Household, family, and economy among wine-growing peasants

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HOUSEHOLD, FAMILY, AND ECONOMYAMONG WINE-GROWING PEASANTS:

The Case of Lower Austria in the First Halfof the Nineteenth Century

ERICH LANDSTEINER

ABSTRACT: This article discusses commercial viticulture as a peculiar form ofagro-economic activity with certain analogies to proto-industry. Using cadastralsurveys, parish registers, and census lists from two Lower Austrian villages, themain economic features, the household formation patterns, and the family formsof peasant wine-growers are analyzed within the broader framework of the demo-graphic and social landscape of the Austrian Alpine provinces of the Habsburgmonarchy in the nineteenth century. The prevalence of nuclear family forms,low proportions of permanent celibates and illegitimate births, highly fragmentedlandownership, small numbers of farm servants, and numerous lodgers are shownto be the main characteristics of this smallholder society. Due to the decline ofAustrian viticulture in the first half of the nineteenth century, it underwent a processof “re-agrarianisation.”

In his ground-breaking study of variations in the marriage patterns of Westernand Central Europe in the nineteenth century, Josef Ehmer demonstrated theunusual—in the European context even exceptionally high—age at first marriage,and the extraordinary high figures of permanent celibacy in the “Austrian Alpineprovinces”1 of the Habsburg Monarchy. Using the percentage of married men inthe age groups 25 to 29 years and 45 to 49 years from the census of 1880 as indicators,Ehmer was able to show that these characteristics were particularly developed inthe Alpine regions of present-day Austria, and that even the southern and northern

Eric Landsteiner is Assistant Professor in the Institut fur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, UniversitatWien, Dr. Karl Lueger Ring 1, A-1010 Vienna, Austria.

THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY An International Quarterly, Volume 4, Number 2, pages 113–135Copyright 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.All rights reserved.ISSN: 1081-602X


114 THE HISTORY OF THE FAMILY Vol. 4/No. 2/1999

border areas of the Alps had a very high portion of late or never married mencompared to other parts of Central and Western Europe. Whereas in the Alps 80to 90 percent of all men in the age group 25 to 29 years were still unmarried, and30 to 50 percent never married at all, these figures attained ‘only’ 50 to 60 percentand five to fifteen percent respectively in the subalpine and lowland regions. (Ehmer1991, pp. 120–129.) Ehmer explained this peculiar marriage pattern in the AustrianAlps by the specific ecological and socio-economic features of this zone, pointingto the huge impartible peasant holdings based on animal husbandry and the highnumbers of farm servants. The impartibility of the peasant holdings forced thesiblings of the heir either to out-migrate or to life-long celibacy as farmhands, andthe very high numbers of “life time servants” (Ehmer 1991, p. 127) among the adultpopulation are seen as the most important causes of this “Alpine marriage pattern,”which in fact seems to be confined to the eastern Alps (Ehmer 1991, pp. 123–127;see also Mitterauer 1986, pp. 200–212; Viazzo 1989, pp. 246–257). Hand-in-handwith it went an extraordinarily high proportion of illegitimate births in most partsof this region, attaining 40 to 60 percent in the middle of the nineteenth century(Mitterauer 1979).

Excluding Slovenia and Istria, both of which had very different social and eco-nomic structures, three districts of the province of Lower Austria stand out inthe demographic landscape of the Austrian lands of the Monarchy for their lowproportions of permanent celibatecy rates and illegitimate births: the Lower Aus-trian district of Ober-Hollabrunn on the border to Moravia in the Northeast (alsocalled “Weinviertel”) had the lowest percentage of celibate men aged 25 to 29 yearsin the whole of present-day Austria, and only six percent of all men never married;next came the neighboring district of Mistelbach; and finally the district of Waidho-fen/Thaya in the northwestern corner of this province (also called “Waldviertel”).Whereas these three districts show similar demographic features, their economicstructures were quite different. The agrarian economy of Ober-Hollabrunn andMistelbach was marked by the importance of viticulture with 36 percent (Ober-Hollabrunn) and eighteen percent (Mistelbach) of the agricultural output resultingfrom wine production (Lorenz 1866, p. 262), whereas the district of Waidhofen/Thaya is a poor agricultural region where rural textile production was of someimportance in the local economy. This is confirmed by the high percentage of itspopulation employed in industrial and craft production (Berkner 1973; Komlosy1988). In this respect it came next to Vienna and its surroundings which were thecenters of industry in this part of Austria in the nineteenth century. On the otherhand the relatively large average size of farms and the considerable number ofservants indicate the existence of a large layer of substantial peasants in this partof the country (see Table 1).

The relevance of viticulture for the marriage pattern in the two northeasterndistricts of Lower Austria is confirmed by the corresponding figures for the districtsof Pettau and Luttenburg in Southern Styria (present-day Slovenia), where wine-growing was less strongly developed, but still of some importance in the agrarianeconomy (Zwiedeneck-Sudenhorst 1895). The data for the province Vorarlberg atthe western border of Austria to Switzerland show, however, that proto-industrialdevelopment, low illegitimacy, and small numbers of farm servants do not automati-

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cally result in a small proportion of permanent celibates and a low age at firstmarriage. This province as well as the northwestern part of Tyrol, in ecologicalrespects very similar to the other Alpine districts, were marked by partible inheri-tance and, as a consequence, substantially smaller peasant holdings (Ehmer 1991,pp. 133–135; Mitterauer 1986, p. 233).

The aim of this article is to analyze the effects of viticulture on householdformation, family forms, and demographic patterns of peasant producers. It will beshown as well that—in the Austrian context relatively low, but in internationalcomparison still very high—shares of permanent celibates in the two afore-men-tioned wine-growing districts of Lower Austria are, at least to a certain extent, aconsequence of the crisis of Austrian viticulture in the first half of the nineteenthcentury. The data gathered from census lists and parish and land registers imply arather restricted field of investigation—two villages in the northwestern corner ofthe Ober-Hollabrunn district.

