in a specific culture and context, the duke’s assets cannot be considered in isolation. This section thus describes the nature of landholding generally in the Czech Lands of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the comparative breadth of the duke’s resources.
None of the extant sources comments directly on the nature of land ownership per se, but the basic terminology of the charters is nonetheless revealing, as are a few exceptionally telling phrases. In reference to landholdings, whether villages, arable fields of different sizes, or various appurtenances, almost all the documents speak of “possessiones.” The nouns “patrimonium” and “hereditas”4 appear regularly and, in all the charters, the verb most frequently used is “possidere.”5 Many charters also explicitly note the conditions under which the recipient was to hold the land. From the end of the eleventh century, and routinely in the last quarter of the twelfth, such properties were given “perpetuo possidendam,” “iure perpetuo possidendas,” or “hereditario iure possidendum.”6 A charter from 1197 explicitly links these suggestive phrases, noting that Zdeslav “sold by legitimate right” his “inheritance” at Bdeněves, “which he owned according to hereditary right.”7 In another case, the Vyšehrad bellringers clarified that they exchanged lands with Marcant “according to the good and proper order, to be possessed in hereditary right by him or his sons or transferred to another whom he chooses.”8 Whether by an individual or an institution, lands were owned outright before and after any transfer. Grants conditional upon the death of a wife or heir, leased back to the donor for the remainder of his lifetime, or dependent upon the donor’s return or death on crusade, so stipulate.9 The possessions themselves could range considerably in size and seem not to have been legally distinguished. Whole mountains could be traded as easily as tiny plots.10 Likewise, landowners probably were not legally differentiated, though individual wealth must have varied greatly.11
Because land was owned by laymen or churchmen of every station, it could be traded freely as a commodity, that is, acquired through purchase or exchange as well as by means of inheritance or grant. A ducal grant to the Hospitallers from 1169 states plainly: “I assigned certain of my villages, which I either bought justly with my money, exchanged by just transfers or acquired legitimately by other just means, according to the judgement of the senior nobles of Bohemia.”12 The donor in this case is the duke, but the charter states that he was simply acting within the legal norms of his society. In fact when the frequency of documentation increases, trading or selling land is revealed as routine among landowners. A grant to Plasy made “by hereditary right” on the part of a woman named Agnes, for example, included a village: “bought back from Drslav with my own money, which my husband Kuno had sold to him before our marriage.”13 Plainly these are not instances of subinfeudation or the like, as the verb is consistently “emere” for sales, while an exchange is usually labeled as “concambium.” The property in these transactions is valued in terms of money: either a sum is paid directly for a piece of land, or the values of two plots are compared and a sum paid to even out the trade as necessary. For instance, at the request of the abbot of Plasy, Soběslav II agreed to an exchange: “giving them an estate named Újezd for theirs, which is called Sušany, with eight talents added from their side so that the exchange would be of equal value.”14 Another charter records that the bishop of Prague, in need of money, sold a village to Mechtfrid of Slavčeves for 15 marks of pure silver, though the latter promised that the property would be returned after his death should his five children die without heirs.15 Among the Czechs, then, land was owned absolutely, and the owners were free to exploit or alienate their possessions as needed or desired.16
Ownership was the normative way in which people and land were connected. Nowhere in the charters does the word “feudum” appear, with a single telling exception. In a document from 1185, issued to the Austrian ministerial Hadmar of Kuenring, Duke Frederick states that, “we undertook to bind him to us by a promise of fidelity, granted him part of our land adjacent to Austria … by right of benefice, and enfeoffed him without objection.”17 In its entirety, the language of this document contrasts sharply with all other Czech charters from the period, reflecting instead the norms of the recipient—or at least the duke’s understanding of them. The phrase here, “sibi iure beneficii concessimus et … infeudavimus,” highlights all the more those grants routinely made iure hereditario. Beyond this document feudum appears only in Cosmas’s chronicle, where the phrase “pheodo vel allodio” is used twice.18 In the first passage, the author is making a broad, inclusive statement about Bishop Ekkehard’s institutution of a tithe that everyone was to pay, regardless of status, while the second comes in a description of the arrangement by which the new bishopric of Olomouc was endowed with lands taken from the bishop of Prague.19 The first, understood in context, is not a technical usage, and the latter is sufficiently detailed to make clear that no fief was involved. Neither here nor in any other source is feudum, or some like term, used to describe a layman’s relationship to his land. In one charter, a magnate named Čéč sold to a monastery land that he received as a reward for service—not which he holds in service—and thus possessed on the same basis as all his other holdings.20 As will be discussed further with regard to castles, the duke had castellans who must have received income from lands designated for their upkeep, but such property was not in the castellan’s power to alienate and, for this reason, never appears in the charters recording land transactions.
Unfortunately, the documents provide little information about perhaps the most important point: the norm of inheritance. On the basis of a few charters in which the donor grants lands from his patrimony combined with others bought from a brother or other relatives, it appears likely that some sort of partible inheritance prevailed. The canon Zbyhněv, for instance, refers to “fields which I bought for my own patrimony from my brother.”21 Likewise, the foundation of Strahov includes a gift from Bishop John of Prague of “the whole of his patrimony, what he had in Lochenice and what he bought there from his relatives, named Msteň and his sons, and from other relatives.”22 From the latter, and other instances in which donors attempted to assure that their relatives would not dispute their gifts to monasteries, it seems that legal claim to land was shared by a range of relations, denoted in the plural.23 The foundation charter for Hradiště mentions the property of Vice-duke Otto’s wife, Euphemia, but since it seems to provide for his daughter, Bohuslava, only if she remains unmarried, it is difficult to ascertain the conditions under which daughters customarily inherited land.24 Partible inheritance, division among several claimants, and provisions for women would have meant that the size, composition, and ownership of arable land shifted almost constantly throughout the Czech Lands as a whole, and even in specific localities.
In the charters, land is most frequently mentioned in terms of whole named villages, which included a wide array of appurtenances usually unspecified, or in smaller units ad aratra.25 “Ad x aratra,” shorthand for “ad aratrum sufficientem,” that is, “land sufficient for one plough,” or a certain number of ploughs, became the normal means of measuring out parcels of land.26 This also indicated that it was arable and for tilling, rather than for pasturage or some other use. Although in one instance forty are counted,27 measurements of one, two, or three aratra appear most commonly. The charter issued ca. 1141 by Bishop Henry Zdík of Olomouc, testifying to all the holdings of his church, lists countless villages in which the bishop owned only a few aratra.28 The bulk of the Moravian church’s property, in fact, consisted of such plots. Villages could also be subdivided, thus references to “halves.” In their efforts to secure Čečín in its entirety, for instance, the Cistercians at Plasy dealt with a magnate named Hermann, Duchess Helicha, and the bishop of Prague, each of whom owned a significant portion of the village.29 These cases illustrate two fundamental characteristics of landholding in the Czech Lands. First, though villages with their appurtenances were conceived as wholes, they comprised landowners, sometimes many—and some of them probably absentee—who farmed plots of different sizes. Second, those with more property, whether individual laymen or ecclesiastical institutions, possessed holdings that were fragmented and diffuse.
