Late Medieval and Early Modern Modifications of Regular Open Field Systems in Bohemia

0467547 - EÚ 2017 RIV DE eng J - Článek v odborném periodiku
Dohnal, Martin
Late Medieval and Early Modern Modifications of Regular Open Field Systems in Bohemia.
Bohemia. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder. Roč. 56, č. 1 (2016), s. 35-61. ISSN 0523-8587
Grant CEP: GA ČR(CZ) GAP410/11/1287
Institucionální podpora: RVO:68378076
Klíčová slova: village settlements * villages * cultural landscape * 1400-1900
Kód oboru RIV: AC - Archeologie, antropologie, etnologie

The presented analyses provides extraordinary insight into the basic principles and arrangement of land division in Central Europe at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. It helps us to understand the impact of late medieval and early modern alterations of field systems, which considerably modified later arrangements. Two particularly impactful modifications were the late medieval construction of fish ponds, which turned meadows and adjacent fields into new water reservoirs, and the intensification of grain production on manors with the associated extension of demesne lands. Another crucial point in the development of the analysed field system is the devastating effect of the Thirty Years War as manifested in the desertion of both peasants’ and cottagers’ farmsteads. Land tenure was altered over the course of the conflict through the desertion of tillage of many plots and their subsequent reallocation to other farms. Analysed archival sources have allowed to document the desertion of many plots of arable land and to prove that before the war local deforestation reached an extent that has never been matched since. The magnitude of the changes in the land use ratio has never before been examined in the Czech Republic. To some extent, the chaotic restoration of farms, primarily during the 17th century, resulted in the land reform that unified and organized the land tenure of particular categories of farmsteads, namely peasants and cottagers. The reform modified in some cases the distribution of the given field system into particular furlongs. From a methodological perspective, the inadequacy of 18th- and 19th-century cadastral maps for studying European medieval field systems has been confirmed by the present analysis. This analysis is thus an important source of our current knowledge surrounding the types of modifications Central European cultural landscapes might have undergone during the early modern period.
Trvalý link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0267075