PEASANT VITICULTURE, RURAL INDUSTRY, ANDHOUSEHOLD FORMATION

About 25 years ago, when the proto-industry paradigm was still a very recentnewcomer in research on European economic history, Charles and Richard Tillyin their “Agenda for European Economic History in the 1970s” listed some alreadydiscernible demographic, social, and economic effects of proto-industrial develop-ment: lower age at marriage; higher fertility rates; higher share of nuclear familiesthan those prevailing in purely agrarian settings; less vulnerability to Malthusianpressure on food supply, but higher vulnerability to price-wage scissors; etc. Theyalso stated that “what is least clear about these tendencies, and therefore mostworthy of research in the immediate future, is how specific they were to cottageindustry” (Tilly 1971, p. 189).

Among the basic characteristics of monocultural wine-growing its high laborintensity and its high productivity per unit of land (frequently small parcels of steepand stony land that could be used for other purposes only with great difficulty)stand out. These distinctive features of viticulture caused an extraordinary rise ofsettlement and population densities in zones with commercial wine production. Theregions with intensive viticulture at the Moravian border of Lower Austria, one ofthese being the field of further investigation here, had more than 100 inhabitants/km2 when the first modern census was conducted in 1869 (Schimmer 1871). Onlyin the already industrializing surroundings of Vienna population density surmountedthis level, but, it should be noted, the rural-industrial area in the northwesterncorner of the province (the afore-mentioned district of Waidhofen/Thaya) with its64 inhabitants/km2 contrasted sharply with its agrarian entourage in this respect.The elevated population densities in the rural-industrial and the viticultural areasof Lower Austria are no accident. Virtually excluding each other in many regionsof extra-Mediterranean Europe,2 both economic activities had similar effects onthe demographic regime and on household formation. Franklin Mendels pointedto the phenomenon that wine-producing regions, although showing a high degreeof farm fragmentation, were hostile to proto-industrial development and attributed



this to the fact that commercial viticulture and other labor-intensive branches ofcash-crop production were far less seasonal in their labor requirements than cerealcultivation, for example (Mendels 1980, p. 184).

In his study on proto-industrial growth in the Swiss region around Lake Zurich,Ulrich Pfister specified this observation, insofar as he demonstrated that it was notprimarily the differential seasonality and intensity of labor requirements, but themodality through which wine-growing was integrated into the local agrarian system,that was decisive in this respect. According to his results, viticulture blocked thedevelopment of proto-industrial activities only in those regions where most of theinhabitants had access to land suitable for wine-growing (Pfister 1992a, pp. 424–442).Due to its high marginal productivity, small-scale peasant viticulture can be seenas a structural analogy to rural proto-industry where large parts of the populationwere engaged in the production of craft merchandising for supraregional and inter-national markets. Both ways represented possible results of the secular differentia-tion process of peasant societies. The first enabled the formation of households inpoor agrarian regions by switching away from land-intensive agriculture to labor-intensive craft production through the intervention of merchant capital. The otherproduced the same results by intensifying the mode of land usage through labor-intensive cash crop-production. In different ways both economic activities brokeup the “chain between reproduction and inheritance” (Tilly 1971, p. 189). Allowingthe formation of households for those parts of the peasant population withoutownership of viable agricultural holdings resulted in accelerated population growthand growing numbers of cottagers and Inwohner (“lodgers”).3

The fact that viticulture, although requiring far less land to make a living thangrain production, is in any case based on land use, introduces another importantfeature of the agrarian regime in wine-growing areas: the devolution of land owner-ship from one generation to the other is generally mediated by partible inheritance,if not by the sale of land. Without entering the vast and complex field of discussionon inheritance practices in European peasant societies, a few remarks on the peculiarposition of vineyards in the early modern agrarian regime of Lower Austria arenevertheless necessary for the understanding of the following sections of this article.It would be a mistake to classify Lower Austria definitely under one of the two polesof peasant inheritance practices: partible or impartible inheritance of agriculturalholdings. The answer to the question of whether a peasant owner would (and could)divide his land among his children or would (and had to) pass it on to only onesingle heir depended in the first instance on the quality of the land and the conditionsunder which it was granted to him by the landlord. Within the framework of theearly modern agrarian regime in Lower Austria two distinct kinds of land and landtenure by peasants existed, both possessing hereditary status since at least the laterMiddle Ages. The bulk of the land, the so-called Hausgrunde (house-land) composedprimarily of arable and grassland, was attached to peasant holdings and could notbe separated from them without special allowance by the landlord and, since themiddle of the eighteenth century until 1868, by the government. The peasant hold-ings were classified in the manorial and government land registers according totheir possession of Hausgrunde as full, half, and quarters of holdings with furthersubdivisions, and the amount of tax and feudal rents they had to pay was based on



TABLE 2Structure of Landownership in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1823

Number of Holdings Average Size of Holdings (Ha)

Size All Kin Lodgers All Land Vineyards Arable Meadows-0.99 Ha 92 31 32 0.46 0.26 0.20 0.001-1.99 Ha 48 9 3 1.44 0.74 0.67 0.032-2.99 Ha 22 1 0 2.44 1.32 1.05 0.073-3.99 Ha 10 0 0 3.28 1.42 1.79 0.084-5.99 Ha 26 1 0 4.93 1.67 3.09 0.166-9.99 Ha 11 0 0 7.08 2.08 4.65 0.3510 Ha- 2 0 0 11.83 4.42 6.69 0.72All holdings 211 42 35 2.03 0.84 1.12 0.07

Sources: Niederosterreichisches Landesarchiv, Standische Abteilung, Franziszeische Katastermappen von Ober-,Mitter-, Unterretzbach, Altstadt Retz, Niederfladnitz.

this classification. From this follows that a peasant owning exclusively Hausgrundehad to pass on his holding with all the land attached to it undivided to a singleheir, the other children being compensated with money or moveable property. Theother category of land held by peasants as well as burghers of market places andtowns, named Uberlandgrunde, could be transmitted to heirs, sold, and subdividedinto parcels without any limitations by the landlord or the state (Feigl 1964, 1976;Kretschmer and Piegler 1965; Berkner 1972). The important fact for the argumenta-tion here is that virtually all the wineland in Lower Austria had the status ofUberlandgrunde, which, in turn, led to the consequence that the probability ofpartible inheritance practice in a certain area rose with the intensity of viticulturein this area, whereas the number and the size of holdings with land attached tothem diminished along with it (Feigl 1964, pp. 59–65).

