorded and therefore improved contract enforcement, the actual
procedure of sales remained much the same over time.
With respect to the legal and institutional framework of peasant land transactions,
the dominance of secure peasant property rights and hereditary tenure seems to be
the most important feature. The legal structure regulating peasant land transactions
did not invest landlords with particular responsibility or surveillance functions.
This conclusion appears to falsify claims of older historiographical traditions about
the existence of a seigniorial control or consent. Hence, formal landlord consent
(Boelcke, 1969: 260-261; Hoffmann, 1989: 77, 354, 425; Meyer, 1967: 43-49, 111-114;
Opitz, 1904: 15-19, 51-55) or seigniorial control of the mobility of peasant property
(Brenner, 1988: 16; Meyer, 1967: 51-84, 92, 114-118; North, n.d [2004]: 345-346),
as the literature claims to have existed in east-central Europe for the early modern
period, must have arisen after the later Middle Ages and would most certainly have
represented a major institutional shift. This change would need to be explained –
which the existing literature fails to do, because it simply does not consider the
structures of the medieval peasant land market.
III. The use of village land transfer registers during the fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries
The strong role of late medieval village institutions, such as village bailiffs and
jurors, and their responsibility for overseeing peasant land transactions is suggested
by the text of contracts and other entries in village land transfer registers. One of the
earliest surviving documents refers to the village of Krzemienica, situated to the east
of Cracow in the south-east of the medieval Kingdom of Poland and thus outside the
42
Czech Lands, but within the area of a comparable legal framework of rural society
(Guzowski, 2008; Doubek and Schmid, 1931). The important and independent role
of village institutions for peasant property transactions is supported by the fact that
in this source the village’s lord is only mentioned in sixteen out of 738 entries in total
(2.2 per cent) between 1451 and 1482, mostly in his absence and in connection to
certain obligations – for instance a fine or rent that one of the individuals appearing
in court owed him. However, direct intervention in the affairs of the village court is
visible in a few examples. In such cases it was most likely not caused by attempts
at seigniorial control, but by one of the parties turning to the lord for support3.
Only twice, in 1465 and 1478, are there records of the lord’s direct involvement
in matters concerning property transactions4. Peasants also turned to their lord for
support if individuals failed to appear in court, possibly in spite of prior orders by
the village court5.
Disagreements on inheritance claims of under-age orphans, arising in cases in

which step-parents or other relatives took over the properties of deceased parent(s),
were regularly resolved by the village court, without any special attention by the
lord6. These were particularly sensitive transactions. It is quite significant that the
village court alone dealt with them, as also with cases of debts or more serious
disagreements7. This lends support to the assumption that lords usually respected the
legal power of village courts and that the peasant population regarded the latter as
sufficient to settle property transactions, and maybe even other matters. The lords’
regard of village legal institutions and the respect in which they held the autonomy
and power of bailiffs and jurors before the first half of the sixteenth century can also
be demonstrated by those cases in which the lords themselves advised individuals
to approach village courts and seek legal support or a verdict, rather than ruling on
the affairs themselves8. Thus, the legal structure that had been laid out in privileges
and charters for the village bailiff during the settlement process appears to have been
binding in practice.
The inferences from this Polish example can be endorsed by the oldest surviving
village land transfer register in the Czech Lands, from the village of Rengersdorf
in Upper Lusatia (1444-1591), situated just north of the city of Görlitz9. The first
3
DOUBEK and SCHMID (1931), p. 23 (no. 101), 30 June 1455; p. 74 (no. 297), 7 January 1465.
4
Ibid., p. 50*, 76 (no. 304), 4 March 1465; p. 162 (no. 599), 7 December 1478.
5
Ibid., p. 171 (no. 630), 13 September 1479.
6
E. g. Ibid., p. 50*, 6-7 (no. 22), s. d. 1452; p. 13-14 (no. 102), 30 June 1455; p. 54-55 (no. 228),
2 March 1461; p. 81 (no. 317), 26 August 1465.
7
Ibid., p. 51 (no. 214), 18 February 1460; p. 130 (no. 486), 19 October 1472.
8
Ibid., p. 50*, 65-66 (nos. 268-269), 2 and 16 January 1464.
9
Archiwum państwowe we Wrocławiu (AP Wrocław), Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie, syg. 190.
43
contract recorded the sale of the village public house, which, as usual in this area,
was the home of the village bailiff and the seat of the village court. In 1444, a certain
Nickel bought this holding ‘dazu diß scheppenn buchs außgebenn [and for this matter
this village court book has been established]’. The contract was confirmed by the
jury and the new village bailiff. While this transaction was carried out ‘mit des erb
herrn wille [with the lord’s will]’10, other references to the lord are rare during the
following decades. The lord’s confirmation for this sale may have been due to the
fact that it was the farm of the village bailiff11. It is quite obvious that the lord of the
village was present only occasionally during village court sessions until the 1480s.
A first analysis found only two direct references to his presence during this period of
several decades12. In one case in 1449, the lord even insisted that a conflict between
two individuals should be settled by the village court13. In another conflict in 1416,
the agreement which the two parties had reached before court in the city of Görlitz
had to be repeated in a session of their village court in order to be formally accepted14.
Moreover, lords used this register to have their own land transactions recorded15.
Judging from the current state of analysis, examples of the lords’ presence are
recorded in almost 10 per cent of the 125 entries before 1500. The village court also
dealt with the more sensitive issue of securing the rights of under-age orphans16.
This situation appears to have changed during the 1490s, when suddenly references
to the lord became more frequent17. But even in this period we found no compelling
evidence of a systematic rupture with respect to the procedures of peasant land-
transfers and the role of village institutions, as the same types of contracts – sales,
confirmation of payments etc. – continued to be regularly registered in front of the
village bailiff and jury alone. The sudden seigniorial presence can at least in part be
explained by a series of transactions involving the lord of the village as either a buyer
or a seller of farms and smallholdings18. As in the previous period, unusual cases seem
to have caught seigniorial attention, or else they may have pushed peasants to ask for
10
Ibid., p. 1, our translation.
11
A Bohemian charter of 1296 regulates that a bailiff’s holding might not be sold without his lord’s
knowledge: EMLER (1882: no. 1730); cf. BOELCKE (1969: 260).
12
AP Wrocław, Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie, syg. 190, p. 5 (from 1449); p. 19 (from 1462).
13
Ibid., p. 4.
14
AP Wrocław, Wsie powiatu zgorzeleckiego, syg. 3043, Entscheide und vorwillungen der landleute
gebauere und der fremden leuten und geste vor dem rathe gescheen (1396-1434), p. 25b.
15
E. g AP Wrocław, Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie, syg. 190, p. 4.
16
Ibid., p. 6.
17
E. g. ibid., p. 7-9, 19, 28. Property transfer contracts from villages belonging to the rural property
of the Upper Lusatian city of Görlitz also frequently mention transactions taken ‘mit wissen vnd willen
der herre[n] vom Rathe’ [with knowledge and consent of members of the city council] in the period
around 1500, but again the majority of contracts lack such a reference. Cf. AP Wrocław, Wsie powiatu
zgorzeleckiego, syg. 3045, Księga ławnina dot. wsi m. Zgorzelca, e. g. fol. 9r-v, 15r, 29r, 52r, 54v, 78r.
18
AP Wrocław, Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie, syg. 190, p. 10, 28, 34-35, 37, 40-41, 563.
44
the lord’s intervention. One such instance occurred in 1510, when Marx Radisch
acted as a guarantor for a debt and the amount was pledged to his farm. He did so
‘mit zu lossunge Juncker Hanße seines erb herrn [by admittance of Knight Hanße,
his lord]’. Presumably, he had to seek consent (or rather he wished to do so himself?)
because there was a potential threat that the farm was alienated to an outsider, since
the creditor and the original debtor were from a different village19.
Village court, village bailiff and jury kept their authority to protect the rights and
property claims of under-age heirs, as was also usual before the 1490s. In 1501,
Andres Hernig bought a farm from the guardian of the children of a certain Fischer,
who was deceased, under the obligation to sell it back should Fischer’s son or daughter
claim it once they came of age. The contract even secured that if this came to pass,
Hernig would have to leave the usual equipment and animals. He was entitled to
claim and receive compensation for investments he might make to improve the farm.
Conversely, he would have to compensate the heirs for damage or mismanagement
during his tenure. These clauses were ordered by the village court20. Contracts
frequently specified fines in the event one of the contract partners failed to honour
the agreements21.
During the 1530s, the formal structure of the property contracts entered into the
Rengersdorf register changed. Clauses like ‘mit willen der herschafft des dorffes
[granted by the lord of the village]’ became a standard part of the formal introductory
clauses. The same contracts, however, still systematically mention the presence of the
village bailiff and the jury or their agreement22. While this change may be interpreted
as a strengthening of the lords’ control over transfers, one specific remark found in
a number of entries confirming the final payments for farms is very interesting with
regard to the way institutions were understood by the peasantry: the confirmations
were written into the book ‘for greater security’23.
The second oldest Upper Lusatian village land transfer register of the village of
Olbersdorf (1485-1595), near the Bohemian border, south of the city of Görlitz,
provides support for the conclusions presented above. In the great majority of cases,
only the village bailiff and jury were involved in the procedures. On some occasions,
which can possibly be linked to special court assemblies (the Jahrding, see below)
19
Ibid, p. 30. Our translation.
20
Ibid., p. 45-46.
21
gebauere und der fremden leuten und geste vor dem rathe gescheen (1396-1434), p. 13b, from 1410.
22
Cf. e. g. AP Wrocław, Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie, syg. 190, p. 74, 161, 429, 562, 565. Our
translation.
23
Ibid., p. 430 (from 1593).
45
the presence of the lord, the abbot of the monastery of Oybin, is noted. While no
such occasions were noted in the register in 1484, 1486, 1488-1490, 1492-1494 and
1496-1498, the lord’s presence in court is mentioned in some contracts in the years
1485, 1487, 1491 and 149524. In these as in the above examples, there were particular
issues requiring the attention of the lord. When in 1493 Nickel Weber wanted to buy
a field from George Vlman’s farm in order to build a fishing pond and a new road,
these projects needed seigniorial consent, as the pond potentially threatened Vlman’s
water supply and required a new regulation of seigniorial rents25. The monastery
was also mentioned in contract records when it bought or sold land in the village26.
Such situations apart, even complicated transactions in which inheritance claims of
children from a first marriage had to be secured were settled by village bailiff and
jury only27. The importance of the village community as an active agent in court
procedures should not be underestimated either. In the city of Görlitz, the court only
gave a verdict on an inheritance matter after ‘bekenntnisse der ganczen gemeyne [the
declaration of the whole community]’ of the nearby village of Kunnersdorf28.
The fourth example, the land transfer register of the Upper Lusatian village of
Radomierzyce (1495-1541) south of Görlitz, provides evidence of some landlord
involvement in peasant land transactions during the late fifteenth century, at least
formally. The first entries already note the presence of the estate manager representing
the noble lord at the sessions of the village court29. It is difficult to ascertain whether
this was connected with specific court sessions of the seigniorial lower jurisdiction,
where lords or their representatives were present (the Jahrding, Eheding or Dreiding);
less formal sessions of the village court, which would still deal with land transactions,
may have taken place without a seigniorial representative (Boelcke, 1969: 231,
251, 266-282; Mitter, 1928: 18, 72-144)30. In Radomierzyce, frequent registers of
payment instalments and some sales in 1498-1501, 1504 and 1511 were recorded
without specific mention of the lord31. However, sales contracts in the 1520s note that
the procedures were carried out ‘myt günst vnd west[en] vnserß herre[n] [...] vnd
24
Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (SächsHSTA), Staatsfilialarchiv Bautzen, Amtsgericht Zittau,
Gerichtsbuch no. 585, Schöppenbuch Olbersdorf, fol. 5v-6r, 10r, 12r, 17r-17v.
25
Ibid., fol. 14v-15v. When a new smallholding was erected in the village of Colmnitz in Saxony in
1517, the village community and the landlord of the village gave their consent. Regulations concerning
the rent obligations of another smallholding were taken in the presence of a representative of the landlord.
Cf. SCHIFFEL (2006: 19, 21).
26
Ibid., fol. 19v-21r.
27
E. g. ibid., fol. 33v-34v (from 1518).
28
gebauere und der fremden leuten und geste vor dem rathe gescheen (1396-1434), p. 6b, from 1403. Our
translation.
29
AP Wrocław, Wsie powiatu Zgorzeleckiego, syg. 3090, e. g. fol. 1r-3r (from 1492 and 1495).
30
Ibid., e. g. fol. 2v (from 1491).
31
Ibid., fol. 3v, 4v, 5r-6r, 7v, 9v-10r.
46
richt[er] vnd scheppe[n] [with knowledge and permission of our lord [...] and of the
village bailiff and jurors]’32.
All the four instances we have analysed of the use of village land transfer registers
during the later Middle Ages seem to show that village and peasant autonomy was the
rule with respect to decision-making in property transactions, and thus corresponded to
the rights of the villages and the form of tenure as laid out by law. Villages and peasants
seemed to have made use of written transfer registers and of institutional control of
property transactions whenever it served their needs and interests. In contrast to the
prevailing hypothesis of landlord pressure to control this sphere of peasant decision-
making, we rather observe a tendency from below to employ both village and seigniorial
institutions to enforce contracts and agreements. Pressure and control therefore seem
to be too one-sided concepts to describe a development of land transaction procedures
that was shaped over time from below as much as from above.
IV. Village land transfer registers and peasant land transactions

after 1550
The usual historiographical account for rural societies in east-central Europe in the
period after 1500 to 1550 assumes a significant rise in landlord powers, leading to a
stricter form of the feudal system – demesne (land-)lordship (Gutsherrschaft) – and the
growth of a demesne economy (Gutswirtschaft) accompanied by the deterioration of
village autonomy, eroding the legal status of peasants and, specifically, their property
rights. This description contrasts strongly with the situation in the later Middle Ages,
in which the peasantry is thought to have enjoyed liberties and secure legal status.
Research has contributed significantly since the 1980s to revising this description of
the early modern period, on the basis of new approaches using detailed case studies
and empirical research that looks beyond legal structures and norms. Among the most
important results, these studies reveal considerable regional variation, a dominant
tendency to maintain hereditary tenure as well as secure peasant property rights –
especially in the Czech Lands – and considerable autonomy of peasants with regard
to their economic and social affairs33. Summing up, we could draw the conclusion
that east-central Europe did not represent a compact ‘second serfdom’ entity and that
structures were extremely differentiated according to time and place.
32
Ibid., fol. 42r (from 1521). Our translation.
33
Space limitations here do not allow more detailed analysis of these. For surveys cf. CERMAN (2008a);
(2008b); HAGEN (1998); PETERS (1997). For Bohemia see CERMAN and LUFT (2005); CERMAN and
ZEITLHOFER (2002).
47
It is usually suggested that peasant property rights, particularly concerning security

of tenure, deteriorated significantly in east-central Europe and that widespread
expropriations were the rule. Even though it is impossible to deal with the evidence
against these assumptions in great detail, we can state that in the territories covered
here, hereditary tenure continued to dominate throughout the early modern period,
despite the rise of demesne lordship and the growth of the demesne economy. Land
transactions continued to be carried out in sessions of the village courts and were
entered into the village registers as they had been in the late Middle Ages, even if most
demesne lords did set up their own registers of peasant land transactions (German
Kaufbücher or Grundbücher, Czech knihy trhové or gruntovní knihy). A tendency
towards weakening peasant property rights in limited areas of Upper Lusatia and of
Upper Silesia, and in regions of Bohemia and Moravia after the Thirty Years’ War can
be explained by widespread desertions of peasant farms and outward migrations due
to the war (Cerman, 2008a: 78-79).
Previous descriptions have concentrated on the legal structure and claimed that
procedures were tightened in terms of formal landlord consent for sales and transfers
after 1500 (Meyer, 1967: 79-81; Petráň, 1964: 42-52; Opitz, 1904: 16-17, 51-52). Yet,
a closer analysis of peasant land transactions based on the study of a large number of
contracts in seigniorial land transfer registers in Bohemia from the sixteenth to the
eighteenth century yielded a different result. Vladimir Procházka found evidence of
peasant decision-making concerning sales and transfers of properties to heirs, which
was largely independent of the intervention of demesne lords (Procházka, 1963).
Detailed studies of the practice of peasant property transactions in early modern
Bohemia and Moravia have recently endorsed these results (Cerman and Luft, 2005;
Cerman and Zeitlhofer, 2002; Grulich, 2008: 276-322; Štefanová, 2009; Velková,
2004; Zeitlhofer, 2007).
The following empirical investigation rests on a case study of the northern Bohemian
noble estate of Frýdlant, in the northern Bohemian border region south of Görlitz, and
deals with the analysis of court and land transfer registers of the villages of Háj, Luh
and Vysoký (cf. for the following Štefanová, 2009). Data analysed include information
about 925 peasant property transfer contracts recorded either in village land transfer
registers (Schöppenbücher) or in seigniorial land transfer registers (Kaufbücher)
between 1558 and 1750. Village land transfer registers were introduced into the rural
areas of Frýdlant by the first half of the sixteenth century at the latest.
The administrative structure of villages did not change in the early modern period.
Village bailiffs, jurors and aldermen were the representatives of the village community.
Jurors and aldermen were elected from the village inhabitants. In the seventeenth
48
century, the demesne lord partly nominated them, but the village land transfer registers
suggest that these individuals nevertheless had to be accepted by the village34. As
confirmed by the very existence of village registers, Frýdlant village administrations
had the right to confirm and register peasant land transactions. Contracts were later
recorded in the transfer registers kept by the seigniorial administration. This took
place only as a second step, often years after the actual procedure (Procházka, 1963;
Velková, 2004; Zeitlhofer, 2007)35.
Figure 2.2. Peasant land transactions in the villages of Háj,

Luh and Visoský, Frýdlant estate, 1558-1750
18
16
14
12
10
0
1560 1570 1580 1590 1600 1610 1620 1630 1640 1650 1660 1670 1680 1690 1700 1710 1720 1730 1740 1750
As in the Czech Lands in general, tenure and property rights of the subject population
were quite secure in Frýdlant. Owners could sell their properties to whomever they
preferred, subject to the consent of their demesne lord, which was largely a formality.
Consequently, there was a relatively high frequency of land transactions in the
selected villages (Figure 2.2).
What emerges from the investigation of property transactions is that the term
‘inheritance practice’, which is generally used to describe property transfers in peasant
34
Státní oblastní archiv Litomĕřice, pobočka Dĕčín (SOA Dĕčín), Vs Frýdlant, Pozemková kniha 1656-
1676, Kart. č. 20, fol. 201v-203r.
35
Similar suggestions in HORÁKOVÁ (1969: 212). On the introduction of seigniorial land transfer
registers in the area see BOELCKE (1969: 262-263).
49
societies, proves inadequate to describe the patterns of transfers observed. Land

transactions were not a matter of simply passing on property from one generation to
another, rather all transfers were designed as formal property sales. This was the case
even in those instances in which the contract partners were identified in the records
as being related to each other36, which amounted to only a little over 30 per cent of all
transfers recorded in the registers of the selected villages (Figure 2.2 and Table 2.1).
Thus, an analysis within the wider land-market framework seems appropriate.
Table 2.1. Property transfers by kin relationship in the villages of Háj,

Luh and Vysoký, estate of Frýdlant, 1558-1750
Time periods
1558-1600 1601-1650 1651-1700 1701-1750 Total
Relationship No. % No. % No. % No. % No. %
Kin 39 29.3 47 24.7 98 40.3 98 27.3 282 30.5
Non-kin 94 70.7 143 75.3 145 59.7 261 72.7 643 69.5
Total 133 100 190 100 243 100 359 100 925 100
Sources. Data linkage between seigniorial and village land transfer registers: SOA Děčín,
Vs Frýdlant, Pozemkové knihy Frýdlant 1558-1750, Kart. č. 1-33; Státní okresní archiv
(SOkA) Liberec, Konšelské knihy, Konšelská kniha Luh č.1, 1656-1734; Konšelská kniha Luh
č. 2, 1734-1783; Konšelská kniha Háj č. 1, 1612-1735; Konšelská kniha Háj č. 2, 1691-1843;
Konšelská kniha Vysoký, 1610-1808.
Property transfers among relatives were very flexible as well, and therefore there
is no indication of the existence of rigid inheritance patterns being policed by the
demesne lord (Table 2.2).
The quantitative evidence shows a clear dominance of transactions among

individuals who were not related, as well as very flexible forms of transfers among
kin, which lends support to our claim that peasants’ decision-making processes
about property transfers among themselves were relatively free and autonomous.
There is not one single case over the 200 years period in which the demesne lord
overruled a contract or did not confirm a sale that had been registered in the village
transfer registers. Village bailiffs and village administrations were responsible for all
procedures being carried out correctly. This confirms the important role of village
institutions, alongside the degree of autonomy of peasant property transfers.
36
The way kin relationships were recorded is discussed in detail in ŠTEFANOVÁ (2009: 49-166).
50
Table 2.2. Family and kin relationships in property transfers in the villages of
Háj, Luh and Vysoký, estate of Frýdlant, 1558-1750
(relationship of seller to buyer)
Percentage Percentage of
Number of
Kin and family relationships of transfers all transfers
transfers
between kin (N = 925)
One generation above buyer
Father 124 44.0 13.1
Mother 52 18.4 5.5
Father-in-law 22 7.8 2.3
Mother-in-law 6 2.1 0.6
Stepfather 5 1.8 0.5
Stepmother 3 1.1 0.3
Uncle 1 0.4 0.1
Same generation as buyer
Brother 29 10.3 3.1
Brother-in-law 6 2.1 0.6
Brother and other siblings 2 0.7 0.2
Brother and brother-in-law 2 0.7 0.2
Sister-in-law 2 0.7 0.2
Future spouse 1 0.3 0.1
One generation below buyer
Son-in-law 4 1.4 0.4
Son 1 0.4 0.1
Daughter 1 0.4 0.1
Heirs and guardians representing family members
Heirs 11 3.9 1.1
Mother and heirs 4 1.4 0.4
Guardian 3 1.1 0.3
Guardian of heirs 1 0.4 0.1
Guardian of the widowed owner 2 0.7 0.2
Total 282 100 29.9
Sources. As in Table 2.1.
The continuous existence and use of village land transfer registers during the early
modern period can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, village institutions
were a useful instrument for the seigniorial administration of the estate. On the other
hand, they can be seen as evidence of a certain level of independent legal action and
negotiation by the village community (Mitter, 1928: 14, 20-22; Štefanová, 2009: 219-
278). How did peasants, village representatives and lords act with respect to peasant
property transactions? Normally, the authority of the village community would be
sufficient to enforce property rights and transfer contracts. When it was not, however,
51
individual peasants could use the authority of the demesne lord to secure their own
interests. A very good example of such strategic use is the conflict that opposed the
smallholder Andreas Schubart to one of the local noblemen who held his manor
in feoff from the demesne lord of the estate of Frýdlant37. In 1636, Schubart sold
his smallholding to the local nobleman. As he had originally come from a different
estate, he turned to his former demesne lord and asked him to sign the sales contract
‘zu mehrerer vergewisserung [for better security]’. As a later report suggests, he
had planned his lord’s involvement deliberately because the local nobleman had
forced him into selling38. Schubart had then complained to his demesne lord, and
as a consequence a regular contract of sale was drawn up which guaranteed him
compensation for leaving his smallholding.
Years later, in 1649, the case came to the attention of the Frýdlant demesne lord,
because the nobleman had not paid Schubart the regular instalments of the sale price.
The lord forwarded the case to the provincial court, which in 1655 finally forced
the local nobleman to pay39. The smallholder had definitely increased his chances
by involving his own estate lord and later that of Frýdlant in this peculiar property
transaction, because the powers of village institutions might have been insufficient to
fight the aggressive advances by the nobleman of a small manor.
Former studies have assumed strict seigniorial control over the peasant property
market. The analysis of transfer patterns in the estate of Frýdlant enables a closer
inspection of this matter. One of the concerns of demesne lords, it is claimed, was
the institution of contractual retirement (German Ausgedinge, Czech vyměnek). If a
peasant sold her or his property because of old age, the contract would also specify
certain obligations on the part of the buyer: for instance, on top of the price of the
property the buyer would have to provide food, a dwelling or a certain field for the
use of the former owner. These provisions might be limited for a certain period of
time or hold for the rest of the seller’s life. According to some studies, demesne
lords took an interest in regulating retirement contracts, because these represented an
additional economic burden for peasant farms or smallholdings (Horáček, 1904: 12;
Christiansen, 1995: 148-150). Yet, among the land transactions we have analysed,
there were only three cases in which the demesne lord intervened directly with respect
to contractual retirement, although 390 out of the total of 925 property transfers were
held under this kind of arrangement.
37
SOA Dĕčín, HS, Kart. č. 223, not pag.
38
Ibid., report of Andreas Schubart, 6 December 1649, not pag. Our translation.
39
Ibid.
52
As a rule, seigniorial intervention only occurred in cases of disagreement and

conflict. Property transfers would always have some potential for conflict. One
cause for this was the buyer’s obligation to transfer a considerable sum of money
in instalments over a lengthy period of time, sometimes for decades. As cases of
conflicts among kin show, contracts between relatives were no different from other
contracts in this respect. When the new owner did not fulfil his or her obligations, the
former owner would sue the purchaser and the disagreement was brought to court40.
In one particular case, the former owner bought back the farm from his son and had
to return all the instalments his son had already paid him. In another case, a son
did not keep the agreement and did not pay a single instalment, and therefore the
property was returned to his father, the former owner41. In other, less dramatic cases
the new owners were forced under threat of punishment to honour the agreements of
the purchasing contract42.
It was as much in the communities’ interest as in the lords’ that no conflicts

between individuals arose from property transactions. This is endorsed by regular
clauses in the contracts, which specified fines to be paid in the event the agreements
were not obeyed by either of the parties43. Fines incurred by the offenders, such as
money or a cask of beer, always had to be paid both to the demesne lord and to
the village community. Sales contracts were deliberately drawn up so as to provide
fallback solutions and out-of-court compromises in the event of disagreement. This
was particularly relevant for contractual retirement arrangements in which the parties
were meant to co-reside. In 11 per cent of these contracts, special passages were
included in order to foresee possible solutions for certain disagreements and to prevent
the escalation of conflicts. For instance, if the retired seller and the buyer did not get
along with each other, the former might receive from the new owner certain fields
to provide for her or himself instead of provisions. This also illustrates that agents
actively and creatively used existing village institutions to secure their agreements,
rather than rely on third party enforcement by seigniorial representatives.
Agrarian historians have usually assumed that landlords and demesne lords
intervened where the male head of the household died and the widow wanted to keep
the tenure of her holding on her own. In this context, widows’ property rights have
been considered weak, mainly because landlords and village communities believed
that widows could not successfully run a farm by themselves. In order to avoid a
40
E. g. SOA Dĕčín, Vs Frýdlant, Pozemková kniha Frýdlant, Kart. č. 1, fol. 133r-133v.
41
SOA Dĕčín, HS, Kart. č. 220, not pag.
42
SOA Dĕčín, Vs Frýdlant, Pozemková kniha Frýdlant, Kart. č. 12, fol. 190r-190v; HS, Kniha trestů a
pokut, Kart. č. 57, fol. 32r, 53v.
43
See examples in SOA Dĕčín, Vs Frýdlant, Pozemková kniha 1613-1618, Kart. č. 16, fol. 149r-150r;
Kart. č. 21, fol. 290v, fol. 310r-310v.
53
shortfall in seigniorial dues or in village contributions, they would be forced to either

remarry or to retire and sell the holding. Pressure was thought to be particularly strong
in areas of demesne lordship such as the Czech Lands. However, we would argue
that it is inappropriate to infer general conclusions about the legal position and the
restrictions put on independent actions of females and widows from such assumptions,
or from normative regulations in this respect (e.g. Ogilvie and Edwards, 1998: 32,
37). Analyses of specific cases cast considerable doubt as to whether these norms
really defined the practice of demesne lords and villages, independently of the specific
situations of individual widows (Štefanová, 2002).
Since widows sold farms and properties, we can assume that they had headed the
household economies for at least a certain period of time preceding the particular
sale. A closer inspection of all contracts between 1558 and 1750 reveals that in about
17 per cent of all cases it was the widows who sold the holdings (Štefanová, 2004:
55). It is usually difficult to retrieve information on the length of time during which
widows’ held independent tenure and headed the household or farm on their own,
because the time of the husbands’ death cannot be reconstructed from the transfer
contracts. However, it was possible to find evidence for individual cases. For instance,
in 1683 Christoph Jäckel’s widow sold the farm left to her by her husband to Martin
Peucker. Some time after 1683, Peucker also died and the farm reverted to Jäckel’s
widow44. The 1683 contract is particularly interesting, as the widow secured a vast
retirement provision for herself, which was, however, limited to the period until the
new owner had fulfilled the payment of the farm price45. Obviously, the woman had
preferred to live in retirement after her husband’s death. Peucker’s death before the
payment had been completed changed the widow’s circumstances of life. The case
suggests that she was then able to revise her former decision to sell and she started
running her farm again, without any obvious resistance by either seigniorial or village
authorities. A new sales contract closed the case in 1699. It does not explicitly state
for how many years the widow had run the farm herself since Peucker’s death, but
the events suggest that it must have been for quite some time, and other studies on
early modern Bohemia show that the independent economies of widows often lasted
for several years (Pazderová, 2005).
This can further be illustrated by a case in 1655, which documents the economic
difficulties of a mill owned by the widow Salomena Newmanin in the village of Luh.
She requested a reduction in the milling taxes, arguing, among other things, that she
had been unable to mill for some time in 1653 because many of her usual customers
44
SOkA Liberec, Fond Konšelské knihy, Konšelská kniha pro Luh 1656-1734, Schuldeneintheilung
und Erbsonderung aus dem Jahre 1699, not pag.
45
SOA Dĕčín, Vs Frýdlant, Pozemková kniha, Kart. č. 21, fol. 267r-268v.
54
had emigrated fleeing the enforcement of the Counter-Reformation (as it happened,

more than a third of the village households were deserted by 1653). Her husband was
still alive in 1651, aged thirty-six. According to the wording of her petition, she must
have run the mill and a household with two children, aged fourteen and nine, at least
since 1653 when she was thirty-two years of age. The demesne lord was supportive
and granted her a 25 per cent reduction in a certain rent in 165546. This was not the
end of her tenure, as she made two further petitions in 1666 and 1672, stating in the
latter that her work had been interrupted by a three-month spell of frozen water47.
This time, the village courts of Luh and neighbouring Raspenava were ordered to
inspect the mill, after which the demesne lord again granted her a 25 per cent rent
abatement. Thus for nearly twenty years at least, the widow Salomena was in charge
and in spite of economic difficulties she was not ordered to either sell or remarry.
Her economic difficulties were obviously not interpreted as the consequence of a
woman’s tenure; besides, male millers had filed similar petitions48. Widows were thus
entitled to run their own farms and crafts, and they were not necessarily forced by
the demesne lord or by the village to either remarry or sell their holdings. This single
case serves as an illustration of a considerable mass of similar qualitative evidence
that challenges the assumed general rule of systematic seigniorial interference in this
respect (Štefanová, 2002, 2009: 153-160).
The evidence from the early modern period supports our initial hypothesis that the
late medieval patterns of peasant property rights and the quality of peasant hereditary
tenure were maintained after 1550. The same holds true for the role of village
institutions in administering peasant property transactions. Village land transfer
registers and village courts were used to secure claims and to provide conditions for
the enforcement of sales contracts within very dynamic peasant property transfer
patterns. Finally, there is no direct evidence of demesne lords systematically
interfering in peasant property transactions, not even with respect to issues which
the literature has traditionally regarded as sensitive for the demesne lords’ economic
interests, such as the institution of contractual retirement or the fact of independent
female or more specifically widows’ tenure.
46
SOA Dĕčín, HS, Kniha dekretů 1652-1657, Kart. č. 81, fol. 8r-8v.
47
SOA Dĕčín, HS, Kart. č. 81, Kniha dekretů 1666, p. 74; Kniha dekretů 1672-1674, p. 10.
48
E.g., SOA Dĕčín, HS, Kniha dekretů 1652-1657, Kart. č. 81, fol. 14r, 15r, 77r.
55
V. Conclusions
A long term analysis of land market institutions and property transfer patterns
in the historical Czech Lands displays certain continuities in the institutional
development and the social practice of peasant property transactions. This chapter
was mainly concerned with identifying long-standing continuities in land market
institutions and property transactions, against usual narratives of peasant rights
deteriorating and peasant autonomous institutions being seriously harmed by the rise
of landlord power and the development of demesne lordship (Gutsherrschaft) after
1500. Although recent research has added significant empirical evidence concerning
the inheritance patterns and property transactions of the Bohemian peasantry during
the early modern period, comparable studies for the later medieval period and the
long term perspective have not yet been attempted. We offer a first tentative step
towards this goal. Our analysis was based on four examples of village land transfer
registers from the later Middle Ages (one Polish and three from the Czech Lands) and
one in-depth case study of peasant land transactions in three villages of a northern
Bohemian estate in the early modern period. We assume the observed patterns to be
representative of tenure and peasant land transactions in other parts of the Czech
Lands where hereditary tenure dominated.
Our findings show that the quality of peasant property rights was maintained and
that peasant property transfers remained a matter dealt with in the sphere of village
communities and their representatives throughout the period under investigation. We
claim that the argument of an increasing landlord control of the peasant property market
after 1500 or 1550 ignores both the medieval origins of the observed institutional
framework and the ways it was socially used over time. More generally, it ignores a
‘view from the village’ (Hagen, 1998), that is, a perspective that explains the interests
of the peasantry in a change of legal practice. Rather than a systematic policy of
control, seigniorial intervention was often caused by specific requests of peasants
acting as parties in contracts. What has merely been regarded as an ‘intervention’
by the lords was in fact in many cases called upon by peasants’ active strategies to
guarantee contract security and to prevent or resolve disagreements. When seigniorial
norms and regulations concerning issues of peasant inheritance were established in
Frýdlant in the late sixteenth century, they were intended to avoid costly conflicts
among contract parties resulting from disagreements in land transactions, and should
not be necessarily regarded as a seigniorial push towards greater control.
Already during the fifteenth century it became visible that peasants were making
more elaborate use of the possibilities offered by written documentation at the village
level. Only at a later stage, however, did more detailed retirement contracts and
56
provisions preventing disagreement and failure to meet obligations become the rule,
which reflect more clearly the way peasants actively shaped the use of institutions
for their interests.
Empirical research on a micro level can thus easily overturn claims made by
traditions in the literature, whose conclusions were based primarily on an analysis
of the legal structure. We have observed a long term continuity of the influence of
peasants and villages in shaping peasant property transactions, the relevant institutional
framework and its application. Claims that seigniorial control over the peasant land
market was paramount in the later medieval structures were not supported by our
evidence.
Archival sources
ARCHIWUM PAŃSTWOWE WE WROCŁAWIU: Margrabstwo Górnołużyckie; Wsie powiatu
zgorzeleckiego.
SÄCHSISCHES HAUPTSTAATSARCHIV: Staatsfilialarchiv Bautzen, Amtsgericht Zittau.
STÁTNÍ OBLASTNÍ ARCHIV LITOMĔŘICE: Pobočka Dĕčín, Velkostatek (Vs) Frýdlant; Pobočka
Dĕčín, Historická sbírka Clam-Gallasů (HS).
STÁTNÍ OKRESNÍ ARCHIV (SOKA) LIBEREC: Konšelské knihy.
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59
3. The evolution of property rights in Tuscany, from
the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth
century
Giuliana BIAGIOLI
I. Introduction
This chapter attempts to understand how property rights worked and were socially
appropriated during the early modern period in the Italian region of Tuscany. The
initial proposition is that property relations transcend ‘legal principles and institutional
frameworks’ (Congost, 2003: 74).
From the point of view of size, this case would appear, on the face of it, to be a
marginal one in European history. Present-day Tuscany, even though it is larger than
when it was a regional State in the early modern times, is still not very large: less
than 23,000 sq. km, with a population of just over three and a half million inhabitants.
However, in this small area there are many cities which back in the Middle Ages
were free communes, with a population that exceeded the European average. From
medieval times up to the modern period, this Italian region has been continuously
involved in European history. It was one of the protagonists in the creation of the
first world economy in the early modern period, centred around the Mediterranean
and identified by Braudel, and albeit more marginally, it continued to be involved
with major trends in the context of European history until, with the advent of the
Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century, it fully entered the great
European phenomenon of the Enlightenment. Throughout the period it played an
important role in the evolution of property rights in Europe as well, both through the
adoption of new forms of behaviour by actors and social groups and the adaptation of
pre-existing institutions to new economic and social conditions.
Tuscany has been an area of precocious urban civilization since the Middle Ages,
with a pre-eminence of many manufacturing and commercial cities in relation to the
countryside. While artisans, merchants and bankers from Florence, Lucca and Pisa
had commercial, financial, and political relations throughout Europe, they were also
among the most important landowners who diverted a part of their capital to acquire
land, in order both to diversify their investments and to gain control of agricultural
surpluses and raw materials. The seigniorial system found it hard to establish itself
where city institutions, the comuni, did not allow institutional competitors to settle
61
The evolution of property rights in Tuscany
Figure 3.1. Tuscany
Note. Map by the author.
in their neighbourhood (Pinto, 2007). The feudal system, together with serfdom,
disappeared almost completely at a very early stage. The very first medieval documents
attest to the existence of a free market for land: such was the case at least with allodial
land (i. e., land in full ownership, as opposed to that in feudal concession), which was
62
Giuliana Biagioli
freely bought and sold, exchanged or used as security. However, such early emergence
in Tuscany of a process which occurred much later in other European countries does
not mean that property rights and the way they are embedded in society have remained
unaltered in the course of the following centuries. On the contrary, it will prove most
interesting to trace the paths of the competition for land among social groups from
the late medieval period to the dawn of modern times, in order to be able to compare
these processes with contemporary events in the European scene and highlight the
peculiarities – if any – of this precocious beginning.
II. The Middle Ages: the importance of men, the importance of

the cities
During the Middle Ages Tuscany, with its manufacturing and commercial cities,
was among the European regions leading economic development, a leadership which
did not wane until the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, both demographic growth and urban
development were high. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Tuscany probably
had over a million inhabitants within its current regional boundaries, which is more
than it had in the second half of the eighteenth century. Population density in the
richest areas was between 100 and 200 inhabitants/sq. km. In the fourteenth century,
almost 30 per cent of the population lived in cities, while the rate of urbanization
in Europe was barely 10 per cent. Florence, with its 100,000 inhabitants, was then
among the largest cities in Europe, together with Venice, Paris and Milan. Pisa and
Siena were also among the fifteen European cities with over 40,000 inhabitants (half
of which were Italian); Lucca had 20,000 to 30,000 and five other cities had between
10,000 and 20,000 (Petralia, 2004: 119-120).
In the cities dwelled landowners, notaries, professional men, bankers and, above
all, many craftsmen-merchants who in 1427 made up 56 per cent of all families in
Florence. Only few among the city’s inhabitants were farmers. Their number was
negligible in Florence in 1427, and it was less than 10 per cent in five of the other six
major cities (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1988: 391). In the course of the fourteenth
century, Florentine wool merchants had begun to produce woollen fabrics as highly
prized for quality as the French and Flemish ones. For the following two centuries,
Florentine woollen fabrics became the most sought after by European aristocrats. The
fourteenth century was also the golden age of Tuscan banking and commerce. Banking
institutions had branches in all the main European cities and courts, and bankers sold
both city products and agricultural produce, namely cereals. The demographic crisis
triggered by the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century resulted in a fall in land
prices and an increase in wages, which gave rise to important instances of social
63
mobility, earlier than in the rest of Europe because of greater economic and social
development in the area.
In fact, during previous centuries the cities had extended their economic and
juridical power, dealing a final blow to the earlier seigniorial hold of the land. From
the second half of the thirteenth century, ‘people’s governments’ promulgated laws
that freed peasants who until then had remained legally subservient to the nobility
and personally bound to the land. Seigniorial estates based on serfdom and corvée,
which had already been in decline for some considerable time, disappeared almost
everywhere but the less populated areas. Noblemen were not permitted to live in the
cities, while their jurisdictional powers and rights were replaced by taxes to be paid
to the communes and obedience to their officials.
III. The central pattern: the creation of the great secular fortunes
in inland Tuscany
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, a considerable part of all landed property
belonged to abbeys, monasteries and to the clergy at large. Their lands were cultivated
mostly by livellari, that is, tenants under a livello contract, which created a duality
of claims to the land between the landlord, who retained the eminent lordship
(dominium eminens), and the tenant as the immediate owner of the land and the right
to use it (dominium utile) – a kind of duality which was very widespread throughout
Europe (Congost, 2003: 86). The livello (from libellum, the relevant contractual
document) has a long history in Tuscany. Some such contracts are still in force to this
day, having survived all redemption laws, even though in many instances they have
ceased to be paid and occasionally gave rise to surges of requests and litigations.
The livello is a contract similar to Roman emphyteusis, a sort of copyhold tenancy,
which generally lasted for three generations. It differed from the original meaning of
emphyteusis because it did not always refer to waste land being cultivated; quite the
contrary, since throughout the centuries, and particularly in the eighteenth century,
the livello was also applied to farms that were already established and functioning.
Furthermore, unlike emphyteusis this contract did not require the lord’s consent to
be conveyed to third parties.
Unfortunately, we do not know the full extent of ecclesiastical land ownership in the
Middle Ages. A maximum of 15.6 per cent of landed property value in the Florentine
cadastre of 1427 seems to be an underestimation (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1988:
333). It has been estimated at 20 to 30 per cent of all land in the sixteenth century
(Stumpo, 1986: 265-289). The feudal nobility were scarcely involved as landowners
in Tuscany, although some families stood out, such as the della Gherardesca who
64
Giuliana Biagioli
dominated the outer zones of the Maremma, or the Ricasoli, barons since 1029,
who owned a major part of the Mugello and Chianti areas. There were also some
small allodial properties owned by commoners. Most of the common land had been
already lost in Medieval times by the rural comuni (Ginatempo, 2003: 263-264), and
what remained was at constant risk of shrinking, though it kept a somewhat larger
importance in the more remote areas, farther away from the cities (Menzione, 1995:
77). This process was very precocious in central Tuscany as compared to other areas in
Europe (De Moor, 2007; Iriarte, Lana, 2007), and indeed within Tuscany as well.
The one wholly new phenomenon which emerged between the thirteenth and the
fourteenth centuries was the establishment of the large city-owned estates, above all
at the expense of former small owners and farmers. This process involved communes
throughout northern and central Italy, and within Tuscany this first began to appear in
the Florentine countryside, or contado. This term, which in the period around the year
1000 had meant the domain and jurisdiction of a count, in the age of the communes
came to refer to the rural area under the authority of a city. The contado’s inhabitants,
the contadini (or comitatini), had a quite different legal status to that of city dwellers.
As the communes extended their control, the term contado generally came to mean
the first areas to have come under the authority of the communes, as distinct from the
wider city district (Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, 1988: 153-186).
Commune societies were pervaded by a strong drive towards land ownership.

Political life, business, work, and existence itself seemed precarious in those days. In the
collective imagination of city dwellers, as it emerges from contemporary documents,
we find the constant ambition to own land to ensure a stable economic basis of bread,
oil, meat, and good wine to the domestic economy (Conti, 1965a: 2-3). Furthermore,
investing in land was a complement to city activities, because craftsmen needed raw
materials from the countryside and merchants would sell their agricultural surpluses.
Therefore, whoever had available funds tried to purchase land in the contado. Around
1320, 70 to 80 per cent of the land in the part of the contado of Siena closest to
the city belonged to city dwellers. In the Florentine countryside, according to the
land register of 1427 two-thirds of the land belonged to Florentines and only 18 per
cent to contadini (Conti, 1965b: passim). At that time, land ‘constituted the common
denominator of all the upper and middle class of urban society’ (Conti, 1965b: 3).
The process leading to this situation had often been quite a long one. In the first
half of the fourteenth century, before the Black Death, it fed off the predicament
of small-scale landowners in the face of demographic growth in the countries that
followed Roman Law, which required the sharing of property among all heirs. Thus
in 1330 the Florentine merchant-banker Peruzzi bought six houses ‘in the castle’,
65
two oil mills, an oven and land with olive trees and vines in Passignano, in Val di
Pesa, through nine separate notary deeds. The sellers were small landowners, perhaps
farmers, who lived in the contado and were leaving Passignano for other ‘peoples’
(settlements), Since these plots of land were scattered far apart, an attempt was made
to link them by means of land exchanges with the local abbey and the purchase of
neighbouring properties (Conti, 1965a: 314-315). In the same period, other Florentine
families acquired allodial land or property in emphyteusis from the inhabitants of the
contado and arranged land exchanges with the same abbey. Meanwhile the abbot,
for his part, had regained possession of land from contadini tenants who had been
in arrears for many years or who had emigrated elsewhere (Conti, 1965b: 298-299).
Parallel to this trend in land transfers, legal instruments became more precise, and
during this period it became possible to distinguish between allodial property and
forms of copyhold tenancy in the notaries’ deeds, while in preceding centuries a clear
distinction between the two categories would have been impossible.
As a result of all these developments, in the Florentine contado at the beginning of

the fourteenth century, it was only in the poorest hilly and mountainous or peripheral
areas that contadini managed to keep hold of the majority of their allodial land, which
tended to decrease in the following century (Cherubini, 1985: 69-71).
IV. The Tuscan ‘far West’ and its convergence to the central pattern
The situation of the city of Pisa, in western Tuscany, remained very different to
that of the inland cities until the fall of the maritime Republic following the war
with Florence in 1407. Pisa’s interests and economic organization were more
directed towards the Mediterranean, from which the city could stock up on supplies
brought in by the ships of its merchants. Because of its sea-faring economy, Pisa
had far less interest in the contado than Florence or Siena had in theirs. Once the
commune’s authority had freed them from the seigniorial yoke, Pisa’s contado and
its inhabitants played a more autonomous role (Luzzati, 1979: 293 ff.). Even up to
the fourteenth century, the only large estates in the area were those of old feudal
families, like the della Gherardesca, those of noble families of merchant origins like
the Alliata, the Upezzinghi and other solid families of the urban bourgeoisie, and
the estates of the clergy, particularly the substantial possessions of the Archbishop
of Pisa. There was still a large acreage in common lands, but these were no longer
collectively exploited, except in the case of wastelands or marshes that were difficult
to bring under cultivation. In some cases rural communes, ever hungry for money,
had underwritten livello contracts with local inhabitants living in households that
held entitlements to common rights. This in itself already entailed a form of private
management and appropriation of collective resources. In subsequent centuries, even
66
Giuliana Biagioli
‘outsiders’, particularly town inhabitants, would successfully infiltrate the system

and gain access to the common lands for their private use.
This situation was overturned first of all by the Black Death and then by the war
defeat to Florence and the subsequent fall of the Republic, even though the whole of
the century was characterized by a precarious political situation caused by attempts
to overthrow the new power. The city and the contado of Pisa declined and became
depopulated. What is more, the hydrogeological condition of the plains, which had
been poor to begin with, became even worse. According to the land register of 1427,
population density in the area surrounding Pisa was three to four times less than in
the Florentine contado. There was little cultivation in the countryside and large tracts
of the lower Arno Valley and its tributaries had turned into marshes.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the new Medici dynasty, who were to become
the consolidators of the State’s territory, began a repopulation policy operating with
incentives and land reclamation, which continued even after the new demographic
increase and the rise in agricultural prices had taken place throughout Tuscany. This
policy was accompanied by the creation of a large estate of the Medici family in the
Pisan countryside, which in the mid-sixteenth century consisted of approximately
34,000 hectares, even though they were not the full owners of the entire area. In
fact, many of the properties, which either belonged to the ecclesiastical authorities
or were common lands, were taken over by the Medici as livellari. The Medici took
advantage of their power to set very low rents, which, moreover, they quite often
did not pay. (Pult Quaglia, 1980: 83). The self-serving intervention in this sphere by
the highest levels of political power, the intertwining of private and public interests,
made the crisis of the common lands irreversible. The contracts contained provisions
regarding traditional collective resources, such as the concession of some privileges
or the return to the communes of a part of the marshlands after reclamation, which
the Medici, as livellari, were committed to implement. In fact, these lands were never
restituted in subsequent centuries.
Other lands came to enlarge the Medicean estate out of the political battlefront:
that of Florentine and, above all, Pisan landowners who had rebelled against Florence
and the Medici and had their property confiscated by the victors. In order to avoid the
rancour of those who had been expropriated in still uncertain times for the destiny
of the Princedom, these lands did not generally become part of the Medici estate
directly; more often than not they were exchanged for more anonymous properties.
Finally, the family did not disdain the purchase of small landowners’ plots, which had
often remained as enclaves within their new properties (Pult Quaglia, 1980: 83).
67
The instance of the establishment, in the territory of Pisa, of the property of yet
another family of merchant entrepreneurs who were subsequently ennobled, the
Riccardi, provides us with further valuable information, not only concerning this
particular family’s estate, but more to the point about the ways in which such private
estates were established throughout the centuries. In the case of the Riccardi, it all
began in the fourteenth century with the family of the Pisan merchants Gambacorta,
who started buying land in the contado in order to convert the profits which had
accrued from trade with southern Italy, Provence and North Africa into real estate
(Malanima, 1979: 350-353). Between 1320 and 1350, by way of about one hundred
contracts, the Gambacorta acquired land from almost as many families of small
landowners, who sometimes were in debt to the Gambacorta. At the end of the
fourteenth century the last descendant of the Gambacorta donated all his property
to the Charterhouse of Calci, whose initial qualms about the cleanliness of the
fortune’s sources according to Catholic precepts were promptly quieted by the
Pope. (Malanima, 1979: 352). In the fifteenth century, the Charterhouse of Calci
went through a period of financial difficulty, of which the Riccardi took advantage.
They were a merchant family from Pisa who had moved to Florence and who were
creditors of the monks. The Charterhouse let them have, through a livello contract,
the lands it had inherited from the Gambacorta. This was the initial nucleus of a
large fattoria (the administrative centre of several agricultural units) which the
Riccardi organized in the course of the fifteenth century. To enlarge it, they later
acquired more ecclesiastical property through another livello contract, took over the
positions of small livellari, and bought land from allodial owners. They became one
of the most important landowners in Tuscany, up to the second half of the eighteenth
century (Malanima, 1977), when the family patrimony came to ruin under the weight
of debt (Biagioli, 1998: 13-15).
The Medici and the Riccardi are by no means isolated examples. Many other
Florentine merchants and bankers invested their capital in the Pisan contado, who
were all ennobled under the newly established Medicean princedom. However, they
were a part of nobility whose origins could be traced back to the wealth accumulated
in the manufacturing and commercial cities, and who were by then partly dedicated
to the acquisition of land (Malanima, 1979: 357-369). This process was not always
properly understood by European and Italian historiography. The investment in land
by the urban bourgeoisie of merchants, manufacturers, and bankers has often been
explained as resulting from the seventeenth century crisis in Italy and of the cities’
economic decline, and as part of the so-called ‘re-feudalization’ (Romano, 1974: 1919-
1927), while in fact the creation of estates by city dwellers had already occurred at the
heyday of the urban economies (Pinto, 1979: 223 ff.; Aymard, 1991: 9-12).
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V. The establishment of the agricultural system: farms and

sharecropping contracts
The conquest of the territory by the cities, the expropriation of allodial land and of
land owned by small livellari, the creation of large estates of bourgeois origin followed
by ennoblement, all deeply modified not only the configuration of landed property,
but also the social composition of the rural population, with a progressive decline
in the part consisting of independent small and medium peasant holdings. Peasants
became more and more dependent on the bourgeois landowners to find jobs as either
wage labourers or sharecroppers. This also influenced the organization of agricultural
areas, the contracts and the characteristics of the families in the contado. The cities
reshaped the countryside they controlled, as urban owners began increasingly from
the thirteenth century onwards to adopt an organizational system of rural life in their
properties based on a form of sharecropping contract, the mezzadria.
This kind of contract hinged on two elements. The first was the farm to be cultivated,
the podere, provided by the owner in fit condition to be productive, together with the
capital needed for the annual cycle of work, above all concerning the cattle. The
second element was the farmer’s family, generally drawn from the inhabitants of the
contado who did not own land, who were responsible for all the work in the podere,
which was run as a family farm. Remarkably, the sharecropping system in central
Italy persisted from the late Middle Ages up to the mid-twentieth century, linked to a
veritable ‘sharecropping culture’. As late as 1951, 62 per cent of agricultural workers
in Tuscany were sharecroppers.
The creation of those family farms, generally aimed at being compact entities, had
very marked economic effects. In fact, to work a farm with all or almost all its land
consolidated instead of many scattered plots was a much more productive agricultural
and economic system, and supervision costs were drastically reduced. Little by little,
a ‘sharecropping landscape’ came into being: isolated farmsteads, each the base of
one family who lived in accordance with its rigid internal organization; an agricultural
system based on mixed herbaceous-arboreal cultivation, with cereals, vines and olive
trees, working animals and a few pigs and sheep, if there were some woodlands or
wastelands to raise them in. The process of establishing poderi in the countryside was
the pioneering phase of a process that eventually led to the demise of small-scale land
ownership and customary copyhold by the inhabitants of the contado, of common
lands, and of village communities and solidarity (Ginatempo, 2003: 271-272).
69
VI. The early modern period: property and its defence
It was in the sixteenth century that the concept of ownership became definitively
associated in legislation with that of an object to which ownership applies, namely
the title or legal ownership of the soil, as opposed to the medieval period when the
attention had been focused more on the enjoyment of the utilitates (the resources, be
they arable land woods, meadows, etc.) (Zagli, 2001: 116-119). But the concept of
ownership as we understand it today was still evolving. In fact, in the first centuries
of the early modern period the rights of use persisted not only on collective lands, but
also on those of individuals. The ius pascendi, the French vaine pâture, was practised
even on private lands: after the wheat harvest or the first scything of the grass the land
was opened for common grazing, albeit under certain conditions. Other rights of use
allowed the inhabitants of a community to gather straw and to glean after the harvest,
and to scythe the second and third grasses.
Such civic uses of private property were widely practised in the territory of Pisa,
especially where the municipal property had been subject to transfers of ownership
and usurpations by the citizens and was regulated by local statutes. A law passed by
Cosimo I in 1547, which was inspired by early elements of agrarian individualism,
banned thereafter the practice of ius pascendi on private lands in the contado of
Pisa, because it was considered an obstacle to agricultural progress. However, many
communities, especially in areas involved in transhumance, continued to allow ius
pascendi on private property during subsequent centuries, even amidst conflicts and
court proceedings. In fact, these uses survived a little everywhere, up to the reforms
of the late eighteenth century.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the distribution of landed property
throughout the region was fairly homogeneous. The amount of land owned by city
dwellers and by ecclesiastical authorities increased, at whose expense depending
on the place in question. In the surroundings of Florence, after all common lands
had been appropriated, it was the allodial property or that held by the inhabitants of
the contado which attracted the attention of citizens and ecclesiastics. In the early
sixteenth century, city dwellers owned an average 60 per cent of all land in the
Florentine contado. The percentage rose to 75 per cent in the countryside around
Florence, while it remained only 14 per cent in the mountainous areas, where most
soil was so unproductive that farming families would not have been able to survive
agricultural income if they had to pay a rent. In the neighbouring territory of Pisa, in
1560, the land owned by the city inhabitants varied between a minimum of 29 per cent
and a maximum of 53 per cent. By 1637 these percentages had risen, respectively, to
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Giuliana Biagioli
46 and 70 per cent (Pult Quaglia, 2003: 139). In the latter year, 28 per cent of the land
was owned by the inhabitants of the contado and 14 per cent belonged to clergy.
In the course of the sixteenth century ecclesiastical authorities maintained their

preference for the traditional livello contract. However, more and more often the
livellari were no longer farmers, who would perhaps add the small plots of land
contracted with monasteries to those they owned or held by some other means, but
rather they were noble and later also bourgeois families, who took large areas of barely
cultivated land on livello to create poderi and have them farmed by sharecroppers.
The abbots, bishops, and rectors of diocesan administrations who ceded the land
typically came from the same city, the same social milieu and often from the same
family as the livellario. The annual rent was low, the contractual period was very
long, and profits were assured for the livellario. Furthermore, taking land on livello
could also be the only legal device to take hold of properties which could not have
been sold since ecclesiastical mortmain was instituted in the sixteenth century.
Common lands were still to be found in the mid-sixteenth century in mountainous

