Hastening Toward Prague. Lisa Wolverton

sociological models or by extrapolating backwards from conditions obtaining in later centuries. Such approaches have invariably led more to distortion than to clarification. For instance, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the origins of later medieval and early modern noble families has generally obscured our knowledge of the magnates during this crucial time because many of the assumptions about the nobility in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century depend upon conceptions of lineage, especially those partrilines later associated with specific castles and heraldic devices, which we cannot be certain prevailed in the twelfth century.² At the other end of the spectrum, the Marxist effort to study the peasantry relied on anachronistic assumptions about conditions among a class oppressed by “feudal” lords. Far less information is available concerning the unfree than for those that might be construed as “the elite,” but even so no evidence supports the assumption that the countryside was populated by substantially more unfree peasants, or slaves, than freemen.³ Bridging these two approaches, however incongruously, is the “družina model” presumed by all current scholarship.⁴ It seeks to describe the Czech protonobility, to explain their relationship to the duke, and to understand the structure of lay society in Bohemia and Moravia in terms of an early medieval retinue. The assumption of its institutional existence has been taken as a starting point, rather than as the subject of focused research, with the result that every reference in the narrative sources to cum suis, clientes, satellites, cum militibus, comitatus, and any other description of men traveling with other men is taken as evidence of družiny.⁵ The flaws in such a circular argument are self-evident. A fourth approach attempts to combine all these assumptions, together with those about state development, ducal administration, and castle districts (discussed above), in order to chart a trajectory for the “development of the nobility” over several centuries; the resulting theories have only the slimmest grounding in the extant evidence.⁶ We must move away from such misguided approaches, whether the convenient short-hand designations by which kin-groups are identified in the historiography or abstract conceptual categories like the družina, in order to begin to examine the freemen’s own consciousness of kinship and lineage, notions of property and inheritance, and social, economic, and political relations with their ruler.

      One final note before proceeding: The term “freemen” is used throughout this study broadly to designate laymen in Czech society in this period, though we hardly know enough about them to determine the English term that would most accurately represent the group of individuals described by any given reference in the written sources. In other instances, “magnates” seems to be the term that approximates most closely the usage of such words as comites in the Latin sources and is also analogous to the medieval Czech župani. At the same time, even “magnate” risks misunderstanding, since it implies an elite group whose preeminence is based on landowning; the latter is certainly not the case in the Czech Lands, and we have few means of determining how “elite” individuals or groups among the Boemini, milites, or meliores were. Because they were not a closed, hereditary social group, as we shall see, “nobility” is inappropriate. The broader term “freemen” is therefore used as the basic term for the free, land-owning warriors of all ranks. “Freemen,” “magnates,” and “Czechs”—understood without explicitly ethnic connotations—are employed loosely, and deliberately so.

      Identifying the Freemen

      As with ducal lordship, consideration of the Czech laymen, their circumstances and interactions, must begin at the most basic level. Although the answers often remain elusive, structural questions need to be asked about distinctions between the free and the unfree, between those with and without landed property, among those bearing titles and moving in the duke’s circle, among various kin-groups or lineages, and between individuals of different ethnic origins. Such queries attempt to understand the Czechs in collective terms, whether in self-consciously identified groups or within the social stratifications defined by custom. This section takes another, complementary tack by examining the circumstances and careers of selected individuals. Some freemen step out of the sources by name, whether because they played a key role in the events described by chroniclers or were listed as donors or witnesses to late-twelfth-century charters. Examining their lives and roles, and the differences between these various men, offers a striking counterweight to analysis of abstract notions of status. Both the social-structural and prosopographical methods proceed by recourse to charters and chronicles, where passing remarks often provide the only clues. At times, the soundest conclusions to be drawn are negative or inconclusive. Still, while a roster of all that is not known easily becomes tedious, it can also prove revealing, especially where it helps dislodge assumptions made too easily or casually.

       Categories of Status and Lineage

      The Czech Lands, the previous chapter argued, comprised a society of landowners, most of moderate means. Small plots simply meant small landowners. Since there were no legal distinctions between lands, none apparently separated their property owners. Categories of personal status, free and unfree, remain altogether unclear, however, as does their relationship to landowning. Specific individuals are almost never described in either narrative or documentary sources as servus or liber, but a few passing comments indicate that such distinctions did exist. The Germans living in Prague, for instance, were all “free” according to the privilege issued ca. 1174.⁷ Several grants to monasteries include as part of the donation men, and sometimes women, defined according to their professions; long lists appear in the mid-eleventh century grant to the chapter at Litoměřice, and in the foundation charter for the Moravian Benedictines at Hradiště.⁸ The Hradiště charter from 1078 also makes provisions for subject peasants who wished to become free:

      It should be known that among those whom we have listed, some are servi and others are to be inducted by a fee. Four fishermen, seven ploughs with ploughmen: these are entirely to be inducted by fee; for the head of each a fee of 300 denarii is to be given, with the stipulation that, if at any time anyone of them wishes to leave servitude, he should pay the fee that was given for him, and from that fee someone else should be inducted into the same profession.⁹

      What sort of arrangement such “servitude by fee” constituted remains unclear—this passage provides the only evidence—but it appears to have been a temporary subjection from which freedom was possible. Since these people were forced to pay their lord to redeem themselves, they were not simply hired laborers; as the bargain, for both subjection and freedom, was to be struck between lord and unfree individual rather than two owners, it seems not to imply slavery. A grant from the turn of the century likewise speaks of emancipating the unfree. Having listed the villages and familia he ceded to the chapter at Vyšehrad, the magnate Němoj concluded: “This is the familia which is given to perpetual freedom: Tutana, Bohumila, Radohna, Bratrohna, Vratena, Ubicest, Decana.”¹⁰ In other instances phrases such as “whether free or servile” lay emphasis on the categories, even as they efface them by stipulating that tithes or taxes, for instance, are to be paid regardless of status.¹¹

      All Czechs owed the duke military and pecuniary obligations. Moreover, no evidence indicates that landless men were universally exempted from such payments and service; nor were those inhabiting property owned by someone else. Even ecclesiastical institutions only rarely secured, to their own profit, exemptions from these obligations for the people on their lands: in the 1140s the bishop of Olomouc, in the 1160s the house at Hradiště, and in the 1190s the Bohemian Benedictines at Kladruby.¹² Outside these documented cases, people on church lands continued to pay tribute to the duke, to gather in his army, to work on castles, bridges, and roads, and to bring suits before, or be punished by, ducal courts. There is no doubt that such immunities were exceptional; it was a long and hard-fought struggle between Bishop Andreas of Prague and King Přemysl Otakar I from 1216 to 1222 to secure them for episcopal lands in Bohemia.¹³ Whether this means that freemen could live on lands owned by others and still remain obliged to the duke by virtue of that freedom, or whether such persons were in fact unfree but retained a measure of his protection, we cannot know. This does, however, reinforce the impression that the distinction between free and unfree was not a rigid dichotomy, but a gradation of statuses and circumstances.¹⁴ Some freemen may have lived in conditions little different from their servile neighbors, and