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 unfree people might have shared rights and obligations with freemen even of the highest rank.
Distinctions among elite freemen are equally difficult to determine. Below the Přemyslid rulers of Bohemia and Moravia, styled either dux or princeps, no system of ranking by title existed. When given any title, individual lay magnates are most frequently described in the narrative sources as comes. It is not at all clear from usage, however, what the specific significance of this title might have been. I have not translated it anywhere in this study because the traditional English translation “count” implies a position in a hierarchy which simply did not obtain in the Czech Lands; rather, the meaning tends more toward the classical Latin usage signifying “companion,” from which comitatus derives. Yet comes was not tossed around arbitrarily by the chroniclers. It is never used when listing young men killed in battle, for instance. But was it a title of honor or stature the chronicler could assign at will? Was it used by contemporaries for men of particular prestige or standing?15 Was it given to men holding particular offices? A man may occasionally be designated comes of a place, though whether because he was appointed to an office or because he was a comes and happened also to hold the castle is not definite.16 In witness lists for late twelfth-century charters, prefectus is used interchangeably with castellanus, and castellanus with comes in reference to the same individuals and locations.17 While prefectus and castellanus mean quite certainly “castellan” and are therefore always given with the name of a castle, we must still be wary of assuming that this was the only, or chief, significance of comes. All that seems certain is that no hierarchic titulature was used to distinguish hereditary strata among the magnates, though prestigious and administrative titles did exist.18
Analysis of continuity or heritability within an “elite” group of magnates is further hampered by lack of knowledge about specific individuals and their families. Occasionally a narrative source provides the name of a man’s father, more rarely his grandfather, sometimes his brother. Individuals who did not figure prominently in notable events are named only among the men killed or wounded in battle or, from the mid-twelfth century, as witnesses to charters. Even when some of these names can be reliably connected with others, this rarely provides continuity over a long period. Cosmas, for example, tells of Olen’s son Borša, who helped Břetislav II (not yet duke) kill Zderad in 1091, and later mentions one Olen, wounded reclaiming Tachov from the Germans in 1121 and identified as the son of Borša.19 Of Olen, Borša, and Olen we can only guess that men of three generations from the same family were of sufficient prominence around the turn of the twelfth century to merit mention by the chronicler. Though in neither case do Borša and Olen occupy important positions—the first is a companion of the duke’s eldest son and the second is simply a “warrior of the duke” on a routine errand—both seem to be young at the time of the event. Prominence at a young age could reflect the eminence of the family, while close association with the duke demonstrates that such was the path to improving and maintaining the family’s fortunes. Although this is a rare instance when naming patterns reveal, with reasonable certainty, more than two generations in a family, beyond these two references and after 1121 they disappear completely from the sources.20
More often, the evidence argues against the construction of magnate lineages on the basis of patterns in personal names. One particular case provides a clear example of how naming patterns can be misleading—and of how dismal the situation is with regard to information about the Czech freemen. In the middle decades of the twelfth century four men called Hroznata are named in the sources. One is identified as the husband of Přibislava and father of Severus, who died before 1132; another, the provost of Mělnik, is a witness to a charter from ca. 1146–48; the third, called comes and identified as the son of Hermann, traveled to Jerusalem in 1152; the fourth, listed as castellan of Kladsko, witnessed two documents in 1169. The third and fourth may be identical, but otherwise four separate men carry the same name, and significant consanguinal connections between them are unlikely or, at least, uncertain. None of these can be surely linked with the various Hroznatas who appear in witness lists from 1175–98, including Hroznata the Curly-Haired (a.k.a. Hroznata of Peruc) and Hroznata the Bald, or with Blessed Hroznata, founder of the monastery at Teplá in 1197 and a leading magnate under Přemysl Otakar I in the early thirteenth century.21
In spite of these difficulties, almost all descriptions and analyses of the magnates at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century in the current historiography refer to them by group designations, such as the “Hroznatovci” or “Drslavici.”22 These entirely modern designations are plural patronymics, formed by the addition of the suffix -ici or -ovci to a man’s name: Hrabiše—Hrabišici, Vítek—Vítkovci, Marquard—Markvartici,