areas, in Val di Chiana, between Tuscany and the Papal States, and in western and
south-western Tuscany, up to then the least populated area. They persisted in areas
which were difficult to cultivate: the marshes in Val di Chiana and in the Maremma,
and in part of the lower valley of the Arno. During the Rule of the Medici (1531-
1737), common lands in these areas regressed wherever public authorities carried
out major land reclamation works (Zagli, 2001: 45-50). Between 1525 and 1532,
Pope Clement VII – Giulio de’ Medici, together with a cardinal from the same family,
convinced the communities of Val di Chiana to grant them many of their lands, which
they had not succeeded in draining, in perpetual livello contracts, promising to make
them suitable for farming. Thus these lands became part of the estates of the Medici,
who paid the agreed rent very irregularly, low as it was. In the seventeenth century,
part of these lands were sold by the Medici to the military order of the Knights of Saint
Stephen, who, once the reclamation work had been effected, abrogated all collective
rights the communities’ inhabitants held in reclaimed and cultivated lands, and nullified
the previous rights of hunting and fishing as well. Furthermore, with the Grand Duke’s
support, they ceased paying any rent whatsoever (Gregori, 1976: 212-213).
Usurpation of common lands did not come about only through the power and the
arrogance of important families. Very often, as has been shown by studies on the Pisa
contado in the seventeenth century, wasteland was taken over and used as farmland
by the local inhabitants themselves, who usurped them without paying any kind of
rent or fee to the community in recognition of its direct authority. The appointed
community magistrates, with the Grand Duke’s consent, ended up recognizing these
71
appropriations, justifying them with the fact that the usurpers’ efforts to cultivate
these lands had proved beneficial to the community. Thereafter, the magistrates only
compelled the usurpers to formally acknowledge the community as the direct owner
of the land. One way of making such an acknowledgement was to have the usurpers
sign livello contracts that, when they were extended not only to the male but also to
the female line of descent, constituted a livellare possession fully comparable with
private ownership, because it was in fact held in perpetuity (Pesciatini, 2000: 334-
335). In this way a new class of land owners came into being; but these processes
which could still, at least at a social level, be considered a defence by the local
community against preying outsiders were often short-lived. Lands given in livello to
small local ‘usurpers’ to legitimate their previous abuses often ended up very quickly
in the hands of large urban and rural landowners, who bought the livelli from the
former holders. The legal provision that prevented urban landowners from signing
livello contracts for common lands, to protect the interest of local inhabitants, was
circumvented by this ploy in favour of the stronger social groups.
The new owners exploited the common lands by carrying out various forms of
agricultural individualism, such as enclosures and the prohibition of the ius pascendi
and all other collective uses which until then had guaranteed the survival of the
poorest groups of the commune. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, most of
the common lands still in existence were held by private individuals either in lease
or in livello.
The first two centuries of the early modern period were characterized by the
widespread application of legal regulations forbidding the sale of aristocratic or
ecclesiastical estates. This is an interesting fact in itself: it means that there was
perceived market demand for these properties, of such proportions as to raise fears that
the social groups controlling these lands might not be able to perpetuate their control.
Entailment was the means used in lay estates. In Roman Law, from which this statute
was derived, it was above all a property bequest to those who, like women, could not
legally receive an inheritance. In sixteenth-century Europe it was reinterpreted as an
obligation to hand down certain assets to a series of persons constituting the family’s
descendants, and, more precisely, to preserve and hand down an undivided estate
through the male agnatic line (Tria, 1945: 5-13).
In practice, according to this interpretation, entailment introduced in Roman Law

countries the principle that a part of the inheritance should be handed down to a
preferential heir, without being subject to the general principle of equal division among
heirs – even though absolute indivisibility was not necessary, nor indeed the rule in
Tuscany, as we shall see. In addition, the portion of the estate received in entailment
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Giuliana Biagioli
could never be sold. The heirs received entailed property in a fideicommissary

capacity and in fact simply held the asset in usufruct: they could benefit from the
income of the property in question, but not sell it, use it as security, or in any way put
it on the open property market.
This was the ethos of the testamentary dispositions which, from the sixteenth
century onwards, multiplied the number of entailments in Tuscany as in the other
countries of Mediterranean Europe (Amalric, n.d. [2004]: 109-111), having started,
it appears, in Spain (Tria, 1945: 13). The main aim was to prevent that as a result of
demographic growth and the survival of more heirs, as in fact had been happening
since the mid-fifteenth century, the splitting up of estates should go as far as to make
them unproductive and thus deplete the source of families’ incomes and social status,
as the loss of a family’s identification with a property which set it apart from others
would have undermined both its social and economic prestige.
The entailed portion of the estate could be handed down to the eldest son of the
current holder (birthright), to the closest relative of the previous holder (majorat),
or to the oldest descendant of the original testator (seniorasco). The first testator’s
dispositions could remain in force either for a specified number of generations or
in perpetuity. In Tuscany, however, the most common kind of entailment was the
‘divisible’ one – namely, divided between various heirs (the first-born and younger
sons, brothers and grandsons or nephews, etc.) – to avoid the risk of the extinction of
the lines of succession (Calonaci, 2005: 45-51).
The importance attributed to entailment has to be viewed from yet another

perspective, that of the region’s general economic prospects, taking into account the
decline of manufacturing and commercial activities since the seventeenth century,
following the shift of the commercial barycentre from the Mediterranean towards
north-western Europe. In Tuscany, this resulted in a fundamental change in the aims
of those investing in land. It was no longer a question of diversifying investments
but rather of turning to the safest ones, which in the circumstances of the time
meant falling back on the internal market. There was more and more investment in
real estate, to such an extent that ‘wealth was tied up in entailments and majorats’
(Tria, 1945: 14). The legislative practice from the sixteenth century onwards was to
place the names of those families who belonged to the recognized nobility in special
books kept apart from the others, and allowing only the former the right to impose
entailments. In Tuscany, however, during the Medicean rule there was a continuous
process of ennoblement and the practice of entailment spread down from the great
aristocratic families to those with smaller estates.
73
The effects of this regime of inalienability have been the subject of long-running
disputes by jurists and economists (Tria, 1945: 1-3). It undoubtedly had one positive
aspect, as far as the intentions of its institutors were concerned: it did preserve the
wealth of families. Another positive result, actually one condition for the former, was
that creditors could not lay hand on the assets which were tied up in the entailment
without going through long and difficult proceedings. As regards the negative
consequences, they will be touched on here not so much in the light of the agreements
and documents which led to the abolition of the restrictive regimes in the eighteenth
century, but rather from the perspective of the records concerning the estates of the
old families of the Tuscan nobility.
From these records, it emerges that when there were entailments these families
would resort in case of need to the sale of allodial assets, thereby diminishing their
wealth, or would offer the income of part of those assets as a guarantee for loans by
placing a censo on it (Biagioli, 2000: 55-62; Bertini, 1989: 56-77). The censo was
a sort of mortgage involving the paying out of the consigned assets of a long-term
annual income to the creditor, who quite often was the Church. This contract was
originally a way of bypassing the religious ban on loan interests, used to provide
credit to small landowners lacking in liquidity. It was later adopted for the same
purpose by noble families. Even though the owner of allodial lands on which a censo
had been placed legally kept it as full property, they could not be sold without the
consent of the creditor nor bought without the buyer accepting to pay the creditor’s
censo fee, nor could they be divided. In practice, it was yet another way to disentangle
the bundle of property rights pertaining to those lands.
Indebtedness of important families was a common phenomenon in Europe. Apart

from their conspicuous living standards, it was partly caused by the need to give
dowries and by the difficulties created by entailments, which hindered the possibility
of obtaining money from the sale of assets (Biagioli, 2000: 72-96). Getting into debt
was not dangerous as long as the creditors were mainly ecclesiastical bodies, who
gave long-term loans at low interest rates both to avoid the sin of usury and because
of the social and family ties their leaders shared with their debtors. The result was,
however, that the property system became more and more complicated. This also
happened because where, as in Tuscany, the ‘democratic’ practice of majorat divided
the usufruct among several family heirs, there tended to be an increase in the number
of restrictions, as each generation of heirs, whether first-born or younger sons,
modified and added new provisions regarding the lands and even personal property
at its own discretion.
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Giuliana Biagioli
The inalienable mortmain on ecclesiastical property was older than the use
of entailment by the laity. As a result of both, the land market became more and
more stagnant and inert, even though ploys were found to bypass the bans, as in
the aforementioned case of the livelli on ecclesiastical property and instances of
economic and social mobility continued to emerge. It is worth pointing out in this
context the vitality of the numerous villages that were involved with manufacturing
and trade from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, which increased
in importance as the traditional cities declined. Along with this process came the
growth of a rural landowning class (often merchants who had bought land), which,
once having accrued substantial estates, moved to the cities to raise their social status
and the family’s political importance, for all intents and purposes becoming city
dwellers. A consequence of these developments is that very often what appears from
the ‘assessments’ (land-tax records organized according to different categories: city
dwellers, the inhabitants of the contado, ecclesiastics…) as a growth of city dwellers’
property at the expense of the inhabitants of the contado was rather caused by some of
the latter having moved to the cities and consequently their property being transferred
to the city dwellers’ category1.
VII. Between enlightened reforms and the Empire: the victory of

land and agrarian individualism
The eighteenth century, as regards property rights, is characterized on the one

hand by the continuation of evolving processes that can be traced back to preceding
centuries, and on the other by the irreversible decline of the old order of land
ownership because of political events (the period of reforms, the French Revolution
and the Napoleonic Empire).
The pace of evolutionary processes already under way quickened considerably and
affected zones which until then had been barely touched by them. Such processes did
not come out of one systematic, organized plan, but rather evolved as the interventions
of the different players gradually contributed to changing the scene: the reforms tied
to enlightened despotism, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that brought in new
legislative principles, but also the need to finance armies. During the eighteenth and
the nineteenth centuries, land ownership and the rights and duties of landowners were
often at the centre of the political and economic debate. Eventually the victors were
those who had stood their ground on the field of those advocating the privatization
of landed property and of its free and total availability. Consequently a process came
1
These conclusions emerge very clearly from still unpublished evidence in research the author is
carrying out on the contado of Pisa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (ASP, Fiumi and Fossi).
75
about leading to the redefinition of property rights, the privatization of land, and the
liberalization of the land market.
In Tuscany, the event that initiated a new phase in the life of the Grand Duchy was
the arrival of the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty in 1737, which carried Tuscany to the
heart of European politics, thus marking the end of the regional state of the Medici.
From the beginning, the new dynasty endeavoured to assert royal power against the
local aristocracy’s former domination and to transform and simplify its laws and
institutions. Concerning property rights, the state of entailments was investigated in
order to achieve a reform of the system However, all three reports presented by the
officials encharged by the new government to prepare an outline of the situation were
against state intervention in such a sphere, at least with regard to noble entailments.
According to them, a law abolishing or limiting entailments would have destroyed
the nobility, for it was thanks to them that the noble families had been able to keep
their assets and remain rich. (Calonaci, 2005: 31). In fact, where, as in Tuscany, the
status of nobility seldom derived from a feudal deed and more often from the assets
accumulated by the family, wealth was indeed considered a necessary attribute of the
nobility (Donati, 1988: 123-124).
This concern was acknowledged by the law passed in 1747 which prohibited
entailments except for those of the nobility, which were maintained because their
aim was to uphold the main families of the State. Nevertheless, the law intervened
further into the matter than the three reports had advised: even noble entailments
were limited to four generations, and some guarantees for third-party interests
were introduced. Forty years later, under the rule of Peter Leopold, who would
subsequently become the Emperor Leopold I, property rights were redefined and
simplified (Montorzi, 1988). This delivered even heavier blows to entailments: first a
law in 1782 abolished the divisible ones after any one share or part of them had been
handed down four times, and in 1789 all forms of entailment were abolished (Tria,
1945: 97). After the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, while many Italian states
restored entailments, in Tuscany a law passed in 1814 reinstated that of 1789 and
pronounced the final word on this institution in the Grand Duchy.
The end of the legal ties on estates which had formerly prevented creditors from
seizing entailed assets exposed noble families to grave risk, as a great many of these
families were heavily in debt. Many eventually lost their lands in this way, disposed
of by forced sale at auctions. Upon the ruins of these families other estates came into
being, belonging to families which were rising in social rank: merchants, builders,
and even secret usurers (Biagioli, 1998).
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Giuliana Biagioli
Concerning ecclesiastical property, other laws had drastically limited the rights of
mortmain since the arrival of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. One of them dating
from 1751 prohibited Tuscan subjects from selling, donating or bequeathing their real
estate or personal property to ‘holy places’, and to all lay or ecclesiastical organizations
which could avail themselves of the privilege of mortmain. Peter Leopold, with two
laws of 1769 and 1771, confirmed the ban on these organizations buying land (Greco,
2004: 60-64). In 1784, all religious confraternities were suppressed and their assets
transferred to the parishes.
Mention has already been made of the redefinition and simplification of property
rights in Tuscany leading to the concentration of ownership in individual persons,
rather than collective or corporate entities. One can find examples of this in the fight
against the collective rights to use the land, either in farms or in wastelands, woods
and marshes. This was not a new trend, but it underwent a marked increase during
the age of enlightened reformism. In 1776 a first law in this area, concerned with the
collective use of the land in the contado and the Pistoia Apennine, abolished collective
grazing rights and the right to the second harvest on the land of private individuals,
who could from then on use it ‘as they consider to their greater advantage’. In the
marshes and the lakes that were considered private property, the collective right of
the inhabitants of neighbouring communities to fish and to exploit other marshland
resources was abolished. In 1778, legal measures were taken against another
customary right of very long standing, that of transhumance. The law, again aiming
to ensure the owners’ total and absolute control of the land and the full benefit of its
produce, abolished transhumance paths through private land and pasture servitudes
for transhumant animals, together with the magistrates who had until then organized
this activity. (Biagioli, n.d. [2004]: 417-418).
The last and perhaps the most noteworthy part of the reforms, certainly the one
that has provoked more debate among twentieth century historians, concerned the
privatization of the lands of the ‘holy places’, of the remaining commons, and of
the lands owned by the Crown and by the Order of the Knights of Saint Stephen.
The Grand Duke’s intention initially was to promote the development of Tuscan
agriculture through the improvement of neglected and barely productive lands.
According to this initial project, privatized land would be used to create a class of
small landowners, which was deemed to be lacking in the country, by employing
the old livello in a new way as a transferable perpetual contract. This project was
implemented, in the first phase of the reforms, on much of the land that had previously
passed through usurpation from collective ownership to that of the sovereign or of
religious orders. Here, the political will recreated two superimposed rights on the
same land: the eminent lordship of the owner and the right of possession in perpetuity
77
of the livellario. This was a paradoxical act, as it totally contradicted the efforts to
unify individual ownership, which had inspired most other laws in that very period.
The project was politically and socially important, but it failed because of economic
(the poverty of the small farmers chosen as livellari) and political problems (due to
the powerful composite lobbies of nobles, incumbent tenant farmers in the properties
to be conveyed, and merchants and financiers with liquid assets available to buy
land). Thus, the government abandoned the project of the new perpetual livelli a few
years later and decided to sell all common and Crown lands, and above all not to sell
them in small but rather in large plots (Biagioli, n.d. [2004]: 421). The process ended
with the strongest economic actors acquiring almost all the lands put on the market.
In the case of the common lands, preference as purchasers was often given to the
families mostly wealthy ones who already had the use of the land as livellari. Thus,
the process eventually ended up reuniting ownership in a single person, joining the
mainstream of the former legislation. As a whole, in the twenty-five years of Peter
Leopold’s reign, the redistribution of landed property involved about 20 to 25 per
cent of the landed property of the region (Mineccia, 2002: 111).
The Napoleonic Empire can be considered in this respect as a period of continuity

and consolidation of the policies on land ownership pursued by the Habsburg-
Lorraine, through a more centralized system of prescriptions by law and control. In
fact, one might say that the French rule was rather more successful in achieving some
of the projects that Peter Leopold and some (though not all) of his ministers had laid
down as fundamental issues in their programmes, but about which they were either
less audacious in their reforming action from the outset, or were unable to achieve
their aims because of the opposition by the representatives of landed interests.
One instance of the first situation was the case of ecclesiastical property, a
multifarious universe difficult to grasp and, when necessary, to fight against. In the
second half of the eighteenth century, under Peter Leopold, the Jesuits had already
lost their property in Tuscany. The action of Peter Leopold’s government in this field
was limited to the suppression of many religious corporations, the endowments of
which were transferred to other religious orders. The hardest blow to ecclesiastical
property, resulting in its almost complete disappearance, was in fact dealt during the
Napoleonic period with the suppression of the religious orders (no less than four
hundred convents and monasteries) and the sale of their land as ‘biens nationnaux’
[national assets] to pay for war costs.
The most striking example of the second situation was that of a truly essential
project to determine property rights in Tuscany, the plan for a new land cadastre on
a geometric basis, which can be ascribed to the French period. Peter Leopold had
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Giuliana Biagioli
tried during his reign to undertake the reform of the old land registers, as an essential
part of the new organization of the communes, the control of which had been given
to landowners who paid land tax in their territory above a certain threshold. After
nearly twenty years of discussions and two successive Deputations concerned with
the new cadastre, the enterprise had been substantially abandoned, mainly because of
opposition by the great Tuscan landowners (Büchi, 1915: 293 ff.; Biagioli, 1975: 3-13).
The issue of land registers was again brought forward by the Napoleonic government,
following the annexation of the Tuscan territory to the French Empire at the end of
1806. In 1807, a new cadastre was prescribed by Napoleon for all the Departments.
No local opposition was possible in this case, and negotiations took place only
concerning the criteria for the evaluation of land income (Biagioli, 1975: 3-35). The
geometric cadastre project in Tuscany survived Waterloo. The restored Habsburg-
Lorraine dynasty took it up again in 1817, and it was operating by the mid-1830s.
This became the most analytical and complete instrument of knowledge about an
Italian territory in the nineteenth century (Biagioli, 1975: 36-37).
The overall result of the succession of enlightened reforms and those under the
Napoleonic Empire was on the one hand the almost complete disappearance of
ecclesiastical property, the loss of the residual rights of most of the few remaining
collective properties in peripheral areas of the state, and on the other hand the
consolidation of the importance of the estates both of the strongest traditional nobility
and of the urban and rural bourgeoisie, as well as a faster pace concerning the creation
of free property to meet the needs of agrarian individualism.
VIII. Conclusions
From the foregoing, the following conclusions may be drawn:
• The concept of ownership and the formation of private property rights

underwent an evolution over the centuries. This was not a linear evolution, but rather
a series of ownership ‘paradigms that developed within previous forms, which
continued to leave substantial traces for centuries, as in the case of collective rights
to use the land of private owners.
• Access routes to ownership for dominant and upwardly mobile and dominant
groups also made use of previous contractual forms. In so doing, however, they
changed the social and economic significance of those institutions, as shown for
instance by the remarkable plasticity of the the livello and its strategic association
with the sharecropping contract in the change of the agrarian landscape and social
structure during the late medieval and the early modern periods.
79
• Tuscan history is a case of precocious development of urban and bourgeois

capitalism, which deeply interfered in rural society and affected social relations,
eventually preventing the creation or the survival of substantial small-scale peasant
property. Even the eighteenth-century attempt to encourage the latter by reintroducing
small-scale livelli was unsuccessful.
• Eighteenth century reforms and those that followed during Napoleonic rule
were crucial for the individualization of property and for the final dissolution of the
remaining collective use, as well as for the liberalization of the land market.
Archival sources
ARCHIVIO DI STATO DI PISA (ASP): Fiumi e Fossi, Registri, Estimi, secoli XVII-XVIII FF.
2601 and ff.; Comunità di Pisa, Bagni San Giuliano, Vicopisano, Bientina, Pontedera,
Vecchiano, Palaia, Lari, Ponsacco, Fauglia, Lorenzana, Peccioli, Castelfranco (109 land
registers).
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82
4. The social embeddedness of common property
rights in Navarra (Spain), sixteenth to twentieth
centuries1
José Miguel LANA BERASAIN, Iñaki IRIARTE GOÑI
I. Introduction
The use of the term embeddedness to a certain extent implies positioning in

view of the methodological alternative between individualism and holism, the first
being dominant in economic theory and the second extending widely in other social
sciences such as anthropology and sociology (Polanyi, 1994; Polanyi, Arensberg
and Pearson, 1976; Granovetter, 1985; Powell, 1990; Thompson, Francis, Levacic
and Mitchell, 1991). However, our concern is not about solving such dichotomies,
which we do not think make much sense, but rather about using the perspective
of ‘embeddedness of economic behaviour’ to tackle a question in which we are
especially interested, namely that of common property and its historical processes of
transformation.
Against the strongly utilitarian and individualistic thesis put forward by Hardin
(1968), Ostrom opposed – still without abandoning the rational choice approach – a
categorical theoretical and empirical re-evaluation of communal forms of resource
management (Ostrom, 1990). Somehow, she argued, institutions that have remained
in place for centuries must have been effective in an environmental, economic or
social sense.
An outstanding feature of such a widespread form of providing access to resources

as common property is the diversity of constitutional and management models
which we observe in historical studies (cf. De Moor, Shaw-Taylor and Warde, 2002).
Moreover, the paths of evolution of common property are also diverse, from radical
or partial privatization, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (cf.
Démelas and Vivier, 2003) and ‘individualization without privatization’ (Grüne, 2006;
Iriarte, 1997), to the nationalization of either property or management (GEHR, 1999),
1
This work is part of the Research projects HUM2006-01277 and HAR2009-09700 financed by the
Spanish Ministry of Science and Education. The authors are grateful to Rui Santos and Rosa Congost for
their careful editorial work, and to Bas Van Bavel, Gerard Béaur and two anonymous referees for their
comments. The authors are solely responsible for all remaining errors.
83
The social embeddedness of common property rights in Navarra (Spain)
or to its maintenance like ‘club goods’ in the hands of private concerns or of town
councils (Serrano, 2005).
How can we explain such diversity of constitution and evolution patterns? We

believe the explanation should be sought in both the environmental and socio-
cultural contexts in which economic decisions were embedded. In her latest book,
Elinor Ostrom has tackled precisely such a problem. Making use of game theory,
she suggests an ambitious analytic structure interlinking several levels in which the
so-called action arena constitutes ‘the focal unit of analysis’ where two other key
elements ‘– participants and an action situation – interact as they are affected by
exogenous variables […] and produce outcomes which in turn affect the participants
and the action situation’ (Ostrom, 2005: 13). Our research is partially inspired by this
proposal, although for the present chapter we have only studied ‘the factors affecting
the structure of an action arena’, following ‘the three clusters of exogenous variables’
identified by Ostrom (2005: 14-15): attributes of the biophysical world and material
conditions; the structure of the community in which the action arena is placed; and
the rules used by participants to order their relationships.
In the following pages, we will present the geographical spaces and the time frame
which we have taken as a ‘laboratory’ to discover and analyse the historical diversity
of forms of common property and management. Since our essential objective is to
further our understanding of how the application of common legal norms imposed by
the state has created different outcomes we will carry out a concise description of the
privatization and individualization processes which took place during the nineteenth
century. Finally, we will analyse in detail the characteristics of different rural areas
selected for this purpose, regarding the three sets of variables mentioned: biophysical
and material conditions, community attributes and ordering rules, attempting to relate
them to the diversity of outcomes in those processes, in order to achieve a better
understanding of the latter.
II. The laboratory: Navarra, its social agrosystems and the

outcomes of the process of transformation of the commons
Navarra is a territory with an area of a little over 10,000 km2, located at the North
of Spain next to the French border. Its location between climatic areas with oceanic
(NW), Alpine (NE) and Mediterranean (E and S) characteristics makes it a territory
with great environmental diversity, which is paralleled by strong diversity in many
other respects.
84
José Miguel Lana Berasain, Iñaki Iriarte Goñi
Figure 4.1. Navarra
Map by the authors.
In general, the nature of settlements involves a complex range of answers to

topography, climate, soils, arable conditions, transportation, exchanges, division of
labour, etc. The size of the settlement affects social values and relations, and brings
about different levels of complexity to solving human needs such as food, shelter,
fuel, clothes, social esteem, etc. In order to highlight the ecological, sociological
and political diversity of the region under study, we have distinguished five areas
according to their habitat types (see Figure 4.1). Each area displayed different
characteristics, which we have summarized in Table 4.1.
85
Table 4.1. Environment and habitat in Navarra, according to area*

Areas
Selected characteristics I II III IV V Navarra
Surface area (km2) 1,101 913 4,734 2,761 492 10,002
Average altitude of settlements (m) 269 790 554 382 399 502
Average slopes (%) 23 19 11 3 3 11
Average rainfall (mm/year) (1941-80) 2,131 1,617 1,085 520 732 1,017
Population 1786 30,519 10,492 86,785 61,455 38,497 227,748
Density (inh./km2) 1786 27.7 11.5 18.3 22.3 78.2 22.8
Settlements (no.) 1786 52 32 671 72 6 833
Average settlement size
587 328 129 854 6,416 273
(no. inhabitants) 1786
Sources. ELIAS CASTILLO, RUIZ BELTRÁN (1986: 124-127); Censo de 1787 (INE, 1991: 4434-
4603); Archivo General de Navarra, Reino, Estadística, lg. 25/2, lg. 6/8, lg. 16/7, lg. 31/1.
* The characteristics of areas I to IV exclude the six larger cities within their geographical
boundaries. Area V is an aggregation of the six cities and their surrounding areas.
Area I is the Navarra of cottages (caserío in Spanish, baserri in Basque). This

is a rainy area (over 2000 mm year) near the Atlantic Ocean, with a mild climate
(the average annual temperature is between 11 ºC and 14 ºC). Settlements were at
an average altitude of 269 metres above sea level, in landscapes of heavy slopes in
which nucleated settlement (in towns or villas with an urban demeanour), usually
lying at the bottoms of valleys, contrasted with a myriad of isolated farms scattered
all over the mountains. During the early modern period, a considerable number of
these farms belonged to landowners who lived in villages and cities and let them out
for sharecropping. The highest population density in the region could be found at the
end of the eighteenth century, following strong demographic growth related to the
spread of maize cultivation from the seventeenth century onwards. This was also the
area with the largest industrial population, tied to iron mining and steel furnaces.
Area II is alpine Navarra. Settlements lie amongst high mountains at an average

altitude of 800 metres, and rainfall is over 1,600 mm/year. In the early modern period,
its very long winters, recurrent frosts and heavy slopes restricted arable lands to the
bottom of valleys and drove the local economy towards sheep raising in nomadic
flocks. Below the Pyrenees, settlements were concentrated in medium sized villages
averaging 328 inhabitants in 1786, which at least since the eleventh century had
been politically clustered into three great districts (the valleys of Aézcoa, Salazar
and Roncal). Their social structure was quite equalitarian thanks to the institution
of hidalguía colectiva [collective nobility], according to which all natives of these
86
valleys were acknowledged as noble people and had license to plough and cultivate
common lands.
Area III can be characterized as the Navarra of hamlets (aldeas), with an average
of 129 inhabitants per village living in scattered hamlets that consisted of small
groups of houses around churches. Topography is less rugged than in the former
areas and valleys expand southwards, allowing for cereal cultivation to take place
in open fields in between forests. Altitude (average of 554 metres) and rainfall
(1,085 mm/year) guaranteed good yields for wheat cultivation. Its population
density was medium-low (twenty inhabitants per km2). The hamlets were grouped
into districts with several names (valles, cendeas, corriedos) in order to mediate
their relations with external agents (the Spanish crown, the exchequer) and to take
common advantage of some wastelands.
Area IV is the Navarra of towns (villas), on low and dry Mediterranean plains
(average of 382 metres above sea level and 520 mm/year of rainfall). Back in the
eighteenth century, it had large nucleated settlements, averaging 854 inhabitants.
Cultivation was favoured by soft slopes but otherwise hindered by long summer aridity
and the dry wind blowing from the northwest (cierzo). Irrigation thus became a crucial
factor here, which may help to explain the nucleated type of settlement. Arable lands
were arranged in fluvial terraces along its rivers (Ebro, Arga, Ega and Aragon), while
in dry high lands there were large pastures mixed with some vineyards and occasional
cereal fields. Land ownership tended to be concentrated in the hands of a few owners,
and tenants obtained arable land through lease or sharecropping contracts.
Finally, Area V includes the six cities with more than 3,000 inhabitants in 1786,
located in Areas III (Pamplona, Estella) and IV (Tudela, Corella) and on their
boundaries (Tafalla, Sangüesa). As we shall see below, the social composition of
these settlements reflected the complexity of urban life, with the highest rate of a
salaried population, artisans, traders, lawyers, employees and especially clergy,
monks and nuns.
Such diversity in ecological, sociological and political conditions coincided with

that found in the definitions of communal systems regarding entitlements, users,
and institutions2. Table 4.2 summarizes the main features of communal systems in
each area.
2
For a comparative study of commons in north-west Europe, see DE MOOR, SHAW-TAYLOR, WARDE (2002),
to which this chapter is indebted.
87
Table 4.2. Selected features of communal systems in Navarra, according to area

Areas
Selected features I II III IV V
Forest; Forest; Forest; Winter pasture; Pasture;
Bracken; Summer Pasture; Open fields;
Main resources Open fields;
Pasture; Pasture; Open fields; Arable land; Water
Mining Arable land Arable land Water
Local commoners; Local commoners;

Entitled users Entitled Entitled Foreign Foreign Inhabitants
houses houses commoners commoners
Share of local popu- High Low

Low Low
lation excluded from (restricted Medium-Low (limited by
(structural (limited by means
commons access means of
to entitlement) emigration) of production) production)
Lords;
Guilds of livestock Town council;
Main institutions Assemblies of Assemblies; Assemblies; Guilds of
governing the com- commoners Delegates; raisers;
Delegates; livestock raisers;
mons Guilds of Restricted
(batzarrak) sheep Lords Restricted
raisers assemblies; assemblies
Town council
In area I, where arable areas were very limited and mainly devoted to maize
and forage in enclosed fields, access to commons was limited to vecinos (people
who owned an entitled house with common rights), while a large part of the local
community (moradores in Spanish or maisterrak in Basque) was excluded from
common rights and the local political bodies. This strong sense of closed community
(vecindad) was the direct result of the defeat of feudal lords (linajes) in the factional
band wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries3.
In Area II, in which the economy was seriously limited by environmental constraints,
structural channels for migration allowed the persistence of almost general access to
commons and a quite equalitarian social structure. Despite a number of disputes and
lawsuits between farmers and stockmen and between villages and districts, the valley
community survived as an administrative entity until the 1840s, and some common
customs have survived to the present day4.
3
See CARO BAROJA (1974: 203-226), ARIZCUN (1988: 314-342), and IMIZCOZ and FLORISTAN (1993).
Historically, population increase caused growing pressure on the commons, and a toughening of
requirements to become a commoner. In the valley of Baztan, there were 460 entitled households in 1553
and 692 in 1646, which grew to 748 in 1678 and 725 in 1726. Meanwhile, the number of non-entitled
households grew from 100 in 1646 to 222 in 1678 and 374 in 1726: MADARIAGA and SERRALVO (1998:
226).
4
In 1726 most of the inhabitants had the title of vecinos (91.3 per cent) and only 8.7 per cent were
excluded from commons and charges, while in the whole of Navarra the share of the commoners was
56.6 per cent: MADARIAGA and SERRALVO (1998: 246-248). More information on the community of Roncal
can be found in IDOATE (1977); concerning the valley of Salazar, MARTÍN DUQUE (1963).
88
In the hamlets of Area III, access to commons was linked to the condition of vecino
(owner and resident in an entitled house), and common regulation was carried out
by assemblies (concejos in Spanish or batzarrak in Basque), in which commoners
approved and reformed bylaws, admitted or rejected applications to become
commoners, designated officials, resolved disputes and imposed fines. A distinctive
feature in this area was that some foreigners were acknowledged as vecinos foranos
(foreign commoners) and had access to commons, a privilege reserved to noblemen
who owned an entitled house (even if it were in ruins). This was a key factor of
continuing social struggle from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, because
communities used to try and remove this privilege5.
Finally, in Areas IV and V the main institution regulating users’ access to resources
(crops, grazing, manure, hunting, firewood, esparto, and building materials) was the
municipality. It was expressed at two levels: the assembly of commoners (concejo
abierto), which was reduced during the eighteenth century to a small political body
of twenty-one wealthy commoners (Junta de Veintena)6, and the executive council
that represented them. This town council managed municipal properties such as
arable lands, pasture lands, mills, ovens, etc., which were regularly leased out to
provide income for the municipal budget (bienes de propios), and also collected the
rents from commercial monopolies and excise taxes (arbitrios). It also managed the
public butchery, which used to raise its own flocks among which the pastures on the
commons were divided. The town council was also the guarantor of the common
lands (común de vecinos) and protected the common use rights of open fields by the
approval and fulfilment of bylaws.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, liberal policies applied to agriculture in Spain

attempted to make tabula rasa of the variety of situations when passing laws which
affected commons evenly. The main such law was the Confiscation Act (Desamorti-
zación in Spanish) of 1855, which attempted to privatize most of the commons
throughout the nation. The act was applied in Navarra with a delay of several years and
remained in force in this territory between 1861 and 1923. However, although the act
was the same in the whole province, its results were quite unequal in the different areas
which we have previously described. This diversity in results was possible because the
exception clauses which were stated in the act itself were used in different ways in the
different areas. Table 4.3 summarizes some of these differences.
5
See ZABALZA SEGUÍN (1994: 177-206), FLORISTÁN IMÍZCOZ (1985).
6
Act number 48 of the Courts of 1757 justified the establishment of the Juntas de Veintena with the
judgement that, because of ‘the tumults that happened regularly [in the assembly of commoners] it does
not vote with freedom, the persons in the Government are treated disrespectfully, and because the number
of plebeians is greater, the deliberations of justices and respectable people do not take effect’, Cuadernos
de las leyes y agravios, (I; p. 339, our translation).
89
Table 4.3. Changes in commons in Navarra, according to area (1860-1935)
Areas
Main indicators of change I II III IV V Navarra
Surface area (1000 ha) 110.1 91.3 473.4 276.2 49.2 1000.2
Commons around 1860 (ha) a 87,672 57,130 243,213 139,775 25,511 553,301
per cent of each area in Navarra 15.8 10.3 44.0 25.3 4.6 100
per cent of territory within area 78.6 62.5 51.4 50.6 51.9 55.3
Commons sold 1860-1935 (ha) 30 20 5,335 21,970 381 27,736
per cent of all commons sold
0.11 0.07 19.23 79.21 1.37 100
in Navarra
per cent of commons within area 0.03 0.04 2.19 15.72 1.49 5.01
Commons ploughed (ha) 1935 218 546 11,173 33,511 8,879 54,326
per cent of all commons ploughed
0.40 1.01 20.57 61.68 16.34 100
in Navarra
per cent of commons within area 0.25 0.96 4.59 23.97 34.80 9.82
Total sold and ploughed
0.28 0.99 6.79 36.69 36.30 14.83
(per cent of commons within area)
Source. IRIARTE (1997: 182-203, 308-326).

a
The surface area in commons includes an extensive wasteland (28,359 ha), the , the use
of which was shared undividedly by the population of seven municipalities within Area
IV and the cities of Tudela and Corella grouped in Area V, and was subsequently divided
among the municipalities in 1901. We have divided it between areas IV and V according
to the 1901 partition.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the proportion of land in common property was

a little over half the surface of the whole Navarrese territory, but this varied widely
across the described areas. In the northern areas (I and II), most of the surface was
communal. The share of land in commons diminished as we move towards central
(III) and southern (IV) Navarra, as well as in the cities (V). Even so, Areas III and
IV, because they were wider than the northern ones, gathered over two thirds of the
whole common surface (69 per cent). Subsequently, the privatizations promoted by
the Act of 1855 involved only 5 per cent of the Navarrese commons, but they were
heavily concentrated in Area IV, in which almost 16 per cent of the commons were
sold amounting to 79 per cent of all common land sales in Navarra, followed by
Area III with just over 2 per cent of its commons sold, accounting for 19 per cent
of common sales in the whole territory. In the remaining areas, the possibilities for
privatization created by the act scarcely materialized in effective sales.
Parallel to the sales process, and particularly since the end of the nineteenth century,
Navarrese commons had become the object of another transformation process, which
consisted of the partition of common lands among the vecinos of villages to cultivate
them, as a response to demand for land in the countryside. This did not imply the full
90
privatization of land ownership, but rather a temporary assignment in private usufruct

for cultivation. Its distribution also varied across the areas in ways that to a large
extent reproduced differences in the sales process. In fact, Areas III and IV together
amounted to somewhat over 80 per cent of all temporary ploughings, involving 5 per
cent of the commons in Area III and 24 per cent of those in Area IV. The weight of the
central and southern areas of the province was followed more closely in this case by
the ploughings carried out in some of the cities in Area V, amounting to 16 per cent of
all ploughings in the province and to 35 per cent of the commons under urban control.
In Areas I and II the process was again almost imperceptible. The cumulative result of
the privatization of ownership and usufruct ended up involving a modest 10 per cent
of all Navarrese commons, yet heavily concentrated around the larger cities in Area V
(36 per cent, nearly all in usufruct) and in the southernmost Area IV (37 per cent, of
which more than one third in sales), followed at considerable distance by the central
Area III (just under 7 per cent, of which nearly one third in sales).
To sum up, even though nineteenth-century liberal reforms tended to homogenize

the institutional framework throughout the whole province, great diversity can be
found in the transformation paths of commons. We will now explore how this diversity
relates to three sets of variables which may help to explain it, which we summarized
in the introduction as environmental and material conditions, community structure,
and constitution and access regulations.
III. Searching for the origins of diversity
III.1. Environment and material conditions

Beginning with the environmental and material conditions in the described areas,
their influence on transformation processes seems clear. In fact, sales of commons
and private ploughings in common land tended to be greater in Areas IV and V and,
at a distance, in Area III. Although very different, these three areas shared important
topographical features, namely low altitude and, in particular, moderately sloping
arable land. On the contrary, Area I, in spite of its mild climate and ample water
reserves, had too rough a relief to be able to expand agriculture significantly. A similar
situation occurred in Area II, combined with the excessive altitude of an important
part of its surface. From this perspective, it can be said that opportunities for land
privatization, either through ownership or usufruct, were largely taken in those areas
in which agricultural potential favoured the individualization of land use. On the
contrary, in the areas where activities related to livestock and forestry predominated,
such individualization of land use was perceived as an advantage to a lesser extent
and changes in that direction turned out to be very infrequent.
91
A second element pertaining to material conditions was the demography of the areas
involved in the use of the commons. Table 4.4 summarizes some population indicators
about the different areas of Navarra, which provide some clues in that respect.
No direct and univocal relation could be established between demographical

pressure and the degree of resource privatization. Common property was overwhelming
in Area I, the most densely populated area after the urban composite Area V. This was
also one of the areas which experienced higher population growth between 1646 and
1817, although this dynamism was eventually channelled through the migratory outlet
between 1850 and 1930. However, the survival of commons in this area matches that
of Area II, which had quite opposite features, namely, low population density and
long term demographic regression. On the other hand, contrary to Area I, a positive
relationship between population pressure and resource privatization does seem to
apply in areas III and IV, both of which had major demographical dynamism between
1646 and 1930.
Another apparent exception in this respect is that of the cities (Area V) which, in
spite of having experienced a high growth rate compared to the whole of Navarra
and which was very similar to that of Area IV, took a much more modest part in the
privatization of land ownership. Obviously, the non-agrarian occupations of a large
part of its population may have caused this behaviour. Still, one must keep in mind
that a much larger share of the commons controlled by cities was turned to private
usufruct than in all other areas, so that the urban area cannot be said to contradict
the relationship between demographic dynamics and some degree of privatization of
property rights in the commons. It is rather the institutional mode in which property
rights were transferred, with a much heavier share of temporary usufruct rather than
ownership, which is really at variance here as compared to areas III and IV.
In short, the relation between population growth and the privatization of commons
was not linear. Overall, the privatization of property rights in common lands did tend
to take place in areas in which population density and the average size of settlements
grew. However, the fact that cities were at variance concerning the institutional mode
of privatization of property rights, and especially the rather divergent behaviour of
Areas I and II in respect to this relationship, point to the need to consider different
explanatory factors.
Another variable related to demography is the structure of the habitat. The

implications of the type of settlement on social, economic and political structures are
not negligible. Firstly, in theory the larger the settlement, the more complex are the
tasks of resource supply and distribution, the more intense is the division of labour
and the more elaborated and hierarchical the instantiation of the political system. It
92
is not necessary to insist on these relationships, since they are widely acknowledged
by the broad literature on urban history and on the relations between cities, rural
areas and central states (cf. Epstein, 2001). Secondly, and more to the point here, it
would seem possible to sketch an inverse relationship between average settlement
size and the importance of common property, as well as a direct one between the
former variable and the thrust of privatization. This is indicated by the combination
of the lower ratios of common property and the higher intensity of privatization of
either ownership or use in Areas IV and V. Yet again, an exception remains which
questions the explanation by this factor alone, as in Area I a pattern of relatively large
settlements coexisted with both the highest share of common land in the territory and
the lowest rate of privatization of property rights, in whatever form the latter took.
Table 4.4. Population distribution and growth in Navarra, according to area,

seventeenth to twentieth century
Areas
Population indicators I II III IV V Navarra
Population density 1786 28.9 11.8 19.9 21.5 78.2 23.6
Population density 1930 32.2 9.3 26.8 41.0 140.4 35.8
587 328 129 854 6 416 273
631 284 174 1 531 12 362 412
Annual growth rate, 1786-1930 (%) 0.08 – 0.16 0.20 0.45 0.41 0.29
Annual growth rate, 1646-1817 (%) 0.29 – 0.03 0.19 0.34 0.15 0.23
Sources. Censo de 1787 (INE, 1991: 4434-4603); Archivo General de Navarra, Reino,
Estadística, lg. 25/2, lg. 6/8, lg. 16/7, lg. 31/1. Censo de la población de España según el
empadronamiento hecho el 31 de diciembre de 1930; GARCÍA ZÚÑIGA (1997: 179-209).
As a whole, even though it can be said that in general the material conditions in each
area did affect the diversity of behaviours, they cannot fully explain such diversity on
their own. This forces us to turn our attention to other explanatory factors, related to
differences in social structure patterns across the areas.
III.2. Social attributes

Table 4.5 synthesizes some of the main sociological characteristics of the five
areas at the end of the Ancient Regime. The data were extracted from the socio-
professional classification in Floridablanca’s census and are presented as rates per
thousand inhabitants, after the figures provided by this source have been corrected
and homogenized7. We have added a feudality indicator, defined as the rate of
7
There are two copies of the Floridablanca census. One is in the Library of the Real Academia de
la Historia, and it was published recently by the Spanish Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE, 1997).
93
population living in localities subject to seigniorial regime per thousand inhabitants.

The table further includes three synthetic indicators: the social complexity rate (the
ratio of non-agricultural related occupations to those linked to the primary sector,
including farmers, labourers, servants and nobles); the salaried rate (the ratio
of salaried labourers and servants to independent producers, farmers and farmers
reputed as noble); and the nobility rate (the ratio of the population considered as
noble to non-nobles), which reflects the weight of the social groups who enjoyed that
status and might therefore have had both fiscal advantages and advantages of access
to opportunities for social improvement outside the region. We can thus rely on four
indicators to enable a summarized characterization of several essential aspects of
the different social systems: the degree to which the communities were dependent
upon seigniorial coercive powers, the division of labour and the weight of activities
non-related to agriculture (through either the family or the market), and finally social
reputation and the distribution of opportunities for upward social mobility. The five
areas again displayed quite different features in all these respects.
The highest scores of the social complexity rate were to be found in cities (Area V),
followed at a large distance by the two areas characterized by concentrated habitat
(I and IV) and with the lowest values in the areas of scattered settlements. This is
therefore an indicator directly related to the type of habitat, as was to be expected.
A similar pattern is patent in the salaried rate, although in this case the cities and
the southern plains (Areas V and IV) were rather distanced from the other three
areas, where familial work within the frame of independent production units was
predominant. The opposite is the case with the nobility rate, at its highest in the
alpine area (II), at a large distance from the other two areas where family agriculture
prevailed (I and III). Within these three areas, the relevant distinctive feature turns
out to be the existence of a more or less extensive sector of the farming community
which enjoyed nobility status, which enabled them to aspire to high posts in the
army, royal bureaucracy or the Church. On the contrary, in the cities and the southern
plains (Areas V and IV), where the labour market played a central role and where
social complexity was high, the nobility rate was quite low. Finally, the weight of
feudal rule was important only in the southern plains with nucleated habitats, where
it reached up to 43 per cent of the population in the area.
Another copy, only for the Navarrese kingdom, can be found in the Archivo General de Navarra
(Pamplona). We have worked over both documents in order to purge the data.
94
Table 4.5. Social attributes of the communities in Navarra in 1787,

according to area (per thousand population)
Areas
Social structure indicators I II III IV V Navarra
1. Nobles (Hidalgos) 13.0 66.1 15.8 16.9 11.2 17.3
2. Farmers with noble condition 22.2 118.4 22.7 0.0 0.0 17.1
3. Farmers (Labradores) 129.1 51.9 161.8 70.0 40.6 107.1
4. Industrial sector 14.2 0.0 1.6 2.2 7.2 4.3
5. Craftsmen 28.8 30.7 23.4 26.1 50.4 29.7
6. Labourers (Jornaleros) 21.6 9.0 18.1 91.0 52.4 43.6
7. Servants 46.5 43.6 48.5 34.5 57.6 45.8
8. Traders 1.5 0.0 0.4 1.4 4.2 1.4
9. Lawyers 0.7 0.3 0.5 1.4 3.6 1.3
10. Employees 3.6 1.0 1.2 2.4 9.2 3.2
11. Priests 2.5 4.2 7.6 2.2 1.9 4.3
12. Idle clergy and members
4.5 6.7 4.2 12.3 35.2 11.8
of ecclesiastical orders
13. Feudality (population
6 14 68 428 0 143
under seigniorial power)
14. Social complexity rate a 0.24 0.15 0.15 0.23 0.69 0.24
15. Salaried rate b 0.45 0.31 0.36 1.79 2.71 0.72
16. Nobility rate c 0.14 1.25 0.14 0.07 0.04 0.14
Sources. Censo de 1787 (INE, 1991: 4434-4603) Archivo General de Navarra, Reino,
Estadística, lg. 25/2, lg. 6/8, lg. 16/7, lg. 31/1.
a
Social complexity rate = (4+5+8+9+10+11+12) / (1+2+3+6+7).
b
Salaried rate = (6+7) / (2+3).
c
Nobility rate = (1+2) / (3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12).
We can observe certain interesting regularities from the viewpoint of the

relationship between community attributes, common property of landed resources
and its transformation. Common property had a greater quantitative importance up
to 1860 and was less disperse from then until 1930 in those areas where independent
agrarian production based on family workforce was more important, also coinciding
with a wider extension of nobility status within the farming community. On the
opposite side of the relationship, in the areas where we found a greater presence of
the labour market and of salaried population, together with a restricted and selective
attribution of privilege linked to bloodline and greater dependence on feudal power,
common property was more limited and eventually came under more effective attack.
All things considered though, there were enough characteristics shared by areas with
different proportions of commons to justify more in-depth analysis of this.
95
III.3. Rules and institutions

The third set of variables which we have attempted to tackle refers to the rules
used by participants to order their relationships. We will divide them into two
parts: the overarching rules determining the structure of local political powers and
the constitutional rules ordering the operation of the community, specifying which
actions or outcomes were required, prohibited or permitted (bylaws).
Table 4.6. Modes of appointment of local authorities in Navarra in 1787,

according to area (per cent population)
Areas
Modes of appointment I II III IV V Navarra
Higher local authorities
A: Suggestion 26.4 61.0 8.6 0 0 9.6
A: Election 11.7 0 39.9 0 0 16.8
A: Rotation 6.1 0 5.4 0 0 2.9
B: Designation 1.8 1.5 2.9 42.9 0 13.0
B: Suggestion 8.6 37.6 15.1 55.0 100.0 40.4
B: Election 45.5 0 0.9 0 0 6.5
Without reference and others 0 0 27.2 2.1 0 11.0
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100
Lower local authorities
A: Election 37.9 61.0 47.4 0 0 26.0
A: Rotation 0 0 29.0 0 0 11.1
A: Cooptation 6.1 0 0 0 0 0.8
B: Designation 0 0 0 5.8 0 1.6
B: Suggestion 1.8 0 0.9 24.0 0 7.1
B: Election 24.1 37.6 2.8 11.3 0 9.1
B: Draw 0 0 6.6 28.7 100 27.2
B: Cooptation 5.4 0 3.4 0 0 2.0
Without reference and others 24.7 1.5 9.9 30.2 0 15.3
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100
Sources. Censo de 1787 (INE, 1991: 4434-4603); RAH (1802: passim); YANGUAS Y MI-
RANDA (1828:18-20).
A. Villages grouped in larger administrative units (valles, cendeas, etc.).

B. Towns and autonomous settlements.
Table 4.6 synthesizes the main features of the structure of local political
institutions. We have made a few operational distinctions. Firstly, we consider higher
local authorities such as majors (alcaldes), governors (gobernadores, almirantes,
capitanes) and delegates (diputados). Then, we consider lower local authorities
such as councillors or jurors (regidores, jurados). We have also made a distinction
96
between two kinds of villages: A) villages grouped into larger administrative districts,
and B) autonomous towns. Finally, we have classified the appointment of these
authorities into six types: 1) designation by an external power (a lord, the king, etc.);
2) suggestion of a few names (usually three) by the village and selection of one of
them by an external power (usually the royal delegate); 3) free direct election by the
village community; 4) rotation among heads of household; 5) random draw system
(insaculación), in which names were extracted at random from one or more bags
(usually there was one for patricians, hidalgos, and a different one for plebeians,
labradores); and lastly; 6) cooptation, that is to say, the last post holder appointed his
follower. The figures in the table portray the percentage of the population affected by
each of the systems described in each area.
In the case of higher local authorities, there was some diversity of situations. In
general, though, external powers (the king, lords) ruled these posts through direct
selection and appointment of the person in charge (especially in the seigniorial towns
in Area IV) or else, mainly in the case of the royal delegate (Virrey), selected one
out of the names proposed by the villages. But there were also some instances of
autonomous selection and appointment of these authorities by the communities,
particularly in the hamlets in Area III and in the villages in Area I. As for lower
local authorities and monitors, the general trend went in quite the opposite direction,
as the villages mostly named their own representatives (except in Area IV), but in
many different ways. Direct and free election (limited to entitled household heads)
prevailed in Areas II (99 per cent of the population), I (62 per cent) and III (50 per
cent), but there were also instances of rotation among households (29 per cent of the
population in Area III) and of a random selection, particularly in the towns in Area
IV (29 per cent).
Thus far, we have uncovered a combination of methods to set up local political

institutions, in which external rule and autonomous decisions interacted. The king
and the lords tended to control higher authorities, while lower posts (and everyday
matters) were mostly in the hands of the communities themselves.
On the other hand, as might be expected, the rules concerning local power
appointments seem to have been in direct relationship to the nature of the
communities’ constitutional rules. These comprised two kinds of rules. One was
formal bylaws written by the community or by an external agent (a royal or seigniorial
representative, a resident judge, etc.), which were legalized and guaranteed by a royal
court. The second kind was orally transmitted consuetudinary rules, acknowledged
and sanctioned by the local community. Table 4.7 summarizes the number of trials
97
concerning local bylaws drawn up royal courts (Real Consejo de Navarra and Corte
Real de Navarra) from the sixteenth century onwards.
We can draw some interesting conclusions from the table. The main and oldest
of these trials were located in Area III (region of hamlets), although if we consider
the number of localities in this region, we must conclude that almost half of the
settlements were not granted written statutes. We also find very few, and rather late,
bylaws in Area I. Both areas were particularly characterized by autonomous regimes
of political appointment. Do these facts bear some connection? We would like to
believe they do. As Marco Casari (2007) shows for the Italian Alps, the formalization
of rules in the presence of royal agents was not a necessary condition for the social
determination of the norms for the use of natural resources. On the other side of the
spectrum, we find abundant trials in areas II, IV and V, in this order. Clearly in the
latter areas sociological and political conditions pushed towards more formalized
local statutes. This activity was particularly intense during the eighteenth and the
nineteenth centuries, whilst demographic growth was more remarkable.
Table 4.7. Proceedings for legal confirmation of local bylaws at the Royal
Courts of Navarra, 1520-1833, according to area (number of trials)
Areas
Years I II III IV V Navarra
1520-1599 1 2 58 19 8 88
1600-1699 4 4 69 17 5 99
1700-1799 8 22 160 94 15 299
1800-1833 9 10 90 106 18 233
Total, trials (no.) 22 38 377 236 46 719
Total, localities (no.) 52 32 671 72 6 833
Trials per locality (no.) 0.42 1.19 0.56 3.28 7.67 0.86
Sources. Archivo General de Navarra, Catalogue of the Royal Courts Records (computer
file).
In short, there were two ways for the regulation of common resources. On the
one hand, there were communities – particularly in areas I and III – that maintained
informal arrangements sustained by long term interaction and social control among
villagers. On the other, there were communities that had replaced, crystallized or
complemented those informal arrangements with private order institutions in the form
of bylaws (ordenanzas). This change very probably responded to growing tension
and conflicts between users in a context of demographic increase and pervasive
commercialization. Indeed, urban and semi-urban areas (IV and V), which were also
socially and economically more complex and differentiated, as well as those where
98
communal property was more impinged upon by privatization, had their bylaws
approved rather early and replaced them several times throughout the eighteenth and
the nineteenth centuries. Their close relation with external powers of which they
depended probably both forced and supported the formalization process, whereas
other communities, characterized by more autonomous political orders, maintained
customary informal arrangements. The existence of Basque as the vernacular
language across areas I and III, the conversion of which to written form had been
frustrated in the sixteenth century, is probably another factor which should be taken
into account to explain the prevalence of informal consuetudinary modes of local
regulation. However, this too was not per se a determinant factor, since Area II was
Basque-speaking as well, which did not prevent intense statute formalization from
taking place there.
IV. Conclusions
We believe this case study of Navarra demonstrates that the concept of embeddedness
may indeed be useful to interpret the diversity in the extension of common property
rights, as well as their greater or lesser survival over time. Although not a very large
territory, Navarra has been historically characterized by its important environmental
and socioeconomic diversity. That has allowed us to differentiate five areas with
different features, each with different extents of communal rights. In such a context
of diversity, the results of the process of land liberalization from the mid-nineteenth
century onwards were very different across the areas described, in spite of the fact
that the legislation approved by the government was the same for all of them.
To seek the causes of such a diversity of outcomes, we have partially followed

the theoretical approach put forward by Ostrom (2005) and have searched across the
areas for relationships with biophysical and material conditions, with the attributes
of the community and with the rules used by participants to order their relationships.
A first conclusion is that while environmental and material conditions underlay
both the diversity of common systems observed in Navarra and their evolution, no
linear relationship existed between these conditions and the levels of privatization
of property rights in formerly common land, whether for ownership or usufruct. On
the one hand, the environmental potential to expand cultures seems to have been a
necessary but not a sufficient condition to alter communal systems. The same may be
said about population pressure, which might have given rise to very different solutions,
depending on its combination with other factors. The attributes of the community, in
turn, also played a relevant role, and everything seems to indicate that it was in the
socially and economically most complex and less equitable communities, as well as
those enjoying less political autonomy, that commons tended to be privatized to a
99
greater degree. And it was precisely in these communities that the formalization of
the norms regulating the use of common rights eventually became more necessary.
Summing up the relationships in a more descriptive way, we have found that

the greatest intensity of privatization of common land took place in those areas
combining good agricultural potential (moderate relief, low altitude, moderate
rainfall, high sunlight exposure, more pasture land than forests), with medium to
high population density in nucleated settlements, with some population growth, and
with more complex social and economic structures in which food production did not
absorb a high percentage of assets, the ratio between independent agrarian producers
and salaried workers was more skewed to the latter, and labour markets were more
precarious. In some of these areas, though not in the urban Area V, the weight of
feudal powers was significant, and nobility status – and therefore social reputation
and access to privileged spaces – was strictly reserved to a few. It was also in this kind
of communities that governance rules tended towards the exogenous appointment
of local powers, either directly or through a mixed system of candidate presentation
by the community, and bylaws tended to be formalized, codified in writing and
sanctioned before royal courts.
Some, but not all of these features were shared by other areas in which privatization
of either ownership or usufruct of common land scarcely had any effect. Area I also
showed relatively high population densities, with a nucleated habitat and some
demographical dynamism, together with comparable levels of social complexity.
However, pronounced slopes and excessive rainfall made the exploitation of forest
resources comparatively more important than agriculture, while the absence of feudal
powers, the access of wider social strata to a nobility status, and the prevalence of
endogenous mechanisms for the constitution of local power all conferred greater
homogeneity on the communities.
The contrast is especially interesting with the region of hamlets (Area III), in
which physical characteristics (height, slopes, rainfall and temperatures) would have
led us to expect more intense pressure regarding the privatization of the territory.
However, both the sales of commons and their distribution for private usufruct were
relatively scarce here, as compared to the more urbanized areas. This can be related
to more stable communities, both in their potential for population growth and their
social structure, with comparatively little social and economic complexity, with an
important role for family farming, a less pervasive labour market which, in any case,
leant to a large extent on permanent rather than temporary salaried workers, and
wider access to upward social mobility linked to widespread nobility status. A lesser
weight of seigniorial rule and some prevalence of endogenous mechanisms in the
100
appointment of local government posts complete this description and contribute to

explain the relatively infrequent need to formalize regulations to provide access to and
use of common resources in written form and to have this sanctioned by courts. The
continuous interaction between agents within a reduced and endogenously governed
framework was enough.
We believe that it was the complex interaction of all these kinds of variables that
determined different forms of embeddedness of common property rights, giving rise
to different outcomes and responses to liberalization and privatization processes.
Future research will attempt to untangle these interactions and to rank the importance
of each of these variables, or of their different conjunctures, in determining more
precisely these forms of embeddedness and their effects on the types, extent and
evolution of common property.
Archival sources
ARCHIVO GENERAL DE NAVARRA: Reino, Estadística, lg. 25/2, lg. 6/8, lg. 16/7, lg. 31/1:
Census of 1787 ‘Floridablanca’.
CATALOGUE OF THE ROYAL COURTS RECORDS (computer file).
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OSTROM, Elinor (2005), Understanding institutional diversity, Princeton, Princeton
University Press.
POLANYI, Karl (1994), El sustento del hombre, Barcelona, Mondadori.
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1817), Pamplona, Gobierno de Navarra.
103
5. Inheritance, land market and social reproduction
in an egalitarian system (Vernon, Normandy,
1750-1830)
Fabrice BOUDJAABA
I. Introduction
During the early modern period, France did not have just one customary law. Each
region had its particular customs, along with internal variations in different areas
based on differing legal traditions. In spite of this diversity, historians distinguish
two major inheritance systems, which differed in their norms for dividing patrimony,
their marriage practices, and their types of family organization. Essentially, these two
systems reflected the differences between northern and southern France. Historians
have examined the geographical boundary between these two systems ever since
the work of E. de Brandt, which was published in the early twentieth century
(Brandt, 1901; Yver, 1966; Le Roy Ladurie, 1976).
In the South of France, the inheritance system was largely inegalitarian1. One
child (usually the eldest) would inherit the household from his parents, while the
remaining siblings were left to fend for themselves. The latter could migrate to find
a spouse or stay at home and remain unmarried. If they did marry, custom stipulated
that their parents had to give them a dowry, which was usually made up of furniture
or cash. In this way, the parents were able to help their non-inheriting children, while
still protecting their patrimony. The inegalitarian system of inheritance would not
be viable without the practice of dowries and exclusions, but this system is a kind
of model, a much favoured option because, by excluding some of their descendants,
families would protect their landed patrimony. This is why historians have often
studied it: inegalitarian systems seem to be a simple and effective way to protect
family patrimony. In fact, French historians have been very interested in this system
since the works of Frédéric Le Play, in the second half of the nineteenth century, who
thought it was a model of social harmony at a time when industrialization seemed to
threaten traditional modes of family solidarity (Le Play, [1856] 1999).
In the North and the West of France, on the other hand, the inheritance system
was mostly egalitarian. This is true, for example, of the Paris region (Viret, 2004: 39-
1
Significant literature about these inegalitarian systems includes GOY and CHIVA (1981-1986), LAMAI-
SON (1979: 721-744), LAMAISON and CLAVERIE (1982), and COLLOMP (1983).
105
Inheritance, the land market and social reproduction in an egalitarian system
56, 135-140). In principle, each child received an equal share of the inheritance.
When they married, children could count on receiving a portion of their parents’
estate to help them establish their new household. The principle thus guaranteed that
one could only receive either gifts ‘amongst the living’ or inheritance upon death.
Where there was a dowry, there was no inheritance – it was necessary to opt for one
process or the other. This is why in this part of France, marriage settlements usually
followed the communal estate settlement model: when the couple purchased land, it
became the joint estate of both the husband and the wife. The property was managed
in common, but the ownership of the goods brought to the marriage by each spouse
remained separate from that of the goods commonly acquired during the marriage.
Thus the rights and interests of the family remained intact against those of the couple.
The legal distinction between personal property originating in inheritance and joint
property acquired during marriage prevented family property from being subsumed
within the property of in-laws.
Of course, there are many exceptions and variations in the customary geography
in France2. The Norman custom is a good example. This law stipulated an
egalitarian inheritance system, but also the exclusion of daughters from inheritance
(Musset, 1997). Each son received an equal share in inheritance, while daughters
received a dowry (consisting of furniture or cash) from their parents. In this way,
although it was still an egalitarian system, the male lineage could protect its land-
based patrimony.
Normans seem to have been concerned with the interests of their lineages. This
is why I have chosen to study the Norman case, in order to understand the tensions
between the interests of the couple and those of their kinship. Following the French
Revolution, the Civil Code replaced old customs in 1804. The Civil Code was based
on the Parisian custom and stipulated egalitarian inheritance and communal settlement
in marriage. The reaction of the Normans to the Civil Code can help us understand
their attachment to the old law and how they obtained economic resources within an
egalitarian system.
In fact, studies about egalitarian systems are scarce in French historiography