Table 2 illustrates the effects of the specific agrarian regime in Lower Austrianviticulture on the structure of land ownership in two villages of Ober- and Mitterretz-bach in the district of Ober-Hollabrunn at the turn of the nineteenth century.4 Bothvillages are part of a zone where viticulture had reached its highest intensity inCentral Europe in this period. In 1789, when the so-called “Josephinian cadastre,”a land register for tax purposes, was carried out, the share of vineyards in theoverall agricultural surface owned by the inhabitants of the two villages amountedto 58 percent. This figure had dropped to 42 percent in 1823, when the followingcadastre was drawn up. The mean size of landed property came up to two hectaresand was consequently far smaller than the average size of agricultural holdings(eight hectares) in the whole district of Ober-Holabrunn in 1869 (see Table 1).Half of all landowners in the two villages owned less than one hectare of land,whereas holdings with more than ten hectares were very rare. Their number evendeclined during the period between the two cadastres. The high percentage of smalland very small landholdings can be partly explained by the presence of Inwohnerand other unhoused landowners with kin ties to owners of houses. The lattercategory was composed of retired parents, unmarried siblings, and other relativesof housed members of the community. The large number of kin-related landowners(fifteen to twenty percent of all landowners) and of landowning heads of households



TABLE 3Number of Houses, Inhabitants, and Size of Viticultural Area in Ober- and

Mitterretzbach, 1790–1869

Circa Houses Inhabitants Vineyards (ha)1790 123 840 3161823 149 854 2091833 160 9101846 1541850 164 8671869 164 861

Sources: Pfarrarchiv Mitteretzbach, Seelenbeschreibungen; Niederosterreichisches Landesarchiv, StandischeAbteilung: Jospehinische Fassionen, Franziszeische Katastermappen und Operate von Ober- und Mitter-retzbach.

in the total population of the two villages (33 percent of the total population) areclear indications of the practice of partible inheritance. The transfer of land fromone generation to the other did not happen at one point in time and to only oneheir, but gradually through partition among all heirs. Sons and daughters got parcelsof land at the time of their marriage, which in turn was not bound to the conditionof the inheritance of a full holding; but there are also cases of land transfer tounmarried children. On the other hand, retiring parents usually kept some land fortheir own use when they handed over the house to the heir (Landsteiner andLangthaler 1997, pp. 202–203; this mode of transfer of land ownership by inheritanceis very similar to the one found by Sabean 1990, pp. 247–258, in the village ofNeckarhausen in Wurttemberg.).

Another trend in the social composition of landownership in Ober- and Mitterretz-bach between the two cadastral surveys is the decreasing number of Inwohneramong the landholders, which is correlated with the rise in the number of housesfrom 123 to 149 (see Table 3). This illustrates on the local level the general trendof a growing number of houses in the countryside affecting the whole province ofLower Austria at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century.

Between 1771 and 1803, the number of houses increased by thirteen percent inthe “Weinviertel.” In the neighboring “Waldviertel,” the increase amounted tofourteen percent and was concentrated primarily in the western part of this region,which experienced an impressive expansion of rural textile industry in this period(Berkner 1973, pp. 179, 185). There is no doubt about the fact that this wave ofhouse-building was carried out by Inwohner eager to improve their material andsocial status. The establishment of new houses was facilitated by a change in thetax-system in the Austrian provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy in the middle ofthe eighteenth century, which shifted the tax burden from the house, up to thispoint the most important object of taxation in the countryside, to the size andquality of the land owned by the taxpayers. It was sped up by the reform of militaryrecruitment, which concentrated on the sons of Inwohner considered to be mostdispensable in the agrarian labor force. Berkner stresses the importance of theabolition of labor services and the subsequent dissolution of demesnes by thelandlords at the end of the eighteenth century for the rising number of houses and



the foundation of new villages in the western part of the “Waldviertel” (Berkner1973, pp. 177–178). This may hold true for some parts of Lower Austria, but certainlynot for those with intensive commercial viticulture, because substantial demesnesdid not exist in the latter and labor services were rarely used by the landlords towork their vineyards. On the other hand, most of the wine-growing rural populationdid not own the implements (ploughs and draught animals) necessary for the perfor-mance of labor services in cereal production. In the middle of the eighteenth centurythe part of the viticultural area cultivated by noble and ecclesiastical landlordsamounted to only 3.5 percent of the total wineland in the “Weinviertel” (Knittler1989, p. 118).

Table 2 also illustrates the system of land use among the peasant wine-growersbased on the combination of corn (rye) and wine production. Because of theimmensely fluctuating grape harvests in northern viticulture caused by climaticinfluences, the peasant producers tried to avoid complete dependence on the resultsof their wine-growing activities. The capability of counterbalancing the risk ofharvest failure in viticulture with corn production rose with the total amount ofland at the disposition of the producer. Among those landowners owning less thanthree hectares of land viticulture prevailed, whereas the amount of land dedicatedto corn production increased with the size of the holding. This association of cornand wine production and the negative correlation between the dependency of theproducers on viticulture and the size of the land at their disposition are two furtherparallels between peasant viticulture and proto-industry. Rural industrial producerssplit their labor between industrial and agricultural activities to counterbalance theeffects of changes in the demand and the price of their output, which they couldnot control. It is usually argued that their engagement in food production forsubsistence enabled the merchant capital within a putting-out system to pay themlower wages/prices, which did not have to cover the total reproduction costs of thelabor force as would have been the case with urban craftsmen. This led to thecomparative advantage of rural over urban industry in the early modern periodand guaranteed a differential profit to the merchant (Medick 1976, p. 299; Pfister1992b, p. 202). In the case of peasant viticulture, the association of cash- and food-crop production led to its comparative advantage over its urban competitors workingtheir vineyards with wage laborers in a period of declining terms of trade for wine(Landsteiner 1992, pp. 194–199). Dependency on distant markets and the possibilitythat the subsistence production of the wine-growers is exploited by wine merchantspaying lower prices to the peasant producers are also characteristics of this kindof agricultural system. On the other hand, research on proto-industrial regions hasshown that rural households disposing of little land usually devote a larger shareof their labor force to proto-industrial than to agricultural tasks compared to house-holds disposing of larger amounts of land.

