Central European household and family systems, and the ‘Hajnal–Mitterauer’ line: The parish of Bujakow (18th–19th centuries)

Abstract

The article examines marriage behaviours, household patterns and household formation rules prevailing among the population of the Upper Silesian parish of Bujakow during the late 18th and the first part of the 19th century. Their character, it is argued, is crucial not only for the proper understanding of European family systems in the past, but also for accurate comparisons of family systems in Europe and Asia. The family pattern prevailing in this part of central Europe exhibited a 'hybrid' nature in many respects. The pattern's chief characteristics were a moderate age at marriage, the dominance of simple family households and the high incidence of lifecycle servants. Serial household lists revealed, however, the significant diversity in proportions of household types between censuses and between villages. Despite the strong indication of a stem family pattern in the parish, the analysis of headship transmission revealed the concurrent co-existence of various modes of household formation among families. Some of these formation processes did not vary much from neo-local principles or followed exactly this type of pattern. This study also made it possible to reconsider the supposed relationship between the seigneurial authority and family behaviours in the parish pointing out the considerable degree of autonomy of the peasant subjects.

Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe: A challenge to spatial patterns of the European family

“…In the author's previous research on several eigteenth-century communities from historical Poland, it has been shown that neither household structures, nor the patterns of leaving home and residential arrangements of the elderly in the localities under investigation fitted what scholars have usually considered typical of East-European societies (Szołtysek, 2004(Szołtysek, , 2007aSzoł-tysek & Rzemieniecki, 2005). Although these studies allowed for revealing a considerable amount of complexity in family behaviours, further insights into the actual distribution of family patterns across historical Poland required a database much more sizeable than the 5 It was P. Czap (Czap, 1983, pp.…”

A life-course approach to co-residence in the Netherlands, 1850–1940

“…3 Furthermore, scholars from central and eastern Europe are putting the 'European family system ' back on the research agenda by tracing the course of the 'Hajnal' line that supposedly divides western and eastern Europe. 4 In the Eurasian realm, the debate on the comparability and implications of stem-family forms continues. 5 Finally, there is a strong interest in the impact of late marriage and neolocal household formation on gender relations and the supposedly unique position of women in north-western European history.…”

Life-cycle service and family systems in the rural countryside: a lesson from historical East-Central Europe

“…6. Some recent exceptions are (Szołtysek, 2007a and (Kopczyński, 1998). Laszuk (1999, 124-125) noticed a decrease in the number of households with resident servants in those regions of Podlachia where kin coresidence was more widespread, but she did not elaborate on that issue.…”

“…The question of the incidence of servants in the eastern part of the continent suffered from both neglect and overgeneralization, which were also characteristic of studies into the Eastern European household structure and household formation rules (Szołtysek, 2007a;Sovič, 2008). First and foremost, in the older debates, the place of East-Central Europe was rather ambiguous: it was consistantly portrayed as being somewhere between the extremes of the western and eastern types (Laslett, 1983, 530;Plakans and Wetherell, 2001).…”