(Viret, 2004). These systems, it is argued, can cause many problems to the social
reproduction of families and to the protection of family patrimonies. Such problems
are thought to be numerous because historians assume that the inheritance of land
patrimony is the primary (if not the only) way of obtaining economic resources to
live, to get married and to raise a family in pre-industrial and rural societies.
2
See the map of the distribution of inheritance customs in sixteenth-century France in LE ROY LADURIE
(1976: 39).
106
Fabrice Boudjaaba
The purpose of this chapter is to understand how individuals could secure economic
resources for themselves and for their children in an egalitarian inheritance system.
In the first part, I will examine the roles of the inheritance process and the land
market in the acquisition of land. In the second part I will try to determine whether
the land market was conditioned by inheritance and family processes, or whether
the workings of the land market may explain more adequately how individuals and
families transformed their landed patrimony and obtained economic resources.
Figure 5.1. The villages in the region of Vernon
Map by the author.
The data I have used come from the area of Vernon, consisting of a small town and
ten surrounding villages situated in the Seine valley, between Paris and Rouen. It was
a region with very small land parcels (1.5 hectares on average) and a very unequal
distribution of property: in 1826, according to the cadastre napoléonien, 38 per cent
of owners (27 per cent in 1774) had a half hectare or less, on the whole owning only
5.7 per cent of the area (2 per cent in 1774). The most important owners, those with
five hectares and more represented around 7 per cent of all owners and owned 64 per
cent of the total area (Boudjaaba, 2008: 78-79).
107
Most peasants were landowners in the eighteenth century, and all of them were
in the nineteenth century. Most land was owner-occupied. Few households owned
enough land to be self-sufficient. Therefore, in this rural society it was necessary
to engage in trade relationships to enable sufficient economic resources for all. To
explain the existence of a labour market, one has to take into account the fact that the
large landowners, the church and the notables, needed day-labourers (who were small
owners as well) to work in their farms. While most peasants in the villages located
in the valley were wine growers, they also produced grain. The market also provided
cash to wine growers. For example, according to the 1806 census, 75 per cent of
household heads in Saint-Marcel were wine growers, while vineyards represented
only 6 per cent of the village land3.
II. Measuring inheritance and the land market
French historians, since Béaur’s book about Maintenon and Janville (Béaur, 1984),
admit that there were several means of obtaining land. The land market is not a
characteristic of the capitalist economy; rather it existed in pre-industrial societies.
But many historians still think that inheritance was the main process, perhaps almost
the exclusive one, for accessing landed patrimony, and possibly the only way of
acquiring resources. According to these historians, the land market existed in rural
societies, but its influence upon the economic resources of families was marginal,
when compared to the impact of inheritance. The land market existed, but only to a
small extent, because in pre-industrial societies individuals used to live in the context
of a low-liquidity economy. For example, individuals could receive a part of their
inheritance at the time of their marriage or at the time of their father’s death, but would
struggle to purchase a farm. They would lack the cash to buy land, and therefore to
increase their patrimony by way of the land market. This point of view is paradoxical
because these historians admit that the land market existed, but they think that
essentially it was inheritance that explained social reproduction, while on the other
hand they admit that the egalitarian inheritance system was an important problem for
the protection of family patrimony and therefore for social reproduction.
In fact, French historiography of egalitarian regions has focused less on inheritance

than on the land market. For the early modern period, we do not have much data on
inheritance, on its value or on its composition. Under the Ancien Régime, successions
were not drawn up by a notary nor by the royal administration. In the early eighteenth
century, the administration attempted to register this information4, but the French
rebelled against this because to give one’s patrimony to one’s children seemed
3
Archives départementales de l’Eure, 6 M 35.
4
Concerning the history of the administration, see MASSALOUX (1989).
108
Fabrice Boudjaaba
‘natural’ and they did not see why they should pay an additional tax for this purpose.
Thus, prior to the French Revolution, there is no quantitative data on successions from
parents to children, only concerning collateral successions (i.e., inheritances from
childless individuals); whereas after the Revolution French people had to declare
successions in a new register, the Registre des Mutations par Décès (RMD) (Daumard,
1973: 4-14)5. In contrast, there is excellent and abundant data on the land market
both before and after the Revolution. The royal law ordered buyers (or their notaries)
to declare the land transaction and to pay a small tax (1 per cent of the transaction
value). Drawing on the record of this Centième Denier, it is possible to study the land
market in a small region.
Thus, historians can measure land market activity under the Ancien Régime.
Though they cannot measure the actual value of successions, it can be estimated that
roughly 3.33 per cent of all landed patrimony would be transferred through inheritance
processes each year (since one generation equals thirty years, and 100 per cent landed
patrimony divided by thirty years equals 3.33 per cent each year, on average).
Several studies have reached the conclusion that land market activity was
proportionally less important. Less than 1 per cent of land was sold each year during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Beauce, between 1760 and 1789, each
year 0.66 per cent of the land was sold in the region of Maintenon, and 1.18 per
cent in the region of Janville (Béaur, 1984: 55). During the same period, in the area
of Vernon, each year 0.71 per cent of the land was sold. J. Viret obtained the same
result for the seventeenth century in the villages of Écouen and Villiers-le-Bel, near
Paris, where each year 0.83 per cent of land was sold (Viret, 2004: 206). Thus the
rather slow rhythm of land market transactions explains why some historians think its
influence was small: a period of 100 to 150 years were necessary for all the properties
to be sold on the land market, whereas all the properties would be inherited within
one generation, that is, in thyrty years6. Under these conditions, inheritance would
be three to four times more important than the market in the mechanisms of social
reproduction and the patrimonial process.
However, this conclusion is but a theory. Therefore, I think it is important to measure

the actual values of inheritance and market transfers for the eighteenth century. As
said above, this is possible for the nineteenth century because land inheritances, as
5
Law of 22 frimaire an VII (12 December 1798).
6
For example, in the preface to Viret’s book, Moriceau wrote: ‘on y mesure l’importance de la voie
successorale trois fois plus redistributrice (3,3 %) que le marché de la terre (0,8 %) au milieu du 17e siè-
cle’, [one can measure thus the importance of succession, which was three times as redistributive (3.3%)
as the land market in the mid-seventeenth century] (in VIRET, 2004: 9-10).
109
well as market transactions, were drawn up by notaries and/or the administration. For
the eighteenth century, I was able to use the land tax register, le Vingtième, for eight
villages in the region of Vernon in 1774. Fortunately, besides the value of individual
property, it also records the means by which landed patrimony was acquired:
inheritance share, settlement, wedding and purchase via the land market or other
trade forms. Thus le Vingtième allows us to measure the ratio between inheritance
and market in the composition of individual patrimonies at a given moment, though
not the amount of land put into circulation each year. On the other hand, it does not
record the actual values of transactions, but rather the estimated income of the land,
which can be used as a proxy for land value.
Table 5.1 compares the values of all market forms of land transfer to those of
inheritance and family transfers, between 1807 and 1826.
Inheritance in all its forms accounted for only 38 per cent of all land transfers
whereas trade in all its forms amounted to 57 per cent. Thus, transactions in the land
market were more important than inheritance at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
This result is amazing and differs from the conclusions of classic historiography.
Do the data either overestimate the importance of market transfers or underestimate

that of inheritance? We know the RMD records are not a perfect source; the French
rebelled against inheritance tax in the eighteenth century, as referred to above.
However, drawing on demographic data, we can ascertain that all the estates
were indeed registered, with the only exception of the estates with nothing, i.e.
dead children’s patrimony7. Maybe individuals underestimated the value of their
patrimony, in order to dodge high inheritance taxes? Tax evasion was possible, but
the RMD administration knew the region and the value of land, checked inheritance
declarations and compared them with other data (cadastre, the notary’s declaration).
Even if tax evasion was important (though I doubt it), the land market was relatively
more important in land transfers than inheritance.
7
Genealogic and Demographic Database of Vernon, directed by J.-P. Bardet and J. Renard (Centre
Roland Mousnier UMR 8596, Université de Paris IV Sorbonne): 200,000 individuals (born, married or
registered as having deceased) in this town and in forty neighbouring villages between 1690 and 1830.
110
Fabrice Boudjaaba
Table 5.1. Value of owned land by the type of transfer through which it was
acquired in 8 villages in the region of Vernon, 1774 (values in livres tournois)*
Types of land transfer Aggregate value % Average value
Market transfers
Sale 795,765 51.69 1,241
Sale with right of redemption 3,898 0.25 354
Retrocession a 3,945 0.26 986
Adjudication 48,518 3.15 898
Fieffe b 15,885 1.03 2,269
Long-term lease 9,989 0.65 1,998
Sub-total Market 878,000 57.03 7,746
Family and inheritance transfers
Démission c 3,300 0.21 3,300
Donation inter-vivos 24,395 1.58 1,016
Donation 13,216 0.86 389
Licitation d 4,705 0.31 2,353
Succession 543,873 35.33 2,956
Sub-total Family and inheritance 589,489 38.29 10,014
Other types of transfer
Transport de rente e 2,130 0.14 533
Rent constitution/New rent entitlement 2,211 0.14 201
Exchange 41,524 2.7 546
Cession 9,255 0.6 771
Others 16,854 1.09 936
Sub-total Other types 71,974 4.67 2, 987
Total 1,539,463 100.0 1,415
* In this region the ‘B sample’ (i.e. persons whose surnames begin with the letter B)
makes up a sample of 13 per cent of the whole population.
a
Act by which someone cedes to a third party a good purchased by fieffe.
b
Purchase against payment of a perpetual annuity.
c
Act by which someone renounces the rights to the land in favour of his or her children
or of another relative, often against housing and food.
d
Sale of undivided property.
e
Act by which someone cedes a rent to a third party.
Sources. Archives départementales de l’Eure (henceforth ADE), (AD27) Registres des
mutations par décès, 612Q 3 to 612Q 10 and Tables de vendeurs et acheteurs, AD27,
13Q2 to 13Q6 and 14Q2 to 14Q5; Genealogic and Demographic Database of Vernon
(Centre Roland-Mousnier, Université Paris-Sorbonne, henceforth GDDV).
111
Will we reach the same conclusion for the eighteenth century, before the French
Revolution? Let us consider two alternative arguments as to why the circulation of
land through trade might have increased in the nineteenth century: firstly, because the
sale of national assets, the biens nationaux, during the Revolutionary period, brought
new land to the market; secondly, because the new, fully egalitarian, inheritance
system might have increased the propensity to trade land (Boudjaaba, 2008: 93-97;
Bodinier and Teyssier, 2000: 442). If these were true, the importance of the land market
would be characteristic of the nineteenth century only. But we cannot substantiate
this argument, because only 1.5 per cent of the land was sold on the land market each
year between 1801 and 1827 (Boudjaaba, 2008: 190), in which case transfers through
inheritance were about twice as important as those through the land market.
Table 5.2. Value of owned land by the type of transfer through which it was
acquired in 8 villages in the region of Vernon, 1774 (values in livres tournois)
Types of land transfer Aggregate Income % Average income

Market transfers
Purchase 27,683 30.21 47
Fieffe 10,410 11.36 31
Fieffe and purchase 400 0.44 133
Sub-total Market 38,493 42.01 211
Family and inheritance transfers
Clameur or retrait lignager a 421 0.46 47
Dower and widowhood right 10 0.01 5
Licitation 50 0.05 50
Gift 16 0.02 4
Inheritance 30,817 33.63 44
Anciens propres b 13,982 15.26 66
Two of the above 1,475 1.61 164
Through the wife 4,197 4.58 34
Sub-total Family and Inheritance 50,968 55.62 414
Other types of transfers
Exchange 212 0.23 27
Cession 1,534 1.67 85
Unknown 431 0.47 36
Sub-total Other types 2 177 2.37 148
Total 91,638 100.0 45
a
Act by which someone exercized a right of preference by purchasing back a good that
had been sold by a relative to someone who was not a relative, because Norman law fa-
voured transfers within the family.
b
Patrimony owned by the family for two generations or more.
Source. ADE, Vingtième tax records, AD27, C83 to C93; GDDV.
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Fabrice Boudjaaba
Table 5.2 indicates how individuals acquired their landed patrimony, as registered
in 1774. As in Table 5.1, two kinds of acquisitions are compared: those through market
transfers and those by right of inheritance or family processes. As stated above, the
indicator for land value is its estimated income for tax purposes.
As the table shows, 42 per cent of the landed patrimony held in 1774 had been
purchased, whereas 56 per cent was owned by right of inheritance, settlement or
other family processes. This result is indeed different from the findings for the
nineteenth century, in that acquisition of land through inheritance and other forms of
transfer within the family was more important than through market transfers, and the
difference can be explained for the most part by the post-revolutionary development
of the land market. However, the main point is that even in 1774, the value of land
acquired through inheritance was not three or four times that acquired through the
land market, but only 32 per cent more. On the other hand, we should consider the
small proportion of anciens propres, i.e. parts of the patrimony that were owned by
the family for two generations and more, which stood for only 15 per cent of all land.
Thus, long-standing ‘family patrimony’ was very small, and it seems that attachment
to family land was a rather relative phenomenon in this rural society.
We can conclude that though the role of the market was indeed less important in
the eighteenth than in the nineteenth century, its influence is nevertheless crucial to
understanding the processes of land circulation.
III. Explaining the restricted role of inheritance in land circulation

and social reproduction
III.1. First hypothesis: Family processes other than inheritance explain

social reproduction and land circulation
III.1.a. A family market?
Some historians reject the role of the land market as an alternative to family
transfer processes in pre-industrial societies, because they think that, regardless
of its size, this was not a capitalist market, as individuals would rather sell land to
their relatives, and under these conditions the land market would work to protect the
family’s patrimony.
In fact, kinship and alliance raise questions about the ‘modernity’ of the market.
Did economic factors (supply and demand, price levels) structure the market, or was
there a sub-market in which kinship and/or alliance, driven by the will to keep the
land in the kin-group in the stricter or wider sense of the term, decisively influenced
113
transactions? (Both approaches can actually coexist.) This leads to the creation of a
second series of questions, concerning what is meant by ‘family (kinship) strategies’.
Did individuals behave like economic agents facing various circumstances, trying to
advance the interests of their immediate family? Or were they otherwise strategists
consciously pursuing policies of patrimony accumulation and conservation within
the kin-group, in which case sellers would not look for the best offer in the market,
but rather for a relative or an ‘ally’ on behalf of a wider family (kinship) strategy
spreading out over one and eventually several generations.
Some historians argue that marriage strategies and the practice of multiple
marriages between the same families reduced the economic tension caused by the
need to pay dowries. By arranging multiple marriages between the same families, the
kin-group could protect its interests by reducing the dispersion of its collective wealth
in dowries8. The textbook example of this practice is the ‘mariage remarquable’,
in which a brother and a sister from one family married a brother and sister from
another family. This situation is obviously unusual, embodying an ideal in which
neither family would lose any patrimony, as the dowries of the two daughters would
cancel each other out. Slightly less perfect but certainly more frequent were the
‘fronts de parenté’ [kinship fronts] (Levi, 1989: 53-95)9. Families would exchange
spouses over several generations, forming chains of economic solidarity. In fact, the
families behaved as though they were trying to neutralize the effect of marriages
on their patrimony through a series of interlocking marriages. As for Normandy,
these explanations are interesting because customary law protected kinship property
by several legal means (exclusion of endowed daughters from inheritance, retrait
lignager and clameur, etc.).
If this hypothesis were true, it would mean that inheritance and family processes of
land transfer played a very important role, even within the land market. However, this
is questionable because it postulates numerous land sales between relatives in rural
societies, and it is difficult to measure this phenomenon. Such a measure requires
that the genealogies of market actors are known in order to obtain a percentage of
land transactions between relatives, but historians cannot easily link economic data
to genealogical data. It was possible to do so in this study because we do have the
genealogical and demographic database of Vernon between 1690 and 1830. However,
because of homonymy, problems of legibility, and so forth, we could identify the
seller and the buyer unequivocally for only 57.3 per cent of all land transactions.
8
On this phenomenon, called ‘renchaînements d’alliances [interlocked alliances]’, see for example
DELILLE (1985).
9
Other authors (VIRET, 2003: 157-161) use the notion of ‘bassins d’alliance’ [alliance pools].
114
Fabrice Boudjaaba
Without taking genealogical information into account, we obtained only 6.8 per
cent of land market transactions that were explicitly carried out between kin, 264 out
of 3,876 contracts from 1750 to 1828. With genealogical and demographic data, the
proportion rises to 17.5 per cent, 251 out of 1,185 contracts in which we know both
the buyer’s and the seller’s genealogies. How much of the land market was indeed a
family market?
Table 5.3. Genealogical identification and percentage of land transactions

between relatives in the region of Vernon, 1750-1828
(transactions of the B sample of buyers)
No. With genealogical
Periods Between relatives
transactions identification
No. % No. %
1750-54 90 30 33.33 1 1.11
1755-59 136 46 33.82 9 6.62
1760-64 135 51 37.78 3 2.22
1765-69 154 77 50.00 10 6.49
1770-74 206 95 46.12 12 5.83
1775-79 192 86 44.79 5 2.60
1780-84 299 145 48.49 11 3.68
1785-89 250 113 45.20 10 4.00
1790-94 192 117 60.94 14 7.29
1795-99 290 154 53.10 9 3.10
1800-04 318 206 64.78 10 3.14
1805-09 240 155 64.58 19 7.92
1810-14 314 233 74.20 34 10.83
1815-19 358 271 75.70 37 10.34
1820-24 251 179 71.31 31 12.35
1825-28 451 299 66.30 40 8.87
Sources. ADE, Centième denier records, AD 27, 2C 2798 to 2C 2814; Tables des ven-
deurs et acheteurs, AD27, 612Q1 to 612Q10 and 613Q1 to 613Q6; GDDV.
In fact, the more genealogies we know, the more we find between-kin transactions in
the land market. To get a more accurate estimate, I analysed this phenomenon in five-
year periods between 1750 and 1828, comparing the percentage of family transactions
to that of genealogic identification, so as to understand to what extent the results reflect
the quality of the data. Table 5.3 demonstrates clearly that the more genealogies we
know, the higher the percentage of family transactions within the known cases is. In
fact, when we know genealogies for 75 per cent of market actors we may assume
we know virtually all the intervening kinship links, as the remaining individuals did
not belong to the area of Vernon and thus tended to have no kinship links within this
115
market. Based on the years that are covered more exhaustively, we can conclude that
family transactions amounted to 10 to 12 per cent of the land market.
If family changes amounted to only one out of ten contracts, this may be considered
an ‘impersonal’ market between economic agents, at least as far as kinship was
concerned. There was no sub-market in which kinship and/or kin alliances governed
transactions in order to keep the land within the kin-group, be it in the strict or a
wider sense of the term. The geography of properties can account for most of the
transactions between relatives, because in an egalitarian inheritance system relatives
are often neighbours. They would not necessarily want to sell to a relative in order
to keep the land within the kin-group, rather they would be interested in buying land
adjacent to their own, which as a result of the egalitarian system would often belong
to a relative, often to a brother.
III.1.b. Other legal means to hand down landed patrimony

The hypothesis of the role of inheritance is also questionable because in Normandy
people did not make much use of legal means to protect family patrimonies. Settlements
and wills were very rare, even after the new law, the Civil Code, replaced customary
law following the Revolution. In administration records, we can count only 169 wills
between 1750 and 1826 for the B population sample10, 12 of which occurred between
1750 and 1788 and 157 between 1789 and 1826. Between 1807 and 1826 alone there
were 111 testaments. The number of wills per year increased after the Revolution,
and especially after the Civil Code was put in place. Were Normans trying to keep to
their old ways in spite of the new law? One might think that having a contract drawn
up by a notary was a means of maintaining the old system that excluded the daughters
from inheritance, once they had received a dowry.
But when we analyse wills drawn up by a notary, such an explanation becomes

dubious. Out of the 38 actual notary deeds that have survived, 20 testators ordered
usufruct in favour of their wives; nine testators wrote a will because they had no
children; and eleven testators did so to show gratitude for assistance – often by a
child – because they were old and sick11.
The number of wills increased in the early nineteenth century because Norman
people wanted to protect widowed individuals (more specifically the widows),
because the Civil Code was less protective of the wife’s interests than was customary
law. We were able to reach similar conclusions concerning settlements and all
other legal processes (Boudjaaba, 2007: 54-60; 2008: 268-277, 309-317). Under
10
See footnote 8.
11
AD 27, 4E 27 150 and 4 E 27 174.
116
Fabrice Boudjaaba
these conditions, family and inheritance processes cannot be considered to play an

important role in land circulation and social reproduction in Normandy.
III.2 Second hypothesis: The land market really was an important means
of social reproduction and property circulation
In this case, it is necessary to understand how individuals used trade to increase
their landed patrimony, according to different social characteristics, beginning with
an analysis of the market actors’ ages. Figure 5.2 shows the participation of each age
group as a proportion of all buyers and sellers, respectively. The figure represents all
the actors who were active in the land market during the period 1750-1828, not their
behaviour during their entire lives; but these two phenomena are not very different.
Figure 5.2. Age makeup of market actors by type of participation in the market
in Vernon, 1750-1828 (B sample: 1873 sellers, 1851 buyers)
Percentage
16
14
Buyers
12
10
8
Sellers
6
0
<20
20-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
40-44
45-49
50-54
55-59
60-64
65-69
70-74
75-79
80-84
>85
Ages
Sources. ADE, Centième denier records, AD27, 2C 2798 to 2C 2814; Tables des vendeurs
et acheteurs, AD27, 612Q1 to 612Q10 and 613Q1 to 613Q6; GDDV.
We can immediately observe that the most active age group in the land market
was that of the 35 to 54 year-olds. Elderly people were less present than all other
groups, and also less than their proportion of the adult population in Vernon (i.e.
excluding those under twenty, who were only marginally active in the market). Older
people tended to be sellers rather than buyers, and also tended to sell more than they
bought in value (Table 5.4). This is why at the time of death the estates were smaller
than can be theoretically estimated (Boudjaaba, 2008: 194). The life-cycle hypothesis
explains both this situation and the restricted role of inheritance. This hypothesis is
117
not recent in historiography12, but its consequences on inheritance processes have

been underestimated because of the idea of attachment to land and of the idea that
in pre-industrial societies the market is not modern, which is a hindrance to the full
understanding of the results of the life-cycle phenomenon13. At the time of death, a lot
of people would already have sold an important part of their patrimony. They did not
give this part to children by way of settlement or in the form of a dowry composed
of land, but rather they chose to sell the land in order to finance their consumptions
during the final years of their lives.
Table 5.4. Distribution by age and value of land transactions

in Vernon, 1750-1828 (B sample)
% of population % %
Ages (an XII, 1804) of sold land value of bought land value
< 20 43.4 0.66 0.86
20-29 13.3 11.96 7.76
30-39 12.3 17.29 25.16
40-49 11.9 26.05 28.15
50-59 8.3 22.74 17.25
60-69 6.3 12.21 19.27
>70 4.2 9.10 1.54
Sources. ADE, Census an XII, AD 27, 6M 35; Centième denier records, AD 27, 2C 2798
to 2C 2814; Tables des vendeurs et acheteurs, AD27, 612Q1 to 612Q10 and 613Q1 to
613Q6; GDDV.
The important activity of the 30 to 49 years-old age groups shows that, in spite of
the life-cycle effect, sales were not mainly transfers from one generation to the next,
but rather they were above all transfers within the same generation. Adult people
alternately bought and sold parcels (and bought them more often then they sold) in
order to assemble the best (not necessarily the biggest) possible farms. Between the
ages of 30 and 49, they accounted for a larger proportion of bought than of sold value.
They were numerous in the land market as compared to younger people who often
had not yet saved enough money to buy land and were less likely to have inherited
land which they might sell, and to older people who, besides being less in number
because of mortality rates, were active mainly as sellers.
12
The life cycle hypothesis has been especially important in economic research since F. Modigliani’s
article( MODIGLIANI, 1954: 338-446), but this idea has been actively present in historical studies mostly
since the translation of A. Chayanov’s book on the peasant economy (CHAYANOV, 1966). In Anglo-Saxon
historiography the idea of ‘household economy’ is very important (CLARK, 1979; 1990; SABEAN,1990: 363).
In France, life-cycle studies are not abundant (BÉAUR, 1991: 275-288; LORENZETTI, 1999: 449ff).
13
This is a paradoxical element in Chayanov’s book, which observes effects of the life-cycle without
admitting the importance of markets in rural economy (DÉROUET, 2004: 53-54).
118
Fabrice Boudjaaba
Table 5.5. Regression for patrimonial situation,

8 villages in the region of Vernon, 1774
Independent variables Coefficient Student’s T Test P>|[z] Significance a
Landowner’s age (reference: 40-49 years old)
< 30 6.746 0.27 0.785 n.s.
30-39 8.391 0.048 0.629 n.s.
50-59 24.769 1.61 0.108 n.s.
60-69 17.138 0.92 0.359 n.s.
>70 years old 17.330 0.63 0.532 n.s.
Marital status (reference: married)
Single – 3.259 – 0.18 0.857 n.s.
Widowed 8.479 0.45 0.651 n.s.
Unknown 78.204 2.93 0.004 ***
Plots by right of inheritance (Lot herité) (reference: none)
1 plot (lot hérité) 0.0974 0.01 0.995 n.s.
2 plots 13.227 0.67 0.502 n.s.
3 or more plots 76.022 2.30 0.022 ***
Received anciens propres (reference: none)
1 ‘ancien propre’ 15.203 0.91 0.364 n.s.
Purchased plots (reference: none)
1 plot 53.487 3.62 0.000 ***
2 plots 50.742 2.55 0.011 **
3 or more plots 231.642 11.51 0.000 ***
Contracted fieffes (reference: none)
1 fieffe 42.217 3.02 0.003 ***
2 fieffes 11.562 0.50 0.619 n.s.
3 or more fieffes 37.409 1.22 0.222 n.s.
Wife’s plot (Apport de l’épouse) (reference : none)
Yes (one or more) 30.037 2.03 0.043 **
Number of brothers who were landowners in the area in 1774 (ref: none)
1 brother 8.850 0.65 0.513 n.s.
2 or more brother 17.029 1.04 0.299 n.s.
Father (reference: living)
Dead – 15.656 – 0.66 0.508 n.s.
Unknown 3.756 0.14 0.889 n.s.
Mother (reference: living)
Dead – 23.213 – 1.42 0.155 n.s.
Unknown 19.711 0.84 0.403 n.s.
Constant 34.520 0.1.21 0.226 n.s.
Source. ADE, Vingtième tax records AD27, C83 to C93 ; Centième denier records, AD 27,
2C 2798 to 2C 2814 ; Tables des vendeurs et acheteurs, AD27, 612Q1 to 612Q10 and
613Q1 to 613Q6 ; GDDV. a Instances where the relationships are significant with over
99 per cent probability are indicated with ‘***’ Those over 95 per cent are indicated with
‘**’. Those that are not significant over 95 per cent probability are indicated with ‘n.s.’.
Number of observations: 447. F(25, 421) = 8.04. Prob>chi2 = 0.0000. R² = 0.3231
119
In order to assess the role of the land market in social reproduction and patrimony
building, it is important to study how patrimonies are formed. As the Vingtième tax
records indicate how individuals came into each piece of their landed patrimony, it is
possible to carry out an econometric analysis that relates their patrimonial situation
(defined as the amount of real estate – land and buildings – they owned in 1774) with
a set of variables in a regression model (Table 5.5).
Out of all the variables used as predictors of the patrimonial situation of each
landowner who paid Vingtième tax, we have distinguished three sets: individual
characteristics (age, marital status, number of brothers, parents living or dead), land
obtained through inheritance (inherited plots, anciens propres) and marriage (wife’s
plot), and land obtained through the market (purchased plots and contracted fieffes).
Since the statistical effect of each independent variable is captured ceteris paribus
(i.e. net of the effects of all the other variables in the model), it is possible to assess the
significance of their individual relations with the dependent variable, the patrimonial
situation of the subjects14.
The fact of having purchased a plot or a house had a significant and immediate
impact on one’s patrimonial situation, ceteris paribus. Those who had bought land in
the market were in all probability richer than those who had not.
On the other hand, inheritance had no immediate effect on the level of patrimony.
Only those who had inherited at least three plots of land had significantly richer
patrimonies than those who had inherited no land at all. However, in terms of family
transfers, those whose wives had brought plots to the family tended to be richer.
These results hold regardless of matrimonial and family situations. Being a buyer
of land statistically relates to the individuals’ patrimonial situation, even if they had
several brothers (and therefore were not the only heir). To have married a woman
who brought land to the family was more positively related to a good patrimonial
situation than to have inherited land. This does not mean that inheritance had no
influence on the patrimonial situation, but it does mean that inherited land might be
14
Statistical significance means the probability that the observed co-variation is not due to chance. The
observed impact can be either positive (the value of the independent variable relates to a richer patrimonial
situation) or negative (it relates to a poorer patrimonial situation), as expressed by the coefficient sign.
All significant relationships in the model portrayed in Table 5.5 are positive. For instance, in the variable
‘purchased plot’, the value ‘purchased one plot’ (as against the reference value ‘purchased no plots’) has
a statistically significant positive effect on the patrimonial situation (over 99 per cent probability that
the observations are not correlated simply by chance), regardless of other features of individuals. Each
variable’s impact is assessed in the framework of the overall model, which in this case explains about 32
per cent of all the observed variance among individual patrimonial situations (R2).
120
Fabrice Boudjaaba
sold, converted into cash, and then eventually put into new plots purchased in the
market because they were better land, or nearer one’s farm.
IV. Conclusions
Parents dying and children inheriting are important events, a significant step in family
history, but also an economic step for the heirs. Nevertheless, even in a traditional
society where land was essential to the peasants’ household economy, the role of
inheritance was complex. In such a society, inheritance and the land market could play
equally important roles in the circulation of land and in patrimony building.
When reading the Norman custom, it would seem that the patrimonial interests
of lineage and inheritance were very important. But although the equal inheritance
system would apparently leave patrimonies in an increasingly delapidated state,
Normans did not try to bypass egalitarian rules (as reinforced by the Civil Code), and
they did not create kinship strategies to keep patrimonies untouched. From a legal
point of view, according to Norman law, male inheritance was an essential principle,
but from a Norman peasant’s point of view it was but a relative one.
In order to understand this apparent paradox, one must reconsider the assumptions
related to peasants’ attitudes towards land and their behaviour in the land market. In
owner-occupier farming, I am not sure that a poor peasant would want to keep land
within his family and kin-group, or that he was especially attached to his plot of land.
Plots of land were interchangeable. Under this assumption, we can understand our
findings regarding the role of the land market in this society.
The distribution of holdings did affect behaviour and market activity, but the latter
in turn had an effect on the distribution of holdings. Where small landowners were
very numerous, the land market followed a pattern in which an increasing number of
landowners brought about higher market potential: the more landowners there were,
the more potential sellers and buyers. On the other hand, most of the peasantry did
not try to accumulate plots of land in order to be self-sufficient, because this aim
was inaccessible. Becoming a larger landowner was not an essential goal for smaller
owners – rather, they tried to muster economic resources through leasing, wages, and
trade. These other possibilities explain why so many small peasant holdings have
coexisted with large landowners.
I hope I have shown that in order to understand egalitarian inheritance systems, it

is not enough to study inheritance tax records alone; one must analyse the inheritance
121
processes, the land market and the life-cycle, along with the labour and credit markets15.
One must also consider family organization. In Vernon, the household model was
the nuclear family. This may help explain why the role of land inheritance was only
relative. Because of this family system, Norman people tried to live without assistance
from their children; they tried to go on living in their own households even when
they were old and sick. They chose to exploit market opportunities and to secure the
financial resources they needed by selling off land, even if as a result they were unable
to pass much landed patrimony down to their children through inheritance
Archival sources
ARCHIVES DÉPARTEMENTALES DE L’EURE (ADE): Vingtième tax records: C83 to C93;
Centième denier records: 2C 2798 to 2C 2814; Tables des vendeurs et acheteurs: 612Q1
to 612Q10 and 613Q1 to 613Q6; Notary records: 4E 27 96 to 4E 27 189; Census an XII:
6M 35.
CENTRE ROLAND-MOUSNIER, UNIVERSITÉ PARIS-SORBONNE: Genealogic and Demographic
Database of Vernon (GDDV).
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de propriété beaucerons dans les régions de Maintenon et de Janville de 1761 à 1790,
Paris, EHESS.
BÉAUR, Gérard (1991), ‘Investissement foncier, épargne et cycle de vie dans le pays
chartrain au XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire & Mesure, VI, 3-4, p. 275-288.
BODINIER, Bernard and TEYSSIER, Éric (2000), L’événement le plus important de la
Révolution Française. La vente des biens nationaux (1789-1867) en France et dans les
territoires annexés, Paris, CTHS.
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Vernon (1760-1830). Le patrilignage normand face au Code Civil’, Histoire et Sociétés
Rurales, 2, p. 33-66.
BOUDJAABA, Fabrice (2008), Des paysans attachés à la terre? Familles, marchés et
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en matière successorale, Paris, L. Larose.
15
It is very difficult to study the labour market and to relate it to the land market and to inheritance,
because there are no serial data about it in the area of Vernon. However, it would be important to do so
because individuals often paid their land purchases in cash, which is likely to have been partially obtained
through wages.
122
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LAMAISON, Pierre (1979), ‘Les stratégies matrimoniales dans un système complexe de
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LAMAISON, Pierre and CLAVERIE, Élisabeth (1982), L’impossible mariage. Violence et
parenté en Gévaudan, Paris, Hachette.
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Paris, Nathan.
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and inheritance: Rural society in western Europe 1200-1800, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p. 37-70.
LEVI, Giovanni (1989), Le pouvoir au village. Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du
XVIIe
siècle, Paris, Gallimard.
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reproduction familiale au Tessin, Bern, Peter Lang.
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XIXe
siècles, Genève, Droz and EPHE IVe Section.
MODIGLIANI, Franco (1954), ‘Utility analysis and the consumption function: An
interpretation of cross-section data’, in Kenneth KURIHABA (ed.), Post-Keynesian
economics, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, p. 388-436.
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à la Révolution, Caen, Presses Universitaires de Caen.
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SABEAN, David (1990), Property, production and family in Neckerhausen, 1700-1870,

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124
6. An English or a continental way?
The great agrarian reforms in Denmark and
Schleswig-Holstein in the late eighteenth century
Carsten PORSKROG RASMUSSEN
I. Introduction
The second half of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth
century saw remarkable agrarian reforms in major parts of Europe. Famous examples
in northern and eastern Europe are the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia, the
reforms of Maria Theresia and Joseph II in the Habsburg lands and the failed reforms
of Katherine the Great in Russia. They all involved government intervention with
the aim of furthering economic growth, but also with a clear anti-feudal tendency.
One further example is that of Denmark, or rather the Oldenburg monarchy, which
also comprised Norway, the twin duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, Iceland and
the Faroe Islands, as well as a few minor colonies. The agrarian reforms mainly
concerned Denmark itself and the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
Figure 6.1. Denmark and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein
125
The great agrarian reforms in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein
The reform movement was furthered by several forces. One was the general
economic growth across Europe, radiating out from England. Rising agricultural
prices were a direct incentive, and the more productive agriculture of England and
some other areas offered an example to follow. The ideas of Enlightenment were
another force behind the reforms. Feudal ideals became increasingly unacceptable for
anyone wishing to be regarded within the advanced elites of Europe.
Many reformers looked towards England, which increasingly became an

economic and cultural leader. This was also the case in Denmark; the historian Dan
Ch. Christensen has lately argued for the importance of the theoretical inspiration of
French physiocrats and English liberals, in contrast with older views that stressed
the importance of German Kameralismus (Christensen, 2002: 9-36). This is largely
convincing, but requires one important qualification: many reformers in Denmark and
Schleswig-Holstein deliberately differed from what they conceived as the English
path to reform. According to them, feudalism should be replaced by a mixture of
liberalism and state regulation to further the interest of the class of peasant farmers,
and the ideal farmer became the owner-occupier peasant rather than the capitalist
tenant (Jensen, [1936] 1986; Hvidtfeldt, 1963)1.
II. Danish agrarian society around 1750
By the mid-eighteenth century Danish agrarian society was feudal, traditional and
regulated (Dombernowsky, 1988; Henningsen, 2006: 157-300; Skrubbeltrang, 1978;
cf. Christiansen, 1996: 125-301 on feudal aspects). Most of the rural population lived
in nucleated villages with open fields. Each farm held a large number of strips of
arable land which in some years were used individually for grain. Grazing was done
collectively both on these fields in the years they were not used for grain, as well as
on areas never ploughed, but this use was regulated by proportionate rights for each
farm. Alienation of individual plots from farms had generally been banned since the
end of the Middle Ages, and ownership referred not to specific plots, but rather to a
certain share of the village lands. In principle, a peasant or his landlord could demand
the redistribution of village lands, if he could convince the authorities that the allotted
proportions did not reflect his proper due.
There were about 60,000 peasant farms in the kingdom, each typically holding
ten to twenty hectares of arable land, plus meadows, pastures and other types of
land. Apart from informal de facto farm divisions that had primarily taken place
in the province of Jylland, the number had hardly changed since 1500. Landlords
1
Both Jensen and Hvidtfeldt interpreted this as a Danish ‘social‘ reform line, based on German
Kameralismus. I shall rather stress here the ideal of the owner-occupier peasant.
126
Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen
endeavoured to keep farms to a size that enabled farmers not only to pay rents but
also to perform labour dues using four horses; and the state on its part had tried to
protect the farm as a solid tax-paying unit. Consequently, rising population created
a class of cottagers who held very little or no land. In the eastern, fertile parts of the
country the number of cottagers by 1750 equalled that of farmers, while farmers still
formed the majority in the western parts. About 10 per cent of the land was included
in demesnes, which belonged to noble or bourgeois landlords and was farmed either
by the landlords themselves or leased out on short leases.
Virtually all peasants and cottagers were tenants, mostly of private manors, but
substantial minorities of the crown or of church institutions, and in the legal concepts
of the time the land and also most of the buildings were regarded as the property of
the landlord. In practical terms, the property rights of the lord consisted of the right
to receive rents and corvée (labour dues) from the tenant, to choose new tenants,
and to sell or otherwise transfer the land. However, the extent of these rights was
variable. Rents had been frozen since the fifteenth century, whereas labour dues
could be increased arbitrarily by landlords, even to existing tenants. Price increases,
even though rents kept a real value because they were due in kind, obviously were
an incentive to demesne farming, which had risen during in the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries making labour dues as important as rents. However, further
increases of demesne land had been banned since 1682. Landlords thus had a very
limited right to change the structure of their manors.
The limitations in the rights of landlords were primarily defined by the state rather
than by opposing property rights of the tenants. An entry fine was due at the start of
the tenancy period, which was freely negotiable and can be understood as a purchase
of the lease. In earlier and better times it had amounted to considerable sums, but
around 1750 its value was rather moderate. This had to do with high taxation and
other burdens weighing upon the peasants, but also with the fact that the tenants’
property rights were not very strong. They had the lifelong right to use the lands of
the holding providing they met all their obligations, but many tenants were evicted
due to arrears in rents or taxes, among other reasons. Even if the peasant kept the
holding during all of his lifetime, tenancy was generally not transferable, except for
parts of Jylland and some smaller islands where the peasants owned the buildings.
Furthermore, peasants were subject to landlord powers in many ways. Since the
late Middle Ages, all noble landlords had held police authority over their peasants,
and this authority had been expanded to considerable groups of the new bourgeois
landlords. After absolutism was introduced in 1660, the government invested landlords
with the powerful but burdensome tasks of conscripting soldiers and collecting taxes
127
from the peasants in their estates. In particular, the right to decide who was to serve
in the army was yet another arbitrary power in the hands of the landlord. Since 1733
all the male population had been tied to the manor by the so-called stavnsbånd or
bondage, which compelled men to remain within the boundaries of the manor on
which they had been born.
The fact that all these powers were united in the hands of landlords or their stewards
made the world look very feudal, as seen from the farms and cottages. The state was
rather absent, as far as the peasants were concerned. In everyday life they met one
dominant power; that of the manor, even though the right to appeal to the king and
state authorities was of some importance. Nonetheless, this must not be misconceived
as the result of a very weak state in relation to landlords. The absolutist rulers had
rather chosen to use the existing feudal order as their local arm, but in questions that
really mattered to them – the size of the army, the amount of taxation, and major
political issues – the government had gained a free hand and used it. Absolutism had
strengthened the manor as a social institution, rather than manor owners as a social
group (Munck 1979; Porskrog Rasmussen, 2004: 53-56).
The social status of peasant farmers was ambiguous. They were the dominant
group versus cottagers and servants in the village, and farmers were mostly recruited
among farmers’ sons. However, peasants met with little respect from most other
groups in society, and were largely dismissed as primitive and stupid. The fact that
they were under feudal lordship also made upper social groups look down on them
(Henningsen, 2006: 398-530). Their position was also affected by the fact that only
a minority were fully able to meet the demands made by the landlord and the crown.
Most peasants were in arrears with some dues some of the time, which made them
dependent on the landlord’s ‘mercy’.
III. Agricultural systems in Schleswig-Holstein
With some simplification, the agrarian regime of Denmark may be described as a set
of variations of one single theme. The duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, on the other
hand, contained more differences within a smaller territory. The political structure
itself was complicated, particularly in Holstein where the king of Denmark and the
duke of Holstein-Gottorp each had their crown districts while sharing authority over
noble manors till 1773, whereas a cadet branch, the dukes of Schleswig-Holstein-
Plön, held more limited sovereignty in some districts.
Schleswig and Holstein were divided into three main geo-morphological regions:
marshes in the far west, fertile clay soils in the east, and the sandy so-called geest plains
128
in-between. Social organization too was more diversified (Porskrog Rasmussen, 2003,
2006). The greatest contrast to Danish agrarian society was found in the marshlands
in the south-western parts of the duchies, where settlements consisted of individual
farms rather than villages with open fields, and property rights fully applied to each
individual plot, which could be sold, leased out, or otherwise transferred. Such liberal
forms of land ownership had created a rural society with great social differences, but
few legal specifications. There was a numerous class of landless labourers, many
smallholders, rather few middling farmers, and a small number of farmers holding
very large farms. A part of the land was leased out, mostly on short term contracts
and a purely economic basis, but most belonged to people who lived within the area
and were regarded as farmers.
Most other peasants in the duchies lived in open field villages under some kind
of lordship and manorial superstructure. The most widespread manorial form can be
described by the classic German term of Rentengrundherrschaft, a rent-based system
in which peasants paid rents to landlords but performed no corvée, there were few
or no demesnes, and farms were formally or informally hereditary2. Most property
rights rested either with the individual peasants or with the village community, while
the rights of landlords had become little more than the right to collect a fixed rent.
This system prevailed in most crown lands and in some private manors, the latter
mainly in geest regions. The social structure of villages in these areas resembled that
of Denmark, with a clear-cut social division into farmers and cottagers.
There were quite different manorial relations in the private manors to the southeast,
from Flensburg to Lübeck and Hamburg further south, plus in a few crown estates in
the same region and a few private manors to the west. These areas may be described
as Gutsherrschaft, a system of corvée-based demesne farming. Demesnes typically
made up half the land, and the other half was farmed by peasant villages in which
there was the same clear-cut division between farmers and cottagers as in other regions
outside the marshes, but where cottagers clearly outnumbered farmers. Corvée was
mainly performed by the peasant farms, which were laden with very heavy labour
burden but paid no rents or taxes of any consequence.
2
The terms Grundherrschaft and Gutsherrschaft have played an important role in German literature
on early modern agrarian history for more than a hundred years, but the exact definitions and the ways
they are used vary a lot. A good survey of the literature on Gutsherrschaft, including theoretical positions
relating or contrasting it to the term Grundherrschaft, can be found in KAAK (1991). SCHREINER (1983)
gives a good overview of the usages of the term Grundherrschaft among medievalists, which – alas –
differ from those of early modernists which are applied here. My usage of the words owes much to the
classic definition by VON BELOW (1900) and is further discussed and explained in my thesis (PORSKROG
RASMUSSEN, 2003: 15-33). To avoid misunderstandings of the word Grundherrschaft, I prefer the
more specific Rentengrundherrschaft, as suggested by LÜTGE (Zur ostdeutschen Agrargeschichte: Ein
Kolloquium, 1960: 83-84).
129
The short term usage rights of the demesnes rested either with the landlord himself
or with large tenants on rather short leases of about ten years, while those of village land
were left to peasant farmers and cottagers. However, the landlord held almost all the
long term rights over all the land in the manor. He could at any time turn peasant land
into demesne land or redistribute land among the peasants if he so wished. The peasants’
holding of farms and cottages was not secured by law, tradition, or contract. Peasants
were Wirte bis weiter, tenants who might be deprived of their land at any time.
Furthermore, peasants and cottagers lived under extensive lordship rights held
by their landlords. The latter enjoyed even greater public authority in this region
than those in Denmark itself. Manors here were under no local or regional political
authority, rather answering directly to the central government, and they formed
separate court districts to which landlords appointed the judges. Most people within
the manors were serfs who, men and women alike, were tied to the land for life,
were obliged to work as farm hands for the peasant farms or in the demesne for a
number of years, and could neither marry nor choose another occupation without
the landlord’s consent. Conversely, the landlords were under some social obligation
towards the ‘conservation’ of his subjects, such as to provide them with some sort of
livelihood in their old age.
In the eighteenth century, the marshes were regarded as very productive and
prosperous. To what extent this was due to the property system or rather to the very
fertile soils will not be discussed here. Peasants in areas of Rentengrundherrschaft
were generally regarded as more prosperous than peasants in Denmark itself, and there
is some evidence that supports this assumption. By 1750 arrears in rents and taxes were
only a minor problem in these areas. Cattle breeding was important for the economy
in most of these areas, and generally peasants under this regime owned more cattle
and fewer horses than those who were under the obligation of corvée. This combined
with more favourable property rights and greater autonomy to make peasant farmers
in these areas a more solid middle class than their Danish colleagues.
The economic performance of the Gutsherrschaft manors was rather ambiguous.