In re-examining this question Ulrich Pfister recently stressed the fact that thisis only true for proto-industrial activities requiring a small amount of fixed capitalinvestment (Pfister 1992b, pp. 203–205). This last point leads us to a further peculiar-ity of peasant viticulture. Table 2 shows a very small share of grassland in the totalagricultural surface of the two villages. Data on the number of animals held bytheir inhabitants confirm that most of the households did not own any horses or



oxen that could be used for tillage. In 1823, only thirteen horses and twelve oxenwere counted in both villages, and the results of the cadastral survey for the whole“Weinviertel” show an average number of 0.55 draught animals per peasant holding.5

In the nineteenth century, Lower Austrian vineyards were still cultivated withoutthe use of ploughs. Indeed, the way they were planted did not allow them to beentered with ploughs drawn by animals. The soil was worked by hoe three to fourtimes a year, which in turn contributed very much to the high labor-intensity ofthis kind of viticulture. As far as grape production is concerned, a very small amountof fixed capital was necessary for the cultivation of vineyards in this way–a factthat considerably facilitated the founding of new households on the basis of smallsurfaces of land planted with vines. Differences in this respect become relevantonly on the level of processing the raw material, which required a considerableamount of fixed capital—wine presses and room (cellars and barrels) to fermentand store the wine.

Following Netting, these villages can be defined as “smallholder”societies, insofaras they are inhabited by “rural cultivators practising intensive, permanent, diversi-fied agriculture on relatively small farms in areas of dense population. The familyhousehold is the major corporate social unit for mobilising agricultural labor, manag-ing productive resources, and organizing consumption” and has “ownership or otherwell-defined tenure rights in land that are long-term and often heritable” (Netting1993, p. 2; Landsteiner and Langthaler 1997, p. 206).

DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THENINETEENTH CENTURY

Before the analysis of the family and household structures of the peasant wine-growers of Ober- and Mitterretzbach, a short outline of the demographic develop-ment of the two villages will be given as a background. The number of inhabitantsin the period under observation (1790–1869) fluctuated between 840 and 910 persons(Table 3). By comparing the difference between births and deaths documented inthe parish registers to the available population figures, one concludes with a netemigration of 380 individuals (4.75 per year on average) over the whole period.This emigration is paralleled by a fifty percent decline of the viticultural area onthe territories of the two villages, which in turn led to even greater decline in theproductivity of the cultivated land. In the cadastral survey of 1820s the net productof a unit of land planted with vines was estimated six times higher than a correspond-ing unit of arable land. Even if one must not trust these estimations blindly, thedifference between vineyards and arable is highly significant. A further consequenceof the decrease in the area planted with vines was the reduction of the overallcultivated area, since parts of the land devoted to viticulture could not be usedotherwise due to the poor quality of the soil and remained uncultivated once thevines had disappeared from it. The total area cultivated by the inhabitants of thetwo villages declined along with the amount of land dedicated to viticulture from464 hectares in 1789 to 428 hectares in 1823. All this implies a process of impover-ishment of the inhabitants of these villages, which could not be stopped by theirdesperate attempts to supplant the vines with other crops and other forms of



TABLE 4Mean Age at First Marriage in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1790–1869.

Range (years) Men Women1790–1799 30.0 26.81800–1809 27.1 26.51810–1819 27.3 26.91820–1829 28.3 28.31830–1839 29.6 29.61840–1849 31.3 28.71850–1859 30.8 29.01860–1869 30.1 28.9

Source: Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach, Parish registers (marriages).

intensive land use, such as, for example, fruit and vegetable production or eventobacco cultivation, the latter tested on small scale since the 1840.

Can we attribute the fact that the population of the two villages was regularlystruck by mortality crisis in the first half of the nineteenth century in the samemanner as it has been in the centuries before to this process of declining agrarianproductivity and impoverishment? Over the whole period under observation, thecrude death rate remained stable at 25 to 30 per thousand, infant mortality neverdeclined under 200 per thousand and often reached 300 per thousand, and thecrude birth rate remained around 30 to 35 per thousand. Other demographic param-eters point to quite important processes of change. The number of illegitimatebirths rose constantly over this period. Whereas illegitimacy was an extremely rarephenomenon until the end of the eighteenth century, the village priest baptizedthree or four illegitimate children every year in the second third of the nineteenthcentury, and the share of illegitimate births rose from one percent of all births inthe 1790s to ten percent in the 1860s. The decline of the aggregate output ofwine following the reduction of the area devoted to wine-production also affectedmarriage habits. Over the whole period under observation the mean age at firstmarriage in the two villages rose considerably for both sexes, but especially forwomen, who married on average two years later in the middle of the nineteenthcentury than they had at the beginning of that century (see Table 4). With 29 to30 years for both sexes, the age at first marriage attained values on the upper limitof its range within the European context in the middle of the nineteenth century(Gaskin 1978).

All these trends point to the fact that the inhabitants of the two villages reactedto the crises of viticulture in two ways: emigration and a slowing down of theformation of new families and households.

HOUSEFUL, HOUSEHOLD, AND FAMILY FORMS

What did the household and family forms in which this smallholder populationlived look like? Are there any repercussions of the crisis discernible? I shall try toanswer these questions through the analysis of two census lists for the villages underconsideration. The first one, dating from 1770, was prepared in the context of



government registration of the population for military purposes in the Habsburglands (Gurtler 1909). It contains clear delimitations of households, family andhousehold roles are systematically ascribed to all members, and the age of everyperson is indicated. Unfortunately it documents only one of the two villages (Ober-retzbach). The other listing, dating from 1833 and documenting the households inboth villages, is a Seelenbeschreibung (“soul-description”) drawn up by the villagepriest to control the practice of religious confession among the members of hisparish. The arrangement of the households is very similar to the first listing, but itcontains information on the age of the household members only for the children.6

Using parish registers, I was able to reconstruct the age of 75.1 percent of the totalpopulation. The missing age-values are not equally distributed over all populationgroups, which reduces the size of sample for those steps of analysis where age is arelevant variable, and contains the danger of distorting the results for certain sub-groups.7 Since all subhouseholds (i.e., all households delimited in the census listswhose heads are not owners of the house they are inhabiting) are classified asInwohner in the two listings, it was of crucial importance for the analysis of house-hold composition and family forms to separate kin from non-kin groups. Usingagain the parish registers as a source of information I was able to determine thestatus of all subhouseholds in this respect.