A new rotation system had developed in demesnes during the seventeenth century,
the so-called Koppelwirtschaft. Almost all the land in the demesnes was made arable
and divided into between ten and fourteen enclosed fields of equal size, which were
used for grain crops during four or five continuous years and then for haymaking and
pasture for the rest of the rotation period. This production was combined with large
scale dairy farming, which was quite productive and successful. The performance of
peasant farms on the other hand was regarded as poor. A likely explanation lies in the
fact that the farms had to feed the horses needed for tilling not only their own soil
130
but also that of the demesnes. The peasants therefore had to use most of their fodder
supply for the horses, while demesnes could reserve theirs for the milk cows. In this
way, it can be argued, demesnes looked more productive than they actually were,
while the opposite applies to their dependent farms.
IV. From change to reform
The latter part of the eighteenth century brought about major changes in agrarian
society. That was in itself nothing new. The systems so far described did not date
back from the beginning of time. That of the marshes had not fundamentally changed
since the Middle Ages, but the other systems had been transformed during the
course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Around 1530 something close to
Rentengrundherrschaft had dominated everywhere except for the marshes, but in the
later half of the sixteenth century demesnes had grown and corvée had increased,
although not everywhere with the same intensity. These developments were reversed
in major parts of Schleswig-Holstein during the first half of the seventeenth century,
where Rentengrundherrschaf again prevailed, whereas demesne farming continued
to increase in most of Denmark itself and in some parts of Schleswig-Holstein. In
Denmark this process had been halted in the 1680s, while the development towards
pure Gutsherrschaft continued in eastern Schleswig-Holstein until the system finally
reached its natural limits (Porskrog Rasmussen, 2003: 554-574).
Some of these changes were quite fundamental, but none of them are normally
described as reforms. In contrast, changes undertaken during the last third of the
eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth century are traditionally
described as the great ‘agrarian reforms’ in Denmark (Bjørn, 1988). The term implies
on the one hand that these changes were more radical and important that the others,
and on the other that they resulted from deliberate, strategic action by the government.
Society did not just change; it was reformed. ‘Reform’ connotes a positive meaning,
it is meant to be a change for the better. The idea that the changes were indeed major
reforms originates in the period itself, even though the wording ‘agrarian reforms’
came somewhat later.
IV.1. The early start: the crown lands in the Duchies

The notion of one major reform process is strongest concerning the kingdom of
Denmark, but has to some extent also been adopted by the historiography of the
duchies, above all by Wolfgang Prange (1971). By ‘reforms’ he meant on the one hand
the dissolution of open fields and individual enclosure, and on the other the dismantling
of corvée and of demesne farming. Prange shows that such changes were actually
131
widespread in the duchies earlier than in the kingdom. However, they were not part of
a more general process. Most of the changes that occurred until 1770 in private manors
in fact meant increased demesnes and heavier corvée. From 1705 to 1709, the ducal
government of Gottorp increased demesnes and corvée in its district of Oldenburg in
Holstein (Cord, 1994). At the same time two new demesnes were established in the
duchy of Plön and yet a third as late as 1726-1727 (Prange, 1971: 20-22).
In the crown districts in the duchies, however, instances of the latter were far
outnumbered by changes towards the concentration of more property rights in the
hands of peasant farmers. Individual enclosure was a long process, starting in the
seventeenth century. Before 1730 it had been fully accomplished in a few places and
had begun in somewhat larger districts, and by 1770 it had come a long way in major
parts of the crown districts to the east in and some on the geest. It was mostly a
bottom-up process, undertaken locally by the initiative of farmers themselves. The
involvement of the authorities ranged all the way from opposition to encouragement.
As farmers had enjoyed rather strong property rights to begin with and undertook the
enclosure by themselves, land was distributed among farmers according to the quota of
rights to village land that they had previously held. The already strong peasant farmers
in these areas were allowed to become even stronger. Cottagers might be granted small
plots of land in compensation for the loss of their grazing rights in the previously open
fields, but never very much. Landed society was as much as before split into a farmers’
class and a cottagers’ class (Prange, 1971: 491-534; Fink, 1941).
After 1730, many projects were formulated to change the structure of specific royal
or ducal manors. They were all variations on the same theme: reduction or abolition of
corvée in return for increased rents, better property rights for tenants, and parcelling
out demesnes. By no means were all of these carried out, but it is striking that all the
suggested changes pointed in the same direction (Prange, 1971: 280-490).
In 1770 the Danish royal government speeded up its engagement in the agrarian
structures of the duchies by establishing a land commission, whose work however
was still confined to crown lands. The commission was to further the processes of
enclosure and parcelling out of crown demesnes. Over the thirty years that followed,
it did its job. Enclosure took place almost everywhere, in cooperation with peasants.
Virtually all crown demesnes were parcelled out into a mixture of peasant farms and
cottages, and everywhere peasants were given hereditary tenure, including the right of
sale, leaving the king only a fixed rent (La Cour et al., 1930-1943, vol. III: 407-439).
Thus governments accepted a reduction of their landlord role and furthered the
position of a rural middle class. They did so out of a mixture of pragmatic responses
to specific questions and ideological views. When civil servants argued for reforms
132
of royal or ducal manors, they mostly emphasized economic benefits in the short
run, but sometimes they used more general arguments. The Gottorp Landrentmeister
Thomsen, the official in charge of land revenues, argued in 1749 that enclosure
and full property rights were ‘die Hauptsäule aller wahren Finance, worauf alles
andere beruhet und woher alle übrige Wohlfahtsumstände herzoleiten stehen’ [the
main pillar of all finance on which everything else rests and from which all other
circumstances of wealth can be derived] (quoted in Prange, 1971: 315-317, my
translation). His opposition to serfdom and to corvée and his belief in the benefits of
strong individual property rights were quite in line with the views later formulated
by French physiocrats and English liberals, but not his wish to parcel out large farms
which had for many years been leased out on short leases without corvée.
Thomsen mostly favoured the (extended) family farm, and so did most other civil
servants of the time. Mörck, a royal civil servant, argued that the replacement of
demesnes by smaller farm units would increase the population, which was always
good for a country (Prange, 1971: 422). Some years later the royal district governor
of Plön, Detlev Reventlow, argued that the abolition of corvée and serfdom would
make the peasants ‘happier’, improve their conditions, and increase the population
and general prosperity of the country (Prange, 1971: 456).
Stressing the advantages of increased population and the ‘common good’ for
which the government was responsible, Mörck and Reventlow were in line with the
prevalent school of thought in German government bodies of the time, the so-called
Kameralismus, whose emphasis on population was a result of much of it responding
to the demographic crisis in Germany after the Thirty Years War. It was also the child
of absolutist states where monarchs, ministers and bureaucrats, under the influence
of the Enlightenment, thought that it was the task of the state to improve society
(Tribe, 1988; Hvidtfeldt, 1963: 26-27).
IV.2. The debate on reform in Denmark

Unlike in Schleswig and Holstein, where until 1795 the government concentrated
its efforts on the crown districts which made up most of the territory, in the kingdom
of Denmark the share of crown lands was much lower and therefore the government
could not just leave private manors well alone and concentrate on reforming crown
lands, if it wanted to change the overall picture.
Change from below had been under way from the 1760s, particularly in parts
of Jylland where peasants had started buying their own farms, and in some places
enclosure of fields had begun by the initiative of landlords or peasants. In the eastern
parts, however, changes mainly concerned demesnes. From 1761, count Adam Gottlob
133
Moltke, the king’s favourite, introduced Holstein-style Koppelwirtschaft in his

demesnes in the island of Sjaelland, and this spread rather quickly. As in Holstein
it made demesnes more productive, but manors as such became more feudal
because corvée had increased. With Koppelwirtschaft the acreage of arable land
was extended and ploughing and other field work intensified. Although Thorkild
Kjærgaard has argued that peasant farms were also in transition and modernising
before their fields were enclosed (Kjærgaard, 1991: 220-226), this view has been
countered with what I believe to be strong arguments (Frandsen, 1992; Bjørn, 1991-
1993; Christensen, 1996: 528-529). Most evidence in fact indicates that increases in
productivity were largely confined to demesnes.
In 1755, Moltke invited the public to send in suggestions for the improvement
of the national economy and 1757 he initiated a commission which was to analyse
possible improvements in Danish agriculture. From 1757 on, new periodicals became
important forums for debate, later followed by pamphlets. Participants in the debate
were mainly civil servants and clergymen of a bourgeois background. They tended to
see themselves as more enlightened than the average man and dedicated to the service
of the common good. But a number of ‘practical agriculturalists’ also contributed,
such as landlords, demesne tenants, and estate managers (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 20-
35, 161-167; Holm, [1888] 1974).
In the beginning the debate mainly dealt with more technical questions such as
crops and rotations. England was an often mentioned ideal, and the enclosure of
fields was repeatedly seen as a way to improve agriculture, a praise not without
ideological overtones as it was also a praise of individualism. Although enclosure
met with scepticism from both landlords who found it too costly and peasants who
believed their traditional rights and usages to be better, it was not really a controversial
question. Some landlords who were seen as very conservative could favour enclosure
of peasant fields in their estates, as they shared the opinion that it was likely to increase
production and thus the ability of tenants to pay rents.
However, some of the participants in the debate claimed that only fundamental
changes in the social order would bring prosperity. They attacked the feudal character of
the manorial system, mainly corvée and the stavnsbånd, but also manorial jurisdiction
and manorial administration of ‘public’ affairs in general. All these institutions were
seen as depriving peasants of their natural liberty and making them unhappy, idle,
and immoral. Corvée and stavnsbånd were deemed to be contrary to freedom. In
1767, the former teacher and present adviser of the new king, Elie Reverdil, described
the feudal order as ‘barbaric in origin’ and an example of ‘slavery’ (Jensen, [1936]
1986: 23-35, 48-50).
134
But the bourgeois participants in the Danish reform debate did not just want
‘liberty’ for the peasants; they wanted ‘property’ as well. ‘Giv bonden en ejendom,
og han vil ikke mere behøve en beskytter end andre mennesker’ [Give the peasant
a property and he will no more need a guardian than do any other people], wrote
professor Jens Schelderup Sneedorf in 1763 (quoted in Jensen, [1936] 1986: 29, my
translation). The influential jurist and later attorney general Henrik Stampe wrote in
a private letter that he had often speculated how Denmark could increase its number
of freeholders, for he believed that a peasant who owned his land would endeavour
to improve the farm and its output far more than a tenant would (Jensen, [1936]
1986: 54-55). On top of the classic liberal argument that clear and strong property
rights would further growth, Stampe took it for granted that it was the property rights
of peasant farmers that should be strengthened.
For many reform advocates, the ideal society was a society of freeholders. In 1786,
the jurist Colbjørnsen formulated the basis for the work of a new reform commission.
He wrote that Denmark had ‘in ancient times’ been a country of freehold peasants who
were free citizens (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 72). A society of freeholders was thus given
higher legitimacy than one made up of landlords and tenants. The example from the
royal parts of the duchies was brought forward as well. In 1774 the clergyman Dyssel
published a book about a ‘domestic journey in Denmark’, which was largely a praise
of Schleswig as a prosperous society. Among other things he wrote: ‘Enhver Bonde
eier sin Gaard, som et lidet Stammegods [...] O lyksalige Folk! Hvor inderlig ønskede
jeg vor Danske Almue paa Øerne noget af samme billige, ordentlige, nyttige og høist
lyksalige Friehed’ [Any peasant owns his farm like a small entailed estate […] O
happy people! How sincerely I wish for some of that fair, decent, useful and most
happy freedom for our Danish common people on the islands] (Dyssel, 1774: 55, my
translation). Yet, although freehold was an ideal, participants in the debate did not
suggest that in practical life farms should simply be taken away from the landlords
and given to peasants. They advocated instead the end of the arbitrary powers of
landlords. The stavnsbånd should be lifted, corvée should be regulated, and the public
role of landlords should be reduced (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 30, 121-123).
Naturally many landlords protested. Some claimed that corvée and feudal authority
were only damaging under ‘bad’ landlords. The ‘good’ landlord was like a father
to his subjects who would not burden them beyond reason and most peasants were
better off under the feudal system, as they had a landlord who would provide for
them in times of distress. One estate manager claimed that it would not help to free
peasants from corvée. Unless they were under constant supervision, they would not
work harder on their own farms than they had before (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 71-72;
Mogensen and Olsen, 1984: 165). However, at an early stage a group of landlords
135
reacted in quite another way. One example is that of the rich landlord, Poul Abraham
Lehn, a man of bourgeois extraction who was later made a baron. In 1771 he argued
for the abolition of the stavnsbånd and of all manorial authority that reduced people’s
personal rights as citizens, but this should in his view be counterbalanced by the
abolition of the peasants’ traditional rights and of the legal ban on changes in agrarian
structure (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 91). His vision was neither one of a feudal society nor
of a society of freeholders, but rather of a capitalist estate system of landlords and
tenants regulated only by contracts freely entered into by both parties.
Lehn was far from being alone in this view, and those who sided with him were
generally known to be competent and modern estate owners and managers who had
improved lands and yields. They all agreed that the stavnsbånd should be lifted so that
the peasants became free to go where they pleased, but then most other regulations
should be lifted as well. A. C. Teilmann argued that corvée was not bad in itself. If
only the stavnsbånd was lifted, he argued, the terms of labour duties would simply be
a normal part of the conditions under negotiation between a peasant in want of land
and a landlord in want of a tenant (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 87-94).
Landlords such as these have been described as ‘the Danish physiocrats’, as much of
their argument was well in line with French physiocracy (Christensen, 2002). Probably
they were at least as inspired by the English case, which Lehn specifically mentions as
an ideal. What these landlords envisaged is not always clear, but generally they wanted
full control of land instead of the current status where they had full control of only
the typically 15 to 20 per cent of a manor that was demesne land, but held restricted
property rights over the 80 to 85 per cent that was farmed by peasants.
IV.3. Danish reforms and the manors

The first legal initiatives were taken around 1760, when Moltke was strong
politically and the government lay in the hands of large landlords. Such initiatives
consisted of nothing but a few cautious steps to encourage enclosure, while manorial
relations were left untouched.
The period between 1766 and 1772 saw changes in both power circles and policies.
The government became less dominated by aristocrats and more influenced by non-
noble civil servants, but still policy moves were far from revolutionary. Sales of
crown land, which had started under Moltke, continued. Crown peasants were not
simply given extended property rights, as they were in the duchies. Instead the farms
were put up for auction, and although a substantial number were bought by peasants,
in most regions the majority went to landlords and bourgeois investors. A whole
series of new laws were passed in 1769, with the jurist Stampe as their driving force.
136
They encouraged enclosure as well as transition to freehold, but mainly through the
removal of legal barriers. More controversially, one of those laws began to limit the
use of corvée for other purposes than direct farm work.
In 1771, Struensee, the new royal favourite, took a more radical step and reduced
corvée by decree, but he was overthrown and executed in 1772. The succeeding
government has always been regarded by Danish historiography as conservative,
even though it was largely run by bourgeois civil servants. Struensee’s anti-corvée
laws were reversed, and the land in two crown districts was sold to private investors
who established new demesnes and actually increased corvée. This was the last
feudalization in Denmark. Characteristically, the government continued to carry out
further enclosure, and practical and technical reforms were welcome (Jensen, [1936]
1986: 65-86, 95-102).
In 1784, political conditions changed yet again. The crown prince and a small
circle of grand seigneurs came to power. Concerning the agrarian question, count
C. D. F. Reventlow became the decisive figure. In 1786 he formulated the basis for
the work of a new agrarian reform commission (Bjørn, 1992: 127). He argued for the
advantages of ‘liberty and property’, but specifically for ‘the majority of subjects’,
i.e. the peasants, and he talked of laws that should secure the rights of ‘the weak’.
Again basically liberal thoughts were combined with paternalistic protection of one
social group. The aristocratic landlord Reventlow envisaged a society composed of
clearly defined social groups who were to live together in harmony. His ideal was a
system where land was farmed by solid peasant farmers with hereditary tenure and
rents that should be fixed following an initial increase (Bjørn, 1992: 121-135, 150).
Such estates could be found in England, but everything indicates that examples from
Schleswig-Holstein, where not only crown estates but a number of private manors
as well had seen such a transition over the previous generation, were a more direct
inspiration.
From 1786 on Reventlow headed the commission, which brought about important
changes. In 1787, a law was passed stating that a farm should be surveyed by impartial
persons whenever a tenant took it over or gave it up, to ensure that the landlord did not
unfairly demand that the farm were in a better state upon the end of the lease than it had
been at the beginning (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 139-142). At an early stage, strong attacks
were made against the stavnsbånd and the landlords’ authority in the conscription of
soldiers. In 1788 the stavnsbånd was abolished in principle and the conscription of
soldiers left to government bodies (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 123-125, 130-138, 144-
153). Soon this became the symbol of reforms. As early as 1791-1792 a committee
deliberated to collect money for a ‘liberation’ monument to commemorate the reform
137
(Kryger, 1986: 25-59). The collection of taxes remained within the landlords’ powers,
but in 1793 taxes were clearly separated from rents, and the procedures concerning
tax arrears were put under public supervision (Løgstrup, 1983: 231-236). In 1809,
manorial jurisdiction was changed from the right to appoint the judge to the right to
suggest a candidate to the king. In 1817, the responsibility for partitioning the estates
of deceased peasants was taken away from smaller manors (Løgstrup, 1983: 359). In
such matters, government could argue that rather than violating the property rights of
landlords, it had only relieved them of burdensome tasks.
The lifting of the stavnsbånd in 1788 had no immediate consequences for either
corvée or the leasehold system as such, which may help explain why peasants did
not rejoice. A few years afterwards, a series of peasant unrests and corvée strikes
took place. The government did not meet the peasants’ demands and made it clear to
them that it had no intention of abolishing corvée, rents or any other kind of material
burden (Bjørn, 1977). Tenure was never made hereditary by law and never became
so in most manors, nor was corvée abolished or reduced by law. Over the 1790s, the
government instead prescribed ‘corvée agreements’ between landlords and peasants
which neither abolished nor necessarily reduced it but simply fixed it, typically at the
previous level. In 1799, a law was passed that declared the levels of corvée which had
been agreed upon as the maxima that could be demanded thereafter. The government
encouraged the commutation of corvée into money dues, but did not demand it
(Jensen, [1936] 1986: 99-101, 104-106, 185-205; Dombernowsky, 1988: 332-350).
Still, the part of government policy in forming the future structure of Danish
agriculture went beyond encouragement, though it acted by way of preventing rather
than demanding. The government kept refusing to give the landlords a free hand to
reorganize their tenant farms. If landlords did not sell them, the only option open to
them was to retain the existing structure and tenancy system. It has been claimed,
both then and later, that the old system was inflexible (Christensen, 1996: 562), and
to some extent this was true, but the reform policies made it less flexible than ever.
Once all the land had been divided, there was no land reserve left on which demesnes
could legally expand. Once corvée was fixed in a way that ascribed a certain number
of days to each task, it became increasingly difficult to change agricultural practice
that was based on it, even though practical life seems to have been somewhat more
flexible than formal rules (Skriver, 2002: 225-228, 241-244).
In 1791, no less than 103 Jylland landlords sent a letter of protest to the crown
prince. It is best known for its claims that the lifting of the stavnsbånd had made
peasants rebellious (which was a fact), but it is less well known that these landlords
also claimed that the reforms had been unbalanced. They argued that it was unfair
138
that they did not have as free a right over their property as did owners of a town
house (Jensen, [1936] 1986: 173). The landlords wanted to enjoy free disposal of the
land and contractual freedom as well – but they were granted neither (Jensen, [1936]
1986: 179-184, 240-248).
This limitation had far-reaching results. When the landlord could not increase rents
(or he was only able to do it very slowly), the value of the farm in lease increased
more slowly than the value of the same farm if it was owned by the peasant. That
made it profitable for speculators to buy up manors and sell them in plots, and
for peasants to buy their own farms. Over little more than a generation, half of
all Danish tenants became owners of the farms (Dombernowsky, 1988: 351-359;
Feldbæk, 1990: 272-273)3. This was a peaceful revolution. No doubt much of this
would have happened even if landlords had been allowed to profit more from leases,
but it would certainly have happened to a lesser extent. Perhaps the best argument
for that is the development on private manors in adjoining territories: Mecklenburg,
Scania – and indeed Schleswig-Holstein (Olsson, 2002: 294-320).
As it happened, peasant farms gained control of most of the land. As in Schleswig-

Holstein, enclosure meant the distribution of land among existing peasant farms. Late
in the process the government tried to intervene on behalf of the cottagers, but this
only resulted in them being given very small plots of land (Jensen, [1936] 1986:
206-216). Even though enclosure typically meant that a peasant who previously had
twenty hectares of individual arable land ended up holding thirty or forty hectares
due to ensuing reclamation, neither landlords nor the government ever considered a
radical change in the distribution of land between peasants and cottagers.
IV.4. Ending feudalism in Schleswig-Holstein

It is striking how long it took the Danish government to intervene in the affairs
of private manors in Schleswig-Holstein. While in the kingdom corvée started being
regulated in 1769 and the stavnsbånd was lifted in 1788, it was not until 1804 that
the government finally regulated such matters concerning the private estates in the
duchies, and the process was not even started until 1795.
In 1795, the situation had changed dramatically in Schleswig-Holstein, as no

longer just one but two contrasting versions of modernity were advocated to replace
the feudal manor. Before 1791, all reforms carried out in manors led to a more or less
complete parcelling out of demesnes and to some kind of hereditary tenure that gave
peasants de facto control of the land, reserving only a fixed rent for the landlord. But
3
FELDBÆK (1990: 273) discusses the reasons for the sale of tenant farms from estates and notices that
the frozen rents meant that the landlord got a ‘low interest from his capital’.
139
in 1791 the estate of Rixdorf was reformed in a quite different way. Its demesnes
were kept as they were. The many unmarried farmhands were allowed to marry and
cottages were built for them, and they remained the labour force of the large farms but
now as wage labourers. Leases of about ten years were introduced in peasant farms,
and corvée was replaced by high money rents which were renegotiated at the end of
each lease (Cord, 1997). The reform was economically successful for the landlord,
and the example was quickly followed by other estates in south-eastern Schleswig
and eastern Holstein. Contrary to rest of the monarchy, an ‘English’ or physiocratic
style transformation took place in Schleswig-Holstein, where landlords were allowed
to do what many Danish landlords had wanted to but had been refused.
The Rixdorf model still left a substantial part of the land to medium sized farms,
but other landlords went further. An example much debated at the time came from
the manor of Rethwisch. After negotiations with the peasants concerning transition to
hereditary tenure failed, the bourgeois landlord Amsinck chose to take the land from
the peasants in a village and establish a new large farm, run with hired labour. The
peasants protested and were supported in public debate. The government eventually
intervened and the peasants were allowed to keep a minor share of the acreage, but
it was nonetheless confirmed that it was basically legal for the landlord to dispose of
the land as he liked (Hvidtfeldt, 1963: 92f; Amsinck, 2005: 116-129).
In 1795, the government finally decided to intervene. As had occurred in the

kingdom, a parallel process went on in commissions on the one hand and in public
debate on the other. It quickly became clear that no one really wanted to uphold
serfdom, but there were different opinions as to how it should be done away with.
The landlords wanted to keep full control of the land, and they argued that the end of
serfdom should be counterbalanced by ending the social obligation of the landlords
(Hvidtfeldt, 1963: 102-275, 208-232 regarding the position of landlords).
The most important public contribution from the landlords’ side of the argument
was that of the jurist L. A. G. Schrader. He stated that serfdom had negative moral
effects as it made peasants stupid, unfaithful, and lazy, and he added that it was also
politically negative as it meant the oppression of natural citizen’s rights, reduced the
industrious spirit of citizens, and limited growth in population and production. Thus
far he was completely in line with the general ‘reform’ views of the time, but contrary
to those Schrader advocated the landlord’s rights to the land and a system of short
term leases (Schrader, 1797: 42-48).
A law passed in 1804 finally abolished serfdom from 1 January 1805. Like the
Danish ones, the law protected existing farms and prohibited further consolidation
into large-scale farms, and the peasants who were currently living at the estate were
140
to retain certain social rights, notably that of some support in their old age. But it did
not give peasants improved property rights. It only stated that the leasehold period
and obligations concerning corvée should be specified. In this case ‘freedom’ was
the freedom of parties to enter into a contract, just like liberal Danish landlords had
wanted but not achieved. The outcome in most cases followed the Rixdorf model:
demesnes were changed into large capitalist farms and peasant farms were turned
into leasehold farms on short term leases (Hvidtfeldt, 1963: 317-420). The landlords
retained most of their public authority, but they were placed under increased control
by the state (Schultz Hansen, 1994: 41).
V. Conclusions and perspectives
Danish government policies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
clearly affected agrarian society. Policies differed somewhat in the kingdom and in
the duchies. In Schleswig-Holstein, the government largely favoured those who held
the strongest rights to begin with, letting them gain fuller control of the land – peasant
farmers in some places, private landlords in others. In the kingdom, the government
showed a clear bias towards the interest of peasant farmers, even though it did try to
compromise among the interests of the different groups.
Why this should have been so is not self-evident. Peasant farmers in the kingdom
were low in esteem and they were politically weak. Those actually formulating Danish
agrarian policy were either aristocrats with large landholdings or civil servants of
bourgeois extraction. Why should they be so determined to strengthen peasant farmers’
hold on the land? Some of the explanation lies in the fact that peasants holding strong
property rights in exchange for high rents was the alternative closest to hand, since it
had been put in place in the duchies and there it had proved favourable to both tenants
and landlords. No one could have foreseen the enormous productivity increases of the
nineteenth century, which were to make fixed rents a very bad deal for landlords.
But this is not the only explanation. After all, other possibilities were discussed and
rejected. However much Danish reformers were influenced by liberal and physiocratic
ideas, they were not full-hearted liberals. Even though they fought feudalism, their
vision of the good state was not without similarities to the feudal landlords’ ideal of
the good landlord. The good state was paternalistic and took care of the ‘weak’ under
its ‘protection’. Some reformers argued that this would eventually turn peasants into
citizens who needed no special rights; others furthermore envisaged a society where
everyone had their places and knew them. For a great aristocrat like Reventlow, the
paternalistic way of thinking fitted his role as minister just as well as it did that of
landlord.
141
Paternalism was combined with a specific interest for one agrarian form, that of the
solid peasant farm. The policy was only ‘social’ or ‘peasant-friendly’ if by ‘peasants’
one means peasant farmers, not the whole population living in manors4. Cottagers
gained little. To some extent, this was based on a political vision of a society with a
rather broad middle class. But perhaps the strong preference for the solid peasant farm
also stemmed from a very long tradition, as since the late Middle Ages both the crown
and the landlords had done their best to maintain exactly that type of agrarian unit.
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4
In this point I differ from Hans Jensen, who described the policy as ‘social’ without emphasizing its
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Kjell HANEN (eds), Modernization and tradition: European local and manorial societies
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regionale mønstre i det slesvigske landbrug i 1700-tallet og deres sammenhæng med
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Grundherrschaft im späten Mittelalter, Sigmaringen, Thorbecke, p. 11-74.
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144
7. Land reform and reallocation in interwar Europe1
Paul BRASSLEY
I. Introduction
By the end of the nineteenth century feudal tenures had effectively disappeared
in Europe, but until 1914 the large landowners, to a remarkable degree, continued
in possession and dominated rural society and politics. In consequence, problems
concerned with property rights in land could be found in many, if not most, European
countries. In some, farms were thought to be too small to produce an adequate
standard of living; in others they were so large that they did not need to be effectively
exploited. In some countries there was a shortage of any sort of capital, whereas in
others landlords wished to withdraw capital from the land in order to invest it more
profitably. In several countries in which it was felt that the pattern of land ownership or
tenure effectively balanced economic efficiency with social justice it was nevertheless
recognized that field or parcel sizes were so small as to produce inefficiency, and in
some there was felt to be a need or a possibility to reclaim land that had hitherto
been unavailable to agriculture or underexploited. Hence the title of this chapter: any
study of property rights would be incomplete if it were simply limited to land reform.
Landed property may be perceived as more than the simple possession of title deeds.
Indeed, it may not involve formal legal documents at all. But it can be seen as a set of
rights, obligations and rules: rights to benefit from the produce of land, to decide who
should so benefit, and who should have access to tenure; obligations to work the land
effectively, to invest in it, to pay rent for it; and rules about who should do what, and
when, and for what reward or payment. The term ‘reform’ implies a (more or less)
legalistic or constitutional process in which property rights are altered; in interwar
Europe, property rights in land were extensively altered, but in only some cases were
the processes involved constitutional, and in some cases they were not formally legal.
1
The author would like to express his enormous thanks to Richard Hoyle, who ensured that the first
version of this chapter was read at the original conference in Lisbon in 2007, to Mats Morell, for his
valuable comments on that paper, to two anonymous referees for their comments on subsequent drafts, to
Juan Pan-Montojo for many references to the land reform literature of Spain, to Ernst Langthaler for very
kindly providing a reference on the extent of land reform in Austria, to Janet Hussein and her colleagues
in the inter-library loans department at the University of Plymouth library, for their persistence and skill
in tracking down and obtaining numerous obscure sources, and to Jamie Quinn in the cartography section
of the School of Geography, University of Plymouth, for his skill and speed in producing the map.
145
Land reform and reallocation in interwar Europe
It therefore makes sense here to define ‘land reform and reallocation’ as widely as
possible to include anything changing property rights in rural land, such as changes
in land ownership and tenure (including those produced by commercial transactions),
attempts to deal with the fragmentation of land holdings, and formal or informal land
reclamation programmes. One or more of these affected every European country in
the period between 1918 and 1939. In some cases owners were dispossessed and
their land redistributed to their former tenants, or they sold out, or they managed
to retain their land, but only after extensive debate or political activity or even civil
war, or they retained their ownership and occupation rights but changed the parcels
of land to which they applied. By 1939 the possessions, power and influence of the
large landowners had gone, were going, or were retained only with the aid of fascist
regimes, while the power and influence of those who worked the land increased as
they owned an increasing proportion of it.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the reasons for these changes on a European
scale. Many previous studies have examined them in individual countries (e.g.
Malefakis, 1970; Mitrany, 1930; Petrusewicz, 1996; Schmidt, 1938; Smith, 1946),
Gibson and Blinkhorn (1991) examined several countries over a longer time period,
but none since Warriner (1939), Yates (1940) and Dovring (1965) has attempted to
survey rural Europe as a whole, even though there were clearly international forces
at work. It begins with an attempt to quantify the extent of the changes as far as it
is possible to do so before turning to an explanation of why they occurred. It then
concludes by showing how these changes may be integrated with wider ideas about
property rights.
II. The extent of land reform
It is impossible to measure accurately the extent of land reform and reallocation

in all European countries in this period, but it is possible to produce an estimate
for eighteen countries that cover the majority (c. 70 per cent) of the land, and to
identify its existence or otherwise in those states in which it cannot be quantified. The
following section summarizes the extent of the process, beginning in the east, where
it was generally greater, and working westwards.
The countries around the eastern Baltic – Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
– were all part of the Russian empire before the First World War, and all achieved
independence in 1917 or shortly afterwards as a result of the Russian revolution. In
each case, one of the first initiatives of the new national government was to introduce
land reform legislation, and between 1918 and 1922 all four states were affected
(Crampton and Crampton, 1996: 72, 90, 96; Wuorinen, 1965: 262-270). In Finland,
146
Paul Brassley
both the number of holdings and the area involved are subject to some disagreement,
although it seems clear that over a million hectares were involved. Whatever the exact
figure the result was a significant transfer of land to new owners, since the agricultural
area of the country was 2.63 million hectares in 1939 (although this only represented
about 9 per cent of the total area of the country)2. There were also major changes in
the other three countries. The most recent assessment of the areas involved produces
figures of 2.4 million hectares in Estonia and 3.4 million hectares in Latvia, which
in each case was about half of the land available. In Lithuania 1.6 million hectares
– about a third of the land – changed hands (Vaskela, 1996: 116-132; Unwin, 1997).
The new Polish state brought in land reform acts in 1921 and 1925 that imposed a
maximum landholding of 180 hectares, with compensation in cash and bonds for the
dispossessed and low interest mortgages for the purchasers. Between 1919 and 1937
about 2.5 million hectares were affected, of which about a million were added to
existing holdings and the rest were used to form new holdings of roughly ten hectares
each (Tcherkinsky, 1939: 52-55).
The provisions of the Romanian land reforms of 1918 and 1921 varied from one
part of the country to another. In the Old Kingdom (i.e. pre-1918 Romania) the
maximum estate size was set at 500 hectares, whereas in the newly-acquired regions
of Bukovina and Transylvania it was set at about half that. Before reform, large
properties amounted to some eight million of the 20 million hectares in the country;
of these nearly six million were transferred to the peasants (Mitrany, 1930: 111
and 116; Tcherkinsky, 1939: 56-57; Moore, 1945: 240)3. Bulgaria, in contrast, was
already a country of small peasant farms. Nevertheless the land reform laws of
1921 and 1924 provided for a maximum holding size of thirty hectares, and further
legislation in 1926 was designed to provide for the resettlement of refugees, many
of them from Macedonia. In all, probably about 400,000 hectares were affected
(Tcherkinsky, 1939: 67; Moore, 1945: 251). Newly-created Yugoslavia promulgated
a decree in 1919 providing for the redistribution of estates in excess of 158 hectares,
to apply to the whole country apart from Old Serbia, where it was unnecessary, since
Turkish landlords had abandoned their estates to their tenants when the country gained
its independence from the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth century. More than two
million hectares were split among half a million peasant families, which represented
about a quarter of the national total in both cases (Moore, 1945: 243-246; Crampton
and Crampton, 1996: 131). In Albania, on the other hand, neither the process of land
registration, nor the newly-established Land Bank, were sufficiently organized to
2
WUORINEN (1965: 262-263) gives a figure of 1.77 million hectares transferred between 1918 and
1939, whereas TCHERKINSKY (1939: 70) states that 1,021,693 hectares changed hands between 1899 and
1937. They also disagree on the number of new farms and smallholdings created, and on the parcels of
additional land bought by existing peasants.
3
See MÜLLER, (Chapter 10).
147
enable the 1930 land reform law to have much effect, and only about 1,200 hectares
of land actually changed hands (Moore, 1945: 253; Crampton, 1994: 149). Hungary
and Czechoslovakia were both dominated by big estates before the war, farmed
either by tenants or hired labour, and both instituted postwar land reform legislation.
But whereas in Hungary only about 600,000 hectares were affected by the 1922
land reform law (a further reform measure in 1939 was overtaken by the war), in
Czechoslovakia 2.2 million hectares were redistributed after the land control act of
1919 (Tcherkinsky, 1939: 56; Moore, 1945: 227-233; Crampton, 1994: 63; Crampton
and Crampton, 1996: 83).
The same postwar political reorganization pressures for land reform did not exist in
western Europe, but nevertheless reform still occurred. It is not possible to quantify it
to the same degree, although figures exist for some countries. The 1920s farm support
policies in Norway, for example, included state aid for creating smallholdings, with
the effect of producing an extra 120,000 hectares of fully cleared land between
1920 and 1950 (Hodne, 1983: 56). In Austria there was a land resettlement law in
1919, although by 1928 only 24,896 hectares, or 0.3 per cent of the cultivated area,
had been resettled (Mattl, 1981: 55-56). In Germany a 1919 land settlement law
reallocated about a million hectares by 1931, but land reclamation policies were also
important. The 1920s saw the beginning of programmes to make polders and drain
moorland that subsequently became central to Nazi policy. The other main thrust
of Nazi policy was the Erbhof programme. These were owner-occupied holdings
of up to 125 hectares, and the policy forbade their division on inheritance in order
to prevent their further fragmentation and promote consolidation. By 1938 some
700,000 such holdings, covering about half of the German agricultural area, had been
registered (Tcherkinsky, 1939: 21-23; Tracy, 1982: 201, 207-208; Blackbourn, 2006:
279; Yates, 1940: 438-450, 472-478)4.
In Italy, as in the other southern European states, landholding in the early twentieth
century was polarized, with the bulk of the agricultural population owning little
land, and in small units, while most of the agricultural area was in the hands of a
relatively small number of owners, probably no more that half a million in the whole
country according to one interwar estimate. The wartime prime minister Salandra had
promised land for the peasants, Socialist electoral success in the north of the country
produced reform legislation, and the fascists too were initially in favour of land reform
(Schmidt, 1938: 13, 26-27, 40-41; Cardoza, 1991: 182 and 192-193). But when in
power their position changed, and after 1922 they proclaimed the ‘fascist duty’ of
large landowners to remain as leaders (Schmidt, 1938: 41). They did, however, initiate
land reclamation in the Po valley and the Pontine Marshes (Schmidt, 1938: 73-101).
4
Cf. LANGTHALER (Chapter 8).
148
Paul Brassley
Similarly, in Spain too the political consequences of reform were much greater than
its extent. There had in fact been land reform legislation in 1907, with little effect.
Moves towards further reform began in 1931, culminating in the Agrarian Reform
Law of September 1932 that provided for limits to the size of property allowed. For
each kind of land – vineyards, orchards, olive groves, arable and pasture – a range
of estate sizes was produced, 300 to 600 hectares in the case of arable, so that the
precise figure for any one region could be determined by the Instituto de Reforma
Agraria according to the local land quality. There were additional provisions for
‘direct cultivators’ of the land that were broadly defined so that the effective limits for
arable land in fact ranged between 400 and 750 hectares, and owners were allowed
to retain this maximum quantity in each municipality. The reform provisions were
therefore moderate, but the existing land distribution pattern was so unbalanced that
the effect, in Malefakis’s view, was ‘revolutionary’ (Malefakis, 1970: 205-218).
There were few beneficiaries: only 4,400 peasants had resettled on 24,203 hectares
of land by the end of 1933. The pace of reform was insufficient to satisfy the small
owners and landless labourers; harvest strikes in 1934 were followed by land seizures
in 1936, and between March and July of that year 111,000 peasants were resettled
on 572,000 hectares of land. It was a small proportion of the land (there were over
22 million hectares of arable in Spain at the time), and perhaps more might have
followed later, but July 1936 marked the beginning of the Spanish civil war, and the
effective end of land reform (Brenan, 1950: 91; Harrison, 1985: 137-140).
As in many other European questions Great Britain formed an exception, in that

what was effectively comparable to land reform (in that it involved transfers of land,
mostly from landlords to tenants, through market price exchanges) occurred largely
without legislation. This is not to say that there was no relevant legislation. Several
Smallholdings Acts between 1892 and 1914 resulted in some 14,000 smallholders
being settled on about 82,000 hectares, and further postwar Acts resulted in the
provision of a further 18,000 holdings on 123,000 hectares between 1919 and
1937 (Wade Martins, 2006: 309; Smith, 1946: 103, 114). But these holdings were
mostly rented out to tenants. They represent land reform in the sense that there was
a social motive behind the legislation and the extent of individual holdings and their
occupiers changed, but they are hardly comparable with the processes examined
above for other European countries, in which the ownership of land changed. In any
case, they formed the minority of changes in Britain. Most reallocation took place
through the free market sales of land by landlords, often to their sitting tenants. Since
some sales clearly represented simply the transfer of land from one renting landlord
to another it is not possible to be absolutely precise about the acreage transferred
from landlords to owner-occupiers, but the probability is that most of the sales fell
into this category. The official statistics record the area of land in owner-occupation
149
at different dates, and more frequently for Scotland than for England and Wales.
They show that between 1918 and 1939 in Scotland the area owned increased by
1,021 million acres (413,000 hectares), and in England and Wales the change between
1919 and 1950 was a little over 7.5 million acres (3 million hectares) of crops and
grass. Sturmey estimates that about a million acres (400,000 hectares) changed from
rented to owner-occupied between 1941 and 1950, so during the interwar period
Figure 7.1. Extent of land reform in European countries
Source. Table 7.1.

Map by Jamie Quinn, School of Geography, University of Plymouth.
150
Paul Brassley
about 6.5 million acres (2.6 million hectares), almost a quarter of the total area of
crops and grass, came into the ownership of those who farmed them (MAFF, 1966:
24-25, 30; Sturmey, 1968: 299)5.
Bringing all these figures together, it is possible to construct Table 7.1. It is

important to remember that the figures in the table are only an estimate, for there is
no perfect agreement between the various sources, although it does at least seem to
be of the right order of magnitude6.
Table 7.1. Areas subject to land reform as a percentage of the agricultural area
per country (an estimate)
Reformed area Total land
Countries % reformed
(million ha) (million ha)
Estonia 2.3 4.0 57.5
Latvia 3.4 6.5 52.3
Lithuania 1.6 5.5 29.1
England and Wales 2.6 10.7 24.3
Scotland 1.0 4.66 21.9
Romania 6.0 29.0 20.7
Czechoslovakia 2.2 14.0 15.7
Yugoslavia 2.0 25.0 8.0
Hungary 0.6 9.0 6.7
Poland 2.5 39.0 6.4
Finland 1.8 35.0 5.1
Bulgaria 0.42 10.0 4.2
Norway 0.12 3.0 4.0
Italy 1.2 31.0 3.9
Germany 1.0 47.0 2.1
Spain 0.6 50.0 1.2
Austria 0.025 8.3 0.3
Albania 0.0012 2.7 0.04
Total 29.37 295.36 9.9
Source. Reformed area from text; total land from International Institute of Agriculture
(1937-1938: passim).
5
These figures have recently been the subject of discussion. See BECKETT and TURNER (2007) and
THOMPSON (2007). The latter estimates (p.293) that the area of land transferred between 1918 and 1927
was about 6 million acres (2.43 million hectares).
6
Royal Institute of International Affairs (1932: 149) gave an overall figure of 28.3 million hectares for
eastern Europe only, arguing that this was 18 per cent of all farmland, but included Greece, half of whose
farmland it claimed was affected. TCHERKINSKY (1939: 71) gave a figure of 20 million hectares for central
and eastern Europe, which, given that about 10 million hectares of the total in Table 7.1 was in western
Europe is not very different, and ROBERTS (1967: 358) gives figures for central and eastern Europe which
are similar to but not exactly the same as those given in Table 7.1.
151
In addition to the countries discussed so far, for which it is possible to quantify the
extent of land reform or its market-driven equivalent, there were others where land
reform of some kind occurred, although it has not yet been possible so far to quantify
its extent (see Figure 7.1). These are discussed below.
Rural poverty on a mixture of small farms and large estates produced pressure for
land reform from all the left wing political parties in Portugal by 1925, as the same
conditions did in Spain. But events in Portugal were more straightforward: the military
coup of 1926 brought an end to ideas of reform until the regime changed again, and that
was not until 1974 (Birmingham, 1993: 152, 181). In Greece the major land reforms
had happened in the nineteenth century, so the main area of post-1918 change was in
the newly-acquired northern areas where the main problem was to find land for the
1.2 million refugees from Turkey, Russia and Bulgaria, many of whom were peasants.
This clearly led to some land reallocation, but its extent is uncertain7. Likewise in
Ireland, the land wars of the late nineteenth century meant that land reform legislation
preceded the First World War and transformed at least two thirds of Irish farmers
into owner-occupiers, but as in eastern Europe, one of the first moves of the new
Irish Free State government was to introduce the 1923 Land Act, followed by further
acts in 1925 and 1931, compelling landlords to sell to tenants (Winstanley, 1984: 41;
Kolbert and O’Brien, 1975: 47-51). Similarly Denmark became a country of owner-
occupied family farms over the course of the nineteenth century, but it is interesting
to note that there was nevertheless legislation introduced in 1919 whereby the state
bought one third of the land of entailed estates and used it to create smallholdings
(Yates, 1940: 55; Kampp, 1975: 15). And in Sweden a 1927 law on tenant farming
was designed to encourage sales of land to tenants, while the National Society for
Rural Economy was assisted by the state to provide loans for the establishment of
family farms. Between 1905 and 1935 some 80,000 such holdings were created, about
30,000 of which belonged to day-labourers (Tcherkinsky, 1939: 38). Tenancy reform
legislation was introduced in Belgium in 1929, and land reclamation and drainage
was also subsidized, but the relative proportions of owner-occupied and tenanted
land were affected more by market forces than government policy (Yates, 1940: 207-
209, 230-231). In France, where the common perception is that peasant farming was
the norm since at least the nineteenth century, there were still many tenant farmers
in 1918. But peasant indebtedness was reduced by inflation and wartime rents were
fixed, so savings increased, and the government, fearful of a flight from the land,
introduced legislation in 1918 to enable the Crédit Agricole to advance 25-year land
purchase loans at only 1 per cent interest. Landlords became willing sellers, and
peasants bought the land they had previously rented. ‘The myth of the small family
7
WOODHOUSE (1991: 223) states that 40 per cent of land was redistributed interwar but provides no
evidence, and MOORE (1945: 256) provides no confirmation.
152
Paul Brassley
farmer… cultivated by the Third Republic, began to approximate ever more closely
to reality’ (Moulin, 1991: 138-142).
In some countries the major structural problem was not so much the ownership of land
as its fragmentation, and another aspect of interwar land reform attempted to deal with
this. It was not uncommon in eastern Europe, but it attracted particular attention in some
western European countries. In France the problem was known as parcellement. The
average parcel size was less than half a hectare in the majority of French departments,
and there was an example of a thirty-hectare farm in the Meuse department divided into
2,000 parcels. Three pieces of legislation, in 1918, 1919, and 1935 were introduced to
attempt to deal with this problem by reallocation (the French term is remembrement), but
although nearly 10 million hectares were identified as being in need of remembrement
less than 500,000 hectares had been dealt with by 1929, most of which were in the parts
of northern France that had been devastated by war8. In Switzerland, in contrast, land
reorganization was more prevalent. Small farms were even more dominant, in the sense
that those of less than ten hectares accounted for half of the land area, and these smaller
farms especially were divided into numerous different parcels. For the whole country
the average was 14.3 separate fields for each farm, and the average farm size was
twenty-one acres (8.5 hectares). A law to encourage consolidation was passed in 1912.
By 1924 less than 20,000 hectares had been affected, although by the end of the 1930s
Lamartine Yates reported that the process was accelerating, with over 2,000 hectares
per year being dealt with. However, this was still a small proportion of the 400,000
hectares that were considered to need consolidation (Hobson, 1929: 10-13; Yates, 1940:
364). Similar legislation was introduced in the Netherlands in 1924 and 1938, but the
impact was small, affecting less than 10,000 hectares (Yates, 1940: 131-132).
Overall, therefore, all European countries were affected by land reform, or the
pressure for land reform, or changes in landholding, of one kind or another, in the
interwar period. What was it that produced this continent-wide trend?
III. The reasons for land reform and associated changes
Pressures for change had been building up long before the First World War. In
Britain the debate on the advantages and shortcomings of tenant farming and owner
occupation had involved philosophers and polemicists since the seventeenth century9.
8
YATES (1940: 281). On remembrement, see TCHERKINSKY (1939: 19), although note that CLOUT
(1994: 153) argues that the demand among landowners for remembrement in war-devastated areas was
uneven, with greater effects in the Somme department than in the Marne department.
9
YOUNG (1900: 18, 61) and MARSHALL (1920: 646) proclaimed the advantages of tenancies. A variety
of heavyweight commentators, such as John Locke, William Cobbett, William Morris, and John Stuart
153
Writing from his own experience at the end of the nineteenth century Walter Rose put
it more simply: ‘the labourer’s highest ambition was to have a plot to cultivate on his
own’ (Rose, 1942: 2). Nevertheless the bulk – perhaps as much as 90 per cent – of
the cultivated land in England remained in the hands of landlords and their tenants in
1914. ‘Only war could shake the English land system’, in Avner Offer’s view, and, as
we have seen, it was not only the English system that was shaken (Offer, 1991: 17).
In continental Europe and beyond the same debate about the social and economic
advantages of different land tenure systems was taking place at the end of the
nineteenth century. Petrusewicz claims that it was the crisis of the 1880s and ‘90s that
‘exposed the structural weakness of large-scale European agriculture’, so that scholars
and legislators began to reconsider the rationality of large scale agriculture and the
merits of peasant farming. Lenin wrote about it in a Russian context in 1899, and in
the same year Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question provoked a debate in Germany and
western Europe (Petrusewicz, 1996: 4). Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy
was originally published in German in 1923 (Chayanov, 1966). In Rostow’s view
the purpose of land reform in Russia and elsewhere in the nineteenth century was to
transfer land from the control of those ‘who would sterilize it in prodigal living’ to
those who would use it productively (Rostow, 1960: 23-24). In short, many of the
topics that may be found in the recent literature on land reform were already being
discussed in the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth-century reform debate went beyond the literary and theoretical. In
Ireland it led to the land wars of the early 1880s (Foster, 1989: 402-408). In Greece
it began in the 1830s, following the separation of the country from the Ottoman
empire (McGrew, 1985). In Russia it dated back at least to the emancipation of the
serfs in 1861 which produced considerable land transfers between different classes
and, in Lenin’s view, resulted in a landholding pattern closer to the Prussian model of
large Junker estates than to the American model of family farms (Tuma, 1965: 81).
Taxation and redemption payments fuelled peasant unrest, further exacerbated by the
Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1945, and thus the land reforms introduced by Prime
Minister P. A. Stolypin in 1905 were part of a series of measures introduced, in Judith
Pallot’s view, ‘in response to the immediate crisis for the tsarist state of the 1905
revolution and the longer-term crisis in rural Russia of poverty, famines, agrarian
backwardness and political instability’. Whether Stolypin’s legislation would in time
have produced the ‘independent, prosperous husbandman, a stable citizen of the land’
that he hoped for and expected will, of course, never be known, because the outbreak
of war in 1914 brought its implementation to a halt, and the 1917 revolution replaced
it with different measures (Pallot, 1999: 1-8).
Mill, were in favour of peasant proprietorship. See BONNETT (2007: 41-42); DEWEY (1974: 17-47) LOCKE
([1690] 1988: 290); PROBYN (1876); RUSSELL (1961: 610); .
154
Paul Brassley
In the view of contemporary commentators, therefore, the land ownership and

tenure systems of Europe in the early twentieth century were characterized by a
variety of structural problems that produced perceptions of social and political
injustice. Europe contained a mixture of holdings from the very big to the very small.
The latter might produce real problems, such as those found by Doreen Warriner
in southern Poland: ‘A land of dwarf holdings […] a nightmare of degradation and
poverty […] a society in decay’ (Warriner, 1939: 26). At the opposite extreme were
the latifundia of Spain and Italy, often with absentee landowners, and extensively
farmed at a time when there was an unsatisfied local demand for access to land.
These disparities produced debates about the function of agriculture and landholding:
was its purpose to support farm families or feed the nation, and was it preferable to
privilege social stability and the moral economy or risk and efficiency? These were
the arguments explored at length at the time by Doreen Warriner (1939) in the context
of eastern Europe, and Yates (1940) for western Europe, but they were not only the
concern of economists and sociologists. In the German congress in November 1919
Dr. Hilferding, a Marxist, advocated the ‘socialization’ of some large estates to
resettle returning soldiers, but admitted that such large units were technically more
proficient than small farms, so that it would be a mistake to dismantle all of them.
The Munich central peasant council thought that the land should belong to those who
worked it, and, surprisingly, the Director of the Prussian State Landbank agreed that
peasant farming was the ‘most rational agrarian policy’. Conversely, the Bund der
Landwirte, dominated by landowners, was hostile to such views (Carsten, 1972: 135,
183, 204; James, 1986: 270).
Perceptions of injustice can thus be identified both before and after the First
World War, and there were similarities in the reasons for them across the continent
from Estonia and Ireland. But it was only after the war that the process of change
accelerated. There were several reasons for this: the effects of war, the end of empires,
nationalism, communism, and changes in prices and profits. All of these affected
several countries simultaneously. Moreover, they were all inter-related to some
degree, so it should be remembered that their separation in the following discussion
is, to that extent, somewhat artificial.
Wartime conscription brought together men who would not otherwise have
come into contact with each other, as in Italy, for example, where it was said to
be one of the factors promoting a collective consciousness among the peasants
(Snowden, 1979: 159). There were also postwar refugee resettlement problems,
in Bulgaria, for example, which had to find land for refugees from Macedonia,
and Greece, faced by an influx of refugees from Turkey, Russia and Bulgaria
(Tcherkinsky, 1939: 66-68; Woodhouse, 1991: 223). But the greatest postwar
155
adjustments were those brought about by the end of the European empires, with
the consequent creation of new nations and boundary changes in some existing
states. Romania, for example, having fought for part of the war on the Allied side,
went to the Paris Peace Conference with considerable territorial demands, and was
remarkably successful, the eventual settlement meaning that its population and
size were doubled. Most notably, it took control of Transylvania under the terms
of the 1920 Trianon Treaty, a move that aroused bitter opposition in Hungary10.
Here, and in the other new states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, the
new leaders espoused a land reform rhetoric. ‘In our free state there can and will be
only free landowners’ declared the King of Yugoslavia, and President Masaryk of
Czechoslovakia described the 1919 land reform act as ‘the greatest act of the new
republic’ (Crampton and Crampton, 1996: 131; Crampton, 1994: 63).
That the new republics and kingdoms of postwar Europe represented the fulfilment
of the ambitions of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century is well
known (Roberts, 1996: 396-398); what is less widely appreciated is the link between
nationalism and land reform. In the Baltic states, for example, it is possible to discern
the emergence of nationalist movements from the 1850s (White, 1996: 21-25). Unwin
(1997) argues that in Estonia, the middle-class leaders of the nationalist movement
identified peasant problems, especially land reform, as central to their arguments.
Nationalism became linked to land reform and technical change in agriculture, and
Estonian language publications included agricultural periodicals. The disturbances
in Russia in 1905 saw a parallel response in the Baltic provinces, with strikes in
the main towns spreading to the countryside, the formation of peasant executive
committees and a Congress of Peasants’ Delegates in Riga, destruction of estates,
and eventually a Russian army helping German nobles to put down a rural labourers’
strike, followed by executions, imprisonment, and exile (White, 1996: 30-31). Before
the war, therefore, the peasants had an organizational base and a casus belli; put
crudely, the postwar land reforms were payback time. Rather more elegantly, Lieven
(1993: 62) sees them as ‘the rock upon which the Baltic republics were founded’, the
main source of postwar social and political stability, and subsequently the mainstay of
support for the nationalist dictators who came to power in all three states. The pre-war
nationalist movement in Poland had advocated land reform to produce an egalitarian
social structure since the latter part of the nineteenth century (Stanter-Halstead, 1998),
and in Ireland the dominance of English landlords formed a focus of discontent for the
nationalist movement (Foster, 1989: 402-408). In several European countries these
10
MACMILLAN (2001: 144, 278). The Society of Transylvanian Emigrants in Budapest commissioned a
response to MITRANY (1930) that began with the claim that ‘Land reform [...] was in Transylvania made to
serve the cause of the political hegemony of the Rumanians’ (MÓRICZ, 1934: 7) and went on to produce
a line by line refutation of many of Mitrany’s arguments.
156
Paul Brassley
land-oriented nationalist parties mutated into agrarian parties in the postwar period11.
Against this background, it is not surprising to find that ethnic minority landowners,
such as Germans and Russians in the Baltic states, like English landowners in Ireland
a little earlier, were dispossessed (Crampton, Crampton, 1996: 72, 90, 96).
The Russian revolution, Communism, and the collectivist movement in the new
Soviet Union both enthused the landless to demand land reform and persuaded
landowners to agree to it. The Romanian front in Moldavia was held by interspersed
units of the Russian and Romanian armies, and when in 1917 news of the Revolution
reached the Russian forces there was much discussion of the possibilities of land
reform. This rapidly passed to the Romanian soldiers, and to check their possible
disaffection just at the point when they were being asked to mount a new offensive,
King Ferdinand visited the front and promised ‘Land will be given to you’. Where
long-existing political pressure had failed to produce change, the immediate crisis
had immediate effects. In Mitrany’s phrase, ‘the horror of what was happening next
door [in Russia] caused Rumania’s rulers and landlords hastily to surrender their
shirts, when in less stormy times they might have bargained hard for a button’
(Mitrany, 1930: 101-102). In Hungary, the effect was intensified by the short-lived
Communist regime of Bela Kun, which promised land reform. Since it meant the
nationalization of the big estates rather than their break up, it failed to win the support
of the peasants. The Bethlen government that succeeded it took the opposite view: ‘In
this state, where private property is sacred, to ask for land reform is like asking for my
pants’ Bethlen told parliament (Crampton, 1994: 83, 87).
The effect of the revolution in Russia was not only felt in eastern Europe. In Italy
it was said to be an inspiration and a promise to many rural workers and to have
‘whetted the old land hunger of the peasants’ (Schmidt, 1938: 26). Similarly in Spain
news of land reform further east soon spread. As early as 1922 Cristobal de Castro,
who held posts in the monarchic governments before 1923 and was a moderate
republican in 1931, published a defence of government-led land reform, and in 1923
Joseph Wiehen’s account of Czech land reforms was translated and published in
Spain. In 1931 de Castro published a further work, and there were other authors
taking different views at the same time (Castro, 1922, 1931; Wiehen, 1923; Martin-
Sanchez, 1931; Wauters, 1931). And this dialogue penetrated official thinking: the
11
Most countries had such parties, but only in eastern Europe did they achieve much electoral strength.
In Hungary the Christian Smallholder Party achieved a majority at one point, and in Bulgaria the
peasantist leader Alexander Stamboliski took power in 1920 and began to build a Green International of
peasant parties in opposition to the Communist International, before being assassinated in 1923 (URWIN,
1980: 167 168; MACMILLAN, 2001: 146-152). In Czechoslovakia they were never a majority party but in
various coalitions Czechoslovak Agrarian Party members filled the post of Prime Minister from 1922
until the end of the republic (CRAMPTON, 1994: 63-65).
157
preamble to the decree creating a commission to prepare for agrarian reform in 1931
referred to similar reforms in eastern Europe12.
If the foregoing reasons for land reform might, overall, be characterized as political,
there were also some countries in which economic forces were more influential in
promoting land reform. It might be argued that this was not land reform at all, but
simply the working of the market mechanism. The crucial feature, whether it was
produced by legal or market forces, was access to resources, and specifically to land.
In circumstances where market forces (perhaps assisted by legislation) promoted
land sales and there was effective demand, legal measures were unnecessary to
effect the transfer from landlord to tenant. The impact of fixed rents and increased
peasant savings in France has been noted above, and there were close parallels in
Britain. There many landlords had been willing sellers since corn prices began to
decline in the late nineteenth century, but their tenants were not willing buyers.
With wartime guaranteed prices and fixed rents all that changed, and the land
market therefore had much the same effect in Britain and France as land reform
legislation had in other European countries (Thompson, 1963: 330-335). It is worth
remembering, however, that governments were not unaware of these changes, and
that behind their agricultural policies often lay a desire to prevent migration to the
towns. This was one of the reasons behind the Crédit Agricole land purchase loans
in France; rural unemployment or overpopulation was perhaps easier to ignore and
less politically sensitive than the results of urban in-migration in an era of industrial
unemployment. If large parts of eastern Europe were overpopulated, as Yates and
Warriner (1943:47-51) argued, they were also by implication under-industrialized.
It is interesting, if unhistorical, to speculate on what might have happened if the
urban/industrial economy had been as hungry for labour in the interwar period as
it was in the 1950s and after. It is presumably no accident that the number of farm
workers and the sizes of farms, especially in western Europe, changed significantly
in the postwar period.
12
See the official Gaceta de Madrid of 22 May 1931. I owe this reference, and all the others on Spain in
this paragraph, to the generosity of Juan Pan-Montojo, to whom I am enormously grateful for providing
details of these works together with much illuminating comment on their content and purpose.
158
Paul Brassley
IV. Conclusions
The interwar years saw significant changes in property rights in land across the
whole of Europe. In these two decades the ownership of large areas of farmland
changed, especially in eastern Europe. There it may have accounted for as much as
20 per cent of the land, although the figures presented here suggest that over Europe as
a whole (and excluding the USSR) the figure was nearer 10 per cent. At first sight this
figure may not seem impressive, although to find two other decades in earlier centuries
with a similar pace of change across the whole continent might prove challenging. The
changes in ownership were in part the result of legislation and in part of market forces.
They were associated with land reallocation and reclamation programmes, and the
acceleration of the whole process was precipitated by the First World War13.
The events described in this chapter did not bring about widespread differences
in the identities of the people who worked the land, although it is certainly true that
some who had not previously had them gained rights to work land and benefit from
its output. But the principal change affected the landlord class. The transfers of land
were not simply between traditional owners of the same social class, but between
traditional owners and those who had not traditionally owned land, although they had
worked it as tenants of various kinds. This was what struck contemporaries so forcibly.
Dr Lucy Elizabeth Textor, an associate professor of history at Vassar College in the
USA, was clearly considerably moved in introducing her study of Czechoslovakia:
‘The day of the great manor has passed, and the farmhouse now rules the countryside […]
the land belongs to him who will work it, but this theory was not translated into reality
until the tiller of the soil found himself free to use his hitherto fettered strength. Then he
rose in his might and took what he always conceived to be his own’. (Textor, 1923:13)
Similarly, David Mitrany, who studied land reform in Romania just after it had
occurred, later reflected on the process as it affected the continent as a whole:
‘The emergence of the peasant as an active factor in the political and social life of Europe
was perhaps the most telling and certainly the least expected effect of the First World
War […] it is the class of large landowners that has vanished from the continent […] the
expropriation of large estates […] everywhere put ownership and production mainly into
peasant hands’. (Mitrany, 1951: 17)
Except, he might have added, that the process was restricted when the large
landowners were supported by fascist regimes, as they were eventually in Spain,
Portugal, Italy, and Poland.
13
DOVRING (1965: 258) makes the same point, without explaining it in any detail.
159
These dramatic and widespread changes may be seen as a response to changing

perceptions of what constituted social justice and which historical actors possessed
the political, economic or social power to decide where social justice lay. The decline
of imperialism, the rise of nationalism, and the fear of Communism led to political
institutions being dominated by groups favourable to tenants and peasants and
antipathetic to large landowners, especially those from a different ethnic background
to those who worked the land. Where this was less visible, as in western Europe,
changes in property rights arose from changes in incentives to invest and endowments
of resources, as peasants used their saved resources from high wartime prices to buy
out landlords who were no longer so keen to invest in land. In both cases it was
the war and its aftermath that produced the new political institutions and economic
circumstances. And in both cases changes in property rights were politically and
socially acceptable because definitions of the public interest changed. Before the war
the political hegemony of the landlord class required them to be supported by landed
property, but after the war the balance of politics was different, society’s priorities
changed, and land was required to produce food and security.
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164
8. From capitalism to ‘neo-feudalism’? Property
relations, land markets, and the Nazi state in the
German province of Niederdonau, 1938-19451
Ernst LANGTHALER
I. Introduction
Land or, more precisely, the multitude of individual and collective rights in landed
property, was a main source of economic wealth in rural Europe from the Middle Ages
to the modern period; moreover, it also fuelled political influence as well as social
status (van Bath, 1963: 310-324). Given the multiple functions of landed property,
land tenure policy greatly affected the distribution of economic, political, and social
power in rural societies. With regard to the transition from feudalism to capitalism,
accelerated by the agrarian reforms in nineteenth century Europe, land tenure policy
by the Nazi regime in Germany in general and the 1933 Reich Hereditary Farm
Law (Reichserbhofgesetz, REG) in particular have been labelled as a step back from
capitalism to ‘neo-feudalism’. According to the doyen of German social history,
for instance, the REG constituted a ‘neo-feudal vassalship’ which guaranteed landed
property to ‘privileged peasant clans’ (Wehler, 2003: 742). Whereas this labelling
remains rather implicit, the political scientist Robert Koehl (1960) has developed
a more explicit concept of the ‘feudal aspects’ of National Socialism. According to
his conceptual definition, ‘neo-feudalism’ is an attempt to reintegrate a society that
underwent extreme disintegration, through personal relationships, of power formerly
attributed to the state. He takes the REG as one example among others, which
apparently updated feudal property relationships:
‘The famous Erbhofgesetz recreated the principle of entail for peasant farms. While it was
never possible to apply this law across the board, qualified farmers were “freed” from
indebtedness, past and future, at the same time receiving their “hereditary estate” as a fief
from the Reich’. (Koehl, 1960: 924)
That the notion of ‘neo-feudalism’ contributes much to our understanding and

explanation of landed property rights under the Nazi regime shall be questioned in
this article due to two considerations: firstly, the ‘neo-feudalism’ argument tends
to equate quite different phenomena, implicitly carrying forward the ‘blood and
1
This article was supported by the APART (Austrian Programme of Advanced Research and Technology)
project funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I would like to thank Erich Landsteiner, Dietmar
Müller and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.
165
Property relations, land markets, and the Nazi state
soil’ ideologists’ claim about the pre-capitalist or, more explicitly, the ‘Germanic’
nature of the REG (Grundmann, 1979: 39-43). It was this National-Socialist claim
of a historical continuity of the 1933 REG with medieval or pre-modern customs of
inheritance that the prominent agronomist Max Sering (1934: 81-83) did not accept
– even though he advocated the law’s anti-capitalist impetus. Secondly, by focusing
on normative and formal aspects the ‘neo-feudalism’ argument tends to marginalize
practical and informal aspects, therefore disconnecting landed property rights from
social relations. This narrow, legalistic perspective of modern western thought is
overcome by historical-anthropological notions of the social ‘embeddedness’ of
landed property which, as in all forms of property, can be explored anywhere in time
and space (Hann, 1998).
Following both considerations, this chapter questions the notion of ‘neo-feudalism’

by emphasizing the social embeddedness of property rights in land in a particular
geographical and historical context, namely the province of Niederdonau in German
annexed Austria, from 1938 to 1945. In order to avoid simplistic dichotomies, the
plurality of both formal and informal property rights in land, in perpetuity or delimited
in time, shall be taken into account: rights to use a given piece of land and to exclude
others from using it; to control how land is used; to derive income from land; to be
immune from expropriation; to transmit land to heirs; to transfer all or parts of the
aforementioned rights to others, by donation or contract; residuary rights that take
effect when other rights lapse; contingent rights to ownership such as those held by a
creditor, and so on (Norton, 2004: 122); in addition, and prominently in this case, the
restrictions imposed on property rights by powerful agents, namely the state.
Following this introduction, the second section of the chapter outlines the
regulation of land markets by the Nazi state, as implemented by the REG in the region
under study. Quantitative analyses reveal that customary property relations closely
connected to local agrosystems were critical for the application of the REG. In the third
section, this quantitative overview is complemented by qualitative case studies which
further highlight the social embeddedness of landed property rights. In contrast to the
one-sided notion of political-economic suppression of property rights, it becomes
clear that rural actors also made strategic use of the REG’s norms in order to achieve
their practical objectives regarding property rights in the ‘field of forces’ of everyday
life. Based on these quantitative and qualitative findings, the conclusions temper the
notion of ‘neo-feudalism’ with a more nuanced view.
166
Ernst Langthaler
Figure 8.1. The German Reich in 1942
Map by the author.
II. Regulation of the land market by the Nazi state
A few months after Austria’s annexion by Nazi Germany, the 1933 Reich Hereditary
Farm Law (Reichserbhofgesetz, REG) was enacted in the new provinces on 1 August
1938 (Marcik, 1938). Simultaneously, the 1937 Land Plot Transfer Declaration
(Grundstückverkehrsbekanntmachung, GVB) came into force, which concerned all
land not captured by the REG thus replacing the 1919 Austrian Land Transfer Law
(Grundverkehrsgesetz). The REG and the GVB complemented each other to regulate
the land market according to the ‘state’s notion of blood and soil’ (Staatsgedanke von
Blut und Boden), as the Minister of Food and Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader
(Reichsbauernführer) R. Walther Darré stated (Riecke and von Manteuffel, 1938: 3).
Both regulations aimed at isolating the transfer of land from the eroding effects
of market forces, signified by the figure of the ‘rootless Jewish capitalist’, and re-
connecting German peasants to the soil through the power of the totalitarian state.
167
Whereas the GVB regulated the conditions under which a plot of land could be
transferred according to the rather vague notion of ‘public interest’ (öffentliches
Interesse), the REG imposed clear regulations concerning the access to and transfer of
hereditary farmland. The law proposed to create a new category of middle sized farm,
the ‘hereditary farm’ (Erbhof), passed down from generation to generation along the
male bloodline via single heirs. The holders of a ‘hereditary farm’ were expected
to be ‘peasant-able’ (bauernfähig), that is, ‘racially pure’, honourable and capable
of running a farm. They were called Bauern (peasant landowners), as opposed to
Landwirte (simply ‘farmers’) whose farmland was not covered by the REG. Besides
the protectionist possibilities offered by the REG, namely the prevention of forced
auctions, the law also imposed constraints which hampered the free disposal of the
farm: a ‘hereditary farm’ could not be sold or partitioned, nor could it be used as
collateral for mortgage (Grundmann, 1979: 44-50).
In short, the REG was the most far-reaching regulation by the state of property
rights in land since the agrarian reforms of the nineteenth century, with strong biases
towards class, gender, and ‘race’. The REG’s totalitarian nature is revealed by the
multiple strands of the bundle of property rights which it affected, namely, the right to
use land, to derive income from it, to control its use, to select suitable farm holders, to
decide upon the transmission to an heir, and to approve sales, leases and mortgages.
Due to their far-reaching implications, the clauses imposed by the REG on landed
property relations in rural society were met with much concern. Especially in the
eastern parts of the provinces of Niederdonau and Styria, as well as in the western part
of the province of Tirol-Vorarlberg where partible inheritance was widely practised,
the REG met with the peoples’ hidden or even open dissent. But even in those regions
where impartible inheritance had prevailed, the initial consent to the REG soon eroded
because it overrode the farm holder’s decisions regarding the distribution of landed
property. A series of amendments to the framework of the original law followed,
which defused the first impetus of resistance. For instance, the 1943 Hereditary
Farm Development Decree (Erbhoffortbildungsverordnung), which permitted the
customary community of spouses’ property in ‘hereditary farms’ and improved the
rank of the daughters in the order of succession, was a reaction to a petition by the
National-Socialist party of Niederdonau.
However, the newly installed hereditary jurisdiction – the Heir Court

(Anerbengericht) of first instance, the Hereditary Farm Court (Erbhofgericht) of
second instance and the Reich Hereditary Farm Court (Reichserbhofgericht) of
third instance – was confronted with numerous applications for exceptions to the
rules. Besides professional judges, the courts included lay judges as well, who were
168
Ernst Langthaler
selected from among the Bauern of the judicial district. Additionally, the opinion of
the official corporation that encompassed all people employed in food production,
processing and trade (the Reich Food Estate – Reichsnährstand) was normally
considered. Therefore, the courts were able to pass judgement on the applications
rather flexibly, in order to take the edge off the contradictions between norms and
practice (Grundmann, 1979; Langthaler, 2000).
Limiting the perspective to the norms of the REG would inevitably make them
appear more stringent than they were in practice. As early as the late 1930s, an observer
from abroad noted the rather ‘elastic conception’ of the law by the ‘hereditary courts’
(Galbraith, 1939: 467). However, it has only been since the 1970s that the hereditary
farm courts, as intermediaries between the Nazi regime and rural society, became
the object of detailed studies (Farquharson, 1976; Grundmann, 1979; Baumgartner,
1992; Schober, 2007). Studies, especially on the implementation of the REG in the
province of Lower Saxony, pointed out the agency of the Heir Courts between the
public administration, the Reich Food Estate and the National-Socialist party, on the
one hand, and the rural population on the other (Münkel, 1991, 1996).
The emphasis of the preceding studies was mainly on the hereditary farms courts’
actions and the rural population’s reactions. The following study on the province
of Niederdonau2 aims to complement this top-down perspective with a bottom-up
approach to the actions of rural actors within their social networks and the reactions of
political-economic agencies. Farm holders, their relatives and other rural actors were
not just passively subordinated to the legislation, but rather they actively in practice
made use of the legal norms according to their interests and values, as indicated by a
recent study on gender-specific strategies towards the REG (Hauch, 2006).
One – if not the – leitmotif of the REG was the protection of Bauern’s landed
property from the seemingly devastating forces of the land market, in order to save
the idealized ‘middle peasant farm’ as the backbone of the ‘people’s community’
(Volksgemeinschaft). Accordingly, ‘hereditary farms’ were ‘in principle’ not to
be sold, either whole or in parts (Grundmann, 1979: 48). However, both in the
district of Stade in Lower Saxony and in the district of Eggenburg in Niederdonau,
exceptions conceded by the courts were very much the rule: a considerable number
of proceedings in Stade (35 per cent of all proceedings, 2.8 cases per hundred farms
each year) and Eggenburg (41 per cent of all proceedings, 2.3 cases per hundred
farms each year) concerned land mobility, that is, sales, leases or barters of hereditary
2
Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv (NÖLA), BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11. The court
district of Eggenburg initially encompassed 586 ‘hereditary farms’ in 41 communes according to the
existing boundaries on 1 August 1938. Because the files of several communes are not available in the
archives, only 402 ‘hereditary farm files’, containing 156 court proceedings, were analysed.
169
farmland (Tables 8.1 and 8.2). Strikingly, nearly all of these applications were
approved by the Heir Courts (Münkel, 1996: 216-231; Table 8.2). In both regions,
the REG’s stated norm withdrawing hereditary farmland from the land market failed
at least partly, due to the approval of such applications. As a result, parts of the land
that had been declared by law a fixed heritage of one ‘clan’ (Sippe) in fact circulated
among different farm holders.
The study on Stade does not go into regional differences, but in Eggenburg the REG’s
implementation varied according to the prevailing agrosystems (Langthaler, 2006).
The region was located on the line between the hilly land in the north-east of
Niederdonau, dominated by mixed arable farming and viticulture in smallholdings
and small peasant farms, and the highlands in the north-west where arable farming and
forestry in small and middle peasant farms prevailed. These agrosystemic differences
considerably affected the implementation of the REG (Table 8.3): in the wine-growing
zone only 26.2 per cent of the farms were ‘hereditary farms’, while in the area without
viticulture their proportion amounted to 35.5 per cent. This difference coincided with
different distributions of landed property: Whereas in the former region more than half
of the farms were five hectares or less, the corresponding proportion in the latter was
less than one third. The ‘margin of subsistence’ (Ackernahrung) that the REG imposed
as the threshold size for a ‘hereditary farm’, which was set by law at a minimum
7.5 hectares, ranged between eight and ten hectares in Eggenburg. Therefore, the
majority of farms in the wine-growing zone and a sizeable minority of those in the
communes without viticulture were excluded from the ‘hereditary farm’ status.
Table 8.1. Number of Heir Court proceedings by types of concern

in Stade, 1933-1945, and Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Stade (Lower Saxony) Eggenburg (Niederdonau)

Concerns of No. per No. per
No. % No. %
proceedings 100 farms 100 farms
Farm status 502 19.3 18.9 26 16.7 6.5
Land mobility 906 34.9 34.1 64 41.0 15.9
Inheritance 749 28.9 28.2 48 30.8 11.9
Land charges 353 13.6 13.3 3 1.9 0.7
Sanctions 83 3.2 3.1 10 6.4 2.5
Others 2 0.1 0.1 5 3.2 1.2
Total 2,595 100 97.8 156 100 38.8
Sources. NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11; MÜNKEL (1996: 202).
170
Ernst Langthaler
Table 8.2. Results of Heir Court proceedings by types of concern

in Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Types of results (no.)
Approved without
Proceedings per
Approved with
No judgement
Percentage of
proceedings
Total cases
Withdrawn
conditions
conditions
100 farms
Unknown
Rejected
Concerns of proceedings
Farm status 14 0 4 5 0 3 26 16.7 6.5

enrolment (farm) 1 - 2 - - - 3 1.9 0.7
cancellation (farm) 2 - 2 3 - - 7 4.5 1.7
enrolment (plot) 1 - - 1 - 1 3 1.9 0.7
cancellation (plot) 10 - - 1 - 2 13 8.3 3.2
Land mobility 59 2 1 0 1 1 64 41.0 15.9
sale (plot) 28 - 1 - 1 - 30 19.2 7.5
sale (farm) 4 1 - - - - 5 3.2 1.2
barter (plot) 18 - - - - - 18 11.5 4.5
lease (farm) 2 - - - - - 2 1.3 0.5
updating land register 7 1 - - - 1 9 5.8 2.2
Inheritance 33 8 1 1 4 1 48 30.8 11.9
appointment of heir 1 1 - - - - 2 1.3 0.5
transfer to heir (farm) 19 6 - - 2 - 27 17.3 6.7
accommodation of retired holders 1 - - 1 1 - 3 1.9 0.7
transfer to non-heir (plot) 8 - 1 - 1 - 10 6.4 2.5
foundation of property community 2 1 - - - 1 4 2.6 1.0
cancellation of property community 2 - - - - - 2 1.3 0.5
Land charges (mortgage credit) 2 0 0 0 1 0 3 1.9 0.7
Sanctions 5 2 1 2 0 10 6.4 2.5
evaluation of ‘peasant ability’ 4 - 2 1 2 - 9 5.8 2.2
removal of farm holder 1 - - - - - 1 0.6 0.2
Others 0 0 0 0 3 2 5 3.2 1.2
Total 114 10 8 7 11 7 156 100 38.8
Source. NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11.
171
Table 8.3. Distribution of landed property in the communes of the court district
of Eggenburg according to land use, 19393
% ‘hereditary
No. farms % farms per class size
farms’
Communes according
0.5-5 ha 5-10 ha 10-20 ha 20-100 ha >100 ha
to land use
Without viticulture 513 38.0 13.3 22.8 25.1 0.8 35.5
Harmannsdorf 176 30.1 13.6 29.0 25.6 1.7 41.5
Sigmundsherberg 337 42.1 13.1 19.6 24.9 0.3 32.3
With viticulture 1,395 53.5 16.2 20.5 9.2 0.6 26.2
Eggenburg 348 52.0 17.2 20.1 9.8 0.9 25.6
Kattau 375 45.6 16.3 26.7 10.7 0.8 33.6
Röschitz 394 61.2 16.0 17.5 5.1 0.3 19.3
Straning 278 55.4 15.1 16.9 12.2 0.4 27.0
Total 1,908 49.4 15.4 21.1 13.5 0.6 28.7
Sources. NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11; Ergebnisse der Volks-, Berufs-
und landwirtschaftlichen Betriebszählung 1939 in den Gemeinden, Statistik des Deut-
schen Reichs 559/13: Alpen- und Donau-Reichsgaue (unpublished manuscript, c. 1944);
ARNBERGER (1952).
Table 8.4. shows clear differences in the concerns of court proceedings between
the two areas. It is striking that the percentage of land mobility proceedings in the
communes with vineyards almost doubled that in the other communes, and that the
number of proceedings under this concern per hundred farms in the wine-growing
communes was nearly three times as high as in the rest of the region, with large
differences in the proportions of sales and barters of parcels of land and of transfers
to non-heirs. Furthermore, sanctions, especially evaluations of ‘peasant ability’, were
much more often imposed in the communes with viticulture than elsewhere, implying
a more disputed status of eligibility for the legal status of Bauer.
As we look into the different kinds of land use involved in sales and barter-related
proceedings in Table 8.5., we can see that such transactions in hereditary farmland
concerned arable land much more than any other single kind of land use, regardless
of the type of agrosystem, and that the significantly higher propensity for REG norms
to raise land mobility issues in wine-growing areas spread across all kinds of land
use, with the exception of land for building. This coincided with different patterns
of agricultural land layout: in the wine-growing communes farms were smaller on
average, as shown in Table 8.3., and plots of land were rather shaped like strips
3
On 1 October 1938, several communes of the court district were unified with Eggenburg, Harmannsdorf,
Kattau, Röschitz, Sigmundsherberg and Straning. However, the ‘hereditary farm files’ were still kept in
accordance with the former communes which had existed on 1 August 1938, when the REG was enacted.
172
Ernst Langthaler
(Streifenflur), that is, the length of the plot was over two and a half times its width,
whereas in areas without viticulture relatively wider ‘blocks’ of land (Blockflur)
prevailed (Klaar, 1942, 1954).
Table 8.4. Number of Heir Court proceedings by types of concerns and

according to land use in Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Communes according to land use
Without viticulture With viticulture
No. per No. per
Concerns of proceedings No. % No. %
100 farms 100 farms
Farm status 16 22.5 7.3 10 11.8 5.5
enrolment (farm) 2 2.8 0.9 1 1.2 0.5
cancellation (farm) 6 8.5 2.7 1 1.2 0.5
enrolment (plot) 3 4.2 1.4 - - -
cancellation (plot) 5 7.0 2.3 8 9.4 4.4
Land mobility 19 26.8 8.6 45 52.9 24.7
sale (plot) 6 8.5 2.7 24 28.2 13.2
sale (farm) 3 4.2 1.4 2 2.4 1.1
barter (plot) 4 5.6 1.8 14 16.5 7.7
lease (farm) 1 1.4 0.5 1 1.2 0.5
updating of land register 5 7.0 2.3 4 4.7 2.2
Inheritance 28 39.4 12.7 20 23.5 11.0
appointment of heir 1 1.4 0.5 1 1.2 0.5
transfer to heir (farm) 15 21.1 6.8 12 14.1 6.6
accommodation of retired holders 2 2.8 0.9 1 1.2 0.5
transfer to non-heir (plot) 7 9.9 3.2 3 3.5 1.6
foundation of property community 2 2.8 0.9 2 2.4 1.1
cancellation of property community 1 1.4 0.5 1 1.2 0.5
Land charges (mortgage credit) 3 4.2 1.4 0 0.0 0.0
Sanctions 1 1.4 0.5 9 10.6 4.9
evaluation of ‘peasant ability’ 1 1.4 0.5 8 9.4 4.4
removal of farm holder - - - 1 1.2 0.5
Others 4 5.6 1.8 1 1.2 0.5
Total 71 100 32.3 85 100 46.7
Sources. NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11; ARNBERGER (1952).
173
Table 8.5. Number of sold or bartered parcels of hereditary farmland

by types of land use in Eggenburg, 1938-1945
Communes according to land use
All communes Without viticulture With viticulture
% in type of % in type of % in type of % in type of
Land use No. % No. No.
land use commune land use commune
Arable land 23 47.9 5 50.0 21.7 18 47.4 78.3
Grassland 3 6.3 0 0.0 0.0 3 7.9 100.0
Vineyards a 4 8.3 1 10.0 25.0 3 7.9 75.0
Gardens 1 2.1 0 0.0 0.0 1 2.6 100.0
Forest 1 2.1 0 0.0 0.0 1 2.6 100.0
Building land 7 14.6 3 30.0 42.9 4 10.5 57.1
Mixed 6 12.5 0 0.0 0.0 6 15.8 100.0
Unknown 3 6.3 1 10.0 33.3 2 5.3 66.7
Total 48 100 10 100 20.8 38 100 79.2
Sources. NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, boxes 1-11; ARNBERGER (1952).

a
Vineyards belonging to farmsteads in communes without viticulture were located in
wine-growing communes.
Though these findings indicate regional patterns for the implementation of the REG,
they are much too aggregated to reveal the motivations and the property relations of
the persons involved. Therefore, we now switch from the regional and local levels
to the personal level, in order to grasp whether and how rural actors negotiated their
ways around the legal framework, according to their own interests and values – their
Eigensinn (Lüdtke, 1989).
III. Struggling for property rights
III.1. Realigning boundaries

Most of the applications to the Heir Court of Eggenburg concerned land mobility,
that is, the right to transfer all or parts of the farmland to others (Table 8.1). Despite
the clause of the REG that neither ‘hereditary farms’ nor parts of them were ‘in
principle’ to be sold, the courts were authorized to approve exceptions to the rule
due to ‘important reasons’ (Grundmann, 1979: 48). As it happened, the Heir Court
of Eggenburg pronounced the reasons invoked by the applicants to be ‘important’
in nearly all cases: as shown above in Table 8.2, the judges rejected only one out of
forty-eight applications for sale or barter of plots of hereditary farmland; twenty-
eight out of thirty sales were approved, and so were all of the eighteen barters that
came before the court.
174
Ernst Langthaler
The particular case of Johann and Amalia Hammer in Kattau exemplifies general
features of such sales and barters, shedding light on their motivations. In 1941,
these owners of a ‘hereditary farm’ of forty-two hectares closed three contracts: one
concerning the sale of 0.3 hectares of arable land and vineyards and two concerning
the barters of 0.8 for 0.7 hectares and 0.6 for 0.7 hectares of arable land. They argued
that the plot they meant to sell was an extremely narrow and long strip, unsuited for
the use of machinery. Moreover, its cultivation caused considerable loss of time,
due to its remote location. The latter argument was also used as a reason for the
two barter contracts. As the applications for approval of these three contracts were
promptly supported by the District Peasant Leader (Kreisbauernführer), the judges
saw no problem in authorizing an exception to the rule4.
Most of the applications for sale or barter in fact stated the advantageous effects
of the proposed land transaction for farm management. In extreme cases, the plots
to be sold or bartered were located ten, twenty or more kilometres from the farm
building5. The more remote the plot of land, the more obvious was the economic
advantage of its sale or barter, which made it all the more likely to be approved by the
court. Quantitative differences between the bartered plots were counter-balanced by
different soil qualities6. The fact that sales and barters were to take place with other
Bauern also increased the probability of being approved; but if this was not the case,
the economic efficiency of the ‘farmer’ who stood as the other trading partner could
be emphasized to the same effect7. Furthermore, if the plot to be traded had already
been leased out for many years to the contractual partner, this fact would strengthen
the argument8. Needless to say, in the event of a sale the court would assess whether
the loss of land would decrease the farm’s size below the ‘margin of subsistence’9.
All things considered, most sales and barters of plots of land allegedly contributed
to the consolidation of fragmented hereditary farmland. This was certainly due to
the layout of agricultural land in the region under investigation: in the court district
of Eggenburg, farmland was only rarely consolidated; in most cases, plots of land
belonging to one farm were scattered across the area of the respective commune,
and beyond (Klaar, 1942, 1954). Collective consolidations of whole communes,
which had been pioneered in Lower Austria in the 1890s, were not implemented
in Eggenburg before the 1950s (Klaar, 1954: 50). Besides the requirements of farm
mechanization, the consolidation of farmland by individual holders between 1938
4
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 7, file Kattau 5.
5
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 6, file Harmannsdorf 4.
6
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 9, file Rafing 15.
7
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 7, file Kattau 14; ibid., box 10, file Röschitz 29.
8
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 7, file Kattau 26.
9
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 8, file Kleinmeiseldorf 25.
175
and 1945 was first and foremost driven by an insufficient workforce, suffering from
the constraints of rural exodus and military service (Langthaler, 2005). The reduction
of journey times between farm plots that was obtained by sales and barters saved the
scarce labour available to the ‘hereditary farms’ concerned.
This argument can be carried further by exploring regional differences. As we have

seen (Table 8.4), sales and barters of hereditary farmland occurred much more often
in the wine-growing area than in the communes without viticulture, and in the former
a strip-like morphology prevailed in farmland plots. This probably was a considerable
difference, as expressed in the application form by Johann and Amalia Hammer in
Kattau, a village in the wine-growing area of Eggenburg. Generally speaking, ‘strips’
were on average smaller in area, and they were usually more scattered hence more of
a hindrance to the use of machines than ‘block’ plots. Data in Table 8.5 suggest that
realigning the boundaries of arable land was the main concern of sales and barters
of hereditary farmland across all communes, and that achieving land mobility was
more important for the farm holders in the hilly wine-growing country of Eggenburg
than for those in the highlands, across all kinds of land use. (In fact, later collective
consolidations that took place in Eggenburg in the 1950s, which transformed ‘strips’
into ‘blocks’, began to be implemented in the wine-growing communes to the east of
the region.) (Arnberger, 1955).
The short term tendency to realign farmland boundaries was strengthened by the
longue durée patterns of land mobility. In wine-growing areas, the mobility of land
plots among households had traditionally been much stronger, even before the full
liberalization of landed property rights in 1868, than in other regions (Landsteiner
and Langthaler, 1997). Hence, the ideology of a stable hereditary farmland, and the
REG which embodied it, probably met with more resistance in the communes with
viticulture than in those without, and in fact the only actual example of verbalized
opposition to the REG in court files is a complaint by a Bauer from Rafing, a wine-
growing village, about the ‘hard enslaving of the German peasantry’10. Be that as it
may, the Heir Court did not end up hindering the individual realignment of farmland
boundaries – in fact, quite the opposite, if anything it supported this strategy which
directly and indirectly, by reducing time-consuming displacements and facilitating
the use of machinery, defused the problem of labour shortage along with the possible
resistance to REG. However, its effects were socially differentiated, as Bauern near
the ‘margin of subsistence’ had little leeway in these negotiations as compared to
those owning twenty hectares and more.
10
176
Ernst Langthaler
III.2 Compensating the offspring

Another strand of the bundle of property rights heavily restricted by the REG was
the transmission of property by retiring owners. According to the REG, it was utterly
impossible to divide a ‘hereditary farm’ among several heirs; neither was it possible to
fully compensate the offspring for hereditary entitlements with money (Grundmann,
1979: 47). In the eastern parts of the province, above all in the wine-growing and
suburban areas, partible inheritance was widespread (Schmidt, 1930; Kretschmer and
Piegler, 1965), and though in the central and western parts of Niederdonau impartible
inheritance of farms to one male or female heir had prevailed, disinherited sons and
daughters were usually compensated with money and even with small plots of land.
In anticipation of future compensation, unmarried children staying in their parents’
household provided cheap labour for the family farm, most of them usually working
for board and lodging, with little, if any, monetary reward (Ortmayr, 1986: 325 ff.).
The court district of Eggenburg was located in a zone where the apparently clear-cut
boundaries of ‘areas of inheritance’ were in fact blurred. Here, like elsewhere, the REG
contradicted established property relations – and was also contradictory to its declared
aim to tie down the ‘rural people’ (Landvolk) to the soil. However, the REG framework,
though restrictive as a rule, was surprisingly flexible in practice, as exemplified by
the case of Anton and Rosalia Blaich in Zogelsdorf. In 1942, the owners of a fifteen-
hectare ‘spouses hereditary farm’ (Ehegattenerbhof) applied for the cancellation of a
plot of 0.3 hectare from the ‘hereditary farm register’. They claimed that this plot of
land did not form a necessary part of the farm, because it lay too far away to be of
use economically; as such, they argued, it had been leased out for several years. The
applicants intended to assign the plot to their daughter who wanted to build a house
there, thus wishing to compensate her for handing over the farm to their son, who
was designated as the first heir by the REG. Though the Reich Food Estate requested a
delay until the daughter’s house was built, the Heir Court of Eggenburg approved the
application along with the handover contract11. The court followed their arguments –
as was the case in similar situations – not least because one of the lay judges confirmed
the claims of the applicants to be true. To claim that the intended plot of land was
unnecessary or even disadvantageous for running the farm was a key argument in this
sort of applications. Whether or not the loss of land would decrease the farm’s size
below the ‘margin of subsistence’ was also of importance.
Handing over a plot of land indirectly by cancellation from the ‘hereditary farm
register’ was one solution to the compensation problem, especially in the wine-
growing zone of Eggenburg. Another was the direct transfer by judgment, which was
11
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 11, file Zogelsdorf 8.
177
especially important in the communes without viticulture. Maria Ulmer, for instance,
who owned a 27-hectare ‘hereditary farm’ in Kleinmeiseldorf, applied in 1939 for
compensation for her daughter with a plot of 0.5 hectares of a fruit garden due to
her lack of money. The remaining three daughters had already been compensated
with money, as the only son was designated as heir. Though the REG ‘in principle’
refused land transfers to non-inheriting offspring, the Reich Food Estate supported the
application ‘as an exception’. Following this lead, the judges valued the arguments
with respect to the relatively large farm size as an ‘important reason’, and accepted
the application without conditions12.
The ‘exception’ made in this case was in fact conceded rather frequently in
proceedings involving the same concern. Even the fact that children were offspring
from different marriages was not necessarily an obstacle: in 1939 Katharina Bauer in
Obermixnitz applied for compensation for her daughter with 0.1 hectares of vineyard.
This daughter came from the first marriage of the applicant who, after the death
of her husband, had married a second time. The Reich Food Estate as well as the
Heir Court substantiated their approval as follows: the farm’s size was quite large,
thirty hectares; the plot of land had been brought into the farm by the father of the
concerned daughter, and therefore would fall back to his offspring; the vineyard would
be transferred to the daughter’s own ‘hereditary farm’; lastly, the son from the second
marriage, who was the designated heir, agreed to the contract13. Even land transfers
of two or more hectares were approved, if the decrease of farm size was bearable or if
the plot increased the size of another ‘hereditary farm’14. However, if thus transferring
a plot would reduce farm size below the ‘margin of subsistence’, or if the plot lost the
status of hereditary farmland, the court either refused the applications or approved
them with conditions15.
As a rule, the Heir Court of Eggenburg did not oppose such strategies for
compensating the offspring. However, particular applications met with the opposition
of the judges, as in the case of Franz and Juliana Wallig in Rafing, who in 1939
applied for the sale of four hectares of forest, out of the 23-hectare ‘hereditary farm’,
to their children Franz and Anna who suffered from a terminal illness. They argued
that the forest plot had been bought in 1937 with the children’s money, so that the
sale contract would compensate them for the credit they had made available to their
parents. Though the Reich Food Estate signalled support, the Heir Court decidedly
refused the application. The ‘sale contract’, the judges stated, was in fact a gift contract
12
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 8, file Kleinmeiseldorf 23.
13
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 8, file Obermixnitz 4.
14
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 8, file Kühnring 18; ibid., box 10, file Röschitz 26; ibid.,
box 10, file Röschitz 34.
15
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 8, file Obermixnitz 10.
178
Ernst Langthaler
between the parents and their children, because the plot had been bought with the
returns of the farm enterprise. They believed they had detected a kind of ‘sabotage’
against the REG, by which the farm owners intended to ‘hold back’ the forest, i.e. to
separate it from the ‘hereditary farm’, reenacting a strategy which prevailed in the
region before the REG came into force: ‘Plots of land were bought with the savings
from the farm enterprise. When the farm was handed down to a heir, parts of the
farmland – sometimes, but not always the same plots that had been bought – were
held back by the retired owners in order to supplement their income or to compensate
non-inheriting children at the time of the owners’ demise, or even before.’ From the
court’s point of view, the spirit and the purpose of the law, namely the abolishment
of such forms of partible inheritance, were at stake here; thus, they had no alternative
but to refuse the application. In order to strengthen the reasons for their judgement,
judges argued that the loss of land entailed ‘considerable weakening’ of the ‘hereditary
farm’, and dismissed as illusory the designated heir’s hope that he would be relieved
of the burden of accommodating his terminally ill siblings. The applicants appealed
via their notary and made no secret of their opinion: The REG, they complained, meant
a ‘hard enslaving of the German peasantry’ and a ‘dispossession of every Bauer of
free disposal of landed property’. Not surprisingly, the Hereditary Farm Court in
Vienna took a firm stand in this polarized conflict and confirmed the judgement of the
Heir Court16. Though exceptional, this case reveals regional conventions of property
relations which were contested by the REG and, therefore, in most cases were not
taken into consideration in dealing with applications.
III.3. Competing for farm ownership

The REG did not impose constraints only on the actors’ disposition of landed
property, but on the eligibility of the people themselves as well. In the first instance,
the person was evaluated as an heir according to the order of succession, which
preferred the male Bauer’s male relations: first, his sons (and grandsons by his sons,
great-grandsons by his sons’ sons, and so forth); second, his father; third, his brothers
(and the brothers’ sons, the brothers’ grandsons by his sons, and so forth); only fourth,
his daughters (and his grandsons by the daughters, and so forth); fifth, his sisters (and
his sisters’ sons, and so forth); lastly, other female offspring. Furthermore, the person
must be evaluated as ‘peasant-able’ (bauernfähig), which meant to be a German
citizen, ‘racially pure’, not carrying any disability, honourable and able to run a
farm enterprise. Those who did not conform to this definition faced several juridical
consequences: their farms could not become ‘hereditary farms’; they could not inherit
an existing ‘hereditary farm’; they could be partially or totally expropriated from any
‘hereditary farm that might have come to their possession’ (Grundmann, 1979: 44-
16
179
47). Therefore, the REG was both an inclusive and an exclusive resource of power for
the Nazi rule over rural society. However, this legal framework was also exploited
for struggles within rural society, in strategic attempts to assert aims, or to prevent
other actors’ strategic attempts with regard to farm ownership through the aid of the
‘hereditary courts’, as the following cases will exemplify.
In 1942, Gregor Wurst in Wartberg appealed against the listing of his fifteen-
hectare holding as a ‘hereditary farm’, claiming that it had fallen below the ‘margin
of subsistence’; so did the Reich Food Estate, arguing that the farm holder had lost
his ‘peasant ability’. On the contrary, Leopold Arocker in Wartberg, a remote relative
of Gregor Wurst, denied these arguments before the Heir Court and persisted in the
claim that the holding was a ‘hereditary farm’ and its holder was ‘peasant-able’.
Further enquiries by the court revealed the opponents’ motives: Gregor Wurst, aged
seventy-six years, unmarried and without close kin, wanted to sell the farm in order
to make a living from the revenue. Leopold Arocker and his wife, who ran a different
‘hereditary farm’, had been working for several years on Wurst’s farm without
adequate reward, before they came into conflict with Gregor Wurst in 1938; thus,
Arocker claimed for himself or his son the right to be appointed as Wurst’s heir. After
several hearings of witnesses and an on-site inspection, the court declared that the
holding, though above the ‘margin of subsistence’, was no ‘hereditary farm’ because
it lacked an adequate farmstead; therefore, a ruling on Wurt’s ‘peasant ability’ was no
longer necessary. Thus freed from REG constraints, Gregor Wurst was allowed to sell
the farm regardless of the claims of Leopold Arocker, provided he got the approval of
the provincial court according to the GVB17.
In 1938 Juliane Pischinger in Rafing, seventy-two years of age, unmarried and

without children, applied for the sale of her ten-hectare ‘hereditary farm’. The
intended buyers were settlers who had been forced to sell their own ‘hereditary farm’
to the German Reich for military purposes. The Reich Food Estate and the Heir Court
supported the application, on the condition that the trade would include the hereditary
farmland which the seller had set aside from the contract in order to hold back some
plots at her disposition. Alois Pischinger, a nephew of the seller, appealed against
this judgement and, himself the owner of a nine-hectare ‘hereditary farm’, raised a
hereditary title to his aunt’s farm. Juliane Pischinger’s notary countered by giving
an ‘important reason’, according to the REG, for approving the sale contract: due
to her old age, the seller was not able to run the farm anymore; Alois Pischinger,
the only possible heir, was morally flawed by his profit seeking interests, as well as
being economically doubtful due to the mismanagement on his own farm; the buyers
were ‘young, efficient and well funded’ people who promised to run the ‘hereditary
17
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 4, file Wartberg 6.
180
Ernst Langthaler
farm’ properly. Between the lines, it became clear that Juliane Pischinger had lost all
trust in Alois Pischinger who since the 1920s had regularly neglected his duties as a
tenant of some of her fields. The Hereditary Farm Court of Vienna and, afterwards,
the Reich Hereditary Farm Court of Berlin, dismissed Alois Pischinger’s appeals:
compared to his claims, the resettlement of the buyers who had lost their ‘hereditary
farm’ through order of the state was of higher priority; the ‘blood of the old Bauer
dynasties’ of the region was to be reconnected with the soil, the judges argued, in
keeping with the REG’s ideology18.
In 1940, the Reich Food Estate applied for the expropriation (Abmeierung) of
Leander Blauensteiner as the owner of a ten-hectare ‘hereditary farm’ in Rafing,
and for his father by the same name to be assigned the management and usufruct
of the farm. The Provincial Peasant Leader (Landesbauernführer) substantiated
this far-reaching intervention in the property rights of the farm holder indicating
serious deficits regarding farm management and dishonourable behaviour, due to
Blauensteiner’s homosexual orientation. A series of witnesses from the neighbourhood
seriously accused Leander Blauensteiner, denying his ‘peasant ability’. According to
them, he was neither willing nor able to work like a ‘proper peasant’ with the plough
in the fields, instead of which he did ‘female’ chores in the kitchen and the garden.
Furthermore, he stood in ‘perverse’ relations with a former male servant of his, whom
he regularly met and corresponded with by letters. The accused countered that he was
forced to do the in-house chores while his father managed the outdoor work, because
he had neither a wife nor a female servant; and he alleged that his close relation with
the former servant was motivated by compassion and common interests alone.
It is obvious from the court proceedings that this was but the peak of a long-running
conflict between the Bauer and his non-inheriting brother over farm ownership. Each
party tried to mobilize witnesses to support their respective standpoints. Some of
the witnesses, among them the Local Peasant Leader (Ortsbauernführer), made
contradictory testimonies, due to pressures exerted by both one and the other side.
Above all, the heat of the dispute was on the seventy-five year-old father of the two
opponents, who on the one hand had filed together with the non-inheriting son several
petitions for an order of lunacy against the son to whom he had handed over the farm;
and on the other, confirmed the latter’s ability to run the farm as well as his moral
integrity. Following extensive enquiries, the court approved the application of the
Reich Food Estate, through which ruling the ‘peasant ability’ of the farm holder was
denied and, therefore, management and usufruct were assigned to his father as the
next heir in line, according to the REG.
18
181
However, during the enquiries following Leander Bauensteiner’s appeal, the

proceeding took an unexpected turn: he married a ‘saleswoman’ from Vienna to
whom he had handed over a dwelling before the wedding. Whatever might have
motivated this marriage, the previous disarrangement of gender roles had been
rearranged, according to the prevailing ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles with regard to
economic and moral affairs. The Reich Food Estate withdrew the application, arguing
that the division of labour within the couple had considerably improved the farm’s
management – the Bauer working in the fields, his wife doing in-house work – and,
furthermore, the widespread rumours about his ‘perverse’ sexual orientation had
become silent in the village19.
Their differences aside, what these cases have in common is, first, that they were
all driven by personal conflicts about farm ownership involving farm holders and
their relatives. The public ‘hereditary courts’ served as the battlefield – as a ‘societal
field-of-force’ (Thompson, 1978: 151) – on which these conflicts involving both
interests and emotions were fought out. Second, going to the ‘hereditary court’ was
an open-ended fight, because the judgement was not at all predictable. In some cases,
a strong gender bias towards patriarchy, which has also been found in Oberdonau
(Hauch, 2006: 178-188), is obvious. For instance, a ‘farmer’ who had divorced
his wife successfully applied for ‘hereditary farm’ status in order to prevent the
commonly owned farm from being partitioned20. However, in other cases women
succeeded against their male counterparts, as shown in the conflict between Juliane
and Alois Pischinger. In any case, the multitude of internal and external relationships
of the opponents, the statements by the Reich Food Estate as well as the assessment
by the judges of the advantages and disadvantages of each decision influenced the
decision-making process. Third, the overthrowing of an incumbent Bauer by a
close or narrow relative was a complex and quite difficult task. In each of the cases
above, the respective farm holder – regardless of gender – managed to enforce his
or her claim, at least in the long run. Though these particular cases cannot simply be
generalized, there is evidence that the hereditary courts which implemented the REG
in situ were more than pure agencies of suppression; they also served as one arena
where personal struggles for landed property rights were fought, as they evolved
within rural society.
19
20
NÖLA, BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten, box 7, file Kainreith 6.
182
Ernst Langthaler
IV. Conclusion
The 1933 REG affected several strands of the bundle of property rights in Austrian
rural society from 1938 to 1945. The far reaching regulation of property rights in
farmland by the Nazi state has led some scholars to apply the notion of ‘neo-feudalism’.
The findings outlined above challenge this notion in several respects. Firstly, due to
the uneven distribution of landed property, only a minority – less than one third –
of the farms were covered by the REG. Secondly, instead of being a fixed heritage
of one and the same ‘clan’, hereditary farmland was mobilized to a considerable,
albeit limited, degree. This was due to the Heir Court’s intermediary role between the
normative logic of the REG and the practical logic of the farm holders, resulting in
a flexible adjustment of the judgements to local agrosystems. Thirdly, farm holders
and their relatives were not passively subordinated to the REG, but rather they made
active use of the legal norms in practice according to their interests and values, as is
indicated by their strategic attempts at realigning farmland boundaries, compensating
non-inheriting offspring, and struggling for farm ownership.
The success or failure of these attempts heavily depended on the quantity and
quality of the actors’ social relationships: to neighbours and kin who were interrogated
as witnesses; to professional and lay judges of the Heir Court; to representatives
of the Reich Food Estate, the Nazi party and the public administration. They also
involved differences in class (e.g. the broader leeway for sales, barters and gifts that
was available to middle and large Bauern), gender (e.g. the abolition of communities
of property in the event of divorce of a married couple) and age (e.g. old age as an
obstacle to ‘peasant-ability’). All in all, the application of the REG in rural society not
only structured, but also was structured by the material, social and cultural relations
in specific regions, communes and households. This dialectic structuring limited ‘re-
feudalization’ by the Nazi regime, in favour of the rural actors’ own interests and
values, both interlinked by the quite flexible jurisdiction of the courts. Paradoxically,
the REG’s embeddedness in rural society both enabled and limited its application.
183
Archival sources
NIEDERÖSTERREICHISCHES LANDESARCHIV (NÖLA): BG Eggenburg, Erbhofakten,
boxes 1-11.
STATISTIK AUSTRIA, Library: Ergebnisse der Volks-, Berufs- und landwirtschaftlichen
Betriebszählung 1939 in den Gemeinden, Statistik des Deutschen Reichs 559/13: Alpen-
und Donau-Reichsgaue (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1944).
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186
9. Securing access to England’s uplands: or how
the 1945 revolution petered out
Richard W. HOYLE
I. Introduction
One of the prime characteristics of English History is its lack of revolutionary

moments. The English were the first to execute their monarch judicially in 1649 and
the first to restore their monarchy in 1660. Thereafter, the continuance of monarchy
came to be seen as the best guarantee of property rights. Subsequent political change
was incremental rather than sudden. The nineteenth-century state was reluctant to
interfere with property rights except in Ireland (where, for pragmatic reasons, the
British state dismantled the Irish landowning classes). The continued existence of
great estates in England was indeed an issue for the radical left in the two or three
decades before the First World War. Both land taxation and nationalization were
canvassed in radical circles in the 1890s (Shaw Lefevre, 1893, ch. 12 summarizes
views at that time), but confiscation or compulsory purchase by the state was never
on the mainstream political agenda. Instead, landowners were put under pressure by
the creation – starting with Death Duties in 1894 – of a deeply disadvantageous tax
regime which, together with low agricultural rents and high levels of mortgage debt
incurred in better times, encouraged the break up of landed estates.
Although the decades before and after the First World War saw the dissolution
of many estates and the sale of extensive areas of land into owner-occupation,
nationalization of land remained on the agenda throughout the 1930s. Some leading
agronomists saw it as the means to achieve the collectivization of British agriculture
and its renewed profitability. And nationalization was the policy of the Labour Party
through most of the interwar years. By the time Labour came to power in 1945, it had
been discreetly abandoned although some on the political left remained convinced
that a mistake had been made and an opportunity lost (Tichelar, 2001).
Instead, the continuation of wartime powers under the 1947 Agriculture Act
seemed to offer a solution to the question of agricultural productivity during the drive
for national self-sufficiency that marked government policy towards agriculture until
the early 1980s. The power to remove farmers who showed themselves unable or
unwilling to farm according to standards of efficiency laid down by the state remained
187
Securing access to England’s uplands
in place until 1958 (Short, 2007). This remained a powerful coercive force which
backed up the inducements of selective subsidies, regulated prices and a powerful
steer to farmers through the government’s agricultural advisory service. In this way,
agriculture achieved something of the character of a nationalized industry without
government having to go the full distance of owning the industry’s assets: moreover
it avoided one of the key pitfalls of collectivization by leaving farmers as independent
entrepreneurs rather than turning them into salaried managers.
Figure 9.1. The Pennine uplands
Map by Rachel Cooke, Carnegie Publishing.
188
Richard W. Hoyle
So whilst the post-war settlement drew back from full nationalization, it created
a state-directed industry in which ownership remained with landlords and owner-
occupying farmers. The settlement established a similar half-way position over the
national parks. There was no intention of taking land of especial scenic or aesthetic
value into state ownership, but its owners would be guided by special planning
authorities. Likewise over access to open land, the particular concern of this chapter:
ownership would remain as it was, but the owner’s property rights would be
compromised by regulations which would allow access.
In terms of property rights, the post-war settlement stopped short of annexing the
freehold to the state (which it did with mineral rights), but tempered the owner’s
absolute rights by annexing to the state degrees of control over his land. The right
of a farmer to cultivate how he wished was taken from him. Farmers who fell short
of accepted norms could be replaced. The right to build on land, or exploit it for
quarrying or gravel extraction, was subjected to planning law. Areas of scenic value
were placed under a more stringent form of control. In the case of open land, the state
removed the landowners’ right to exclusive use by obliging them to allow the public
a right of access. Where possible, this would be achieved by voluntary agreement, but
where it was not, a compulsory process could be invoked. What was nationalized was
the owners’ right of exclusive use. In short, the post-war settlement was predicated by
leaving the freehold with the owners whilst annexing rights implicit in the freehold to
the state, to be exercised for the larger public benefit. Nowhere is the compromising
of private ownership clearer than in the case of the Pennine uplands, but the story of
how access was secured to this land turns out to contain an unexpected twist.
II. Walkers and sportsmen
Access to land in the Pennine uplands had been sought for half a century before
the Second World War. This was land of little agricultural use being poor quality
sheep pasture, with important secondary uses as grouse moor and water gathering
ground. (For the ecology of the area, Simmons, 2003, also Hey, 2008; Hoyle,
2008.) It was also of considerable scenic value. In some upland areas, notably the
Lake District, moorland and mountain were traditionally open to walkers. In part
this reflects the early discovery of the Lake District by tourists; but most crucially
it also reflects the fact that the central Lake District hills are poor land for grouse
shooting. As A. J. Brown said in 1938, ‘[i]f by some freak of nature, grouse suddenly
began to breed on the waste lands about the lakes, walkers would very soon find
their movements hampered by the kind of restrictions imposed on the moorlands of
Derbyshire, Scotland and parts of Yorkshire’ (Brown, 1938: 357). Grouse, of course,
have no agricultural significance; but grouse shooting was a keenly pursued patrician
189
sport supported by successive monarchs. Photographs of Prime Ministers and their

cabinets shooting grouse on the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ (the opening day of the season)
were a staple of mid-August newspapers until the mid-1960s. The best shooting was
in Scotland, but the Pennines also contained a range of distinguished shooting estates
as well as a plethora of smaller ones, and moors leased by shooting syndicates. The
grouse differed from other game birds in one key respect: it has never been possible
to breed it in controlled conditions. Moorland could be managed to increase their
numbers by burning off the older heather, but they still varied from year to year in an
unpredictable way. The fragility of grouse numbers was a pretext to justify excluding
the public from grouse moors on the grounds that they would disturb the birds and
disrupt their breeding (Hill, 1980: 51).
At this point it would be helpful to introduce the distinction between footpaths and
the right to roam. Some of the Pennine moors were traversed by public paths, but
these tended to originate in practical village-to-village routes which normally crossed
upland areas by the lowest route. Those engaged in recreational walking frequently
sought to go to the highest points which were off the established routes. Walkers
also tended to resent being held to what they sometimes referred to as ‘pedestrian
tramlines’. If walkers were found trespassing off the paths, they might be turned back
by gamekeepers. What walkers increasingly sought was a ‘right to roam’, to have
the freedom to wander. This was seen by the shooting interests as incompatible with
the use of the moors for shooting. But this was also a right which had, de facto, been
established by the beginning of the twentieth century on the Lake District hills and
on one notable moorland in Yorkshire – Ilkley Moor.
Walking was well established as a leisure pursuit by the end of the nineteenth
century. Inevitably, walkers, with their desire for free access to the countryside, found
themselves in conflict with landowners who sought to maintain their privacy. Taylor
has shown how there were intermittent conflicts between walkers from the Lancashire
towns and landowners on their fringes throughout the nineteenth century and how
walkers formed Footpath Preservation Societies to safeguard their interests and oppose
footpath closures. These disputes ran on into the second decade of the twentieth
century at least (Taylor, 1997, chs. 2, 4). There seems to have been something of a new
desire to search out the wilder and more barren parts of the countryside from the late
nineteenth century. Where earlier guidebooks had directed the walker to essentially
pretty villages and riverside paths, a new generation of walkers sought the mixture of
solitude and physical challenge involved in scaling hills and engaging with frequently
inclement weather. One reason for this may well have been the increasing appearance
of the motor car, the motor bus and the tarmac road, all of which made what had been
relatively isolated countryside into a common possession. The uplands were too wild
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and difficult for the casual walker or ‘day tripper’. As this was unknown land, there
were also elements of discovery, with the added piquancy of trespassing. (It might
be added that rambling, at this stage, had strong associations with Socialism and so
the act of trespassing, and conflicts with gamekeepers, had a clear political edge to
them.) For some, this style of walking became tied up with the achievement of a male
physical strength or hardiness. One of the leading walking clubs, the Sheffield Clarion
Ramblers, founded by G. H. B. Ward in 1900, appears to have been strongly gendered
in its early years. Women were made welcome, but were discouraged from undertaking
the harder Clarion walks, tests of endurance in undertaken in bad weather or through
the night. (For the culture of the Clarion Ramblers, Tebbutt, 2004a, 2004b, 2006.)
Hence, from the late nineteenth century, there seems to have been the emergence
of a new element within rambling that sought access to the high Pennine moors which
lay to the east and south of Manchester and the west and south of Sheffield. In 1908
Sir Charles Trevelyan explained to the House of Commons how the open moorland
to the south and west of Sheffield was almost entirely closed to the city’s people
(Taylor, 1997: 133).
III. ‘A minor social revolution’: public good defined as freedom
There were attempts, from the late 1880s onwards, to secure a statutory right to
roam over mountains and hills. This was originally a movement to open up the Scottish
and Welsh mountains. Bryce’s Access to Mountains (Scotland) bill was moved eight
times in the House of Commons between 1888 and 1909. In 1908 Trevelyan moved
the first access bill for England which would have opened up all land over 800 feet
and lake shores. Even though his bill protected the shooting interest, it too failed.
Further access bills were moved (unsuccessfully) in 1924, 1930, 1931 and 1937.
The only real evidence for an improvement in walkers’ rights in the inter-war years
came from Section 193 of the Law and Property Act of 1925 which gave a right of
exercise and recreation on common land lying within urban districts. This included
some quite large areas of land on the edge of towns (such as Port Meadow in Oxford)
but also moorland in the West Riding (Baildon Moor, Ilkley Moor) and elsewhere
(Shoard, 1999: 25-26; Taylor, 1997: 255). Despite intermittent pressure from
walkers, landowners stood firm, using their keepers to police the moorland. In May
1933 one Peak District landowner went so far as to publish pictures of trespassers on
his land with the offer of a £5 reward for information leading to their identification
(Hill, 1980: 52). Walking seems to have increased in popularity in the 1920s and
particularly in the 1930s. Walkers increasingly organized themselves into regional
federations and, from 1935, in the national Rambler’s Association. The Youth Hostels
Association – providing cheap accommodation for walkers – was established in 1930
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and the Standing Committee for National Parks in 1936. The developing demand for
outdoor recreation was slow to get a response from parliament. A rights of way act of
1934 conferred powers on landowners to stop footpaths. There was an attempt in 1934
to close parts of Ilkley Moor to walkers for five months of the year and to implement
by-laws which would, inter alia, have forbidden them to sing or shout. Protests by
ramblers in the West Riding forced a public enquiry, and, as a result it was ordered
that the moor could be closed – access to footpaths apart – for one month in the
summer and up to sixty-five other days between April and September (Hill, 1980: 76-
77; Brown, 1938: 67-68). This seems to have been part and parcel of an aggressive
landlordism towards ramblers in the years before the war. Attempts by the ramblers’
organizations to negotiate greater access seem to have been consistently rebuffed
(Taylor, 1997, chap. 7; Hill, 1980, chs 5-6; more generally Lowerson, 1980).
As Brown wrote in 1938:
‘We are fond of talking about England as the Land of Freedom, but England is the only
country in Europe where such severe restrictions prevail. In other countries the mountains,
forests and waste lands are free for all to roam, but in England they are rigidly reserved
to a few rich landowners and shooting syndicates, who only use them for a few weeks
in the year […] men who fought for England (and who will probably be called upon to
fight for her again sooner or later) should have at least as much right to explore these
uplands as any syndicate has to shoot over them […]. If, as one absentee landlord said
[…], “you cannot have ramblers and grouse”, then I very much fear we shall have to do
without the grouse […] It is, of course, true that over many of the Yorkshire moors the
public are allowed by courtesy to wander freely: and nobody is a whit the worse for it.
Unfortunately, over certain moors (and more especially in Derbyshire […]), access of
any kind is stubbornly denied, and brute force is used to turn the public off the moors.
Walkers are treated, not as free Englishmen, but like escaped convicts from Dartmoor’.
(Brown, 1938: 364-366 passim).
The failure to confer rights on walkers was accompanied by a new militancy

amongst them. From 1928 there was an annual walker’s protest at the Winnats Pass
in Derbyshire calling for open access to the countryside. Then, in 1932, a radical
element amongst the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers organized a mass trespass of
Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. This has become a celebrated occasion, commemorated
annually: the five men imprisoned after it became martyrs, or, as the Guardian put
it in 2007, ‘Freedom Fighters’. The Sheffield Ramblers widely advertised their
intention of making an ascent of Kinder Scout. They were joined in this by a larger
party of ramblers from Manchester: altogether several hundred people made their
way up the moor, apparently failing to reach the summit. On their descent six of the
ramblers were arrested and later tried on charges of illegal assembly and assault.
The jury before whom their case was heard at Derby Assizes consisted of two
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brigadier-generals, three colonels, two majors, three captains and two aldermen. It
was drawn to the attention of the jury that five of the accused were members of the
Young Communist League; one was selling the Daily Worker, another was carrying a
pamphlet by Lenin. (‘Is that the Russian gentleman’ the judge asked.) Three of the six
were Jewish. The judge instructed the jury not to allow the ‘extreme views’ of some
of the defendants or the fact that ‘some of the men had names which sounded perhaps
strange’ to prejudice their deliberations. One of the accused was acquitted, and the
other five imprisoned for terms of between two and six months. This was class justice
with a vengeance and it may have served its purpose. Other mass trespasses planned
for 1932 seem not to have attracted much support, and the trespass itself divided
opinion, with the majority of ramblers apparently feeling that the direct action
techniques of the Manchester and Sheffield ramblers were unhelpful (Hill, 1980,
chap. 5; Stephenson, 1989: 153; Taylor, 1997: 259-260; headline, The Guardian,
Society Supplement, 18 April 2007).
An access bill finally made it into law in 1939 but only after it had been
emasculated in committee in the House of Commons (Hill, 1980: 78-83; Stephenson,
1989, chap. 8; Cherry, 1975: 17-25). The Act, as opposed to the unamended bill, did
not establish a general right of access. Instead, people who wanted to secure access
to specific areas of mountain land had to take the initiative and negotiate it using
a cumbersome and potentially expensive procedure laid down in the act. Access,
when granted, could be limited to periods of the year only. Anyone who entered
access land at times of the year when access was prohibited, or who was found
guilty of a range of minor misdemeanours whilst on the land, would be committing a
criminal offence and not simply trespass. The act disappointed and split the rambling
constituency between those who thought that it was the best that could be achieved
short of a ‘minor social revolution’ and those who saw it as a ‘landowners protection
act’ (Stephenson, 1989: 186). In fact it was a dead letter. Having been due to come
into force on 1 January 1940, it was repealed in 1949. By then the ‘minor social
revolution’ needed to open up the countryside had taken place.
It has often been remarked how the Labour Party came to dominate the wartime
planning of the post-war domestic agenda. For the countryside and the national parks,
the key document was the Dower Report of 1945. On access, Dower proposed a
general right of the public to roam over all uncultivated land, in which he included not
simply northern moorlands but also chalk heaths in southern England. The Hobhouse
Committee (1946) considered the feasibility of Dower’s proposals and found in favour
of the general right he proposed, but went a stage further by recommending that to
avoid ambiguity, County Councils should draw up maps of the land considered to be
uncultivated. Landowners would be able to withdraw land from this for agricultural
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improvements and certain other exemptions were envisaged: but what Dower proposed,
and Hobhouse re-iterated, was a broad right, established in law, for the public to enter
uncultivated land for recreational purposes.
However, by 1949 the government was increasingly tepid about implementing