I also introduced a variable of social stratification ascribing to every independenthousehold (owners of houses and Inwohner with no kin tie to the owner of thehouse) the amount of land its head owned according to the cadastral survey of1823. Considering the higher productivity of vineyards in comparison to arable andgrassland, I multiplied the surface of the vineyards by the factor four and dividedthe landholders into four groups according to the total amount of land owned bythem after this recalculation. Owners of less than two hectares are considered asbelonging to the “lower class,” those owning two to five hectares to the “lowermiddle class,” those owning more than five and up to ten hectares to the “uppermiddle class,” and those with more than ten hectares to the “upper class” of thevillage society. Since there are only thirteen households listed in 1833 that combineda craft occupation with agriculture I do not treat these separately. I excluded fromthe analysis four millers who only temporarily lived in Mitterretzbach in this periodwithout establishing any kinship ties to the other inhabitants, and the householdof the parish priest.

After these manipulations the total sample consists of 208 households with 869members. Classifying them according to the position of the household heads, 150are owners of houses and 29 Inwohner without any kinship ties to the owner ofthe house (only these will be named Inwohner in the following sections), whereaseighteen households are composed of retired parents, and eleven households areformed by persons with other kin relationships to the owner of the house they areinhabiting (see Table 5). The distribution of owners of houses according to the sizeof their landholdings (Table 6) results in a nearly equal partition over the fourstratification groups, whereas most of the Inwohner belong to the lower class.

The sex ratio of the population amounting to 130 females to 100 males is heavilydistorted. This points to the fact that emigrants from the two villages were primarilymales. Looking at the results of the population census of 1869 one finds two subdis-



TABLE 5Types of Households, Inhabitants, and Mean Household Size (MHS) in Ober- and

Mitterretzbach, 1833.

Type of Household Inhabitants

n % n % MHSOwners of houses 150 72.1 707 81.3 4.7Inwohner 29 13.9 105 12.1 3.6Retired parents 18 8.7 37 4.3 2.1Other kin 11 5.3 20 2.3 1.8All households 208 100 869 100 4.2

Source: Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach, Population list (Seelenbeschreibung) 1833.

tricts in Lower Austria north of the Danube with sex ratios higher then 110 femalesto 100 males: the subdistrict of Retz in the “Weinviertel” which contains the twovillages analyzed here and the subdistrict of Waidhofen/Thaya in the “Waldviertel.”8

The decline of rural textile industry in the western part of the “Waldviertel” andthe crisis of viticulture in the “Weinviertel” seem to have produced the same effectsas far as emigration is concerned.

Differences in the behavior of men and women are also visible when the maritalstatus of the population is taken into account. Looking at the relevant age groups,50 percent of all men, but 78 percent of all women are not married in the age-group 25 to 29 years, and whereas all men in the sample with 45 to 49 years of ageare married, eleven percent of all women in this group are not.9 This difference inmarital behavior turns up as well in the age distribution of sons and daughters.There one finds nine of 172 individuals with the family role “son” (the total is 183,age for eleven of them is missing) older than 30 years but none older than 40 years,whereas twenty out of 216 “daughters” (total: 244, age missing for 28 cases) areolder than 30 years and six are older than 40 years. That permanent celibacy wasnearly exclusively a female affair is confirmed by the fact that 84 percent of allcelibate individuals deceased older than 50 years in the two villages between 1790and 1889 were women (90 out of 107). Another point of interest concerning marriagebehavior is the age difference between spouses. Here the rising age of marriage of

TABLE 6Stratification of Households (Owners of Houses and Inwohner) according to Landownership

in Ober- Und Mitterretzbach, 1823.

Owners ofAll Households Houses Inwohner

n % n % n %Upper class 32 17.9 32 21.3 0 0.0Upper middle class 44 24.6 44 29.3 0 0.0Lower middle class 44 24.6 40 26.7 4 13.8Lower class 56 31.3 34 22.7 22 75.9No entry 3 1.6 0 0.0 3 10.3

Sources: See Table 2.



women shows its effects, in so far as 48 percent of all wives were older than theirhusbands (90 valid cases, 26 missing). Since widows remarried less frequently thanmen—the sample contains sixteen widowers and 33 widows heading household—thisdifference cannot be attributed solely to remarriage. Dividing the husbands intotwo groups along the age of 40 one finds that 54 percent of all married men youngerthan 40 years had older spouses, whereas the corresponding portion for those aged40 and older amounts to 47 percent. By contrast only 26 percent of all husbandsin the village of Oberretzbach had older wives in 1770. Taking into account thesex ratio, it seems as if the common method of birth limitation was delaying themarriage age of women, a practice getting even more common in the first half ofthe nineteenth century, especially among the upper class of the village society: 56percent of the upper-class husbands had older wives, 46 percent of all husbandsbelonging to the upper middle class, but only 42 percent of those belonging to thelower middle class. (Due to missing age values the number of cases for the lowerclass is too small to allow any significant results.) The logic within these differencesmight be that land partitions and the formation of new households with smallamounts of land became generally more difficult as the viticultural area declined,and that in this situation members of upper class reacted most consequently dueto the risk of a decline in social status.