Dower and Hobhouse’s recommendations in full and the National Parks and Access
to the Countryside Act was seen as a retreat from their more radical proposals. This
made provision for the creation of National Parks in England and Wales, for the
establishment of long distance footpaths and the designation of access land by either
voluntary agreement or by order confirmed by ministerial directive. The National
Parks were to be run by local committees under the supervision of the National Parks
Commission (NPC). The park authorities could own land and in time some did, but
the National Parks Act was essentially designed to protect the countryside through
the use of planning powers. In all ten parks were created between 1951 and 1957.
The National Parks Commission was also to identify Areas of Outstanding Natural
Beauty (AONB) which would receive a degree of protection from unsympathetic
development. The National Parks Commission was given an advisory rather than an
executive role and was dependent on the support of the Secretary of State for Housing
and Local Government to achieve its aims. It has been judged to have been weakly
led and to have had very little purchase over the Ministry of Housing and Local
Government. In 1962 the Commission’s chairman, Lord Strang, could remark in the
annual report how:
‘I am bound to confess that our experience has, in the whole, been gravely disappointing.
Where a government department has had plans for erecting large installations of one
kind or another in a national park, I can remember no case where it has been diverted
from its purpose by anything that the commission might say’. (National Parks
Commission, 1962: 71)
Conversely (and as we shall see), the Commission had great difficulty persuading
the Ministry of Housing and Local Government of its point of view. The Commission’s
limited powers meant that where (for instance) it was unable to secure agreement with
local landowners over the boundaries of national parks or the route of long distance
footpaths, then the matter was referred to the minister who, after holding an enquiry,
would adjudicate. A great deal therefore depended on the minister’s sympathy for the
national parks and access agenda. But at least England and Wales got their national
parks. The parallel legislation for Scotland, to have been based on the Ramsey Report
of 1947, never happened (Blunden and Curry, 1990, chs. 3, 4; Cherry, 1975, chs. 5, 8;
MacEwen and MacEwen, 1982: 9-22).
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The Act’s provisions for access to open country formed one of the sharpest retreats
from Dower and Hobhouse’s recommendations. The minister in charge of the
legislation, Lewis Silkin, came to feel some sympathy with the landowners.
‘After all, in the existing state of society and the law, a person’s land is his land. I think
it is wrong to give the public an automatic right to go over all private land of a certain
character’. (Cherry, 1975: 160; Hill, 1980: 92).
Following the Hobhouse Committee’s recommendations, Part V of the Act

instructed each County Council to prepare ‘review maps’ of open land within its
boundaries and bring forwards proposals for securing access to it. These maps were to
be approved by the minister but were also open to appeal by landowners and interested
parties. Having defined ‘open country’, a machinery was established whereby a local
authority could negotiate an access agreement with a landowner. If agreement proved
impossible, the local authority could issue an access order which could be appealed
to the minister by the landowners involved. In extremis, compulsory purchase could
be used to secure land from irreconcilable landowners – with the minister’s sanction.
Compensation could be paid to the owners of access land for loss of value.
The access arrangements in Part V of the act have normally been judged to have
been a failure. When it came to preparing maps of open country, no fewer than
thirty-eight English counties (and all those in Wales) responded by either saying that
they had no ‘open country’ or that no action was necessary (Blunden and Curry,
1990: 136). By 1970 only forty-six agreements had been made covering 29,133
hectares, almost all of it in the Peak District National Park. No land was ever subject
to an Access Order in the first two decades of the act’s operation, but Lancashire
County Council successfully made one in 1972 to gain public access to land in the
Forest of Bowland1. By the 1980s some landowners, perhaps most notoriously the
Duke of Westminster at his Abbeystead estate in the Forest of Bowland, were flatly
refusing to enter into access agreements. A new mood of radicalism was infecting the
rambler’s organizations with a conviction that neither the promise of 1945, nor the
diminished promise of 1949, had ever been implemented. Hence it remained for a
later reforming Labour government to confer a right of general access to open land,
mountain and moorland by the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act of 2000
along the lines envisaged by Dower and Hobhouse.
This has normally been seen as a story of how there was more kick left in the
English ruling classes after the Second World War than the architects of the 1949 act
appreciated. English landowners had refused to compromise on access to their grouse
1
Information from Lancashire County Council, in response to the author’s inquiry, 2007.
195
moors throughout the inter-war years. The 1932 mass trespass played into their hands
and they reacted by pursuing a number of the trespassers vindictively through the
courts: by doing so they deterred further actions of that sort. They successfully neutered
the 1939 Access to Mountains bill by incorporating wrecking amendments. By the end
of the 1930s the position of walkers was arguably no better than it had been at the end
of the First World War. Then the Dower and Hobhouse reports wholeheartedly adopted
their agenda. They secured legislation in 1949 which, although a major retreat from
the radical ambitions of the Dower and Hobhouse reports, seemed to hold considerable
hope. But, thereafter local authorities – which were often dominated by landowners
– did the minimum to open up access land. Moreover the Conservative government
which followed Labour into power in 1951 had a very strong landed and aristocratic
element which was unsympathetic to the ramblers. Hence by the 1970s the ramblers
had come to see the access clauses in the 1949 act as unworkable. It was a further half
century before the landlord interest was finally overcome by new legislation, but even
this contained safeguards for the grouse-shooting interest.
None of this quite adds up. The area in which access orders were most used, and
most successfully used, was in the Peak District National Park, the centre of the
bitterest disputes between landlords and walkers in the 1930s. By 1980 a little short of
50,000 acres in the park was covered by access agreements, including the land most
contested in the 1920s and 1930s. This was about a third of the open land within the
national park. But it was also heavily concentrated in the Dark Park, and the Ramblers
Association continued to seek access to twenty-eight further moors mostly in the east
of the park (Hill, 1980: 96; Blunden and Curry, 1990). Amongst those who entered
into voluntary agreements with the Peak District National Park was the Duke of
Devonshire. Even on his Yorkshire estates, access agreements were concluded in 1960
and again in 1968 even though there seems to have been some ducal foot-dragging
(Hill, 1980: 99, 101-102). Where interwar conflicts were sharpest, the 1949 access
provisions seem to have been used with most success. There certainly were landlords
who refused to cooperate. Chief amongst them were the municipal water boards.
IV. ‘The great corporations’ passion for water’: public good defined
as health
The provision of water for the growing urban centres of the nineteenth century was
left to the initiative of the individual towns. In the North of England many of them
built dams in the smaller Pennine valleys, often developing strings of reservoirs – as
Manchester did in Longdendale, Liverpool at Rivington, Bradford in Nidderdale and
Leeds in the Washburn valley. Other towns relied on abstracting water from upland
streams, but the effect was the same: each town had its own valley and the catchment
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which drained into it. By the 1880s Manchester and Liverpool both recognized that
there was too little unexploited ground left in the Pennines to meet the projected
needs of their cities and looked further afield, Manchester to the freshwater lakes of
the Lake District and Liverpool to Wales.
The result was that publicly-owned utilities came to possess large areas of upland.
After the individual water boards had been merged into regional companies (in
1974), North-West Water owned 140,000 acres and Yorkshire Water 72,000 acres
(Water share offer, 1989: 212, 579) much of which was in the national parks. In 1980
they owned 7 per cent of the Lake District National Park and 14 per cent of the Peak
District. The area used for water catchment was somewhat larger – 29 per cent of
the Peak District (MacEwen and MacEwen, 1982, Table 7.1 and p. 230). This made
the companies major landowners in their own rights, but they were concerned to
purchase (or acquire rights over) a particular type of land, in a particularly localized
area (Simmons, 2003, Fig. 4.6). Geology plays a role here. In the Pennines the water
companies were primarily interested where the underlying geology was gritstone.
Where it was limestone – in the southern half of the Derbyshire Peak District or in the
Yorkshire Dales – the rock was too porous for reservoirs and, in addition, the geology
might not stand the weight of masonry or earth dams. As the acid soils of gritstone
suited heather, the staple food of grouse, there was something of a coincidence
between grouse land and water board land.
The water boards are, in this story, the elephants in the room. Brown, in his
Striding through Yorkshire, listed ‘the great corporations, with their passion for
more and more water, whose ideal seems to be to convert England into a vast chain
of reservoirs’ as the first of the three opponents of walkers, the second being the
Forestry Commission and the third, the landlords (‘who are actuated by the loftiest
motives of all. They wish to secure adequate breathing space for the tender grouse
in the congested areas’) (Brown, 1938: 357-358). Tom Stephenson of the Rambler’s
Association devoted a chapter in his memoirs to his dealings with the water authorities.
And whilst the Dukes have taken the force of the most recent polemical writing (for
instance, Shoard, 1999: 191), the water boards stood shoulder to shoulder with them
in opposing access to moorland. Their role in the struggle to secure access rights has
never been given the weight it deserves, nor have their motives been scrutinized.
As early as 1935 the Council for the Preservation of Rural England led a delegation
of countryside organizations, including the Ramblers Association, to a meeting
with the British Waterworks Association to discuss access to their catchments
(Stephenson, 1989: 102-103). There was no meeting of minds. The water companies
were well aware that there were occasional outbreaks of water-borne disease: in
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Maidstone in 1897 (blamed on itinerant hop-pickers defecating in the open air near
to springs which produced some of the borough’s water supply); Denby Dale in
Yorkshire in 1932, which left eleven dead and was traced to a single infected person
who was nursed in a house whose water closet drained into a stream which in turn fed
a small reservoir; and more seriously in Croydon in 1937-1938, in which there were
322 primary cases and forty-three deaths (Local Government Board, 1898; Ministry
of Health, 1948; para. 18, The Times, 11 Nov. 1939). The dangers necessitated
preventive measures. As early as 1898, after receiving reports of domestic sewage and
farmyard effluent getting into its reservoir at Rivington, the Liverpool waterworks
committee was advised that the only way for the Corporation ‘to effectively and
permanently guard the purity of the water […]’ was for it to become the owner of
the whole catchment. ‘A closeness of supervision could then be exercized that is
not possible so long as the land is in the possession of private owners’ (Hope, 2002:
13). It seems that Liverpool started buying up its catchments from about this time,
and other municipal water companies probably followed. This was later to become
government policy. A circular from the Ministry of Health in January 1939 after the
Croydon epidemic advocated that upland undertakers ‘should, wherever reasonably
practicable, acquire the whole of the gathering ground above the reservoir, dam or
intake, and protect the reservoir or intake by adequate fencing’. They were therefore
recommended to take a strict exclusionist approach. Steps were to be taken to ensure
that drainage from houses or farmyards did not enter reservoirs, or that runoff from
manure did not contaminate the supply (Ministry of Health, 1948: 7). It was in this
spirit that the water board engineers argued against the Access to Mountains Bill
of 1939. Typhoid, in the meantime, had become a very rare disease with a national
annual death rate of less than five per million in the later 1930s and during the war
years (Ministry of Health, 1948: 9).
There was a realization amongst the ramblers after the 1935 contacts that the water
utilities’ justification for the need to exclude the public from catchments to ensure
water purity needed to be challenged on their own terms. By 1943 Stephenson and
others were advocating the establishment of a technical committee to explore the
issues (Stephenson, 1989: 104-105). Whether at their behest, or as a result of the
recommendations of Dower’s National Parks Report, such a committee was established
in 1946 under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Heneage. This committee – which was
also charged with considering the afforestation and agricultural uses of gathering
grounds – largely accepted the rambler’s arguments (Ministry of Health, 1948).
The committee found that there were three defences against the bacteriological
contamination of water by typhoid. The first was long storage: it was known that
typhoid bacteria did not survive for long in water. The second was filtration through
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sand, the third chlorination. It is clear that the water boards had unevenly adopted
these. Manchester, most notably, was supplying its customers with untreated water.
In place of treatment after water had left the reservoir, the water boards had come to
place a premium on avoiding contamination of water before it entered the reservoir
(Ministry of Health, 1948, paras. 21, 22). Hence, some water boards had, in effect,
tried to sterilize their catchments by excluding people as far as possible. On this point
the committee found wide variations in practice. Bradford Corporation owned 2422
acres of a catchment of 2812 acres and ‘wholly prohibited access’. It allowed a limited
number of sheep on its land and had pulled down farms so that no one was resident
on its catchment estate. The Fylde Water Board (serving Blackpool and the West
Lancashire towns) had 10,193 acres from which the public were excluded. Shooting
tenants were allowed on the land but kept away from the reservoir. The grazing of
sheep and cattle was allowed, but again, they were kept away from the reservoir’s
edge. Other authorities were more relaxed. Leeds, owning 12,954 acres, allowed
some access along rights of way including along paths dedicated by the Corporation.
Sheffield Corporation with 8,049 acres, permitted footpath access, allowed agriculture
‘virtually to the water’s edge’ and declared itself ‘generally favourable to public
access’. The report also contrasted the varied and contradictory advice it had received
from individual waterworks managers (Ministry of Health, 1948, App. II and paras.
26-31). The Committee found some practices which they criticized as being too lax
(Ministry of Health, paras. 46, 48), but by implication, it also pointed to the lack of
hazard which those practices seemed to involve. They pointed out that even if all
except medically-examined water board employees were removed from catchments, it
would still be impossible to prevent the spread of disease carried by sea gulls (Ministry
of Health, 1948, para. 20). They were dismissive of the more extreme opinions of the
water engineers and whilst acknowledging the possibility of pollution of a reservoir by
human faeces deposited in its catchment, thought the likelihood very small.
And yet, if the Committee found the water board engineers unpersuasive, then
the engineers did not change their mind on the publication of the report. They were
plainly uncomfortable with the National Parks Bill, but parliamentary pressure forced
the removal of any blanket exclusion of walkers from catchment grounds. (This can
be followed through a position paper prepared in 1954, TNA, COU 1/188.) It is clear
enough that the policy of the Labour Government at this time was that gathering
grounds would normally be open to public access with the possible exception of the
banks of the reservoir. The onus was very much placed on the water boards to argue
why the public should be excluded from some or all of their land.
When it came to the designation of national parks, water undertakings objected

to the inclusion of their land within the boundaries in at least four cases: the Lake
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District, the North York Moors, the Yorkshire Dales and the Brecon Beacons. In the
first three cases the minister rejected the arguments put forwards. In the decision
letter establishing the Lake District National Park, Hugh Dalton wrote that:
‘generally the minister is advised that public access to gathering grounds does no damage
[…] substantial areas of this and other prospective national parks are gathering grounds,
and the minister would not accept the existence of a gathering ground as a reason for the
exclusion of an area from a Park’. (National Parks Commission, 1954, App. G)
The other letters were drafted in similar terms. In the case of the Brecon Beacons,
the county boroughs of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea, all of whom drew water from
within the projected national park, raised objections to its boundaries which were
ultimately withdrawn (National Parks Commission, 1956, para. 10; 1957, para. 5). It
seems clear that successive ministers (of both parties) would not allow the boundaries
of a park to be determined by the water lobby, holding that they had the means to
argue for the exclusion of the public from their land if an access order was later
brought forwards.
V. The purchase over government
The purchase that the water boards continued to hold over government is illustrated
by three episodes of 1954-1956, the third of which, I suggest, was fatal to the access
order clauses contained in Part V of the 1949 Act. The first two episodes arise out of
objections to the route of the Pennine Way made by Huddersfield and Manchester
Corporations as the owners of gathering grounds crossed by the footpath.
In the first, what was at issue was an alternative bad weather route for the Pennine
Way. Two routes were proposed over Huddersfield’s gathering grounds on Wessenden
Head Moor: a high level route which, it was proposed, would be the usual route, and
an alternative low-level route which would give walkers an easier way off the hill
in bad weather. This second option crossed three of the feeder streams feeding the
Digley reservoir and then ran alongside a fourth feeder stream for about 800 yards.
Huddersfield Corporation lodged a complaint against this route, alleging that it would
be impossible to ‘prevent persons who are so minded from committing nuisances in
or adjacent to the feeder streams’. The Corporation outlined a series of circumstances
in which water contaminated by urine or faeces from walkers could enter the public
supply without filtration, notably after summer thunderstorms when run off from the
hill could pass into the reservoir without the usual period of delay. It proposed a less
satisfactory alternative route.
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Richard W. Hoyle
For the Rambler’s Association, this was about more than the line of the path. ‘If it
were accepted that the approved route would lead to the pollution of Digley Reservoir,
then it is feared that such a decision would prejudice the possibility of obtaining a
general access to this gathering ground’. At heart though, the enquiry was about rival
assessments of risk. Huddersfield plainly felt that the risk of admitting the public was
too great where the Rambler’s Association, in their written submission, called the
danger of pollution ‘if not entirely theoretical, [then] so small as to be immaterial’. A
public enquiry was held on 14 May 1954: the Minister wrote to interested parties less
than two months later holding that ‘the risks of harm occurring in the supply through
the use of the path are so remote that the Corporation’s objections to the proposed line
cannot be supported’ (Stephenson, 1989: 108-109: LMA 4826/02/400).
In Manchester Corporation the National Parks Commission and the Ramblers

Association encountered a much stiffer and – one suspects – better-connected
opponent2. The Pennine Way, running north-south, was bound to cross Manchester’s
water-gathering grounds in Longdendale where the city owned 13,200 acres and had
water gathering rights over a further 6500 acres. The public had long been excluded
even though the main road to Sheffield and a major railway line ran through the
valley along the edge of the reservoirs. When the route of the Pennine Way was
announced in 1953, Manchester immediately lodged an objection on the grounds that
the projected line followed one of the principal streams feeding the reservoirs and
crossed other feeder streams. The Minister, in the first instance, overruled Manchester’s
objections and then, one assumes under pressure from the Corporation, pleaded a
misunderstanding and withdrew his earlier letter, instead telling the National Parks
Commission that their route was unacceptable because of the risk that it posed to
the purity of the water and instructing them to identify another route which satisfied
Manchester. Finally the matter went to a public enquiry which was held at Glossop
on 27-31 July 1954. Here Manchester stressed the need for purity. The Ramblers
Association showed how great the risks of pollution were from the roads and railway
running alongside the reservoirs. (Remember that this was at a time when the waste
from toilets on trains was tipped directly onto the track.) Manchester had tolerated
these obvious sources of contamination without employing filtration of the water or
(until recently) chlorination.
During the enquiry, one of the Manchester officials was heard to remark that
the city hadn’t a case but that it would win anyway. His confidence in the outcome
seems prescient. In his decision letter, dated 29 December 1954, the Minister rejected
the line of the Pennine Way initially proposed by the NPC and insisted on another
suggested by Manchester. The Minister noted (‘with pleasure’) that Manchester had
2
For the following, LMA 4826/02/402A, and STEPHENSON (1989: 109-114)
201
not opposed the Pennine Way passing through its gathering grounds and suggested
that once the proposed system of filtration had been put in place, then the route might
be reconsidered. It was a further ten years before this was done, but in 1965 the
Pennine Way was restored to the route originally proposed and Manchester entered
into an access agreement with the Peak District National Park.
The third episode, and the one which did more than any other to kill the access order
provisions of the 1949 Act, concerned moorland on Boulsworth Hill in Lancashire,
on the county’s border with Yorkshire. The full story of Lancashire County Council’s
attempts to open up this land for access has yet to be fully elucidated although it was
clearly understood at the time to form a test case.
Lancashire was one of the counties which took its responsibilities under the 1949
Act seriously. Where others simply made a nil return, declaring that there had no
open country which was not accessible, Lancashire, ‘in order to ensure that they were
properly informed as to the areas where there was a demand for a greater degree of
public access’, invited the recommendations of the local amenity societies mediated
through the Lancashire branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.
Three areas were identified where access needed to be improved, Hailstorm Hill
above Rochdale, the moors above Bolton and Rivington, and Boulsworth Hill in
the east of the county overlooking Nelson and Colne (TNA, COU 1/945, evidence of
Harold Irving). The three areas seem to have been chosen because they were near
major urban centers and their continued closure was a grievance to walkers. The
council’s approach was pragmatic. Longridge Fell near Preston was defined as open
country, but it was suggested that the needs of walkers were best served by creating
a new footpath rather than by implementing an access agreement (LRO, CC/PLM 5,
p. 172, 175).
The County Council’s negotiations to open up the countryside can be followed

through the minutes of its planning committee (LRO, CC/PLM 4-6). The Council
secured agreements with a number of water boards over the following two years
either to open their moorland estates (subject to some reservations) or less formal
undertakings that bona fide walkers would be allowed access unchallenged. But
Boulsworth proved altogether more difficult to achieve3. This was a moor with a
long history of closure to walkers. There was a pattern of fragmented ownership. The
eastern part of the area was a gathering ground for Keighley. The southern part of the
hill was a gathering ground for Burnley, who like the Irwell Valley Board, had been
markedly anti-access in 1946-1948. But on this occasion they undertook to enter
3
The following account is based on TNA, COU 1/188, LMA 4287/02/044, and Stephenson (1989: 114-
115).
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Richard W. Hoyle
into an agreement with the County Council for Worsthorne Moor. Nelson, however,
declined to open its gathering grounds, a decision which the County Council seems
to have accepted. Several farmers also declined to enter into an agreement, but gave
undertakings – which satisfied the council – that they would not discourage walkers.
Trawden Urban District Council and Colne Corporation both refused to open their
water gathering grounds, although for a time the County Council remained optimistic
that Trawden might fall in with their intentions. The owner of the Moor Lodge estate,
who also rented the shooting rights from Trawden, declined to enter into an agreement.
Keighley initially expressed themselves happy with ‘regulated access’. The County
Council was not persuaded by the reasons the various owners offered for refusing to
enter into an access agreement and so proceeded to issue an access order against all
the landowners except Trawden, and then, when Trawden finally came down against
cooperating, issued a further order against them too. The Minister convened a public
enquiry which sat in Colne in March 1956. As this was the first time the compulsory
procedure had been used, the enquiry attracted some interest in the press and amongst
the countryside societies.
The enquiry was conducted by two inspectors, one with experience of water
engineering. The County Council’s senior solicitor opened, outlining its case,
stressing that the area was attractive to ‘the more respectable type of country lover’,
that if any damage was done, then compensation could be claimed and that there
could be little in the way of agricultural objection. Any objections by the water
undertakings had already been met by the 1948 Gathering Grounds report. A parallel
was drawn with those areas of the county which had already entered into access
agreements. The representative of the Council’s Planning Department, Harold
Irving, then identified the grounds on which objections had been made and set out
to counter each in turn. Taking the agricultural concerns first, he suggested that the
experience of other parts of Lancashire and the Lake District showed that sheep
farming was completely compatible with the use of the land for walking. Anyone
walking on access land with an out-of-control dog would be committing an offence.
Turning to shooting, Irving again cited examples of moors which were covered by
access agreements but which continued to provide good sport. He was, however,
prepared to accept some limited closure of the moor (one or two days a week during
the shooting season) if it satisfied the concerns of the shooting interest. Irving then
turned to claims that public access would lead to increased pollution of the water
supply. He again drew analogies with other moors where this had proved not to be
the case. Keighley’s reservoir at Watersheddles was excluded from the order: in any
case it was surrounded by a wall although one arm of the reservoir passed under
a public road. Irving did not believe that any large number of walkers would ever
exercise their right of access to the hill: this was ‘all the more reason why permission
203
for the relatively small number of people likely to wish to use the hill at any one time
cannot be regarded as harmful’.
Opposing the orders were the three councils in their guise as water boards, Colne’s
shooting tenant, two private owners, one whom also rented Trawden’s shooting
rights, and a grazing tenant. Their arguments, so far as they can be reconstructed, can
be taken in the same order as Irving’s attempt to counter them.
The agricultural interest was represented by Mr J. Greenwood who ran 600-

700 sheep on the land and had undertaken some draining. He expressed fears that
if the public were admitted, the sheep might be driven off the moor by dogs or fires
started by the walkers. Evidence was then given on behalf of the owner of the Moor
Lodge estate. He had bought the moor in 1954 and also rented the shooting over
Trawden Water Board’s land. His agent argued that the shooting was actually worth
more than the grazing. The estate would, at a minimum, require two days a week of
closure each week during the shooting season. His remarks were amplified by the
estate’s head gamekeeper – two were employed – who claimed an annual bag of
5,000 birds per annum although more had been shot in the past. His chief fear was
members of the public causing fires – one in 1941 had burnt in the peat for three weeks
– and after that poaching and the damage caused by dogs. There was, in the minds of
the shooting interest, no demand for access to the moor (although evidence was also
offered of people being forbidden to go on it). The shooting interest maintained that
the quality of the shooting would decline if access was allowed.
As for the water interest, two of the authorities placed weight on the fact that
if access was allowed, then contaminated water could pass quickly into the public
supply without any period of delay. In fact, as the Ramblers’ Association showed, the
bio-security of all three suppliers was, in different respects, open to criticism.
The inspectors seem to have been aware that if an access order was not granted,
then the intentions of the 1949 act would be fatally undermined. They tried to
arbitrate between all the interests. They held that areas of the moor used as gathering
grounds should be closed to the public, thus deferring to the water interest. They were
sympathetic to the shooting interest, recognising the employment it brought. They
therefore recommended that all the areas of the moor used as gathering grounds should
be closed to walkers, but an access order should be made for the remainder which
should not apply for the two breeding months, April and May, or on the 12 August, or
subsequent Tuesdays and Thursdays in August and September. They also suggested
that a path be made to the summit of the hill as a sop to the walking interest.
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Richard W. Hoyle
The Minister clearly found the decision a difficult one, and sat on his inspectors’
report until June 1957. He then declined to confirm either order. The decision letter
recalled that the 1948 Gathering Grounds report had argued that ‘they could see no
justification on grounds of water purity for prohibiting access to gathering grounds’,
but the Minister pointed out that the committee had held that this only applied ‘where
there was long storage in a reservoir, followed by efficient filtration and sterilization’.
This did not apply in these cases, and therefore he could not confirm the orders so far
as they related to areas of catchment ground. Moreover, the Minister did not think
that the need for access to the remainder of the moorland was so great as to justify
making the order although he offered to reconsider this in the light of the campaign
for access to the moors to the east in Yorkshire. He did, however, commend the idea
of creating a new footpath, and this was finally done some years later.
No further access orders were sought by local authorities in the years immediately
following. The lesson they doubtless learnt was that their negotiation was time-
consuming and any water board who did not wish to enter into an agreement could
chance on the Minister taking their side.
VI. Conclusion: a paradox left unspoken
We need to insist that the arrangements proposed in 1945 by Dower and reiterated
by Hobhouse, with their willingness to compromise the private rights of landowners,
were revolutionary in their import and directly paralleled the radical thinking of the
other war-time planners. It is hardly surprising that not all of these ideas were fully
consummated in legislation and some of those which were were unpalatable to the
first post-war Conservative government. The National Parks Commissions and the
local national parks boards were far less powerful than was originally envisaged. The
right of general access to open country was stood on its head and turned into a right
which could be negotiated over specific areas. At all points the minister’s approval
was needed, whether for the creation of National Parks (the last park to be designated,
the Cornish coast, was never confirmed) or for a local authority entering into an
access agreement. It was therefore easy for a government out of sympathy with the
aspirations of the countryside and rambling lobbies to apply the brakes.
Nonetheless, the idea of access agreements and access orders contained in the 1949
Act can still, with justice, be called revolutionary. It was far more than any pre-war
government or parliament contemplated passing into law. The first problem it faced
though was in its implementation. Some local authorities simply declined to involve
themselves in open country issues and returned a certificate of omnia bene to the
(Conservative) government – which was hardly likely to challenge their disinterest.
205
The West Riding was amongst the counties which did so, but was challenged by
the Ramblers Association and other societies who forced a public hearing into
the County Council’s view that nothing needed to be done4. There may have been
another calculation at play. The right of the public to have access to open country was
established by the 1949 Act. It was a piece of pragmatism for landowners to tolerate a
little trespass in the knowledge that keeping their moorland completely closed might
be answered by public demands for an access order.
If we see the access agreement and even more the access order as a reserve power
to be drawn on where informal understandings could not be reached, then the success
of Part V of the Act does not turn on the acreage subjected to agreements. Its success
may be seen in the way in which it solved one particular problem – the recurrent
disputes between walkers and landowners in the Peak District. There was no post-war
return to the weekend wars between gamekeepers and ramblers. Likewise the use of
the access provisions in Lancashire may also be seen as resolving particular local
grievances over access. In this respect the qualification of private property rights by
the 1949 act may be seen as a tremendous success.
Now, if this is to see the access agreements in a rather different way to the usual view
of them, then we also need to appreciate that the walkers’ opponents were as much
water boards as private owners. The supply of water was enormously fragmented and
the industry differed enormously in its attitude to walkers after the war. But it is plain
that between 1945 and 1955 a good number of companies shifted their ground. The
keeper injured at the Kinder mass trespass, it is often forgotten, was in the employ of
Stockport Corporation which had warned the massed ramblers to stay off its land. By
the time of the Boulsworth enquiry of 1955, the whole of the Stockport catchment at
Kinder had been opened to the public and Stockport could be offered to the enquiry
as an example of enlightened management. But some boards continued to be opposed
to walkers entering their gathering grounds. There is more to be learnt about this, but
some suggestions can be offered as to why they should have done so.
The fear of disease was plainly in the forefront of the water engineer’s minds.
Some towns, which were supplying unfiltered water to the customers, had made the
exclusion of people from their catchments a key element in their water purification
strategy. Some at least of the water boards held that the investment in treatment plant
could not be justified to allow a minority interest group to pursue its hobby. But as the
Ramblers’ Association took pleasure in showing, the water industry was riddled with
hypocrisy and double-thinking. It massively overstated the risks involved in allowing
4
I hope to write about this on another occasion.
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Richard W. Hoyle
walkers on their moors whilst seeing no incongruity in permitting shooting parties

and tolerating a whole range of potentially dangerous practices.
What we have to accept however is that the bird which will not take wing is the
old class enemy, the shooting sportsman. There is simply no evidence that access
agreements were thwarted by sportsmen. The need to preserve game may have been
an adequate justification in the 1930s, but not in the 1950s. The Gathering Grounds
Committee were at pains to stress that in their view, the suggestion that ‘an important
motive of the water undertakers in seeking to exclude the public from gathering
grounds has been the preservation of game’ was ‘misleading and that in all the cases
of restricted access of which we have any knowledge, the motive has been a genuine,
if possibly exaggerated, fear of pollution’ (Ministry of Health, 1948, para. 38). The
inspectors at the Boulsworth enquiry bent over backwards in trying to accommodate
the shooting, but the minister’s decision letter firmly said that he ‘would not regard
as conclusive against general access the arguments which were put forward on behalf
of the sporting and agricultural interests’. The sporting property rights of landowners
did not, then, limit the use of the act: fears over water contamination did. It may well
be asked why there should have been a perception that the shooting estate was the
enemy. It might be suggested that whilst shooting and water collection could happily
co-exist, water collection was an oddly invisible process, but game keeping and
shooting were not. It was gamekeepers and not water engineers who turned people
off the moors. But there is an other reason which might be suggested. With the water
boards we have the paradox of publicly-owned companies denying the public a right
of access over publicly-owned land in the name of public health whilst using the
same property as a minor source of income from shooting tenants. The walker, of
course, generated no income, only costs. It was perhaps a paradox that was better left
unspoken, and in any case dukes made better targets.
Even if the 1949 Act was a dilution of the aspirations of the Dower and Hobhouse
committees, it achieved a great deal. In common with most revolutions, it seems to
have largely run its course within ten years. It was later seen to have been an incomplete
revolution, which left many aspects of the ancien régime untouched, and it was this
which necessitated the Countryside and Rights of Way legislation of 2000. By this
time, walkers on gathering grounds was no longer a public health issue, but more
straightforwardly one of ownership, property and political power. The 2000 Act went a
long way to completing the unfinished business of 1945, further qualifying the private
property rights of landowners for the public benefit. All in all, it was a very English
revolution: protracted, incremental and still incomplete, but a revolution all the same5.
5
The steps the government took in the 1970s and later to open up reservoirs and water board land for
recreation must await another occasion.
207
Archival sources
LONDON METROPOLITAN ARCHIVES (LMA): 4826/02/400; 4287/02/044; 4826/02/402A.
LANCASHIRE RECORD OFFICE (LRO): Cc/PLM 4-6.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES, Kew (TNA): COU 1/188; COU 1/945.
Bibliography
· Government publications
LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (1898), Report […] on epidemic of Typhoid fever in Borough
of Maidstone, 1897 (BPP 1898, xl).
MINISTRY OF HEALTH (1948), Public access to gathering grounds, afforestation and
agriculture on gathering grounds. Report of the Gathering Grounds Sub-Committee of
the Central Advisory Water Committee.
NATIONAL PARKS COMMISSION (1954), Fifth Report of the National Parks Commission for
the year ending 30th September 1954.
NATIONAL PARKS COMMISSION (1956), Seventh Report of the National Parks Commission
for the year ending 30 September 1956.
NATIONAL PARKS COMMISSION (1957), Eighth Report of the National Parks Commission for
the year ending 30 September 1957.
NATIONAL PARKS COMMISSION (1962), Thirteenth Report of the National Parks Commission
for the year ending 30 September 1962.
The water share offer (1989).
· General references
BLUNDEN, Nigel and CURRY, John (1990), A people’s charter? Forty years of the National
Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, London, HMSO.
BROWN, Alfred J. (1938), Striding through Yorkshire, London, Country Life.
CHERRY, Gordon E. (1975), Environmental planning, 1939-1969, II: National parks and
recreation in the countryside, London, HMSO.
HEY, David (2008), ‘The grouse moors of the Peak District’, in P. S. BARNWELL and Marilyn
PALMER (eds), Post-medieval landscapes, Macclesfield, Windgather Press, p. 69-79.
HILL, Howard (1980), Freedom to roam: The struggle for access to Britain’s moors and
mountains, Ashbourne, Moorland Publishing.
HOPE, Michael (2002), Lever versus Liverpool: Their six year struggle over Rivington
and its water, Croyden, Anatole Publishing.
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HOYLE, Richard W. (2008), ‘Grouse in history; non-agricultural uses of the British

countryside’, (paper read at the ESSHC, Lisbon).
LOWERSON, John (1980), ‘Battles for the countryside’, in Frank GLOVERSMITH (ed.), Class,
culture and social change: A new view of the 1930s, Brighton, Harvester Press.
MACEWEN Anne and MACEWEN, Malcolm (1982), National Parks: Conservation or
cosmetics?, London, Allen and Unwin.
SHAW LEFEVRE, George J. (1893), Agrarian tenancies, London, Cassell and Co.
SHOARD, Marion (1999), A right to roam? Should we open up Britain’s countryside?,
Oxford, Oxford University Press.
SHORT, Brian (2007), ‘The dispossession of farmers in England and Wales during and
after the Second World War’, in Brian SHORT, Charles WATKINS and John MARTIN (eds),
The front line of freedom: British farming in the Second World War, Exeter, British
Agricultural History Society, p. 158-178.
SIMMONS, Ian G. (2003), The moorlands of England and Wales: An environmental history,
8000 BC-AD 2000, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
STEPHENSON, Tom (1989), Forbidden land: The struggle for access to mountains and
moorland, Manchester, Manchester University Press.
TAYLOR, Harvey (1997), A claim on the countryside: A history of the British outdoor
movement, Edinburgh, Keele University Press.
TEBBUTT, Melanie (2004a), ‘Gendering an upland landscape: Masculinity and place
identity in the Peak District, 1880s-1920’, in Ian D. WHYTE and Angus J. L. WINCHESTER
(eds), Society, landscape and environment in upland Britain, [n. p.], Society for Landscape
Studies, p. 141-148.
TEBBUTT, Melanie (2004b), ‘Men of the hills and street corner boys: Northern uplands
and the urban imagination, Derbyshire’s Dark Peak, 1880s-1914’, in Keith GRIEVES et
al., Rural and urban encounters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Regional
perspectives, [n.p.], CORAL: Conference of Regional and Local Historians, p. 57-98.
TEBBUTT, Melanie (2006), ‘Rambling and manly identity in Derbyshire’s Dark Peak,
1880S-1920S’, Historical Journal, 49, 4, p. 1125-1153.
TICHELAR, Michael (2001), ‘The Labour Party, agricultural policy and the retreat from
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51, 2, p. 209-225.
209
10. The governmentality of land ownership
in south-eastern Europe.
Romania and Yugoslavia: a comparison
Dietmar MÜLLER
I. Introduction
Private property and the institutions for administering it, such as cadastres and
land registers, have undergone a spectacular ideological rehabilitation in the post-
Communist societies of eastern Europe. In a figure of discourse, the restitution of
expropriated valuables and goods − in particular land, following the dissolution and
reprivatization of collective and state farms − was formulated as a return to European
norms and values, while at the same time being described as a return to indigenous,
pre-Communist legal forms. This implies wide-reaching assertions about the quality
and consequences of three radical breaks in the agrarian history and the history of
property in eastern Europe: the post-1918, post-1945-1949, and post-1989-1990 land
reforms. It also contains the promise of liberal-individualist property to ensure an
economically effective allocation of property rights and goods, and to create the basis
for a society of active and equal citizens. The extent that this promise has been made
good for the rural population in these regions can only be assessed at the individual
level, a difficult task for jurists, economists, political scientists and historians. A
comparison of these three periods in Romania and Yugoslavia with a view to land
ownership reveals that, far from being abandoned just in the Communist period, the
promise of private property providing the material basis for civil society had already
been largely undermined in the years between the wars. The same fate now threatens
it in the post-1989 transformation of eastern Europe (Sundhaussen, 2000: 149-177).
Taking the institution of land ownership as a tertium comparationis for a

comparative study of south-eastern Europe, I posit the thesis that the decisive
break in property and agrarian history was not that of 1945-1949, but potentially
that of 1989–1990. This is grounded on a comparison between the interwar and the
Communist periods. Given the massive encroachment on property rights and rights
to dispose of land resulting from the post-1918 land reforms, which were ethno-
politically motivated in ethnically mixed areas like Vojvodina and Transylvania,
the more or less thorough collectivization of agriculture which began in the 1940s
no longer seems like the start of a new era. Instead it appears to have been the
intensification and acceleration of what the countries’ elites defined as an overall
211
The governmentality of land ownership in south-eastern Europe
process of social modernization, in which agriculture, economically speaking, was

accorded little more than a residual function in both of the political systems which
ensued.
Figure 10.1. Romania and Yugoslavia in the interwar period
Map by Dietmar Müller and Thomas Klemm, Leipzig.
The distribution of land in the course of agrarian reforms after World War I
represents an ambiguous delimitation of property rights. On the one hand, the liberal-
individualist property regime as the basis for a society of property owners was
significantly broadened, because the number of property (land) owners had suddenly
multiplied. Moreover, the protection of property was anchored in the Constitution.
On the other hand, the concrete process of turning land into private property can also
be described as an ethnonational and protectionist limitation of property, because the
same movement which distributed land was also responsible for a massive restriction
of property rights. Following the trend of the 1920s to question the efficiency of
unrestricted private property, Romanian and Yugoslav legislators had doubts of their
own about its potential to achieve their social project. They aimed at overcoming the
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Dietmar Müller
perceived backwardness of their states and societies and catching up with western
Europe, in terms of the ethnic homogeneity of their populations as well as their
economic performance.
With a focus on the interwar period, but also with a look at the Communist and post-
Communist period, this chapter seeks to show that the governance of landownership
in Romania and Yugoslavia more closely resembles the Foucaultian governmentality
style of rule than a communicative policy mindful of the interests and competencies
of actors in the rural sphere (Foucault, 2004)1.
II. Governmentality, property and nation
The empirical work for this chapter was conducted using approaches developed in
governance and governmentality research, as well as in new institutional economics.
The results of this analysis, on the one hand, point out the cognitive potential resulting
from a combination of all three approaches, and, on the other, they illustrate the
reductionist perspectives sometimes employed, which can bluntly be described as
historical shortsightedness, ignoring the effect individuals have as historical agents.
Governance and governmentality research share the view that it is less than
promising in a heuristic sense to place the focus of analysis at the level of modern
states and societies. Renate Mayntz emphasizes the ‘double nature of the term
governance’, which, according to her, can ‘refer to a structure regulating action
as well as to the process of regulating’ (Mayntz, 2005: 15). Marianne Pieper and
Encarnacíon Gutiérrez Rodríguez, on the other hand, follow Michel Foucault
in defining the state not merely as an ‘administrative apparatus, but rather [as] a
geographically, historically and politically configured ensemble of institutions,
practices and discourses which is subject to transformation’ (Pieper and Gutiérrez
Rodríguez, 2003: 10). The governance concept pursued by Mayntz, however, cannot
deny that its theoretical ancestry is clearly modernization theory, which paid close
attention to structures and institutions as a means of steering society to modernity,
while leaving agency very much under-researched. Governance research in political
science is now conceived as a continuation of this old steering model, and consequently
the collective volume cited above does not deal with the agents’ perspectives in a
systematic manner (Schuppert, 2005). Continuation in this case seems to mean an
attempt to theoretically underpin the decline of the nation-state’s steering ability
under the influence of globalization. The shortsighted perspective in this instance is
1
The term ‘governmentality’ comprises the terms ‘govern’ and ‘mentality’. Foucault’s analysis of
power is based on the assumption that rulers and ruled interact, enabling an inquiry, for instance, into the
relationship between the techniques of rule and self-discipline.
213
that the problem of governmental steering is being conceptualized as merely that of

a disappearing phenomenon, whereas it can rather be also understood as an overall
process, thus taking account of the fact that the steering ability of modern states has
been on the rise since the early modern era.
Foucault’s concept of governmentality has a deeper scope, its historical genetic

approach aiming to describe the change in power relations at the cusp of the modern era
in Europe as the development of a new style of rule, moving away from Christian based,
religiously structured pastoral power. The new art of governing is no longer limited to
sovereignty over a territory and its population, but aims instead at ‘the proper order of
things attended to in order to lead them to an appropriate goal’2. This goal can be attained
by acquiring knowledge of these ‘things’ through the newly available techniques for
recording and processing information, (e.g. statistics), then ‘putting them in their
proper order’ with the help of an administrative apparatus. But Foucault particularly
emphasizes the agents’ side in pointing out that ‘administering the population also
means administering them at the lowest level, in the subtleties and details’, which is
inconceivable without their active cooperation (Foucault, 2004: 151 ff., 161). Thus,
being governed is not something which is suffered passively, rather it is marked by
the interaction of the state’s steering and control with forms of self-discipline and
self-leadership. Yet even the historical genetic potential of Foucault’s governmentality
concept is largely ignored in the subsequent literature cited below, because
‘the majority of these studies […] are less genealogical-historical in orientation, but […]
utilize Foucaultian instruments of analysis to investigate contemporary processes of social
transformation and the formation of “neoliberal governmentality”. (Lemke, Krasmann
and Bröckling, 2000: 18)
Any analysis of the decline of the steering potential of modern nation-states, as

they are faced with the processes of globalization and integration into supranational
entities like the European Union, will necessarily fall short if it does not also take
into account, or at least have some awareness of, the preceding growth process in the
steering potential in the wake of nation-state building. In an analysis of statehood in
south-eastern Europe, the period of independence from the Ottoman and Habsburg
Empires until the end of the interwar period can be regarded as the crucial period.
New institutional economics seems to indicate a possibility of overcoming both the

historical shortsightedness and the concentration of governance and governmentality
research on structures, as referred to above. In the 1980s, its most prominent
2
G. DE LA PERRIÈRE, Le Mirroire politique, oeuvre non moins utile que necessaire à tous monarches,
roys, princes, seigneurs, magistrates, et autres surintendants et gouverneurs des Républicques, Lyon
1555; cited in FOUCAULT (2004: 145).
214
Dietmar Müller
representative, Douglass C. North, laid out the foundations for an understanding

of institutions, allowing for changes over time and assigning an important role to
agents. Institutions, as ‘restrictions of human interaction invented by humans’ have
an interrelationship with organizations: the latter are created to take advantage of
opportunities opened up by society in the form of institutions (North, 1992: 3)3. In the
course of their development, these organizations, or the political and economic actors
working within them, have in turn a modifying effect on institutions, as they expect
to profit and gain advantage from them.
As will be shown, the manner in which elites in south-eastern European states

conceived the latter after 1918 is closely linked to the institution of the property regime
as well as to the organization of cadastre and land register. In the interwar period,
an institutional and organizational system created by state actors for ethnopolitical,
centralistic and paternalistic reasons began to determine the actions of citizens. Elites
in south-eastern Europe pursued the social project of a uniform nation-state by means
of an unconventional policy and administrative model which can be characterized as
the conscious abandonment of administrative depth and legal security in exchange
for the intensified exploitation of citizens as subjects, in a politically paternalistic
way. These findings are in opposition to the usual assumptions of the governmentality
approach, which normally aims its critique of power at the growth of bureaucratic
authority through the creation and use of knowledge. It is merely the concrete form
this policy and administrative model takes that is unique here, because the emergence
of any institution in any state context − not only in those in south-eastern Europe −
must necessarily be investigated in terms of political motivations.
Be that as may, as compared with western Europe, the south-eastern and east-
central European states in the period following the First World War exhibited specific
features that can be described as the ‘dilemma of simultaneity’ and the ‘curse of
backwardness’ (Offe, 1994: 57-80; Hildermeier, 1987: 557-603). Their goal was to
set up nation-states in territories which in the preceding centuries had formed parts of
other states and which were characterized by heterogeneous populations, in both their
ethnic and religious affiliations. What is more, this was to occur under the internal
conditions of universal (male) suffrage as well as under external pressure to adopt
western European and American values and institutions, such as the protection of
minorities and a universal, individualist concept of property. In addition, all of this
was to take place as quickly as possible, in order to close the widening economic gap
vis-à-vis western Europe.
3
Institutions can take the form of formal restrictions, e.g., a constitution or an agrarian regime, or of
informal restrictions, for instance, codes of conduct or the Flurzwang (a compulsory system of common
farming). Like institutions, organizations, defined for instance as public corporations, legal persons in the
business sector, and educational establishments, serve to minimize uncertainty in human interactions.
215
Legal historian Peter Häberle has pointed out that the reception of legal concepts
and institutions can hardly be conceived of as one of pure reception, but rather more
appropriately as a kind of ‘creative reproduction’, which is particularly dependent
on the cultural context of the receiving society (Häberle, 1997: 180 ff.). In assessing
the reception of the universal, individualist concept of property, it might therefore be
helpful to pose the rather schematic question of whether these institutions modified
practices in Romanian and Yugoslavian societies, or these societies succeeded in
altering the meanings of the institutions. Under the said conditions of institutional
transfer, the question might be refined as: Were the elites of these societies willing
to reproduce these institutions in such a way that the same positive effects on the
incentive structure and expectations of organizations and individuals could develop
there as they had in western Europe?
The meagre amount of research on this topic with respect to south-eastern

Europe seems to point in the opposite direction. One line of research which comes
to a negative conclusion points out the superficiality of the transfer, while another
underlines its use for political ends. The earliest debate, which in the case of Romania
began in the mid-nineteenth century under the slogan ‘form without content’ and
has since become a classic of political and cultural history, cannot be enlarged on
here. In considering the system of institutions and organizations, historians Holm
Sundhaussen and Wolfgang Höpken have foregrounded the tendency towards political
appropriation, especially in the interest of national-political aims (Sundhaussen,
1994: 35-54; Höpken, 1998: 68-104). Seldom, they assert, were organizations such
as cooperatives or professional associations able to achieve the necessary degree of
autonomy from state authorities so as to allow them to consolidate or articulate their
own social interests.
III. Property and agrarian regime. Between social reform and

nation-building
The idea vehemently espoused by Hannes Siegrist and David Sugarman in 1999,
that property must be thought of as a key theme of modern social and cultural history,
indeed that history itself might be conducted as a comparative historical science of
property, is slowly beginning to take hold in German historiography. The volume
Eigentum im internationalen Vergleich contains numerous articles based on research
that poses questions relevant to property, without exclusively focusing on it (Siegrist
and Sugarman, 1999: 9-30). Since then, the institution of property has gone on to
become the center piece of several research projects and publications4. This has been
4
Cf. the project ‘Bodenrecht, Kataster und Grundbuchwesen im östlichen Europa. 1918-1945-1989.
216
Dietmar Müller
thanks to the heuristic potential property has − as a notion, an institution and a form of
practice − to reflect on general hierarchies of meaning and value, to determine social
relations and processes, and to analyze options for individual and collective action.
Strategically, the focus on property can help to bridge the gaps between supposed
pairs of opposites commonly referred to in historical research (e.g. state and society
or structure and agency).
Given the current predominance of literature on intellectual property, the

concentration on land ownership may seem hopelessly out of date. The marginal
position of this topic in German humanities today is due, not least of all, to structural
economic factors and their influence on research orientation. The last major political
debate on land ownership laws in the Federal Republic of Germany dates back to
the 1970s, when changes towards a restriction of property rights were instituted in
land law. Even with the restitution of property in post-Communist East Germany, the
agrarian dimension of land law played only a minor role, in comparison to residential
or industrial property.
In most eastern European societies and economies, in contrast, agricultural

activities and rural areas retained their significance throughout much of the twentieth
century. In the interwar period, 60 to 80 per cent of the population in countries such
as Romania and Yugoslavia were employed in agriculture and lived in rural areas.
This share decreased to 40 to 50 per cent under Socialism, then rose again in some
areas to over 50 per cent after 1989, with the ‘countryside’ taking on the function of
a repository for workers made redundant by deindustrialization (Turnock, 1998: 28;
Müller, 2000: 55-61). Thus, well into the twentieth century, the success or failure
of elite projects and of development processes in the countries of east-central and
south-eastern Europe, be they the modernization of the economy and society within
the framework of the nation-state in the years between the wars, the creation of
‘Socialist man’ under Communism, or the democratization of the political system
and the establishment of market relations in the post-Communist era, has been largely
dependent on rural areas. Significantly, the political turning points in these countries
in the twentieth century − 1918, 1945, and 1989 − were all followed by radical
agrarian reforms.
Polen, Rumänien und Jugoslawien im Vergleich’, coordinated by Hannes Siegrist, Stefan Troebst and
Bogdan Murgescu, and conducted by Dietmar Müller. See also Martina Winkler’s research project at
Humboldt University in Berlin, Adlige Eigentumskulturen im Rußland des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts.
217
IV. Agrarian reforms in Romania and Yugoslavia in the interwar

period
In most of the countries of east-central and south-eastern Europe that were newly
founded or significantly expanded after World War I, from Estonia to Yugoslavia,
agrarian reforms in the interwar period are generally portrayed as both (legally)
positivist and patriotic (Hristodol, 1988; Gaćeša, 1984). The redistribution of land as
such, but especially the rationale and the manner of implementing these reforms have
given them an importance in the property and agrarian history of these countries that
extends well into the twentieth century. Particularly in newly acquired provinces such
as Transylvania and Vojvodina, the institution of landownership was developed as an
instrument of ethnically conceived nation-building, thereby undermining the promise
of a society of property owners – that is, a system of general and formally equal
property rights in which key social resources, long term property rights, and rights
of disposal are decoupled from traditional parameters such as social status, family
ancestry, regional and national background, religious denomination, ethnicity, etc.
In formal terms, the property regime in Greater Romania and in the Kingdom of
the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (henceforth referred to as Yugoslavia, its designation
as of 1929) entirely followed the liberal-capitalist pattern. The continued influence of
western European models on the constitutions of south-eastern Europe can be seen
in the Yugoslavian (1921) and Romanian (1923) constitutions, with their egalitarian-
universalist property orders and a definition of the citizen based on a political
understanding of the nation (Stadtmüller, 1958: 405-422; Ionescu (ed.), 2000:
559 ff.; Ustav Kraljevine SHS, 1921). Both states guaranteed all types of property.
Expropriation was limited to public need, with such cases being defined by law and
the amount of compensation to be determined by the courts. However, significant
deviations from this ideal of a liberal-democratic social order resulted from several
specific articles in the constitution, from the interpretations of key actors in the course
of constitutional debate, and ultimately from the politics they practised.
Article 131 of the Romanian Constitution, in the chapter on ‘transitional regulations’,

essentially sanctioned and gave constitutional status to the key regulations of agrarian
reform in Old Romania as well as in the new provinces of Transylvania, Bessarabia
and Bukovina. Yet the manner in which agrarian reform was implemented between
1917 and 1922 and the results it produced were in contradiction with the proclaimed
liberal-individualist property regime and the principle of equal rights for all citizens.
In the new provinces, both the maximum allowable area of the plots the previous
owners were allowed to keep and compensation payments were significantly lower
than in Old Romania. In Transylvania, for instance, all of a landowner’s holdings
218
Dietmar Müller
beyond the maximum allowable plot of 250 hectares were expropriated (100 hectares
in Bessarabia), and the compensation was calculated according to a median price
based on the preceding years. In Old Romania, in contrast, the maximum size of
each piece of land was 500 hectares, and compensation followed the going rate,
approximately 10 per cent higher (Mitrany, [1930] 1968: 122 ff.). Furthermore, in
the new provinces all land owned by an individual or a family was taken together and
then expropriated, whereas in Old Romania each single plot of land was considered
as the unit to be expropriated (Evans, 1924: 108). Finally, lands belonging to German
and Hungarian churches, which were used to maintain private schools, were defined
as large estates and expropriated as such. The amount of compensation for the land
expropriated was not set by the courts but by the legislators. Apart from communally
owned church properties, entailed estates, which were common among Hungarian
families, were likewise dissolved. Romanian and Serbian commentators hailed this
as proof that the agrarian reforms were in line with the western European, liberal-
individualist notion of property (Bogojević, 1928: 299-316).
There was a marked tendency to suppress the fact that the agrarian reform coincided
with the hitherto single greatest act of legal expropriation in Romanian history. A
speech given by Alexandru Costin in early April 1922 at the Romanian Social Institute
was symptomatic of this suppression. His scholarly contribution to the constitutional
debate managed to uphold the very constitutional principles of property which recent
agrarian reform had so blatantly violated. His only mention of the agrarian reform
itself was in the context of article 18, namely, that land in the countryside could only
be owned by Romanian citizens (Costin, [1930] 1990: 379). In fact, the colonization
of new provinces with members of the titular nation coming from demographically
active but economically passive regions within the older territories, such as Romanian
Moldova or Serbia and Montenegro, was an integral part of the agrarian reforms in
Romania and Yugoslavia. These colonists were settled on expropriated lands, not
only in the former Habsburg provinces of Transylvania, Bukovina and Vojvodina, but
also in Bessarabia and Dobrudja, as well as in Kosovo and Macedonia.
The social and political necessity of agrarian reform and colonization has often
been emphasized in the literature (Mitrany, [1930] 1968; Tomasevich, 1955), but
the ethno-political motive has only recently been analyzed (Giordano, 2002: 463-
480; Müller, 2005). A certain redistribution of land was deemed necessary in
Romania and Yugoslavia as a buffer against the spread of communist ideas from
the Soviet Union and Hungary, particularly through soldiers returning from the war.
The practice of redistribution, however, indicates that Romanian and Serbian elites,
however influenced they may have been by the issues of the day (though economic
considerations were conspicuously absent), were essentially guided by long term
219
convictions about how their nations should be constituted. Romanian and Serbian
national codes had since the 1870s been structured along the lines of ‘redressing
historical injustices’. Elites had seen their hereditary territories, and the nation in
general, infiltrated by various foreign ethnic groups during the periods under Habsburg,
Tsarist, and Ottoman rule. This ‘historical injustice’, they argued, had to be rectified
through a variety of measures, ranging from the physical occupation of territories to
mental re-nationalization. These processes, discernible in multiple policy fields, were
described as ‘nationalization’ or ‘Romanianization’ and ‘Serbianization’ respectively
(Müller, 2005).
The redistribution of land in Transylvania and Vojvodina revealed a clear

preference towards colonizers and war veterans, to the detriment of the local
population. Broadly speaking, the ethnic German and Hungarian populations in
the two provinces were defined as representatives of the former foreign rulers, with
the result that their rural poor were only peripherally involved in the redistribution
of land (Janjetović, 1999: 142). In Vojvodina, for instance, ethnic Hungarians and
Germans who were Yugoslavian citizens were not included in the lists of persons
eligible to receive land, so that they held no voting or participatory rights in the
agrarian committees which were later established (Matl, 1927: 101).
Even the resident members of the Romanian and Yugoslavian titular nations
apparently seemed unreliable for the decision-making elites in Bucharest and
Belgrade, for whatever reason: either for their lack of militancy due to their experience
of longstanding interethnic cooperation at a personal level; because they were
organized as farm workers in autonomous cooperative societies (Marković: 1921)5;
or because, as a rural middle class, they opted for paths of political participation other
than the parties from the ‘Old Kingdom’ (Müller, 2001: 140-149). Be that as may, the
settlement of colonists was linked to their national mission of ‘redressing historical
injustices’. In both Romania and Yugoslavia, land distributed in agrarian reforms did
not immediately become their unrestricted property. Only after a period of up to ten
years, in which they had to prove their services to the nation, did the land become
their own (Petrović, 1930)6. In Serbia, colonist status was even linked to membership
in a state cooperative society.
Agrarian reform and colonization were a costly mistake in both socio-economic
5
In the early 1920s, the Federation of Serbian Farm Worker Cooperatives, with its base in Vojvodina,
tried to shake off its reputation for being autonomous from Belgrade by championing a policy of land
distribution in accordance with the following principle: ‘Land for the farm workers! Only to Serbs in
Serbian Regions!’.
6
In Yugoslavia, reference was made to the Serbian Homestead Law of 1836, which decreed a certain
amount of land and productive livestock to be an unmortgageable and inalienable minimum.
220
Dietmar Müller
and ethno-political terms. They resulted in neither agricultural modernization nor

a significant alleviation of rural poverty, nor for that matter in a sustained ‘re-
appropriation’ of the new provinces by the titular nation. Many of the colonists made
no effort to fulfil their national mission, illegally rented the land they had received
back to Hungarians or Germans, and moved to the nearest city, if they did not leave
the province altogether. The damages caused by these primarily ethno-nationally
motivated activities were enormous, both in the field of economic policy and in the
civic domain7.
The ten-year waiting period before the land distributed under agrarian reform
became the full property of the farmer amounted to a considerable restriction of
property rights. The land could not be mortgaged or legally sold off during this
period, so that banks steered clear of small family farms, while the latter made
virtually no investments whatsoever and were effectively excluded from the market.
The remaining large estates in Vojvodina (up to 300 hectares of arable land and up to
500 hectares in all) were put under a kind of supervision. State commissions, vested
with the right to inspect account books, ensured that these ‘pieces of land are made
available to the needs of various branches of agricultural industry with consideration
of the interests of the general public’ and that ‘the requisite crops’ were cultivated
(Lukan, 1931: 59).
Adding to the economic consequences of agrarian reform, there was another

negative aspect that can best be characterized as the loss of legal security and
predictability. Not infrequently, distribution resulted from a spontaneous act of land
seizure by peasants. The amount of land ‘acquired’ in the process was generally not,
or only belatedly, surveyed and entered in the land register by land-office officials.
For the reasons mentioned above, the land handed over to colonists was not entered
in the land register under their name. The systems for registering and administering
land ownership, which had existed in a workable form till 1918 (a Habsburg legacy
in Transylvania and Vojvodina), suffered a distinct decline in the period between
the wars (Cadastre, 1936; Herlea, 1985). The cadastral and land registers largely
lost their function of providing a legal framework for real estate transactions and of
giving landowners a degree of economic, political and legal security. In their real
estate transactions − which took place all the same, despite the prohibition on selling
property distributed under the land reform, particularly after the Great Depression −
peasants were thrown back upon the preliterate mode of communal knowledge as the
only proof that land transactions had actually taken place.
7
For a detailed analysis of the results and costs of the agrarian reform and colonization in Dobrudja and
Kosovo as case studies for Romania and Yugoslavia, see MÜLLER (2005: 362-374, 436-453).
221
How can one explain this dismantling of the recording system for land ownership,
down to preliterate forms of interaction? The argument of political elites in the
period between the wars is, in any event, not a very satisfactory one: that too little
time and too few resources were available to set up a uniform cadastral and land
register system. We have to look, instead, at the institution of the agrarian regime
created by the agrarian reform, at its purpose and the incentive system that resulted
from it. The overarching priority in the governance of land ownership during the
interwar period was an ethno-national one. Consequently, the agrarian constitution
born of agrarian reform created a system scarcely capable of offering economic
incentives, but essentially only national-political ones. Market logic − that land
would automatically go to the best farmer − was not allowed to operate, neither
during the distribution process itself nor in the transactions that followed. Instead,
land was given to those who had performed the greatest service to their nation as war
volunteers, partisans, war invalids, etc., albeit with greatly restricted property rights,
thereby burdening the real estate market with high transaction costs and bringing
investment activities in agriculture to a virtual standstill. That the cadastral and
land register system in Vojvodina and Transylvania was a remnant of the Habsburg
Empire was reason enough for politicians in Belgrade and Bucharest to disparage
it; even worse was that it set down property relations which allegedly were the
product of ‘historical injustice’. Although a decision was reached in Yugoslavia
in 1931 to use the Habsburg cadastral and land register system as a model for a
planned Yugoslavia-wide land recording system, the actual survey work barely
made it past the preliminary stages. The same occurred in Romania, where a uniform
nationwide system was voted on in 1938. At no point in the period between the wars
did Romanian and Yugoslavian legislators attach enough importance to the issue to
make sufficient investments.
Bearing in mind the fundamentally ethno-political aim of agrarian reform, the

dismantling of a rational and professional system for the administration of land
ownership and the legal uncertainties this entailed seem to follow their own logic,
rather than resulting from the misplaced priorities of poorly informed politicians.
The fact that peasants had to resort to preliterate transactions is merely one more
component of a forced strategy of nation-building, which, though ethno-national in
character, made no pretence to mobilization and integration, being organized instead
in a decidedly top-down and paternalistic manner (Müller, 2006: 279-296). Insecure
property rights in the rural areas of the new provinces constituted an attempt on the
part of elites from the Romanian and Serbian heartland to create an environment
in which the purported interests of the ethno-state could win out over regional and
ethnic minority interests. To put it pointedly: at any given time, a given citizen
should feel sufficiently dependent upon the political elite and the administration of
222
Dietmar Müller
his country so as to reduce his scope for social and political participation to merely
that of acclamation.
V. A look at the Communist and post-Communist governance of

land law
The ethno-national adaptation of the liberal-individualist concept and practice

of landownership in the interwar period gave way to Communist transformation
in the postwar period. Both periods had in common a focus not on the interests,
rights and options open to the individual, but on those of a supposed national or
class based collective. Accordingly, the practice of land registers deteriorated in the
postwar period to such an extent that they were eventually treated as archives. A
cadastre system based on mathematical surveying methods was only reinstated in the
1960s, and only gradually at that. The increasing insignificance of property in land
law, in favour of rights of use, corresponded to a worsening of professional training
programs for geodesists, along with an attendant loss in social prestige for members
of this occupation. The concept and practice of property was de-individualized and
de-professionalized even more intensively than in the interwar period. The right to
dispose of land that had de jure remained in private property virtually disappeared,
and the technical administration of land ownership was managed more and more
laxly. The promise of strengthening ties between property, a self-determined lifestyle
and self-confident participation in the political process was replaced by the Party’s
technocratic-ideological promise to best define the welfare of all and to make this a
reality by means of large scale modernization projects in agriculture, as in other areas
of society. To draw on James C. Scott, this hubris, which had no room for individuals
and their property, could be characterized as ‘high modernity’, that is, as accelerated
modernization according to a centrally formulated and executed plan (Scott, 1998).
Agrarian reforms have also been undertaken in the post-Communist era in eastern
Europe, but have greatly varied from country to country in their extent and context8.
Whereas in Romania more than 75 per cent of land is now in private hands, following
restitution to original owners or to their heirs, in rural Serbia land that had remained
in private property under Socialist Yugoslavia has since changed hands considerably,
not least thanks to the settling of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Krajina and
Kosovo, particularly in the Vojvodina. In both states, these processes cannot be
explained very convincingly by the concept of governance, i.e., as the result of a
dialogue between the greatest possible number of those affected and by weighing
the interests of all participants. These were ad hoc, populist measures with very
8
Cf. HALAMSKA (Chapter 11), CHOI, WOLZ and, KOPSIDIS (Chapter 12) and VARGA (Chapter 13).
223
little attention given to economic considerations, serving instead to keep old elites
in power in a new situation. It was hardly a coincidence that their most reliable voter
base in the 1990s was to be found in rural areas.
VI. Conclusion
In theoretical and methodological terms, governance and governmentality studies

have been found lacking in terms of systematic insight into the historicity of their
object of contemplation, and to focus too one-sidedly on state agents. As shown
above, this can lead to serious problems in assessing the transfer and the effectiveness
of institutions and organizations in the case of catch-up modernization cum nation-
building processes in states such as Romania and Yugoslavia. To assess the concrete
effects of an institution like land ownership at the level of rural actors in the post-
1918 and post-1989-1990 eras is, however, a problem of methodology, and this is not
only the province of historians.
Whether the promise of legal equality, security, and predictability, as well as of self-
confident participation in the political process, inherent to the universal, individualist
concept of property has indeed proved effective, and to what degree it has done so,
can ultimately only be assessed on this level. The most promising attempts to answer
this question have been made by cultural anthropologists since the early 1990s (Hann,
1998; Hann et al., 2003; Verdery, 2003). The sceptical views of the anthropologist
Chris Hann regarding the perspectives for the development of civil society in post-
Communist eastern Europe, given the precarious material foundations prevailing,
particularly among rural populations, point to a problem of longue durée (Hann,
1996). Throughout the whole of the twentieth century, the governance of land law in
Romania and Yugoslavia was structured according to an exclusively governmental
logic, in such a way that private property in rural areas seldom delivered on its
promise of prosperity and participation.
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11. Changing property structures in central European
agriculture during decollectivization:
the social aspects of appropriation1
Maria HALAMSKA
I. Introduction
This chapter consists of an essay about the decollectivization of agriculture as it

took place in Romania, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland in the first half of
the 1990s. For the third time in the twentieth century, the central European village
corrected the trajectory of its agrarian evolution. It had done so for the first time at the
beginning of the century when, through many albeit unsystematic agrarian reforms,
the newly emerging states in the region made an effort to solve their ‘agrarian
issues’ (Roszkowski, 1995)2. These agrarian reforms, interrupted by World War
II, were completed in the 1940s by new Communist governments or governments
under Communist pressure. The new legislation (decrees and acts of parliament) of
1944-1945 laid down the rules of obligatory division of land among the peasants
without compensation to the former landowners, and had been implemented by 1948.
Enforced in different years in different countries as Communist rule consolidated,
they forwarded a ‘peasantization’ of agriculture. This ‘peasantization’, however,
remained incomplete because another radical process began in the late 1940s, that of
collectivization.
The history of this process in Europe is still incomplete and its definitions have
changed over the years. Collectivization usually means liquidation of peasant
farming by means of the creation of large cooperative farms under political,
economic and administrative pressure (as well as terror), of large cooperative farms.
Michel Sivignon (1993) defines the process in a slightly different way, taking as
his point of departure the Soviet model of agriculture (organization of production
based on two types of large, non-private farms: the kolkhoz and the sovkhoz) and
understands collectivization as the popularization of this model and its institutions
throughout the world3.
1
Translated from the Polish by Elzbieta Klarkowska.
2
Cf. BRASSLEY (Chapter 7) and MÜLLER (Chapter 10).
3
Collectivization in this sense took place in the 1970s. It made its last, ephemeral conquest in Portugal
(in the Alentejo and Ribatejo) after 1974.
229
Changing property structures in central European agriculture during decollectivization
The prospect of agrarian decollectivization suggests yet another shift in emphasis

in our attempt to define collectivization. Here we shall define collectivization more
broadly, as the process whereby organizational, productive and social structures and
specific mechanisms for their functioning are developed in agriculture, throughout the
specific process of absorption of the peasant farm by the so-called Socialist economy,
based on central planning. This process took place in two stages. The purpose of the
first stage (1949-1962) was to lay the foundations for collective farming. To do this it
was necessary to deprive the peasants of their economic autonomy, to take control of
their property and to secure them within the collectivist organizational system. The
second major stage of collectivization – during the 1960s and 1970s – witnessed the
implementation of a collectivist agrarian order. This stage involved, above all, the
development of agrarian structures in the broad sense of the term, of a dual welfare-
and-production logic of their functioning, and of the so-called ‘new farm man’,
resulting in the decomposition of the farming occupation into narrow professional
specialities (Halamska, 1998).
In spite of the existence of a unified model, of similar initial intentions and of

homogeneous mechanisms for the functioning of collective farms, each country
developed slightly different agrarian structures. These structures were contingent upon
the country’s level of development and its post-war political history, as well as on the
inertial effect of the ‘long agrarian history’, which neither radical agrarian reforms
nor collectivization managed to overcome completely. In each of the countries I am
going to analyse there were production cooperatives, state-owned farms and peasant
farms, although the share of the various forms of organization of production differed
from country to country. After 1989, agrarian structures in each of these countries
underwent changes which we will call decollectivization.
II. Decollectivization: its nature and determinants
Collectivist farming is farming based on large, complicated, hierarchic production

structures rooted in collective property (i.e., property owned by either a group or the
state) and which function according to a dual welfare-production rationale (Halamska,
1997a). Decollectivization is the process of eliminating collective farming in its two
varieties: cooperative and state. Decollectivization, therefore, by definition brings
about changes in ownership relations, changes in the ways production structures
are organized and changes in functional rationale. Changes in the economic sphere
(particularly in the property structure and organizational hierarchies) lead to changes
in the social structure of the countryside, which in turn lead to changes in attitudes
and values. Decollectivization of agriculture is a significant part of the process of
transformation (transition) of the agrarian sectors in post-Communist societies.
230
Maria Halamska
Decollectivization thus conceived began in central European farming in the early

1990s. The concept itself, however, emerged in the 1950s with a quite different
connotation and a narrower meaning than it does today. Originally, decollectivization
meant the spontaneous process of dissolution of farming cooperatives during the post-
Stalinist thaw. Decollectivization in the 1950s meant the return to pre-collectivist statu
quo ante. Decollectivization in the 1990s did not lead to the reinstatement of any pre-
collectivist statu quo ante, because of the different countries’ diverse socio-economic
structures, of their different degrees of modernization, and of the advancement of
ongoing globalization processes.
Socialism, as Jadwiga Staniszkis demonstrates in her ‘ontology of Socialism’,

had its own systemic identity, largely determined by the specific form of property
called ‘collectivist ownership’, a kind of collective ownership which can neither be
divided nor change hands (Staniszkis, 1989). Although, chronologically speaking,
decollectivization began with the destruction of the collectivist logic of the so-called
Socialist farm (be it cooperative or state-owned), the nexus of the decollectivization
process had to be the change of property relations in agriculture. Various types of
agrarian assets which belonged, to begin with, to often unidentified collectives (the
cooperative, the state) had to be assigned to concrete entities as their new owners.
Hence the appropriation process was initiated, which was the reverse of the process
of expropriation that had been the framework for agrarian collectivization.
Appropriation is based on privatization, broadly understood, meaning the

process whereby the role of ownership and private initiative is increased in society.
Appropriation in this sense consists of three logically more specific processes:
· reprivatization, meaning the transfer to the former owners or to their heirs of
property rights in objects, which had previously been formally or factually either
taken over by the state or turned into cooperative ownership;
· ‘decollectivist’ privatization, meaning the process whereby components of state
or cooperative property, which had never been privately owned, pass into private
hands;
· spontaneous privatization, i.e., the process of autonomous development of the
private sector (Brozi, 1993).
This multifaceted process of appropriation has its own dynamics. We can

distinguish three phases within it: a) the preliminary, euphoric stage during which
the legal foundations for appropriation are laid down; b) the primary, optimistic
appropriation stage during which nominal owners are ascribed to property, and c)
the state of secondary, realistic appropriation leading to actual ownership. Secondary
231
appropriation also involves transformation of the property structure as it had

developed in the previous stage. Concentration is a particularly interesting aspect of
secondary appropriation.
This chapter is based on empirical studies and continual observation carried out
between 1990 and 1997 in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania and Hungary, within
the framework of two research projects of which I was co-author and participator, and
also on my own observations conducted during research visits4.
III. The legal foundations of appropriation: from civil project to

specific solutions
Although liberalism has neither structural foundations nor historical tradition in any
of the countries being analysed, except perhaps in Czechia, the vision of individual
freedom, rule of law, respect for property rights, and rooting of the economy in private
ownership and a free market was ubiquitous in this part of Europe in the late 1980s.
Liberal ideology emerged ‘first as a kind of communism à rebours, and therefore
largely as a set of principles which opposed the official ideology and were basically its
reversal’ (Szacki, 1996: 91). Post-Communist society had no civil base for liberalism,
in the absence of a so-called middle class, and private property was virtually non-
existent. What did exist, however, was liberal reformers and it was they who began to
declare capitalism as a model and as an ideological project (Halamska, 1997b).
The idea to privatize agriculture is a logical consequence of the liberal option for
the transformation of post-Communist societies. On the other hand, it has a logic of its
own, rooted in the post-peasant nature of central European societies (in an actual sense
and / or an ideological one)5 depicted as populated by peasants and by former peasants
who had gone through collectivization, or whose legal descendants had. This is why
the privatization of agriculture was so important politically in these countries, and also
why the development of its legal framework usually preceded the first free elections.
As such, legislation concerning privatization carries a stigma of agrarian ideology:
‘Through the choice of dates which are the reference points when determining property
rights6, through the use of a specific vocabulary, particularly the open use of the term
4
Les décollectivisations en Europe centrale et orientale, managed by Marie-Claude Maurel at
Montpellier University, and Mutation et transition des modèles de production agricole en Europe de
l’Ouest et de l’Est, coordinated by Hugues Lamarche at CNRS.
5
By an actual post-peasant nature of these societies, I mean the share of farming population in these
countries’ social structures in the late 1930s and the popularity of agrarian ideology at that time, as
exemplified by the then powerful peasant parties.
6
In all cases, those dates acknowledged the effects of Communist land reforms, conducted until 1948.
232
Maria Halamska
“land reform”7, through the principles inspiring certain solutions (area restrictions or the
value of compensation8, recognition of the “moral right” of those who work the land to
own it)9, through the allocation of plots to workers or “landless” village people, through
the accompanying concern about proper use of space (rational division of plots), these acts
of redistribution are acquiring the meaning of land reforms. All this reflects the complex
ambiguity of the assumptions underlying this social restoration [...]’. (Maurel, 1996: 6,
our translation)
Legislation concerning the privatization of land has its national specificities and is
a part of the more general transformation rationale in each country.
Most liberal of all is the philosophy of change adopted by the Czechoslovakian

reformers, who acted on the assumption that the most important element of economic
transformation was the emergence of owners because it was they, as responsible
economic actors, who would find the best way to use their property and to stimulate
economic restructuring. The keywords in the Czechoslovakian philosophy of agrarian
transformation were: property rights sanctioning possession and unrestricted use of
property, restitution of formerly nationalized property, privatization, meaning the
transfer of state property to private hands, and transformation, meaning the conversion
of collective farms into other social forms for the organization of production.
Acting on these assumptions, Czechoslovakia developed the most liberal, consistent

and ramified legislation including rehabilitation, privatization, restitution and
transformation laws. From 1990 onwards, there was a series of legal acts regulating
the restitution of property which had been confiscated in various periods, crowned by
the restitution act of 21 May 1991, by which estates nationalized between 15 February
1948 and 1 January 1990 were to undergo restitution in kind. The former owners or
their heirs could apply for restitution in kind and if that was not feasible they were to
receive compensation, part in cash and part in Restitution Investment Fund bonds.
This major act of parliament remained in force in both the republics which resulted
from the division of Czechoslovakia: the Czech Republic (Czechia) and the Slovakian
Republic (Slovakia), supplemented in Slovakia by an additional act of parliament on
the restitution of ecclesiastic and monastic property. The original act was amended
in 1996, when a provision was added to the effect that the satisfaction of demands
for restitution is the obligation of either the new owner or the Slovakian Land Fund,
founded in 1991. Up to 150 hectares of arable land and 150 hectares of forests were to
be returned, but these limits were lifted in the Czech Republic. The framework for the
7
‘Land reform’ stands for decollectivization, eg. in Romania.
8
Limits in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.
9
In Hungary and Romania.
233
transformation of agrarian production cooperatives was set forth in a separate act of

parliament passed in 1992. This act defined the eligibility to benefit from the division
of cooperative property and the procedures for such division, and it also set the
deadline for the completion of the legal reorganization of the farms (Baugertnerova,
1993; OCDE, 1995; Simon, 1995; Stechlik, 1996).
The Hungarian solutions followed a different philosophy, although here too the
keywords were property rights, private property, transformation, privatization,
compensation and restitution. In contrast with the Czech philosophy, the Hungarian
philosophy of transformation was not based on mass privatization, because
‘Hungary adopted a different strategy, i.e., one of seeking and encouraging owners/users
who had initiative and were willing to take the risk associated with maximally effective
asset management. The Hungarian authorities believed that mass privatization, limited to
modification of the property structure alone, would not stimulate restructuring, without
which there could be no guarantee of effectiveness’. (OCDE, 1994: 54, our translation)
According to Maurel (1996: 44), Hungarians wanted to ‘achieve two mutually

incompatible goals: to transform property rights and at the same time to ensure that
agriculture continued to function’ – which is hardly surprising if we consider the role
agriculture played in the Hungarian economy.
In this case, agrarian decollectivization involved the privatization of state-

owned enterprises and farms on the one hand, and the transformation of farming
cooperatives on the other. This process was regulated by three groups of legal acts,
which reflected both the specificity of collectivization in Hungarian agriculture and
the considerable permeation of the by then still Socialist Hungarian economy by
market mechanisms. The legal framework for decollectivization was provided by
a number of acts of parliament: four compensation acts (1991), two acts regulating
transformation of agricultural production cooperatives and several acts dealing with
privatization in general, not limited to agriculture. All in all, these acts rendered the
process of decollectivization in Hungary quite complicated and ambiguous, and not
just for the external observer. The procedure for compensation for nationalized land,
which was to be partial, degressive and step-by-step, was the most complicated of all
(Gurzo, 1995; Maurel, 1994a, 1994b)10.
The keyword in the philosophy of decollectivization in Romania is ‘new land

reform’, and it indicates the significance lent to the land which ‘makes the peasant’
who, even during the Communist era, was the synonym of the ‘good citizen’. The
unique Balkans approach to decollectivization – spontaneous destruction of kolkhozes
10
Cf. VARGA (Chapter 12).
234
Maria Halamska
even before the appropriate legal acts were passed – can be seen here as well. The
first signs of a revolutionary fever were placated by a decree issued by the National
Salvation Front on 31 December 1989, increasing the area of homestead plots. In
some regions (Transylvania, Maramures) this initiated spontaneous privatization
during which people took over their former plots.
However, decollectivization in Romania was not legally regulated until the act of
parliament called Legea fondului funciar was passed on 16 February 1991. This act
provided the framework for future agrarian system. It stated that state-owned farms
would be retained and production cooperatives were to be quickly liquidated (by
31 July 1991). It also stated which categories of citizens would benefit from their
liquidation (current and former cooperative members) and defined the future social
forms of organization of production. The rules governing the division of land formed
an important part of the act, and the act itself has been evaluated mainly on their basis
(Bordanc, 1997; Lhomel, 1995; Sivignon, 1994).
Polish legislation is quite humble vis-à-vis those presented above. This can be
explained to a certain extent by the size and the specific nature of the collectivization
of agriculture as had taken place in Poland11. Legislation is based on the same values
that determined the specific rationale of the so-called ‘Balcerowicz Reform’, the values
of functional economic liberalism which highlight such functions as effectiveness
and efficiency and clearly neglect or underestimate other aspects of property rights.
It said nothing about reprivatization, a situation which has persisted to this day with
numerous economic, political and psychological consequences. The few existing acts
of parliament dealing with decollectivization in Poland fit into this philosophy very
well. Only state-owned farms were to be obligatorily privatized, according to the
act of 19 October 1991 which defined the forms and methods of their privatization.
Cooperative farms might be transformed, but transformation was not mandatory. After
1989, agricultural production cooperatives continued to operate on the basis of the
cooperative law passed in 1982. The 1990 act decreeing obligatory liquidation of all
cooperative unions gave farms complete independence, but the possibility of change
in property was limited until autumn 1994 due to the still existing principle of the
indivisibility of cooperative assets. The share valorization act of August 1991 and the
act of October 1992 regulating change in the organization and operation of cooperatives
and re-valorization of shares opened up some possibilities of change in their internal
structure. These acts made it possible to privatize part of the cooperative assets (mainly
buildings) and to take a multi-stage path for the transformation of cooperatives into
companies. But property transformation only became fully possible after the cooperative
law was amended in 1994. This amended act stated that the entire cooperative assets
11
The sector of collective farming occupied only approximately 20 per cent of the land.
235
belonged to the members and could be divided among them if the cooperative were
to be liquidated (Halamska, 1995; Maurel, 1994b; Psyk-Piotrowska, 1995). The legal
foundations for decollectivization are reviewed in Table 11.1.
Table 11.1. An overview of the legal foundations

for the privatization of collective farms
Czechia/Slovakia Hungary Romania Poland

Transformation of cooperative farms
Mandatory trans- Mandatory trans- No obligation
Mandatory liquida-
formation by 31 formation by 31 to alter the legal
tion by 3 July 1991
December 1992 December 1992 status
Procedures for the privatization of collectivized land
Option of withdrawing one’s
land and farming it indivi- Yes, since Yes, since
No Yes, since 1956
dually is available (factual May 1990 November 1989
appropriation)
Restitution of up
Complete or Partial and to five hectares
Restitution and/or
conditional degressive per person and 10 No
compensation
restitutiona compensation hectares per family
(only employees)
To members and
Allocation of land None To other peoplec No
employeesb
Procedures for the privatization of the capital of cooperative farms
Increased propor-
Distribution of a tion of share fund
Sales of 25 per
maximum 10 per Possibility of
cent to eligible
cent among em- buying housing
people
ployees and cooperative
land with this fund
Distribution accor- Distribution accor- Distribution accor-
ding to ding to ding to
reparation logic redistribution logic redistribution logic
Procedure for the privatization of state-owned farms
Restitution, sale, Commercialization Commercializa- Sales and leasing
leasing, Coupon and then sale or tion, shares in by tender,
privatization leasing exchange for land commercialization
a
Restitution first of up to 150 hectares of arable land in Slovakia, no limit in Czechia.
b
For cooperative members who had made no land contribution – thirty gold crowns; for
cooperative employees – twenty gold crowns12.
c
Every village inhabitant, provided there is enough land to go round.
12
The ‘gold crown’ is a conventional value unit traditionally used in Hungary to estimate the worth of
land. One gold crown of land value was set at 1,000 Hungarian forints, roughly equivalent to US$ 8.30 at
1991 exchange rate. Cf. VARGA (Chapter 12).
236
Maria Halamska
The remaining legal solutions pertaining to decollectivization can be divided into

several groups: a) legislation pertaining to the restoration of full property rights to
owners whose rights had been limited by collectivization (the peasant right to own
land in production cooperatives); b) legislation pertaining to the restitution of, or
compensation for, property which had been confiscated or nationalized in a way
recognized as illegal; c) free distribution of property according to a combination of
‘reparative justice’ (according to input) or ‘re-distributive justice’ (according to work
effort); d) sales in various forms and e) handing over.
A review of these categories leads to several conclusions. The legal solutions

pertaining to the privatization of agriculture, although they sometimes were among
the first privatization solutions in the country concerned (for example in Romania),
were not idiosyncratic, isolated or irrational. On the contrary, they were consistent
with the global philosophy of transformation adopted by each of the societies being
analysed, an inchoate pattern which would only emerge fully during the stage of
economic and secondary appropriation.
The legal solutions relating to privatization of agriculture have their roots in

liberal and agrarian ideologies. These ideological trends mingled in the discourse
that preceded the legislation procedure, at the moment when the project for social
change emerged. However, even a first approach to the form of new legal frameworks
suggests a withdrawal from liberalism and a bowing to collectivism. Although the
new decollectivization laws dissociated themselves from collectivist ideology, they
adopted and legitimized a number of collectivist solutions. This conclusion follows
from the analysis of the new laws from the perspective of: a) the attitude towards post-
war land reforms, b) the adopted scale and character of restitution, c) the principles of
distribution of indivisible cooperative property and d) the restrictions on the owners’
disposition of received property in the market.
IV. The optimistic stage of legal appropriation
The second stage of the appropriation process is legal appropriation, broadly

understood. Within the theoretical framework of property rights, which states that
rather than regulating ‘people-object relations’, property rights regulate ‘people-
people relations relating to the use of objects. Thanks to property rights, individuals
can foresee beforehand what they can rationally expect in their relations with other
members of the community’ (Brozi, 1993: 32), legal appropriation is the process by
which property relations are defined. I suggest therefore that we adopt here a wider
perspective on the process of legal appropriation and view it as the general process
whereby property rights are organized in agriculture and owners are designated. This
237
general process can be analysed in two more specific and overlapping components:
the designation of a nominal owner to each property or its parts and the purchase of
ownership rights by individuals or groups.
The first of these component processes, the designation of owners, albeit an

indispensable phase of privatization, must not be equated with it. First and foremost,
it involves the procedures of structural transformation, the valuation and division of
previously indivisible collective property and the designation of each part’s rightful
owner. As real estate is divided, the institution of the central mortgage register must
be restored. Parts of the property may be in kind (i.e., consisting of tangible goods),
other parts may be symbolic (e.g., stocks or shares). However, this process does not
always end with the legal designation of private owners, rather it often involves the
state treasury taking over property, which may later be privatized by other means.
The second component process, the acquisition of legal property rights, is both
more complex and more interesting. Regardless of where decollectivization took
place, the related legislation in each country has two elements, each extremely
important for the further course of the process. Firstly, the change of ownership
structure is not a voluntary process; rather it is compulsory and it must proceed at a
predetermined rate. The legal acts state the precise date for obligatory completion of
the transformation of the property-structure of farming production cooperatives and
for the structural functional transformation of state-owned farms (Table 11.1). Only
Poland could afford to transform at a leisurely pace and adopt a liberal privatization
logic because here most of the agrarian ‘production force’ was located in the family
sector. Several goals seem to have informed this enforced transformation rate. The
reformers wanted to gain the majority’s political applause and take advantage of
social enthusiasm. At the same time they did not want to leave too much time for the
collectivist nomenklatura to counterattack. The fast pace was probably also motivated
by the need to change the agrarian production structure as soon as possible, in order
to avoid a drastic drop in agricultural production. Secondly, ownership rights are
not acquired automatically and the would-be owners must demonstrate a great deal
of determination and activity from the very start. They must apply for restitution or
purchase within a specific deadline, even if the property had been misappropriated
illegally. The time legally given to apply for restitution or allocation of property is
very short and once again the Romanian Legea beats all the records by giving former
owners only thirty days to claim confiscated land.
The legislation concerning reprivatization and decollectivist privatization, as

formerly defined, indicated who could acquire property rights in agriculture. Not
everybody who was eligible applied for restitution or the right to acquire land,
238
Maria Halamska
however. In Romania a little over five million people were eligible, but only about
4.7 million obtained ownership certificates (which were not yet property rights). In
Czechia there were about 1.5 million eligible people, about 95 per cent of whom
actually applied for restitution. This suggests that the first filter in the development
of the group of future owners was the desire to own as well as a certain amount of
activity which potential owners had to muster in order to apply for property restitution
or allocation and to prove their eligibility (Bordanc, 1997; Maurel, 1994).
Let us now have a closer look at the characteristics of the new groups of owners,
taking Hungary as an example. The new owners of agrarian property can be divided
into three subgroups: land owners, production capital owners, and stock and share
owners. They can further be divided into two categories: those who have regained
actual capacity to manage land they formally owned (it is difficult to estimate the
size of this category) and those who acquired the land either through purchase or
compensation bonds. By the end of 1994, the latter group numbered about 600,000.
A further 1,143,000 people became new owners of cooperative production capital,
each of whom on the average appropriated property worth about 200,000 forints.
Working cooperative members made up 25.3 per cent of this group and together they
appropriated 40 per cent of the cooperatives’ property, while old-age pensioners made
up 30.6 per cent and appropriated 38.7 per cent of the property, former members or
their heirs made up 42.3 per cent and appropriated 19.8 per cent, and hired labourers
made up 1.75 per cent and appropriated 0.9 per cent of the cooperatives’ property. A
third group of new Hungarian agrarian owners consisted of owners of shares in farms
which have been transformed into joint-stock companies. Most of these were former
state-owned farms that were transformed into either employee companies or state
treasury companies, in which employees became owners who acquired part of the
shares (usually a rather small part) under preferential conditions in the initial stock
distribution (Duro, 1996; Maurel, 1994).
In all the analysed countries except for Poland, this technically complicated
and economically complex stage resulted in the development of a large, spatially
dispersed and heterogeneous group of owners of farmland and production capital.
Everywhere the new owners of the means of agrarian production were mainly not
people who actually worked in farming, but rather former owners or their heirs who
now lived in towns and cities. This led to the development of a new albeit temporary
situation in agrarian relations: that of fragmented ownership of means of production
separated from farming work.
From the formal, legal point of view the decollectivization process was complete
once property had been distributed and each part attributed to one individual, nominal
239
owner. However, in spite of their formal and legal status, new owners were confronted
with many economic, social and psychological barriers which limited their freedom
to use their property. The main economic barrier was the lack of a market for agrarian
property. The main social barriers were rooted in the owners’ characteristics: their
‘externality’ with respect to farming, either because they were ‘urban’, geographically
distant, aged, had other sources of sustenance, or lacked elementary farming and capital
management skills. To this we must add psychological barriers. Although the vast
majority of present owners held full legal right to their property, they were vicarious
owners by a caprice of history. These people’s attitudes were formed under ‘real
Socialism’ and their individual resourcefulness competed with learned helplessness.
The results of a survey conducted among cooperative farmers in Poland, Czechia and
Hungary in 1991 speak for themselves: only one-fifth of the respondents approved
of the change in social relations of production and private ownership (Halamska and
Maurel, 1997; Psyk-Piotrowska, 1996).
V. The realistic stage of economic appropriation: main strategies

‘The act of appropriation, acquiring something, making a property one’s own implies the
owner’s indivisible control of that thing, meaning that the owner concentrates in his or her
hand the right of usus, fructus and abusus or, to put it another way, the right of material
and legal disposal of that thing’. (Maurel, 1996: 1).
The stage of legal appropriation produced a large and very heterogeneous category
of owners. After this initial phase of systemic transformation, central-eastern European
agricultural production (again, with the exception of Poland) was carried out by
leaseholders rather than landowners. In Czechia, for example, it was estimated that only
about 10 per cent of the land was cultivated by its direct owners (Vyskumny, 1995). In
this situation, economic appropriation assumed two basically different forms: classical
economic appropriation in which the appropriating agent is the owner (proprietor
appropriation) and factual appropriation where the appropriating agent is the manager
(managerial appropriation). These are the two forms of economic appropriation which
Françoise Simon identified in her analysis of the privatization of Czech agriculture
(Simon, 1995), but this model apparently has a much wider meaning and can be
applied to agrarian privatization throughout central Europe.
The following strategies can be identified within the ‘proprietor appropriation’

model:13
13
Marie-Claude MAUREL (1996) gave a slightly different definition of appropriation strategies. She
distinguished the following strategies: retrait concentrée, the equivalent of our capital-gaining strategy,
appropriation-contrôle, closely related to our collective-solidarity strategy, réappropriation patrimoniale,
the equivalent of our patrimony reconstruction, and instalation de type entrepreneurial, the equivalent of
our more narrowly defined entrepreneurial strategy.
240
Maria Halamska
a. the subsistence-oriented strategy, which consisted of gaining or regaining

property, usually of limited worth, and using it for sustenance purposes. These
may include various degrees of self-provision (almost 100 per cent in many
Romanian farms in the early 1990s), an additional source of income (very frequent
in Hungary), or recreation (the khalupa institution in Czechia and Slovakia, cf.
Buchta, 1994);
b. the capital-securing strategy (‘grab what’s yours and run!’), which consisted
of taking over property (land, buildings, machinery) from the collective farm
with the purpose or the hope of selling it at a later date. This mainly applied to
cooperative farming equipment (Hungary, Romania) which might later be used
to start an agricultural service enterprise. It could also apply to buildings, usually
farm buildings. We also find cases of land claimed as restitution or, as in Hungary,
purchased with bonds (Kovach, 1995), in the hope of selling it shortly afterwards
for farming, recreational or construction purposes. But the sale of appropriated
physical property was a marginal and rather rare strategy. The sale of book-stock
assets such as company shares, parts or stock, often below their nominal value,
was much more widespread;
c. the collective-solidarity strategy, which was used by employee co-proprietors

in neo-collective forms of organization of production. The new neo-collective
farms, most of which were cooperatives of various types but also companies, were
created out of the coalescence of the legal property of many people. Most of the
property is in fact owned by external proprietors; were they to withdraw their
assets, the farm would cease to exist. Because individual owners did not discover
a better way of making use of their property than the neo-collective farm, they
were determined to keep the farm running and at this stage they treated it as a
pool of jobs. Therefore, they made various efforts to discourage external owners
from withdrawing their shares, for instance by granting them inalienable parts
of the property or offering to pay them back part of their shares by rendering
them various services. The next stage of the collective-solidarity strategy, based
on covert structural conflict, is played out between external owners, interested in
the dividend, and employee owners, interested in jobs. The management plays a
major role in these conflicts, sometimes taking one side and sometimes the other.
Therefore, the collective-solidarity strategy of retention of workplaces tended
to evolve to a group-clique strategy or to concentration of property or control
(Maurel, 1996; Teller, 1996);
d. the patrimony reconstruction strategy was very emotionally charged and

centred on regaining collectivized or nationalized land and reconstructing the farm
241
as it had existed before collectivization. There are not many cases of this strategy,
which was adopted by the families of once wealthy kulaks who usually had been
brutally deprived of their property and submitted to repression and persecution.
For these people, regaining their land and farm had more than purely material
value; it also had symbolic value and implied social rehabilitation;
e. the enterprise strategy differs from the previous strategies in that it was fuelled
by a widely understood project for a future farming enterprise, rather than by the
memory of the past. Farming does not yield rapid and easy profit, and therefore
this strategy did not attract many wheeler-dealers intending to make money
quickly and effortlessly. This strategy has as many varieties as there are types of
agricultural enterprises and entrepreneurs. In terms of the type of enterprise we
have either family-farming enterprise projects or projects for large farms based
on hired labour. In terms of the entrepreneurs themselves we have entrepreneurs
of necessity who are struggling to make a living or to defend their attained status,
‘occasional’ entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs of choice.
While analysing all these real economic appropriation strategies, one must
remember that most new agrarian owners have remained passive. Such passivity
‘[…] is not a strategy deliberately chosen by the owners. First and foremost, their passivity
expresses their lack of real means of realising their ownership rights. Lack of information,
competence and behaviour patterns, lack of financial markets and land markets, or the
embryonic state thereof explain why most owners were unable to utilize their ownership
rights effectively’. (Simon, 1995: 265, our translation)
This in turn gave way to the second type of economic appropriation, that is,
managerial appropriation. The managerial, non-proprietor type of appropriation
acquired several variations anchored between two extreme strategies. The classic
strategy was based on dispersed ownership, which enabled the manager to control the
owners’ actions. We find this classic managerial appropriation strategy in many new
production cooperatives, as well as in joint stock or employee-owned companies. The
managers behave like active owners who manage the property on behalf of the owners
who have delegated their rights to them. The second strategy is a form of degenerated
classic strategy. The degeneration of the classic managerial type of appropriation
was often facilitated by ‘soft’ ownership rights (Halamska, 1999): the managers
were used to govern shared property (that is nobody’s and therefore is theirs) and the
owners are not yet in the habit of executing their rights. Here, appropriation was very
seldom overt and direct. It was usually based on various networks, mutual ownership,
buying up stock with the help of various funds, such as social benefit funds. While
in the previous, classic version we had control of property through delegation, here
242
Maria Halamska
we have a different strategy: network property control. Is this, one wonders, just
property control or is it a novel, post-collective type of ownership, which we might
call manageriate?
VI. Concluding remarks
At the beginning of this analysis we called decollectivization a process of change

of property relations in the organization structures of agrarian production and in their
functional rationale. When analysing decollectivization as a social process, we must
pay attention to several important and characteristic features such as the cyclic or
serial nature of changes, the dynamics and sequence of changes and their mutual
dependence. We may analyse changes in property structure either from the point of
view of the process’s social dynamics or from that of its outcomes. Process dynamics
have both an ideal dimension and a real dimension.
When analysing the appropriation process as it really took place, we must pay
attention to its rhythm and results. When discussing the rhythm, we must take note of
the spontaneous versus systematic nature of the process on the one hand, and of its
obligatory versus autonomous nature on the other. With regard to central Europe it
mostly took a systematic turn and remained within the limits defined by law. In other
words, it was legal, it followed fixed legal procedures, it was carried out by legally
designated institutions and it was obligatory.
The real dimension of the appropriation process pertains, above all, to the
consequences for the current property structure in central European agriculture. Three
situations merit our attention. Firstly, not all agrarian property has found a rightful owner.
Secondly, there is the agrarian property structure resulting from decollectivization. We
have mentioned several of its aspects, such as the multiplicity and diversity of owner
categories and the inherent potential to generate conflict. This also implies – and this
is the third situation to which I would like to draw attention – that the current agrarian
structure in central Europe is still liable to undergo further change.
243
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246
12. Family farm ideology and the transformation of
collective farms in East Germany, 1989-2005
Jeong Nam CHOI, Axel WOLZ, Michael KOPSIDIS1
I. Introduction
After the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and of the system of a
centrally planned economy in 1989, East German agriculture had to be fundamentally
transformed to adjust to the conditions of a free market economy. Most important was
the establishment of relatively unrestricted private property rights, which implied a
rapid change in the legal and institutional framework. At the farm level, this transition
was guided by three main rules which were strongly interconnected: privatization,
restitution and restructuring (Wilson and Wilson, 2001: 124-134; Forstner and
Isermeyer, 2000: 67-68). Privatization meant the establishment of private property
rights by law for all agricultural production assets. Restitution was the legal and
moral principle for privatization, which acknowledged the injustice of enforced
collectivization during the 1950s, whereby former owners or their heirs had the right to
claim the return of their physical assets or receive the respective financial equivalent.
The third rule meant that the former collective and state farms had to be restructured
to be able to function as single, self-responsible operational units under the conditions
of a market economy, a process which has been labelled ‘decollectivization’ (Mathijs
and Swinnen, 1998: 1).
At the beginning of the transition process in East Germany, according to the officially
declared general policy concerning agriculture, the West German federal government
advocated the break up of the former collective and state farms into ‘family farms’
(Forstner and Isermeyer, 2000: 75). Many agricultural economists strongly supported
this concept, arguing that the extremely high transaction costs of large-scale farming,
especially in monitoring wage labour, are not matched by economies of scale which
only exist to a limited extent in agriculture, even in industrialized countries (Johnson
and Ruttan, 1994; Schmitt, 1993). However, more than fifteen years after the transition
process, results have refuted most of the experts’ and politicians’ predictions. There
was no triumphal return to family farming after 1989. Large-scale farming is now
1
The authors wish to thank the editors and two anonymous referees for clarifying earlier versions of
this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies.
247
Family farm ideology and the transformation of collective farms in East Germany
fully established in East Germany. These farms became the most efficient German
farm enterprises, at least with regard to crop production (Rothe and Lissitsa, 2005a).
With reference to the dominance of large scale farming in East Germany, economic
analyses have concentrated on econometric comparisons of efficiency and productivity
between different types and sizes of farm enterprises (Mathijs and Swinnen, 2001;
Rothe and Lissitsa, 2005b). Therefore, there seems to be a lack of research concerning
the views of the actors about the process of farm restructuring during the transition that
took place from 1990-1995. This paper presents an assessment of the transition phase
from the viewpoint of entrepreneurial decision makers in agriculture at the village
level, both farm managers of restructured former collective farms and the new owners
of individual farms. We carried out twenty-one in-depth interviews early in 2006. The
respondents had been selected from a list of farms compiled by two advisors (key
informants) in the southern part of the Federal State of Saxony-Anhalt. Hence, the
sample is not statistically representative and this study is of an exploratory nature.
The next section briefly describes the legal framework for privatization and
restructuring in 1990-1991, i.e. immediately before and after unification, as well
as the change in the farm structure in East Germany during the period 1989-2005.
The main focus of this contribution will be in section three, which summarizes the
empirical analysis of the in-depth interviews. Section four presents the conclusions.
II. Changes in farm structure in East Germany 1989-2005: legal

framework and consequences
In the GDR there was a relatively small number of about 500 state farms and
about 4,300 large-scale, highly specialized cooperative (collective) farms, run
mainly by farm workers and cooperative farmers (who in reality could be regarded
as workers as well) (see Table 12.1). This farm structure was shaped as the result
of the collectivization policy of the 1950s. Collective farms were subsequently
enlarged until the collapse of the GDR, and they became highly specialized (Wilson
and Wilson, 2001: 149).
The last, democratically elected, parliament of the GDR adopted an Agricultural

Adjustment Act (AAA) on 29 June 1990. This was fundamental for the structural
development of agricultural holdings. The state was to no more be an owner and
a decision-maker in agricultural production. All assets were to be privately owned
by individuals and/or companies. Ownership rights in agricultural land were to
be returned to their respective claimants. The privatization of non-landed assets
(inventory) of the farms was to proceed separately from the disposition of the land.
248
Jeong Nam Choi, Axel Wolz, Michael Kopsidis
The remaining assets were to be divided among three groups of owners: 1) those who
had brought assets to the collective at the time they had joined (former owners of
assets), 2) the landowners (those who had a former claim on some land), and 3) the
workers. In reality, an individual could belong to one, two or even all three groups.
The law also provided rules for valuing the assets, although these were rather vague.
All agricultural enterprises had to set up an opening balance account where assets
were valued at prevailing market prices, not book values. The final decision about
the future of the collective rested with its members of which, in general, the workers
were by far the majority; this had serious repercussions on the rules of valuation and
compensation, as will be discussed below.
Table 12.1. Patterns of farms and land use

in the German Democratic Republic, 1989
Average farm
No. Share (%)
size (ha)
Type In number In labour In farmland
State-owned farms 706 465 5 14 7
Arable cooperatives 4,392 1,159 11 37 85
Livestock cooperatives 17 2,696 26 38 1
Other (e.g. GPG, ZBE)a 368 431 4 11 1
Individual farms, incl. Church
60 5,604 54 - 6
estates
Total 510 10,355 100 100 100
Source. WOLZ, KWON (2004: 42).

a
GPG: Gärtenerische Produktionsgenossenschaften (specialized horticulture coopera-
tives); ZBE: Zwischenbetriebliche Einrichtung (specialized coordinating units).
The amendment to the Act on 3 July 1991, after unification, clarified the voting
rules and the distribution of assets among the claimants. In cases where wealth had
to be redistributed, the former owners of land and non-land assets were remunerated
first, at fixed minimum rates. The remaining value was distributed, half to the workers
according to their working time, and half to the farm as a contribution to the asset
base of the enterprise. All claimants had the option to receive their claims in cash or
kind and leave the collective farm, or else to turn their claims into individual share
capital in the successor organization. The AAA gave the members the right to leave
the collective farm at will, requiring only proper notice, one month in advance in
1990 and three months thereafter. Once the collective farm was transformed, the right
of departure had to be included in the respective by-laws. In addition, the law gave
farm management the option to dismiss workers when layoffs were needed or when
they did not perform well. A redundant worker, however, could still remain a member
of the cooperative farm.
249
Among those who wanted to leave the cooperative farm, two groups can be
distinguished. The first group comprised those who wanted to take up private farming
by themselves. Within one month after leaving the farm, they received the value of
the assets they had brought into the collective. Additional remuneration of assets and
land took place after the approval of the balance sheet. The other group was composed
of those who did not want to take up farming by themselves, but rather to take their
land and rent it to somebody, or to get their compensation claims in cash as soon
as possible. This group received their claims only after the approval of the balance
sheet. In order to reduce liquidity problems, the claimants were paid in instalments
over several years. In addition, in many cases, managers of the cooperative farms
convinced departing members to renounce some of the values they were entitled to,
in order to secure the viability of the enterprise and the security of jobs. Hence, the
survival of many enterprises was only possible because members accepted a smaller
share than the one foreseen by law.
With the privatization of agricultural land, landownership was split up among a

huge number of individual owners. About 800,000 landowners had to be identified
(Wilson and Wilson, 2001: 126). In this sense, the restitution and privatization
process led to a high degree of fragmentation of land ownership. Nevertheless, due
to a relatively well-functioning leasing system, the cultivation of land is not very
fragmented, as shown in Tables 12.2 and 12.3. In short, there are a large number of
landowners, but a relatively small number of farms.
Table 12.2. Development of farm businesses in East Germany, 1992-2005

1992 1998 2005
Farm type (legal entity) No. % No. % No. %
Individual farms
Family farms 14,602 25,925 23,100
Partnerships 1,123 3,064 3,200
Sub-total individual 15,725 84 28,989 91 26,300 89
Cooperatives and corporate farms
Cooperatives 1,464 1,218 1,100
Ltd. 1,178 1,560 2,000
Other corporate 208 164 400
Sub-total coop. and corporate 2,850 16 2,942 9 3,500 11
Total 18,575 100 31,931 100 29,800 100
Sources. WILSON and WILSON (2001: 129); BMELV (2006: 94).
As politicians had intended, the number of family farms increased rapidly between
1992 and 1993 and rose to a peak of 25,925 in 1998. Since then, however, their
number has been steadily declining (Wilson and Wilson, 2001: 128), and many
250
individual farmers have joined together to form partnerships. In general, they are
close relatives who registered under this legal format. Most Socialist farm entities,
if they were not liquidated, were transformed into juridical entities compatible with
market economy, be it new forms of agricultural producer cooperatives, limited
liability companies (Ltd.), or joint-stock companies. Similar to individual farms,
the number of cooperative farms has gradually been declining; many of them have
also been reorganized as limited liability companies. Hence, the number of corporate
farms has gradually been increasing.
Thus, a re-emergence of individual (family) farms could be observed in East

Germany, but in no way as important as in West Germany, if we consider their share
of the agricultural area cultivated (Table 12.3). Individual farms may dominate the
farming structure numerically, but cooperatives and corporate farms dominate it
spatially, together in 2005 farming about 51 per cent of the agricultural land area.
The highest share of agricultural land is still cultivated by transformed agricultural
cooperatives, amounting to about 27 per cent, followed by family farms with 26 per
cent, limited liability companies with 23 per cent and farm partnerships with 22 per
cent. In contrast, in West Germany agricultural production is still dominated by
family farms and, to a limited extent, by partnerships, although their overall number
declined rapidly during the 1990s (Wolz and Kwon, 2004: 52).
Table 12.3. Farms in East and West Germany according to legal entity, 2005
East Germany West Germany
Farm type Average Average
(legal entity) No. % area No. % area
size (ha) size (ha)
Family farms 23,100 25.8 62.4 347,100 89.8 29.6
Partnerships 3,200 22.3 386.7 15,400 9.2 68.3
Cooperatives 1,100 27.1 1,404.4 100 0.1 77.4
Ltd. 2,000 22.7 645.6 700 0.2 32.2
Joint stock co. 100 1.7 1,278.6 40 0.1 274.6
Other corporate 300 0.3 50.5 1,200 0.6 52.6
Total a 29,700 100 188.4 364,500 100 31.3
Source. BMELV (2006: 94).

a
Due to rounding up the sums do not always exactly add up to the total.
The fundamental changes in East German farm organization in the course of

privatization and restructuring were accompanied by a radical reduction in the
agricultural labour force. In the GDR agriculture had become a collecting basin for
abundant low qualified rural workers, who could not be put to use in other sectors.
A large share of this workforce (around 25 per cent in 1989) had been engaged in
251
non-agricultural activities such as cultural and social tasks, building, garage work
etc. After 1989, in only one year, the East German agricultural labour force was
reduced from 825,200 (1990) to 361,700 persons (1991) and dropped further to
144,500 persons in 1998 (Forstner and Isermeyer, 2000: 72-73). After unification, the
shedding of farm labour was supported by very generous social security measures
(e.g. early retirement, unemployment benefits), so as to avoid personal hardship and
to support structural change in agriculture.
III. Major issues and retrospective assessment of the transformation

process by farm managers
The change of the political regime and, finally, the unification with West Germany
had severe repercussions at the farm level. Collective farm managers had to re-
organize them into farming units compatible with the market economy. In addition,
they had to quickly learn how to operate in the new economic system, which was
introduced almost overnight. On the other hand, motivated persons had the option to
set up their own individual (family) farms.
Figure 12.1. Location of interviewed farmer managers

in the Federal State of Saxony-Anhalt
Map by the authors.