The classification scheme, designed by Peter Laslett and most common amongsocial historians concerned with the analysis of household and family forms, isbased on the distinction between three concepts: the “family,” including all coresi-dent members of a domestic group linked together by kinship and marriage ties;the “household” including the “family” and other coresident persons, e.g., servants,with shared activities of production and reproduction; and the notion of the “house-ful,” uniting several households under the same roof (Laslett 1972; Hammel andLaslett 1974). This classification and its underlying premises have been severelycriticized from the time they were proposed. For Lutz Berkner the most importantshortcomings are the neglect of kinship ties between the narrowly defined residentialgroups, the incapacity of taking the development cycle of the household into consid-eration, and the ignorance of different marriage and inheritance systems (Berkner1972, 1975; see also Sabean 1990, pp. 99–100). In what follows I shall first describethe composition of houses—“housefuls” in Laslett’s terms—according to differenttypes of households united under one roof, and then turn to the analysis of thesehousehold types; differences among the housefuls and households according to thestratification variables and the development cycle of the households/housefuls seenthrough the age of their heads are taken into account; and finally the classificationscheme of Laslett and its alternative designed by Berkner (Berkner 1972, 1976)are applied to the households in the two villages.

If we accept the delimitation of households given in the census list of 1833 in afirst step of analysis, 94 out of a total of 150 housefuls consist only of the householdof the owner of the house, whereas 56 contain one or more additional households.The latter category is composed of 27 housefuls with one Inwohner household,sixteen houses with an household formed by the retired parents of the owner,eleven houses with an additional household headed by a person with other kinshiprelations to the family of the owner, and two houses with retired parents and



TABLE 7Stratification and Composition of “Houseful” in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1833.

Percentage

Upper LowerUpper Middle Middle LowerClass Class Class Class All N

No subhousehold 53 68 57 71 63 94With Inwohner 16 14 23 20 18 27With retired

parents 19 9 13 3 11 16With other kin 12 9 3 6 7 11With Inwohner

and retired parents 0 0 5 0 1 2n 32 44 40 34 150

Sources: Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach, Population list 1833 and sources cited in Table 6.

Inwohner. Among the heads of these 150 housefuls (132 men and seventeen women),79 percent are married, sixteen percent are widowed, and four percent are single.The probability that a houseful contained retired parents or other kin-related house-holds rose with the size of the landholding, although not in a completely linearrelationship, whereas Inwohner were more often housed in lower-middle-class andlower-class housefuls (see Table 7). Table 8 points to a negative correlation betweenthe presence of servants in the household of the owner of the house and the presenceof a Inwohner-household within the houseful.

These are important indications about the mode of recruiting non-familial laboramong these wine-growing peasants. Due to the peculiarities of the productioncycle (points of high labor intensity unevenly distributed over the seasons), thesupplementary labor force in viticulture was generally composed of day laborersrecruited among the Inwohner and lower-class sections of the village population.This explains the small number of life-cycle servants in the villages with intensiveviticulture. In the present case 52 out of 208 households employed sixteen maleand 48 female servants (7.4 percent of the total population). Since all of themexcept two female servants were located within the households of house-owners,the average number of servants in this category amounted to 0.5, a much lower

TABLE 8Percentage of “Housefuls” with Lodgers or Servants in Ober- and Mitterretzbach

According to Stratification Groups, 1833.

Percentage

Upper LowerUpper Middle Middle LowerClass Class Class Class All N

With Inwohner 16 14 28 20 29 21With servants 59 32 23 24 33 50

Sources: See Table 7.



TABLE 9Age Group of Head and Composition of “Houseful” in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1833.

Age Groups (Percentage)

20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 601 All NNo subhousehold 40 18 50 88 89 60 75With Inwohner 30 27 27 8 5 18 23With retired parents 30 23 17 0 0 12 15With other kin 0 23 7 4 7 9 11With Inwohner and retired parents 0 9 0 0 0 2 2N 10 22 41 25 28 126

Sources: Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach, Parish registers, population list 1833.

number than the one given for the whole district of Ober-Hollabrunn in Table 1.Servants, and especially male servants, are most frequent among those peasantsowning larger arable surfaces. In the 1770 census list for Oberretzbach there is aperfect accordance between the presence of male servants, usually named Pferde-knechte (“horse-servants”), and the presence of draught animals indicated in thelist. In 1833 the average size of the agricultural area of those holdings employingfemale servants amounted to 4.3 hectares, but to 6.6 hectares where a male servantwas employed, whereas the average size of land for all households was 2.0 hectares.This points to the fact that those peasant families employing non-familial laborrelied on servants for their food-crop production and on wage labor for cash-cropproduction, but they frequently did not integrate their day laborers as Inwohnerinto their housefuls. Since a considerable number of Inwohner was able to build ahouse at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the latter statementmay only hold true for this peculiar period and things might have been differentbefore. On the other hand, the higher frequency of households composed of retiredparents and other kin in the housefuls of the upper class can also contribute toexplaining this pattern, in so far as there was simply no place for Inwohner in theircrowded houses. These peculiar features of labor organization can as well help toexplain the elevated number of female heads of households in general (nineteenpercent) and especially of widows among the heads of housefuls with substantiallandholdings, since single or widowed women could work their land by hiring daylaborers. The pressure on the widows to remarry as fast as possible was thus reducedand the possibility to remain single was facilitated.

The next step of analysis is to consider the relevance of the development cycleof the household by comparing the age of the heads and the composition of theirhousefuls (see Table 9). The fact that households of retired parents are only presentin housefuls with heads under 50 years of age is of course a consequence of thedemographic process. The frequency of households containing individuals with kinrelations to the head of the houseful decreases as well with the age of the latter,since the majority of these households were constituted by single relatives of theowners of the house who sometimes married in their later years, whereas thedecrease in the frequency of Inwohner along with the age of the head of the housefulmust have had different causes. The most probable explanation brings us back to



the peculiarities of the system of inheritance among these wine-growing peasants.Since land was not passed on to the next generation at one single point in time,but gradually (before or at the marriage of the children; when parents and otherrelatives died, etc.), the willingness to house Inwohner as a source of additionallabor might have been greatest in the middle years of the development cycle ofthe houseowner’s household, when children were still too young to contributesignificantly to the production process and the land at the disposal of the householdwas largest. In this respect the drastic reduction of the frequency of Inwohner inhousefuls whose heads are older than 50 years might be due to the fact that in thisstage of their live the first children left the house, taking some of the land withthem. When the head of the houseful reached the age of 60, it became very rarethat he housed an additional household under his roof.