Note. Groups according to legal status of farm: A. Transformed agricultural producers’
cooperatives; B. Corporate farms; C. Individual farms.
252
In this section, we will analyse the answers of sixteen farm managers of legal
farm entities, of which eleven were attached to transformed agricultural producer
cooperatives and five to corporate farms, as well as five individual farmers. They
were asked about their personal experience at the time of transformation, as they saw
it in retrospect, after a period of about fifteen years. The focus of the analysis will be
on two issues: on the one hand, we looked at how they assessed the privatization and
restitution process with respect to land and non-land assets. On the other, we analysed
how they had performed the re-organization process in their respective farm (i.e.
restructuring), and what role external advisors had played in selecting the appropriate
legal form compatible with the market economy.
III.1. Privatization
At the beginning of the transformation process, all political forces in the GDR
understood that individual ownership rights with respect to land and other assets
had to be strengthened. Already immediately after the ‘Fall of the Berlin Wall’
(9 November 1989) the first ‘reformed’ Socialist government made the first moves
in this direction, although it was still highly committed to the cooperative production
model. This commitment was shared by the other political forces in the GDR, which
had been established in late 1989 or early 1990. The advisory body of the West German
Ministry of Agriculture, however, had already in May 1990 emphasized the vital
role of secure ownership rights in production assets, in order to ensure functioning
and competitive factor markets. This was seen as an important precondition for
developing private entrepreneurship and a competitive agricultural sector. Hence,
ownership rights concerning agricultural land as well as all other agricultural assets
had to be individualized as broadly as possible. In addition, asset owners were to have
the right to select, from all types of legal business entities, the most appropriate one
for them (WBBMELF, 1991: 1-5).
III.1.a. Land
The re-establishment of private ownership rights concerning agricultural land
was carried out at a relatively fast pace. On the whole, the authorities were able to
identify individuals owning about 80 per cent of the agricultural land in East Germany
relatively quickly. In the remaining cases, in which no private individual could be
identified as the legal owner (situations that may have lasted even up to the present
day), the local district courts administered these pieces of land and rented them out to
the highest bidder, on an annual basis.
The respondents from all groups fully supported the process. They all agreed that
this had been a vital step for future development. In line with the restitution process,
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all individual plots had to be returned to their original owners or to their heirs. Since
the West German institutional set-up could easily be transferred to East Germany, and
the original cadastres had not been destroyed, although they had not been updated
after the early 1960s, the process was not particularly difficult. As one cooperative
manager put it:
‘In Germany, this step was relatively easy because all the cadastre books were still
available. We had no major problems, as everything had been recorded. We had all the
maps, where individual plots had been marked by numbers and the names of the respective
owners’. (Choi, 2008: 131, our translation)
Problems would arise only if the land had been used differently by then, e.g. if
former agricultural land had been converted into housing land or used for barns, etc.
In general, the reconfirmed owners had the right to receive compensation in the event
the land could no longer be restored to its original condition.
While managers of transformed cooperatives and corporate farms agreed to

the need for privatization of agricultural land, they had different opinions about
its repercussions. At the time of the regime change, most of them were persuaded
that there was no way back to small-scale agricultural production. They sought for
information about trends in agricultural production and the situation of agricultural
producers in West Germany. One cooperative chairman put it like this:
‘As a child I experienced what it meant to be a family farmer. By the end of 1989 I had
gone to West Germany, and most of my colleagues had done so as well. We learned
about the problems of individual farms. Therefore, we quickly realized that we could not
reverse the agricultural structure in place. There was no way back, only forward’. (Choi,
2008: 133, our translation)
Therefore, they knew that they had to ensure long-term access to land. They were
eager to identify the re-confirmed landowners and to sign lease contracts with them.
Most of the re-confirmed landowners were either members of the cooperatives or
living close-by, and in general they were quite forthcoming in signing the lease
contracts. They generally lacked the necessary knowledge and information about
the newly emerging land markets. Hence, the cooperative managers were in a quite
comfortable bargaining position, and rent prices were relatively low. In 1991/92 the
average rent price amounted to 138 Deutsch Mark (DM) per hectare in East Germany,
as compared to 485 DM per hectare in the West (Thiele, 1998: 142).
On the other hand, managers, particularly of the transformed agricultural

cooperatives, complained that it had been too easy for the restituents to reclaim their
land. They just had to put in informal writing that they wanted to have their land
254
back for individual farming, without any justification. As one cooperative chairman
complained:
‘The whole restitution process concerning land can be seen as a mistake. We had problems
in handing over the pieces of land so quickly, and this delayed the restructuring and
adjustment process of the cooperative’. (Choi, 2008: 132, our translation)
III.1.b. Non-land assets (inventory)

The ownership of all other assets besides agricultural land, i.e. machines, buildings
and animals, which had been collectivized during the 1950s, had to be individualized
as well. This meant that the remaining surplus value of the collective farm had to
be converted into individual ownership shares. The way this process was organized
had severe repercussions on the future farm structure. The first AAA had provided
rather vague guidelines on how to establish the current value of those assets. The
cooperative management had a lot of leeway in determining these values, which they
put at rather the lower end. This was in line with the (East German) political objective
to facilitate the continuation of cooperative agriculture within a market economy.
With the revision of the Act in 1991, the rights of the asset owners were strengthened,
as the (West German) political objective was to put the value of these assets at the
higher end, for it was assumed that, if these assets had a higher value and could be
withdrawn from the cooperatives, then more persons would be encouraged to take up
family farming.
The privatization of non-landed inventory was quite complicated. The first

problem referred to the fact that, at the time of collectivization, the inventory had
not been assessed or valued at all. In order to start the process, all cooperative
managers, along with the chairmen of all economic enterprises in the GDR, were
required to set up a ‘DM opening balance account’ for the day of currency unification
(1 July 1990). This balance accounted for all the available assets, which had to
be valued according to their resale value, and all liabilities had to be listed. The
cooperative chairmen had to balance two diverging objectives in the process. If they
put the value of the assets too high, many members might feel encouraged to leave
the cooperative and ask for cash payments for their individual shares. If they put
the value too low, members might stay, but then they would have no collateral and
would not be solvent for bank credit. All managers of the transformed cooperatives
and corporate farms confirmed that the process of identifying and individualising
the assets at the time of transformation had been a very complicated and time-
consuming process. They had to compile precise figures about the land, inventory,
the provision of labour time and the value that had been added over time. With
255
respect to added value, these figures had to be adjusted for an annual inflation
factor. As one cooperative chairman put it:
‘We had to compile all the necessary documents. It was a huge problem to get all these
documents together. Once we had an overview, we had to get in touch with all the potential
beneficiaries. Well, that can be easily said now, but it took us more than one and a half
years to finish that task’. (Choi, 2008: 137, our translation)
The value of the remaining surplus assets, if any, was to be distributed among
three groups of beneficiaries, as referred to in the previous section. Therefore, the
next problem was under which criteria to distribute the remaining assets among these
groups. According to the first AAA, each cooperative was free to develop its own
criteria, which had to be approved by the members at its general assembly. This,
however, gave an indirect preference to the objectives of the agricultural labourers,
who as a group had not contributed land or inventory, but often formed the majority
in the general assemblies2. They wanted to keep the assets together and continue
farming in a cooperative way, so that it was in their interest to value the assets as low
as possible, in order to minimize the incentive for other members owning land and
inventory to leave and start their own individual farms.
With the revision of the AAA in 1991, it was stipulated that any transformation had
to be approved by the majority of the landowning and inventory-providing members.
The value of the factor labour was set at a very low level or indeed at zero, as it was
argued that it had been regularly paid during the past. In contrast, the factors capital and
land had not been compensated at all during the Socialist period (Thiele, 1998: 85).
As such, it is no secret that there were conflicts between these interest groups. One
respondent estimated that at the time of transformation in his area, there had been
about ten to fifteen conflicts in each cooperative which culminated in lawsuits.
III.2. The transformation of the former Socialist agricultural production

cooperatives and the role of external advisors
The introduction of the market economy and its legal framework, as well as the
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EU, put a lot of pressure on farm managers
and newly emerging individual farmers. This has to be seen in the light of the fact
that this adjustment process had to be accomplished in a very short period lasting
only a few months (‘big bang strategy’). There was no time for adjustment and to get
experience, unlike most other countries in central and eastern Europe. At that time
there was a high degree of uncertainty and insecurity among farm managers as to
2
From 1972, everybody in the GDR had had the option to join an agricultural cooperative as a working
member.
256
what steps had to be taken. Hence, there was a great need for advice and extension
services in order to decide about the future direction at the farm level. Table 12.4
summarizes the major topics for which external advice was sought.
Table 12.4. Major topics of external advice needed by farm producers

according to legal entity of farms, 1990
Legal entity Field of competence Subgroup
General knowledge about market economy All
Preparation and organization of
Managers of All
the transformation process
transformed
Selection of (future) legal form All
cooperatives and
corporate farms Tax advice, book keeping, farm management
All
(economics)
Access to financial support and subsidies All
Access to financial support and subsidies All
Mentoring during the start-up phase, farm Former cooperative
Individual farmers
management (economics) members
Restitution of assets Returnees from the West
Source. CHOI (2008: 105).
The main topics of external advice focused on the need to quickly obtain an
understanding of the market economy and how it works in agricultural production.
All managers of transformed cooperatives and corporate farms emphasized that they
first had to know about the role of legal issues in a market economy, as compared
to the central planning economy, particularly with respect to tax, company and
property laws. This need for legal extension services referred to the preparation and
organization of the transformation process, including advice about the assessment of
the current value of the contributed production factors at the time of collectivization,
the conversion of all surpluses into share capital and its distribution among individual
entitlements. Similarly, farm managers had to know the pros and cons of the various
legal forms of business enterprises.
Time to decide was short, as the AAA set the deadline for 31 December 1991. The
selection of the legal type of the future production entity was seen as the main task
in the transformation process. The need for detailed information is reflected in this
statement:
‘At the time of the GDR, there existed the law about agricultural production cooperatives
(LPG-Law). This LPG-Law did not foresee liquidation or that type of transformation
into registered cooperatives [based on individual shares and voluntary membership] or
business companies, such as limited liability companies or joint stock companies. Frankly,
257
we had absolutely no idea about these different types of legal business entities, nor did we
understand them’. (Choi, 2008: 140, our translation)
Closely connected with the choice of the type of future legal entity, farm
managers needed advice concerning tax regulations. They all agreed that they had
no knowledge about the tax system in a market economy, and that they had relied on
advice. This advice became a permanent service requirement not only at the time of
transformation, but has been on-going ever since, as ‘the tax laws in Germany are
very complicated’, one manager explained. In addition, all farm managers mentioned
the need for economic and farm management advice in order to adjust quickly
to changes in input and output prices. Similarly, farm managers had to develop a
business concept for their future activities. Such a plan was required in order to apply
for bank credit and, more importantly at that time, for any kind of financial support,
as farm managers experienced severe liquidity problems at the time of transition.
In addition, they were also fast to realize the economic benefit of financial support
programmes and subsidies.
From the point of view of the individual farmers we interviewed, the need for
external advice was situated in different fields. The farmers coming from West
Germany were fully familiar with the German legal and institutional system, as well
as with the CAP. The two restituent farmers (‘returning occupiers’) clearly needed
advice to facilitate the restitution process. Both East German farmers (‘locally
resident new farmers’) who had left the cooperative and started their own individual
farms stated that they did not need in-depth knowledge about the functioning of the
market economy, unlike the farm managers. For them, economic advice with respect
to management related to their own farm was most urgent. All individual farmers
voiced, as did all farm managers, the need for external support in obtaining access to
the various financial farming support and subsidy schemes.
In the following part of this section, we will mainly look at the first sources of
information regarding transformation, the origins of external advisers and (for farm
managers only) the major reasons for adopting a certain type of legal entity. Finally,
we will analyse why individual farming did not emerge as the dominant mode of
agricultural production in East Germany and why cooperative and corporate farming
still prevail.
III.2.a. First sources of information for farm managers

As soon as the Socialist regime collapsed, farm managers were eager to obtain
as detailed information as possible about the transformation requirements and the
applied economics of farm management. They all confirmed that they had attended
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seminars and lectures and participated in study tours to West Germany, carried out
by universities and agricultural organizations. Due to this information and ongoing
discussions they obtained a certain level of understanding of the market economic
system, as well as initial ideas about the future concept of their cooperatives. In
general, they were quite satisfied with these information visits and discussion forums,
because, as most of them stated, the various business models under which they could
get registered after transformation had been explained to them. According to most of
them, visits to West Germany farms were decisive in making them realize that the
West German family farm model could not provide a guideline for their own future.
As a corporate farm manager explained:
‘In 1990 we visited many farms in West Germany, including the offices of the agricultural
administration. We looked for hints and ideas of how we could continue with our
cooperative. However, our farms were organized differently. Besides agricultural
production, we managed some restaurants, a butcher’s, a building unit and a kindergarten
for our staff. The farm itself was much larger. We had to continue somehow’. (Choi, 2008:
142, our translation)
However, some farm managers emphasized that these study tours were very helpful
for getting in contact with West German advisors, which will be discussed below.
III.2.b. External advice and background of the advisors

As discussed above, the need for advice from different sorts of lawyers and farm
management advisors, focusing on company and business law, tax law and farm
management, was immense. However, at the time of transformation, such extension
services were not available in East Germany. It was only after unification that the
government financially supported the set-up of several extension services. However,
the cooperatives received financial support for recruiting the advisors they needed.
Hence, all farm managers got in contact with them.
As stated above, most farm managers first got in touch with external advisors
during their study tours to West Germany. In addition, many advisors from the West
came to eastern agricultural cooperatives of their own initiative. Some East German
lawyers and economists offered their advice as well. But, as shown in Table 12.5,
regional preferences can be made out as to which external advisors the agricultural
producers finally relied on, when deciding on the transformation process.
An almost clear-cut dualistic pattern can be identified. The managers of transformed

cooperatives preferred lawyers and advisors from East Germany. On the other hand, all
managers of corporate farms relied on West German advisors. This is understandable,
as at that time the company model, while not popular among agricultural producers
259
in West Germany, was simply unknown in East Germany. With respect to individual
farmers, the pattern is also very strict. Resident new farmers preferred advisors
from their own cultural and local background, while farmers who came from West
Germany brought their advisors with them.
Table 12.5. Regional origin of the (important) external advisors

at the time of transformation according to legal entity of farms
Legal entity Interv. Type and origin of advisors
A1 One lawyer from the West and one lawyer from the East
A2 One advisor from the East
A3 One economist and one lawyer, both from the East
A A4 One lawyer from the East
Transformed A5 One advisor from the East
agricultural A6 Several advisors from the East; one lawyer from the West and one lawyer from the East
producers’ A7 One lawyer from the East
cooperatives A8 Several advisors from both the West and the East
A9 One tax advisor from the East
A10 Several advisors from the East
A11 Several advisors from the East
B1 Three advisors from the West
B2 Several lawyers from the West
B
B3 One lawyer from the East and one tax advisor from the West
Corporate farms
B4 First one advisor from the East, then several advisors from the West
B5 One advisor from the West
C1 One lawyer and one tax advisor from the West
C2 One farm management advisor from the West
C
C3 One advisor from the East
Individual farms
C4 One advisor from the East
C5 One lawyer and tax advisor from the West
Source. CHOI (2008: 109).
When asked about the reasons for this regional and cultural preference for East
German advisors, particularly among managers of transformed cooperatives, they
stated that these advisors were familiar with farms of that size, and that they did not
just look at economic indicators, but also knew the historical background and looked
at social considerations. In general, West German advisors primarily looked at how
to make the transformed farm competitive, even if this entailed applying for a high
amount of credit and getting rid of as much labour as possible. It was as though there
was a mental barrier between them. As one farm manager explained:
‘The mentality of people in East Germany is completely different from that of the West
Germans. In East Germany, people are used to cooperating and to sharing experience. But
260
these advisors did not understand nor accept this issue. They tried to make us competitive
almost without people, but rather with bank credit’. (Choi, 2008: 146, our translation)
In addition, farm managers were afraid that if they listened too closely to West
German advisors, they might lose influence in their cooperatives. Contrary to the
opinion of most agricultural economists and of agricultural journalists at that time,
according to whom East German farms were oversized and had to be split up into
smaller units in order to be competitive, managers received offers from the West
German advisors to ‘sell’ their cooperatives to West German investors. This experience
indirectly made them confident that their large-scale farms would be competitive in
a market environment, which proved to be correct in the following years. One farm
manager put it as follows:
‘We did not listen to anybody except to our East German advisors. The other advisors
from West Germany with whom we got in touch wanted to take over the whole farm.
Many of them had one or other investor at hand. But we focused on the local people’.
(Choi, 2008: 146, our translation)
While the farm managers of transformed cooperatives were relatively critical

of the advice they got from West German advisors, their colleagues from business
companies were very satisfied with them. They needed advice from the West, as
they were sure that their farms would become more competitive once they were
transformed and registered as business companies. None of them regretted this step,
and all kept in contact with these advisors.
III.2.c. Major reasons for the prevalence of cooperative and corporate farms
With the collapse of the Socialist regime, the collective farm model became
obsolete. Collective farms had to be either transformed or liquidated, while new
individual farms could be established. As unification approached, political support
shifted in favour of individual farming. West German politicians advocated the set up
of family farms of about 150 hectares. Hence, some farm managers had to overcome
the scepticism among their members as they strived to continue as cooperative or
corporate farms. As one cooperative manager recalled:
‘Some of our members did not want to join the transformed cooperative in the early
1990s. It had been regularly reported in the media that transformed cooperatives would
never survive’. (Choi, 2008: 148, our translation)
We asked the managers of agricultural cooperatives and corporate farms why they
had opted for registration as legal entities in either of these forms. We also asked them
and the individual farmers their opinions as to why cooperatives and corporate farms
261
still dominate agricultural production in East Germany. To summarize, the following

points were brought up by them:
1) The Socialist agricultural production cooperatives were collective farms that had
enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. They were not managed as state farms. Their
members were aware that it was actually their own property that was jointly managed.
Therefore, members did not see themselves simply as farm workers; rather they were
highly dedicated to their cooperatives. Unlike what happened in the industrial sector,
cooperative members were motivated to work overtime in order to manage labour
peaks, and this kind of motivation could still be relied on after transformation. In
this respect, most collective farm members had a relatively positive attitude towards
large-scale organizations.
2) The managers were and still are highly dedicated to their farms. Most of them
had not just been recruited through the party system; they came from the same
geographical area and had a good agricultural education. These people had not simply
been the ‘long arm’ or the ‘puppets’ of the central planning system. Most important
was how able the managers were to perform their jobs, to collaborate with each other
and to develop a good working climate with the other members. As one cooperative
manager put it:
‘I was already a manager at the time of transformation. If we had quarrelled among each
other, we would have split up our cooperative farm [like some others in this region did].
If management and ordinary members develop a good and trusting relationship, then you
can go on as an efficient corporate farm, regardless of the legal form. The most important
issue is that you understand and treat each other well. Otherwise, you will accomplish
nothing’. (Choi, 2008: 149, our translation)
3) Concerning the transformation into agricultural producer cooperatives based on

shares and voluntary membership, managers stressed that the transformed model is
quite similar to the former collective one. As one chairman explained:
‘Most of the members were afraid to start farming on an individual basis or to switch to
other kinds of jobs. They wanted to go on under a familiar umbrella’. (Choi, 2008: 151,
our translation)
This is closely connected with the fact that most landowning members were only
entitled to about five to seven hectares, which was considered too small for setting up
family farms. Another cooperative chairman added:
‘The land most members got was simply too small to start family farming. That is why
most members wanted to stay in the common farm enterprise. The model of transformed
262
cooperatives looked understandable to all of us. It was almost the same as the well-known
collective model’. (Choi, 2008: 151, our translation)
4) All farm managers stressed that since transformation they have been able to
make use of economies of scale. During the time of the central planning system, their
major problem had been the lack of inputs or of their availability at the right moments
of the agricultural calendar. Now they can make full use of the advantages of size in
the market economy.
Therefore, all the farm managers of transformed cooperatives and corporate farms
agreed that they had taken the right decision in not splitting up the farm unit. Their
own success proves the West German thesis according to which they would not be
competitive in the long run as being wrong. As reflected in the statistics, transformed
cooperatives and corporate farms are the dominant type of agricultural producers in
East Germany. West German farmers themselves had to acknowledge their success,
as stated by a cooperative manager:
‘In 1992 a group of West German farmers visited us. At that time, we had not yet organized
properly, so they anticipated no chance of success for us. They visited us again in 2000
and 2001. Now, they were really impressed with how well we have accomplished our
tasks’. (Choi, 2008: 150, our translation)
Even their direct competitors acknowledge their success, as a returned occupier

concludes:
‘West German politicians tried to introduce family farming in East Germany. This has been
prevented by East German politicians, who did not favour a western style privatization.
They were rather in favour of agricultural producer cooperatives. Whether this has been
right, I don’t know. Well, partly yes. It is the most modern and efficient agriculture all
over Europe’. (Choi, 2008: 150, our translation)
5) While farm managers definitely played a vital role in contributing to the success
of large-scale farming in East Germany, there are also reasons on the side of individual
farmers why the envisaged ‘rush’ into family farming did not materialize. The number
of those who actually had the will and the necessary background to take up individual
farming was rather small. Quite simply, there had not been many potential candidates
available. Another reason was that, as discussed above, most restituents were only
entitled to relatively small areas of land. One returning farmer explained:
‘A number of collective farms had to be liquidated in line with the Agricultural Adjustment
Act in this region. But the people who were supposed to start family farming were simply
not there. The children of those who had fled to West Germany [during the 1950s] and
the former cooperative farmers in East Germany had taken up different jobs. Hence, it
263
was impossible to meet this objective. Insofar as I am concerned, it was just a matter of
chance’. (Choi, 2008: 151, our translation)
Those who did take up individual farming can be divided into two groups. One of
the locally resident new farmers stated: ‘I was eager to take up individual farming. I
like to work on my own’ (Choi, 2008: 158, our translation). She seems to stand for the
type of individualist farmer which West German politicians mainly had in mind at the
time. On the other hand, some farmers were rather pushed into this type of activity, as
reflected in this statement by another individual farmer:
‘Our collective farm was liquidated in 1991, as nobody wanted to go on with that type of
farming. Everybody was aiming at total freedom. At the beginning, we did not know what
to do with our land. But then we got an external advisor and started on our own’. (Choi,
2008: 158, our translation)
New individual farmers needed to invest heavily. This they could only do, in
general, with the help of special investment and credit subsidy programmes. But
then transformed cooperatives and corporate farms could also make use of these
programmes. Therefore, one locally resident new farmer concludes that he did not
experience the special political encouragement that had been announced by the West
German politicians:
‘We participated in the federal financial and investment support programmes. This was
only the start. On the other hand, the transformed collective farms already had all the
machines and buildings in place, while we started from scratch. Therefore, I would not
say that family farmers have been more supported than cooperative and corporate farms’.
(Choi, 2008: 160, our translation)
IV. Conclusions
Fifteen years after transformation, contrary to the predictions of most experts and
politicians, cooperative and corporate farms dominate agricultural production in East
Germany. We would suggest that it was not large-scale farming as such that was the
source of inefficiency in East German agriculture, but rather the organization of farm
enterprises under the conditions of a centrally planned economy. Once they were
organized as autonomous operational units endowed with full private property rights
in their farm assets, facing hard budget constraints and the danger of bankruptcy,
and they were able to allocate their resources according to their own business plans
and were allowed to release redundant labour, large-scale farms proved to be highly
competitive.
264
The analysis confirms the leading role of the managers of the former collective
farms, as a village elite, in the process of farm restructuring. They could do so because
they were relatively quick to adjust to the new situation and they had relatively easy
access to the necessary information. They were strongly convinced that there was no
way back. Even though they had no illusions about Socialist agriculture, they tried
to re-establish their new farm enterprises as close as possible to the model of the old
collective farms. As most villagers and members of the former collectives, they were
very familiar with this model and had experienced it positively. As representatives
of the village elite of the Socialist times, the managers were trusted by their fellow
members. Therefore, it was relatively easy for them to convince their members and to
get strong support for their transformation strategies. This support and trust enabled
them to control local land and lease markets.
Thus, the reestablishment of large cooperative farms did not result from a conspiracy
of old Communists, but rather from the choices of villagers who tried to start within a
totally new economic system as carefully as possible, putting their trust in managerial
elites which were deeply rooted in the village communities. Agricultural production
was quite exceptional in this regard, because in the other economic sectors a clean
sweep of elites took place. But it must be emphasized that this smooth transformation
was supported by generous investment programmes and social benefit schemes for
reducing the agricultural labour force.
There were also other reasons for the fact that individual farming did not
materialize as the dominant mode of agricultural production. Most landowners
lacked the knowledge and entrepreneurial skills to take up farming for themselves,
and the available land was in most cases too small. The financial hurdles for start-up
investment in individual farms were also quite high. All interviews with individual
farmers confirmed the observation that individual farming was taken up particularly
in those areas where the former collective farms had not been well managed and,
in most cases, had been liquidated either at the beginning of the transformation or
during the early 1990s, as could also be observed in other parts of central and eastern
Europe (Mathijs and Swinnen, 1998: 2).
265
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BMELV, Bundesministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucherschutz (2006),
Agrarbericht der Bundesregierung, Berlin, BMELV.
CHOI, Jeong Nam (2008), Eine Analyse der Transformationsberatung für die ‘kollektive
Landwirtschaft’ während der ersten Transformationsphase (1989-1991) am Beispiel
Ostdeutschlands: Lehren für Korea, unpublished PhD. thesis accepted by the Faculty of
Natural Sciences III of Martin-Luther University, Halle (Saale).
FORSTNER, Bernd and ISERMEYER, Folkhard (2000), ‘Transformation of agriculture in East
Germany’, in Stefan TANGERMANN (ed.), Agriculture in Germany, Frankfurt, DLG-Verlag,
p. 61-90.
JOHNSON, Nancy L., RUTTAN and VERNON M. (1994), ‘Why are farms so small?’, World
Development, 22, 5, p. 691-706.
MATHIJS, Erik, SWINNEN and Johan F. M. (1998), ‘The economics of agricultural
decollectivization in east-central Europe and the former Soviet Union’, Economic
Development and Cultural Change, 47, 1, p. 1-26.
MATHIJS, Erik and SWINNEN, Johan F. M. (2001), ‘Production organization and efficiency
during transition: An empirical analysis of East German agriculture‘, The Review of
Economics and Statistics, 83, 1, p. 100-107.
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Transformationsprozess: Ausgangssituation, Entwicklung und Problembereiche’, IAMO
Discussion Paper, 81.
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Landwirtschaft: Eine Effizienzanalyse landwirtschaftlicher Unternehmen Sachsen-
Anhalts und der Tschechischen Republik’, IAMO Discussion Paper, 87.
SCHMITT, Günther (1993), ‘Why collectivization of agriculture in Socialist countries has
failed: A transaction cost approach’ , in Csaba CSAKI and Yoav KISLEV (eds), Agricultural
co-operatives in transition, Boulder, Westview Press, p. 143-159.
THIELE, Holger (1998), ‘Dekollektivierung und Umstrukturierung des Agrarsektors
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in den Neuen Bundesländern, Münster-Hiltrup, Landwirtschaftsverlag, BMELF, Series A,
(328).
WILSON, Geoffrey A. and WILSON, Olivia J. (2001), German agriculture in transition:
Society, policies and environment in a changing Europe, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar.
WOLZ, Axel and KWON, Tae Jin (2004), ‘Transformation of collective agricultural
production in East Germany and its lessons to North Korea’, Journal of Rural
Development, 27, p. 33-66.
266
13. The post-Socialist transformation
of land owner-ship in Hungary1
Zsuzsanna VARGA
I. Introduction
After decades of a Socialist regime, the establishment of democratic institutions

and a market-oriented private economy began in Hungary in 1988 and 1989. Political
and economic transitions took place at the same time. Hungary had to switch over
from a one-party to a multi-party system and from state and cooperative property
to private property. At the time of the political transition, it seemed that agriculture
would be the economic sector that would adapt most easily to the conditions of a
market economy.
Hungarian agriculture had shown an unrivalled capacity within the Socialist

block. Besides supplying the population of the country with high-quality products, its
produce was exported to both eastern and western countries. In fact, in the first half of
the 1980s Hungarian agriculture ranked among the world’s best in cereal farming and
meat production. In 1985, Hungary ranked fifth in the world in grain production per
capita, second after Canada in wheat production, and fourth after Denmark, Holland
and Australia in meat production. Hungary came second only to Holland in mass-
scale production of hens’ eggs (A magyar, 1987: 25-28). It is therefore all the more
intriguing that this sector went into a long downward spiral after the system changed.
Production declined dramatically in the 1990s and for a long while it stayed about 30
per cent below the former average output. The average yields of all major crops also
declined (Laczka, 2003: 9-13). While growth in industry began from 1994, and in
other sectors of the national economy from 1996 and 1997, the agrarian sector faced
a continuing and comprehensive crisis.
After a brief historical introduction, this chapter focuses on post-Socialist property

transformation in Hungarian agriculture. On the one hand, I shall summarize how
the different political actors influenced the enactment and the enforcement of the
compensation acts. On the other hand, I shall outline the actual processes that resulted
1
In thinking about the issues in this chapter, I have greatly benefited from my participation in this
workshop that gave rise to this volume and in the conference on Twentieth Century Hungarian Economic
History, organized in Győr (Hungary) in October 2007.
267
The post-Socialist transformation of land ownership in Hungary
in the change of land ownership and land use. Finally, I shall pay special attention to
the radical transformation of rural society. I have approached these problems using
archival sources and the records of parliamentary sessions, as well as the results
of sociological surveys. This historical-sociological outlook will enable an analysis
of the complicated processes of compensation (restitution), privatization and de-
collectivization in which property rights and related institutions were fundamentally
reshaped into new economic and social structures2.
II. State, cooperative and private property under Socialism
During the decades of Socialism, the sharpest conflicts between the Communist
party and the rural population concerned the private ownership of landed property.
From 1948-1949 onwards, the Hungarian Communist party (then officially called the
Hungarian Workers’ Party, from 1956 on, the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party)
launched collectivization as an integral part of the Soviet model (Lampland, 1995: 144-
160; Szakács, 1998: 257-229; Varga, 2004a: 221-252). But cooperative farming
based on the kolkhoz model seemed advantageous only to farmers who had little
or no landed property. The majority of farmers had no intention of giving up
their individual farms, not only because it was their accustomed way of making a
living, but also because they believed, based on experience handed down through
generations, that only ‘independent small farms’ of at least five to six hectares could
ensure safe subsistence and economic independence. Farming this amount of land
was considered necessary to achieve social recognition and at least partial protection
from social defencelessness (Fél and Hofer, 1997: 37-52).
As a reaction to this, the representatives of the political leadership sought to narrow

the farmers’ agricultural produce and market relations. Furthermore, they made every
effort to loosen and even to eliminate farmers’ persistence in keeping their private
property, especially concerning land. One of their methods to achieve this was land
consolidation, which at this point meant that the cooperatives simply incorporated the
holdings owned by farmers unwilling to join them. Dispossessed farmers received a
plot of land of similar size as compensation, but further away from the village and
usually of significantly worse quality than their own (Sipos, 1991: 496-497).
However, even these methods were insufficient to reorganize Hungarian

agriculture successfully. Two attempts at collectivization failed in the 1950s. It was
only by 1961 that a third effort was successful in establishing large scale Socialist
2
For a fuller understanding of transition processes in eastern Europe, see CREED (1998), HANN (1998),
SWAIN (1996), SWINNEN, BUCKWELL and MATHIJS (1997), and VERDERY (2003). Cf. HALAMSKA (Chapter 11)
and CHOI, WOLZ and KOPSIDIS (Chapter12).
268
Zsuzsanna Varga
farming. However, it is important to emphasize that, as opposed to the Soviet

model, collectivization in Hungary did not mean a change in juridical ownership of
the land taken into cooperative use. Almost three-quarters of the land used by the
cooperatives was privately owned, while that remaining came under state ownership
(Szakács, 1989: 61). However, the private property rights of the cooperative members
were heavily restricted. Owners could not sell the land and did not hold effective
ownership rights on it, since the cooperative statutes decided what the land should
be used for. The owners’ rights to dispose of the land ceased to exist in practice,
except for the right of inheritance. However, owners could claim land rent as a formal
recognition of ownership.
Once the collectivization process was over, the area of cooperative farmland owned
by people not working in the cooperative in exchange for land rent or a usage fee
began to increase as members left, moved away or died. Regulations even allowed
for the return of owned or inherited land, although cooperatives, with the support of
the managing bodies behind them, never actually returned it. This became a source of
constant conflict and litigation3.
In the course of a debate on land ownership and land use in the autumn of 1966,
János Kádár, first secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party, characterized
the situation of the cooperatives in relation to the reclaiming of land as follows:
‘It should also be said that there is no breach of the letter of the law in this matter,
since this issue has been regulated by various decrees by the Presidential Council or by
the Government, but in reality the existing situation is contrary to the constitution and we
are in fact committing continuous breaches of the law, since our fundamental laws ensure
ownership by the citizen. This is the case, and until now ownership has been ensured with
the small proviso that an owner can do whatever he wants with his property, apart from
disposing of it’.4
Thus land use by agricultural cooperatives in the first half of the 1960s in fact took
on the character of ownership. Law IV/1967 sought to solve this problem by bringing
in cooperative land ownership (Törvények, 1968: 75-83).
Officially, the Communist party had always supported the general idea of ever-
expanding public ownership. However, agriculture followed a rather different path
in this respect, as compared with industry and trade. While in the latter sectors
expropriation was not followed by any form of compensation, when it came to
3
Hungarian National Archive (hereafter: MOL) M-KS-288. f. 28/1965/14. ő. e.
4
MOL M-KS-288. f. 4/83 ő. e. (my translation; my emphasis).
269
agriculture, where the process affected millions of people emotionally as well as

financially, gradual transformation with financial compensation was preferred.
The land law stated that land in cooperative use might only be inherited by a
member of an agricultural cooperative. Non-members had to make their title to the
land over to the cooperative. This was forced upon them in exchange for a very small
five-year rent, so that the cooperative stood to gain land for very little compensation.
Still, the new system left landowning cooperative members’ rights of ownership
acknowledged by entitlements to land rent.
The 1967 land law marked a new stage. It was a weightier measure than any before
in the process of abolishing private land ownership. Law IV/1967 decisively affected
the conditions of land ownership in the following twenty years. Thereafter, three
kinds of landed property existed: land owned by the state, by a cooperative, and
by private individuals. State farms cultivated state-owned land. The ratio of private
land within the land cultivated by cooperatives steadily decreased, while the ratio of
cooperative-owned land increased. Cooperatives also cultivated some state-owned
land as well (Sipos, 1991: 504).
To make matters even more complicated, the overwhelming majority of the

land was cultivated collectively, but at the same time, all cooperative members
were entitled to keep household plots. Cooperative members cultivated these plots
individually and their produce remained entirely at their own disposal. They could
use these vegetables, fruits and animal products (eggs, poultry, pork, etc.) for their
own consumption or else sell them in the market (Romány, 1998: 316-339).
By the beginning of the 1980s, a new group had emerged out of the cooperative
membership, composed of farmers who were very successful in their household
farming, but were unable to develop their farms, as they had opportunity to buy
neither land nor proper machinery (Szelényi, 1988: 28-41; Valuch, 2001: 200-
207). The main cause of this problem was that the Communist party, because of
ideologically motivated restrictions, excluded private capital from accumulation for
the development of production. In spite of occasional suggestions by agricultural
experts, who in the mid-1980s outlined the reform of landed property and of the
structure of production, the state referred to obligatory prohibitions, thus delaying the
implementation of reforms5.
The 1987 law on landed property is a good example of this. Twenty years after the
1967 law, this was an attempt to untangle the rather complicated regulation concerning
5
MOL M-KS 288. f. 38/74. ő. e.
270
Zsuzsanna Varga
landed property. Yet, despite the fact that Law I/1987 repealed two former laws, ten
statutory rules and about thirty Government orders, it failed to establish an entirely
new approach to the issue. For instance, cooperatives were still not allowed to sell
land to individuals. The single new feature of the law was that it enabled cooperatives
to lease out land that they could not cultivate efficiently. Such land could be leased to
individuals without any restrictions of time or space, and without requiring any kind
of official approval (Törvények, 1988: 3-20).
III. Property and politics in the 1990s
In 1988 and 1989 the land question became a symbolic issue of agrarian policy,
since political parties had quite dissimilar views on this. Since the overwhelming
majority of land, as an inheritance of the Socialist era, was owned by the state and
by cooperatives, the main question was that of according to which legal principles
should the privatization of cooperative land be executed – that is, who should be the
new landowners.
According to data from 1990, 35 per cent of all arable land belonged to private
owners, 34 per cent to the state and 31 per cent to cooperatives (Figure 13.1). However,
land use showed a very different picture: individual and complementary (private)
farm plots used only 14 per cent of the land, state farms 26 per cent and cooperatives
60 per cent (Figure 13.2). Cooperatives were based on a mixed form of access to land,
in which ownership and leasehold went together (cooperative ownership and private
ownership leased out to the cooperatives). Of all land cultivated by agricultural
cooperatives, 3.8 per cent was owned by the state, 61.1 per cent was cooperative
property and 35.1 per cent was private property conveyed for cooperative use (SzücS
and Tanka, 1998: 152-162).
The Hungarian Socialist Party, the successor to the former Hungarian Socialist
Workers’ Party suggested that agriculture be restructured while preserving the
system of large collective farms (Kiss and Vida, 2005: 289). However, at the time of
the political transition, the party’s political influence was so little that they had no
significant impact on the transition of agriculture. The Alliance of Free Democrats,
the strongest liberal party, advocated privatization in every sector of the economy,
including agriculture. However, they had no clear conception of how to realize this.
The Independent Smallholders Party (officially the Independent Smallholders’,
Land Labourers’ and Citizens’ Party), a historical party representing farmers and
smallholders, was of the opinion that land should be returned to those who owned
it back in 1947. Thus, they wanted reprivatization, which meant giving back
former owners the exact plots of land they had previously owned. This was very
271
controversial in itself, not to mention the fact that many of the former owners had
died in the meantime, whose heirs consisted largely of workers and intellectuals
living in towns.
The Hungarian Democratic Forum, which won the first free elections after the
political transition and became the leading party of the first democratic government,
was intent on privatization rather then reprivatization. The agrarian program of the
coalition government proclaimed that
‘The basic principle of the reform process of proprietorship in agriculture is the idea
that the new landowners should be the ones expected to cultivate their properties. It is
our aim to do justice to the peasant population for the significant damage they have had
to suffer in the past. The year of 1947, when proprietorship was confirmed following the
1945 agrarian reform but forceful collectivization had not yet begun, may be a starting
point in this regard […] The use of agricultural land will take place according to the
conceptions of its owners. It is they who will have to decide whether they intend to
cultivate it individually or collectively, whether they will lease it or sell it. The purchase
of landed property by foreign citizens will be made public and transparent and should
be limited only during a transitional period’ (Kurtán, Sándor and Vass, 1990: 454, my
translation)
Even though Prime Minister József Antall made it perfectly clear that ‘the agrarian
programme of the government does not express the opinion of only one party, rather
it should be considered as a common stance of all three parties involved’, this was
exactly the issue that divided the coalition6. While the Hungarian Democratic Forum’s
original intention was a privatization entirely based on the market, the Smallholders’
Party, whose supporting votes were essential for the government’s majority in the
parliament, wanted reprivatization instead. The Prime Minister sought to ease the
controversies by proposing a partial compensation of former owners, including farmers,
which might be used to purchase new property. But the Smallholders’ Party did not
accept this proposal. Their demand was for the re-establishment of the conditions
of land ownership as from 1947. In an attempt to save the coalition, József Antall
requested a statement from the Constitutional Court, which finally proclaimed that
landed property could not be treated differently from any other form of property.
6
The clash of views showed in the parliament session when reassembling in May 1990. During its first
month, the parliament made three amendments to law I/1987 concerning landed property (XXXVII/1990,
XXXVIII/1990, XLI/1990). The Smallholders’ Party wanted all trade in land prohibited. They feared that if
cooperative members purchased cooperative land, former owners who had previously left the cooperative
and even the village, or their heirs, would never be able to repossess their land. Law XXXVIII/1990 declared
that the ownership of real estate owned or used by a cooperative could be transferred, imposed a charge
on, or transferred to a company, the latter requiring special authorization by the county committee of
inventorying and stocktaking.
272
Zsuzsanna Varga
The controversy over compensation continued even after the decision of the
Constitutional Court. As a matter of fact, it even grew stronger after the government
accepted the revised version of the bill. In the course of parliamentary debate, all
possible solutions arose. The Smallholders’ Party, at one end of the spectrum, held
that all former landowners should be fully compensated. The Alliance of Young
Democrats, at the other, advocated that no compensation should be offered, other
than a verbally stated moral restitution. The first act on compensation was eventually
passed on 24 April 1991. However, the distribution of votes (189 in favour, 108 against
and eleven abstentions) predicted a continuing struggle between the opposing interest
groups. As a further indication of this, petitions kept arriving at the Constitutional
Court even after the act had been passed.
The parliament finally passed the revised version of the law on compensation
(restitution) on 26 June 1991 which took effect from 10 August. The so-called first law
on compensation (Law XXV/1991) aimed to repair the damages inflicted by the state on
private property following 8 June 19497. Full reprivatization, that is, the restoration of
original assets, could not take place due to economic, political and technical reasons.
Partial compensation was carried out by issuing securities (compensation vouchers),
which were given to the former owners and their heirs. Compensation vouchers were
on-demand option rights or bonds issued by the state, which could be exchanged at
face value for state assets scheduled to be privatized. They could be used during the
privatization of state assets and in the course of the privatization of agriculture, to
purchase land, state and local council flats, or to fund a life annuity.
After the first law on compensation came into effect, former landowners were given
three months to register their claims, not for a particular parcel of land, but for the
estimated sale value of the land that had been taken from them. In Hungary, the value
of land was traditionally expressed in a conventional value unit, the ‘gold crown’.
According to the compensation law, each gold crown was valued at 1000 forints8.
Once converted into forints at this rate, claims for restitution of land value, like
those under any other heading, were scaled down by means of a digressive formula.
Up to 200,000 forints the claims were met in full; the portion between 200,000 and
7
Although only one compensation law was at first envisaged, four were eventually passed. The second
law (XXIV/1992) related to property lost between 1 May 1939 when the first anti-Jewish legislation was
published, and 8 June 1949, from when the provisions of the first law applied. The major provisions of
the first law held for the second as well, and restitution vouchers awarded under the second law received
interest backdated to the effects of the first law. The third and fourth restitution laws did not significantly
extend the scope of restitution. The third law (XXXII/1992) introduced restitution for those who had
suffered imprisonment or death (in which case their heirs were the beneficiaries) for political reasons
between 11 March 1939 and 23 October 1989, the day that the political regime changed in Hungary. The
fourth law (IL/1992) was meant as a facilitator for the other three.
8
The exchange rate of the forint against the US in 1991 was approximately 120 forints for 1 US.
273
300,000 forints was met at 50 per cent; that between 300,000 and 500,000 forints at
30 per cent; and finally, the portion above 500,000 forints was met at 10 per cent, up
to an overall ceiling of 5 million forints.
Having received the restitution vouchers equivalent to the scaled-down value of

their losses, claimants could then use them to bid in the auctions held for the land
which every collective farm was forced to set aside for restitution claims. Anyone
eligible to claim restitution, on the basis of any kind of loss, could bid for land.
Auctions were held by bidding a price for each gold crown of land. Bidding was on
a Dutch auction principle and began at three thousand forints per gold crown, with
minimum bids of five hundred forints. The higher the value per gold crown at which
the bidding stopped, the smaller (or less valuable) the piece of land the bidders would
acquire in exchange of their vouchers.
Collective farms had to ensure that the land they set aside for the restitution
auctions was of a similar quality to the land that had been expropriated. Collective
farm members were able to claim land in either one of three locations: where it was
originally located; where the member currently lived, and in any of the other villages
where the collective farm operated. Those who were not collective farm members
only had the first two options.
The government set up the National Office for Compensation and Reparation, as
a legal successor of the former Compensation Office. Compensation offices were set
up in each county, the task of which was to inform farms and industrial units by 16
February 1992 about the value of land for which citizens had put in claims. Following
this, agricultural cooperatives, state farms and forestries set out to establish land funds
to be auctioned to the claimants. Paralleling this, each local authority was obliged to
establish a land-administration committee to supervise the auctions and to ensure that
all the land in its area was being cultivated, and if not to find temporary farmers for
uncultivated lands, whoever nominally owned them. The overwhelming majority of
land auctions took place during 1993 and 1994.
IV. Changes in land ownership and land use
The main objective of the political transition in the early 1990s was the radical
transformation of the conditions of proprietorship and the establishment (or better
said, the restoration) of private property as the dominant form of property. The central
components of Hungary’s land privatization strategy, besides the compensation
laws, were the Cooperative Law (I/1992) and the Transitional Cooperative Law
(II/1992). Besides their compensation-related tasks, cooperatives had to undertake the
274
Zsuzsanna Varga
assignment of assets, in the course of which all land and material property they used
had to be divided among members, employees, former members and their heirs in the
form of proprietary and business shares (Varga, 2004b: 46-51). Any individual with
a valid claim could opt to take land or equipment out of the collective; and all who
had been members (not necessarily working members) of a collective for five years,
or their heirs, were entitled to hold shares in the new cooperative. On the other hand,
all cooperative members and employees were assigned rights to the cooperatives’
property and land (up to the value of thirty gold crowns for members and twenty gold
crowns for employees), even when they had not contributed land to begin with.
Assets had to be assigned so that members would become genuine owners. This
was indispensable for the emergence of new cooperatives based on free association.
In accordance with the I-II/1992 laws, three categories of cooperative members
were defined: active members (including management), old-age pensioners, and
external business share owners (former members and their heirs). The principles for
the assignment of assets were decided by cooperative assemblies. Finally, business
shares came to be divided as follows: 10 per cent on the basis of the assets originally
contributed; 20 per cent on the basis of duration of membership; 38 per cent on the
basis of the number of years worked; 27 per cent on work performance; and 5 per cent
based on other principles (Tóth, 2000: 23-29).
Due to the compensation acts, to the land auctions and to the transformation of
agricultural cooperatives, the proportion of private property grew to 70 to 80 per cent.
By 2005, some 86 per cent of all arable land in Hungary had become private property;
8 per cent remained in state ownership, 4 per cent belonged to business organizations
and about 2 per cent to reorganized agricultural cooperatives (Figure 13.1). Formally,
it seems, the original aim to switch over from the Socialist system of large farms to
a capitalist agricultural system based on small farms had been achieved. However, if
we deepen the analysis, the picture is far more controversial.
On the one hand, an extremely fragmented land ownership structure emerged

(Burgerné, 2002: 99-109; Szücs and Tanka, 1998: 8-25). The fundamental
transformation of land ownership relations (via the compensation of former owners
and their heirs and the assignment and distribution of the land to members, employees
and share-owners) led to the significant expansion of the circle of landowners,
regardless of whether or not they had any ties with agriculture at all and whether or
not they intended to pursue agricultural production on their newly acquired land.
Out of the 1.4 million individual farms registered in the early 1990s, some 90 per
cent held less than one hectare of land. Furthermore, farms of less than half a hectare
formed the majority within this category. Significant concentration of the land of
275
Figure 13.1. Distribution of ownership and use of land in Hungary

per legal status of entities, 1990-2005
100 4
14
90
35 38
80
Percentage of agricultural land
70
60
60
50 31 86
40
55
30
20
34
26
10 2
8 7
0
1990 2005 1990 2005
Ownership Use
State Cooperative Private Business
Source. Agricultural Yearbooks of the Hungarian Statistical Office, 1991-2006.
Figure 13.2. Distribution of farms and of land in Hungary per farm size, 2005
80
70
60
50
Percentages
40
30
20
10
0
0-1 1.1 - 5.0 5.1 - 10.0 10.1-50.0 50.1-100.0 100.1-300.0 > 300
Size of farms (hectares)
Percentage of farms Percentage of agricultural land
Source. Agricultural Yearbook of the Hungarian Statistical Office, 2006.
276
Zsuzsanna Varga
individual farms began to take place during the 1990s, but although the average area
rose fivefold, it still remained below three hectares. According to data from 2005,
the distribution of farm sizes was extremely skewed. The overwhelming majority
(89.5 per cent) of the individual farms were below five hectares, a farm size that is
insufficient to provide a secure livelihood for a family, unless supplemented by other
sources of income (Figure 13.2). Conversely, a small minority of farms (1.3 per cent)
with over fifty hectares held almost 40 per cent of all agricultural land (Figure 13.3).
Figure 13.3. Distribution of land in Hungary

per farm size (Lorenz curve), 2005
> 100 ha
100
90
80
100 ha
Percentage of agricultural land
70
50 ha
60
50
40
10 ha
30
5 ha
20
1 ha
10
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
Percentage of farms
Source. Agricultural Yearbook of the Hungarian Statistical Office, 2006.
On the other hand, it is quite apparent that land owning and land use became
largely separated and mediated by leases (Swain, 1994: 6-23; Varga, 1998: 145-168).
This was a logical consequence of the fact that many in the new group of landowners
who had received land under the compensation act had no intention at all of engaging
in farming. Most of them in fact leased out their land to business organizations and
to private farms. At the same time, many business organizations (which were for the
most part the legal successors of former state or collective farms) needed to lease
land from the outset, since they were not entitled to own it. As an indication of the
significance of this sector, up to 1996 business organizations held a greater share of all
277
land than did individual farms. Since 1996, this ratio has fallen somewhere below 50
per cent nationwide but with significant regional variance (Varga, 2004b: 58-62)9.
Besides the mechanism of compensation as described earlier, the other major

reason for the separation of land ownership and land use was the Act concerning land
ownership passed in 1994. In the last month of the first post-Socialist government,
just before the call for elections, a new bill on land ownership was passed. The most
important paragraphs of Act LV/1994 determine the group of persons who are entitled
to hold landed property or to lease it and the possible duration of the lease. Two
groups were excluded from the ownership of agricultural landed property10.
§ No. 6: Corporate bodies and other organizations without the status of a corporate
body shall not acquire the proprietorship of arable land with the exception of the State
of Hungary, local government, the Forest Directorate, the Pastures and Grazing-land
Management body, and public funds.
§ No. 7: Foreign private persons and corporate bodies may not acquire the ownership
of arable land and nature reserve area’. (Törvények, 1995: 492-502)
Concerning foreign private persons, the law went as far as to make a distinction in
the maximum duration of leases, which was fixed at a mere ten years for foreigners
as compared to thirty years for native citizens.
Following the elections in 1994, hopes were high that the new coalition government
of the Hungarian Socialist Party and the Alliance of Free Democrats would revise and
correct the latter hurried-in act on land ownership. Clearly, it was in the interests of large
scale corporate farms, cooperatives and limited liability companies alike, to buy land
rather than to lease it. A further issue for the government was whether to let foreigners
buy land, but only some members of the Free Democrats openly supported the former
option, and official government policy conceived it only as a long term goal.
The revised land bill was introduced to the parliament as late as 24 July 1997.
The general debate on the bill started on 19 September and soon grew more heated.
Finally, in the autumn of 1997 the governing parties decided to put the question to
the citizens in a referendum, along with the question of Hungary’s accession to NATO.
9
The smaller cooperatives and business organizations were established mostly east of the Danube,
while in the western part of the country large and medium sized farms operating as cooperatives or joint-
stock companies have prevailed. In this region in 2000, two-thirds of the total agricultural area was used
by business organizations, while to the east of the Danube the division of land use between business
organizations and individual farms was much more balanced with more than half of the land being used
by individual farms.
10
Act LV/1994 defined arable land as an area of land that is located outside towns and is registered as
plough-land, vineyard, fruit garden, garden, lawn, reeds, forest or fish pond in the land registry.
278
Zsuzsanna Varga
However, the question was soon put off the agenda due to strong protest from the
opposition, which even initiated a petition against it (Tanka, 1997: 17-25).
After such developments it is hardly surprising that the issue of landed property
also proved a sensitive subject during the accession talks to the EU. Referring to the
land act in place at the time, the Hungarian Government requested the maintenance
of a ten-year ban on the sale of land in Hungary to domestic and foreign legal entities
and foreign natural persons, beginning as of the date of accession. In essence, the
explanation was that since land prices in the EU were five to forty times higher than
in Hungary, there was concern that speculative capital would inundate the Hungarian
arable land market.
It was clear that Hungary did not carry sufficient political weight to enable the
Hungarian law, which explicitly bans selling arable land to foreigners, to be accepted
in the EU. The agreement concluded in June 2001 includes the following compromise:
foreigners who are not resident in Hungary do not have the right to purchase arable
land for a period of seven years following accession; however, foreign citizens who
can prove that they have been normally resident for at least three years in Hungary,
and who have been working in the country as individual agricultural entrepreneurs,
can purchase land they held on lease since before the accession (Varga, 2004a: 290-
294). In the autumn of 2002 a clause was added, granting the possibility to extend this
transitional period by three years, if land prices in Hungary still remained below EU
price levels seven years after accession.
V. Transformed social and economic relations
The dismantling of the Socialist farming structure and the creation of a market
economy based on private ownership took place amidst extremely difficult external
economic conditions. As the traditional COMECOM market collapsed, access to western
markets proved very difficult. In the period under examination the domestic market
for agricultural produce narrowed, since massive unemployment and the drastic
decline in personal incomes led to a fall in food consumption.
The political and economic situation of the agrarian sector was also unfavourable.
The high inflation rates that characterized the 1990s had an impact on agriculture as
well. Between 1990 and 2001, the price of input products and services for agricultural
production rose six-fold, while the price of agricultural products at the producers
only quadrupled (Laczka, 2003: 10-15). Due to such unfavourable changes in price
relations, the income situation of producers significantly worsened. As a result of the
drastic widening, by 50 to 60 per cent, of the gap between the prices of agricultural
279
and industrial products in the course of the decade after the change of regime, more
than 500 billion forints of income were drained out of agriculture, at constant 1989
prices. The widening of the price gap did not take place evenly; it increased in 1991
and 1992 and then again during the second half of the decade.
Subsidies formerly paid to agriculture fell drastically in the early 1990s. Although
subsidies began to increase from 1994 onwards, in the 1990s they reached only 27
to 47 per cent of the subsidy levels that existed between 1986 and 1990, at constant
prices (Udovecz, 2000: 12-34). Furthermore, central subsidies for agriculture usually
remained below the amount of government budget revenue obtained from taxation of
the agrarian sector.
As a cumulative consequence of the problems inherited from the Socialist era, of the
changes in the foreign economic environment and of the hardships of the transition to
a market economy, the agrarian sector faced the deepest crisis of all the main branches
of the economy. In the 1990s agricultural production was 20 to 30 per cent lower than
the levels of 1989-1991. The level of agricultural income is still much lower than that
of the other branches of the economy and the profitability of agriculture has declined
enormously since 1991. Financial crisis in the sector and the lack of appropriate
credit opportunities had a negative impact on investments, which in turn affected
production. The supply of seed declined, and the use of artificial fertilizers greatly
decreased, as on the whole did the use of pesticides (Udovecz, 2000: 7-9). Thus, not
only there has been no technological modernization in agriculture, it has not even
managed to maintain its original level of production.
We shall now turn to the discussion of the situation of the old and new actors
in agricultural production facing the economic background described above. As a
starting point, we must consider that employment in agriculture fell from 17.5 to
5.3 per cent of the active population between 1990 and 2005. The main reason for
this huge fall was that, with the transformation of large collective farms, two-thirds
of workplaces in large farms were done away with (Varga, 2004a: 280-294). In the
1990s, the highest number of people laid off in the Hungarian national economy
belonged to the agricultural sector, and 90 per cent of these labour-force dismissals
took place in a very short period, between 1990 and 1994. Rural unemployment
increased dramatically.
The composition of agricultural employment also changed substantially in the 1990s.

In 2005, out of the nearly 240,000 people working in agriculture the proportion of
wage employees neared 60 per cent, while that of cooperative members was barely 10
per cent. The proportion of entrepreneurs, together with the members of their families
who worked with them, was around 30 per cent (Antal, Guba and Kovács, 2005: 6-8).
280
Zsuzsanna Varga
The size of the full-time agricultural labour force was exceeded several fold by that
of part-time agricultural producers. The number of people depending on some sort of
ties to agriculture to make a living or to earn a supplementary income was almost two
million, about 20 per cent of the whole population, and a slightly higher proportion
of the working age population.
What has been discussed so far is enough to suggest that the composition of the
population active in agriculture changed significantly during the 1990s. In fact,
the structure of rural society underwent a radical and spectacular transformation.
On the one hand there came to be a wealthy and well organized group of a
few ten thousands of farmers, while on the other there was the poverty and the
defencelessness of hundreds of thousands of others (Harcsa, Kovách and Szelényi,
1994: 15-43; Kovács, 2002: 247-272).
Former landowning peasants submitted claims in large numbers for the return
of the landed property which had once been theirs. However, this ageing stratum
returned to production only temporarily, for obvious reasons. Others – mostly
claimants of working age whose claims to land were based on inheritance – fearing
unemployment and impoverishment, or indeed because they had lost their former
workplaces, seized those few hectares of arable land that promised self-sufficiency
and perhaps some income. Because of mass unemployment, which was especially
high in the provinces, these households established new ways of combining income
from small agricultural production with that from other sources (early retirement,
unemployment benefit etc.). However, both professional knowledge and capital were
generally lacking in these small scale farms established out of necessity (Alvincz and
Varga, 2000: 5-41).
Former members of cooperatives that went bankrupt or were disbanded were left
with no alternative but to attempt private farming, relying on the land they were given
during the transformation of the cooperatives. A very wide stratum was reduced to
this need, since the number of those employed on large farms fell by 80 per cent. We
may recall that, according to the law, an area of land worth up to thirty gold crowns
had to be provided out the cooperatives’ property for their members, while employees
were entitled to land worth up to twenty gold crowns (Tóth, 2000: 29-34). The new
small farms of between two and three hectares owned by cooperative members and
employees who had been made redundant now face an uncertain future, since they
scarcely have any means of production or finance. In the course of the assignment
of cooperative assets, the value of the per capita business share was far less than the
amount of capital required to start up a viable agricultural enterprise. Furthermore,
281
most of the tool assets which underlay the business shares were not adequate for
small scale farming.
Only the stratum of working-age people whose determination was coupled with
adequate skills and assets was able to start up genuine agricultural enterprises. In this
respect, besides professional skills, the possession of material goods (land, buildings,
machinery) and of liquid financial means was of decisive importance (Balogh and
Harza, 1998: 26-30). Often, the larger families of members leaving cooperatives,
occasionally joined by relatives who were not cooperative members but who owned
external land and business shares, pooled their assets to establish a company, whether
they registered it as a legal entity or not. It was also frequent for the leaders of
disbanding cooperatives, together with a narrow circle of relatives and friends within
the cooperative and the village, to buy the land, business shares and compensation
vouchers allotted to the members at convenient prices, thus getting hold of large
parts of the former cooperatives’ assets cheaply. In this way they established well
capitalized individual and joint enterprises.
Thus, despite the radical changes in ownership within agriculture, large

and medium sized farms remain important in the Hungarian economy
(Tóth, 2000: 23-29;Varga, 2004b: 92-100). Most cooperatives and state farms were
disbanded, and their place was taken by a wide variety of farming types. A myriad
of small individual farms emerged, taking up 55 per cent of the land in 2005. On the
other hand, the 136 state farms registered in 1988 (using 26 per cent of the land in
1990) and 1,246 agricultural cooperatives (60 per cent of the land in 1990) gave way
by 2005 to 4,400 business organizations (using 38 per cent of the land) and somewhat
over one thousand new cooperatives (7 per cent of the land) (Laczka, 2003: 38-48;
Figure 13.2).
VI. Conclusion
Since Hungary acceeded to the EU on 1 May 2004, further challenges as well

as great opportunities have awaited the agrarian sector. What advantage producers
can take of these opportunities partly depends on the adaptability and organizational
capacities of Hungarian farmers, and partly on the fast supply of needed technological
developments. As a positive sign, capital reconstruction from domestic resources has
already begun, and Hungary can count on the input of working capital from other
parts of Europe.
Throughout the stormy centuries of Hungarian history, agrarian producers have

demonstrated a high level of adaptability. In the course of the last half century alone
282
Zsuzsanna Varga
they have lived through three major turnarounds. In 1945, land was distributed and
small peasant farming became dominant. In 1949 collectivization began, and as a
result large Socialist farms (cooperatives and state farms) had replaced individual
farms by 1961. In the early 1990s, following the change of political regime, the
establishment of agriculture based on private property dominated the agenda. In the
absence of a consistent and well thought through agrarian-political concept, many
problems arose out of two genuine interconnected economic and social demands: on
the one hand, the unavoidable change in the structure of agricultural ownership, and
on the other, compensation for the unjust damage caused to private property by the
previous regime.
Thus one dramatic change followed another. The one common characteristic of the
various regime changes has been that politics, regardless of the values it promoted,
has always been suspicious of the inherited structure – a situation that has not allowed
for natural evolution. Thus at each change of direction a significant loss of value has
taken place, in terms of both capital and production experience11.
The real issue now is both how the actors in the economy and society will adapt to
the results of the contradictory experiences of the past decades, and how much time it
will take to meet the competitive conditions of the European Union. Another important
factor is how sensitive the older member-states of the EU and its administration will
be to the national problems of the newly joining states.
Archival sources
HUNGARIAN NATIONAL ARCHIVE: M-KS-288. f. 28/1965/14. ő. e. [Ways, conditions and
methods of developing land ownership and land use relations. Ministry of Agriculture,
Department of Land Use Policy]; M-KS-288. f. 4/83. ő. e. Central Committee minutes,
13 October, 1966; MOL M-KS 288. f. 38/74 [Submission on the problems concerning
ownership by agricultural cooperatives, 5 June, 1986].
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Rural History in Europe 5

As precursor of advanced multidisciplinary research COST has a very important

Edited by Rosa CONGOST and Rui SANTOS

This publication is supported by COST.

Printed on acid free paper.

© 2010 Brepols Publisher n.v., Turnhout, Belgium and COST

Giuliana BIAGIOLI Università di Pisa, Italy

Sometimes viewed as the producer of foodstuffs and raw materials, as a garden

Rosa CONGOST, Rui SANTOS

In order to provide a framework for this attempt, we have turned to a broad

The notion of social embeddedness of the economy basically represents an

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Mark Granovetter reutilized the notion of

II. Property rights: basic definitions from neo-institutional

Even though the socially and historically contingent character of property

Accordingly, property came to be defined as the social legitimacy of specified kinds

Two major theoretical developments stemming from these assumptions concern us

However promising such definitions may appear for a coalescence of research

New institutional economics and the related economic history literature is a

III. Socializing and historicizing property rights

It is only fair to acknowledge that new institutional economic and historical

Another example is Buoye’s narrative of the privatization of land in eighteenth-

We believe that fully taking advantage of neo-institutional insights for social

The contribution of social history to such a research framework can be grounded,

Once property is conceived as the socially acknowledged and sanctioned rights of

Defining property as not simply a bilateral relationship between social entities

IV. The volume: embedding property rights

The stereotyped a-historical concept of property resulted from a specific historical

IV.1. Conceptual strands

Processes of change in the categories of social entities holding property rights

The relationship between property rights and identities is questioned as well.

gentry and patrician families, citizens’ associations, public utility corporations,

The definition of the kinds of actions admitted or restricted as discrete strands in

Discourses of justification to legitimize action and the distribution of entitlements

IV.2. Historical issues and debates

continental Europe; twentieth-century reforms, restrictions and challenges to the

Giuliana Biagioli’s essay in Chapter 3 provides a synthesis about agrarian contracts

The simple polarization of power relations between landlords and peasants in

was actually embedded in a largely wage based production regime backed by

IV.2.c. Reforms, reallocations and restrictions: twentieth century challenges to

In Chapter 7, Paul Brassley deals with multiple processes of reallocation of

In the cases of Romania and Yugoslavia, according to Dietmar Müller in Chapter

IV.2.d. The post-Socialist decollectivization of land in central and eastern Eu-

Maria Halamska in Chapter 11 presents a comparative synthesis of such processes as

A common trend appears in Zsuzsanna Varga’s essay on the Hungarian case in

appropriated. This in turn depended on who was empowered by sufficient levels of

CARRIER, James G. (2004), ‘Property and social relations in Melanesian anthropology’,

ISLAMOGLU, Huri (2004b), ‘Towards a political economy of legal and administrative

SMELSER, Neil and SWEDBERG, Richard (2005), ‘Introducing economic sociology’, in

Figure 2.1. The area of the historical Czech Lands

Map by Gabriele Dorner.

II. The institutional framework of land markets in the later Middle

Village land transfer registers provide evidence of a legal structure according to

Disagreements on inheritance claims of under-age orphans, arising in cases in

IV. Village land transfer registers and peasant land transactions

It is usually suggested that peasant property rights, particularly concerning security

Figure 2.2. Peasant land transactions in the villages of Háj,

societies, proves inadequate to describe the patterns of transfers observed. Land

Table 2.1. Property transfers by kin relationship in the villages of Háj,