The gradual devolution of landownership from one generation to the other raisesthe question of a possible demographic influence on the stratification of the villagesociety in the manner Chayanov imagined it in his theory of peasant economy(Chayanov 1966). The facts that the mean age of the heads of housefuls belongingto the upper class is the highest among all classes10 and that their age distributiondiffers from the other classes in so far as it is slightly displaced to the higher agegroups could support this hypothesis. For several reasons the interpretation restson a very insecure basis. A small number of cases, the ten-year-lag between theinformation on the size of landed property, the age of the head and the compositionof the housefuls, as well as differences in the age at marriage and in the mortalitybetween the classes, can all intervene here.

Up to this point I have treated all domestic groups in the two villages as separatehouseholds following the delimitations given in the census lists. Critics of the classi-fication proposed by Laslett have frequently concentrated their counter-argumentson this treatment of the sources. Berkner once wrote: “The division of householdsin a nominative list depends on the enumerator who wrote them down. We usuallydo not know what rules he followed, who was left out, and what criteria were usedto make those all-important divisions into ‘blocks’” (Berkner 1975, p. 725). In thepresent case there are two indications of the rules followed in the preparation ofthe lists. The first one is given in a government ordinance dating from 1777 thatdefined what coresident domestic units should be considered as a “family” in theAustrian censuses of the late eighteenth century. According to this ordinance, allthose persons, married or not married, who ate and lived together under the author-ity of the head of a household had to be registered as a family unit. This definitionextends the concept of “family” beyond the narrow boundaries of the coresidentkin-group, including servants and other individuals sharing the same table, butexcludes relatives and other persons living in the same house who cooked forthemselves (printed in Gurtler 1909, pp. 67–70; Hajnal 1983, p. 100, gives an Englishtranslation of the central passage.).

A further indication of the rules according to which the author of the census listof 1833 delimited the households can be deduced from the list itself by consideringcases of kinship groups with an analogous structure which he divided into householdsin different ways. Comparing two cases of households with a laterally extendedfamily structure, it turns out that in one case the enumerator integrated the brother



TABLE 10Composition of Households in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1833, according to

the Hammel/Laslett-Classification.

Categories Cases %1. (Solitaries) 23 11.1

1a 121b 11

2. (No family) 5 2.42a 42b 1

3. (Simple family households) 167 80.33a 253b 1163c 93d 17

4. (Extended family households) 7 3.44a 04b 64c 1

5. (Multiple family households) 0 0.06. (Not classifiable households) 6 2.9Total 208 100.0

Source: Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach: Population list 1833.

and the sister of the widowed head into the same household, whereas in the othercase he separated the younger brother of the head into a household of his own.Two examples of upwardly extended families are equally revealing. In one casethe son of a widowed mother had already assumed headship but lived togetherwith his mother in the same household, whereas in the other case the widowedmother of a recently married son is excluded from his household and formed ahousehold of her own. Although the two former examples are the only ones in thelist, where the enumerator has included unmarried siblings or retired parents asthe household of the head of the houseful, does this mean that he did it by accident?Considering that even unmarried sisters of heads of housefuls frequently ownedsome land and conducted a small agricultural enterprise, it is plausible that thesedifferent ways of delimiting households indicate if relatives of the head of thehouseful formed separate units of production and consumption, or lived within hishousehold.

Following strictly the delimitation given in the list and applying Laslett’s classifi-cation, the distribution of family forms shown in Table 10 shows that 80 percentof all family units reveal nuclear family forms, eleven percent contain unmarriedor widowed individuals living alone, five cases consist of siblings with or withoutrelatives other than their parents, and only seven cases show characteristics ofextended families. Six of them are extended downwards in the sense that an unmar-ried woman lives together with one or more illegitimate children in the householdof her parents. All of these women except one belonged to the lower middle classor the lower class of the stratification scheme applied here, but there are also severalcases of women related to the head of the houseful with illegitimate children forming



TABLE 11Composition of Households in Ober- and Mitterretzbach, 1833, according to

Berkner’s Classification.

Categories Cases %Nuclear family 135 75.4Stem family forms 31 12.3

Retired parents with or without children 5Widowed parent and children 6Widowed father 1Widowed mother 6Unmarried siblings 2Married child 2

Other extended forms 12 6.7Co-resident married siblings 0Co-resident unmarried siblings 1Other relatives 11

No family forms 10 5.6Single individuals 10Unrelated couples 0Total 179 100.0

Source: See Table 10.

households of their own (cases “not classified” in Table 10). If we integrate thoseeleven single individuals forming a subhousehold of their own in the list (six retiredparents and seven relatives of the head of the houseful) into the household of theowner of the house the over-all picture changes only slightly. The share of house-holds composed of single individuals decreases and the percentage of extendedfamilies increases, but the distribution remains very much centered on nuclearfamily forms.

Drawing on the example of peasant household composition on the manor ofHeidenreichstein in the Lower Austrian “Waldviertel,” Berkner, in his classicalessay on the Austrian “stem family,” proposed a method to identify changingforms of extended families along the development cycle of the peasant household.Counting all households with coresident parents or unmarried siblings of the headof a houseful, he maintained that 25 percent out of a total of 618 peasant householdson this manor show characteristics of “stem family” forms (Berkner 1972, p. 407).If we apply his classification to the households of the two villages a share of twelvepercent of “stem family” forms results. By assuming that six cases of laterallyextended families—where the relationship of the relative to the head of the housefulis not unequivocally determined—also represent “stem family” forms, this percent-age increases to 15.1 (Table 11).

With 75 percent of nuclear families without any relatives and twelve to sixteenpercent of “stem family” forms, the two villages would occupy an intermediateposition between peasant societies characterized by the formation of “stem families”in the course of their development cycle (usually associated with impartible inheri-tance) and peasant societies where nuclear family forms prevailed (usually associ-ated with partible inheritance) (Berkner 1976). Austrian historians concerned with



the history of the family did not fully accept this interpretation since the term “stemfamily” coined by Le Play (“famille souche”) in their understanding applies onlyto households uniting several generations under the authority of the father of amarried offspring. They argue that the essential difference between the commonphenomenon among Austrian peasants that the retired parents remained in thehouse after the transfer the holding to the heir, which was usually associated withthe marriage of the heir and the stipulation of a contract guaranteeing certainconsumption rights to the elders, and the “stem family” as defined by Le Play,although showing the same composition of the houseful, is contained in the author-ity- and property-relations between the generations. Whereas in the Austrian caseof upward extended peasant families the ownership of the holding is transferredto the heir who by this act assumes full responsibility in all economic and legalaffairs, the “stem family” imagined by Le Play is characterized by the fact that thefather of the married offspring remains in possession of the authority within thefamily (Sieder and Mitterauer 1983, pp. 317–318; Mitterauer 1992, pp. 93–94).

In Lower Austria the phenomenon of retired parents inhabiting the same housetogether with the heir of the holding was most common where legally impartiblepeasant holdings engaged primarily in corn production and animal husbandry pre-vailed, and less frequent in regions with intensive viticulture since the partibleinheritance practice resulted in a high frequency of neo-local household formation.Substantial land ownership of retired parents who had passed on the house to oneof their sons or daughters or, of siblings of the head of the houseful, was notuncommon here. In a survey of the rural inheritance and retirement practices inLower Austria at the beginning of the twentieth century, the districts with intensivecommercial viticulture stand out in that that landownership and separate householdsof retired parents were common practice (Schmidt 1920, pp. 214–215; Landsteinerand Langthaler 1997, p. 201). In connection with the gradual devolution of landown-ership from one generation to the next, these are good reasons to consider house-holds formed by retired parents, especially when they live together with unmarriedchildren and kin-related individuals as separate production and consumption units.The ten percent portion of housefuls with retired parents in the sample results fromthe fact that the house was sometimes transferred to the heir when the parentswere still alive, but the rising age at marriage indicates that the peasant familiestried to avoid such a situation. I am not able to account for the possibility of arising life expectancy in this respect. The higher frequency of housefuls with retiredparents among the upper class can be explained by the fact that holdings disposingof a relatively large amount of arable land were impartible in respect to their arableland and supported larger housefuls easier than those based primarily on wine-growing. On the other hand families of the upper class showed tendencies of neo-locality as well, since they often owned several houses in the villages which thecould use alternatively to house Inwohner or as retirement seats for the elders.Even by adopting Berkner’s approach it is not plausible to speak of “stem families”in these cases.

To summarize the effects of the crisis of viticulture on the demographic structuresand household composition, a comparison of some of the above-mentioned features



TABLE 12Oberretzbach, 1770: 1833 (Index of Change of Major Variables, 1770 5 100).

Major Variables 1770 1833Population 100 117Owners of houses 100 127Inwohner 100 89Households of retired parents 100 180Number of farm servants 100 138Viticultural area 100 68Illegitimacy 100 259Sex ratio (Females to 100 Males) 100 111

Mean age at first marriage 1785–1794 1830–1839

Men 100 100Women 100 110

Sources: Stadtarchiv Retz, Konskriptionsliste Oberretzbach 1770; Pfarrarchiv Mitterretzbach, Parish registers, pop-ulation list 1833.

with respect to the village of Oberretzbach, documented by both census lists, isvery instructive (see Table 12).

Within the 60-year period between the two censuses the viticultural area on thevillage territory declined by 32 percent. Whereas the total population rose byseventeen percent, the number of Inwohner declined alongside with the risingnumber of houses, but the numbers of servants and especially of housefuls withretired parents increased significantly. With these changes in the household/housefulcomposition, the percentage of illegitimate births, the sex ratio, and the mean ageat first marriage for women increased as well. All this means that the village societywas loosing its peculiar features which I have associated in this article with theeffects of intensive viticulture on demographic behavior and household compositionof the peasant producers. It was involved in a process of “re-agrarianisation”11

leading to impoverishment and emigration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this article was presented at the ESTER-Seminar in April 1993 at theCambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The author wishes toexpress his thanks to all participants of this seminar for their critical comments and to theeditors of this journal for giving him the chance to publish this modified version.

NOTES

1. These parts of the empire coincided with the territory of present-day Austria excludingthe province of “Burgenland” in the east, but including the German speaking part of thenorthern Italian province of Bolzano, most of present-day Slovenia, and parts of Istria.

2. In 1774, 56 percent of the 4,195 weaving looms owned by rural guild members inLower Austria (Vienna excluded) were concentrated in the western part of the provincenorth of the Danube (“Waldviertel”); only one percent was located in the wine-growingpart east to it (“Weinviertel”). See Goehlert 1872, p. 148.



3. The rather imprecise term “lodger” is used here to translate the Austrian termInwohner that designated a subgroup of the village population without ownership of houses.The members of this group usually paid their rent to the owner of the house they inhabitedthrough fixed labor services.

4. The two villages are treated as a single settlement in virtue of their spatial proximityand the close relationship of their inhabitants in all aspects of everyday life.

5. Niederosterreichisches Landesarchive, Regierungsabteilung, Summaries of the cadas-tral survey of 1823 (Handschrifteninventar Nr. 85/9), contain data on the number of holdings;Liechtenstern 1820, pp. 254–258, contains data on draught animals.

6. The census-list of 1770 for Oberretzbach is deposited in the city archives of the smalltown of Retz in the immediate neighborhood of the village; the “soul-description” (a kindof liber status animarum) of 1833 is in the parish archive of Mitterretzbach.

7. The information about the age of the male population, children, and owners of housesis more complete than that about the age of females, old people, and Inwohner.

8. See Schimmer 1871, pp. 157–158. The author attributes the disturbed sex ratio in thesubdistrict of Retz to the fact that men were engaged in railroad construction, when thecensus was taken. Since the sex ratio in the two villages in 1833 is even more unbalanced,this cannot have been the main cause.

9. Age values are missing for 18.3 percent of all males and 29.9 percent of all females.10. The mean age of heads of housefuls is for the upper class 51.1 years, for upper middle

class 47.2 years, for the lower middle class 48.0 years, and for the lower class 45.4 years.11. Hoffmann 1972 used the term “agrarianisation” to denote the consequences of early

industrialization for Austrian peasants engaged in domestic craft production.

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Household, family, and economy among wine-growing peasants

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