Peasant Stem Families in Early Modern Austria: Life Plans, Status Tactics, and the Grid of Inheritance

Abstract

And you know the story about a son whose wife disliked her father-in-law so much that she denied him a place at the table. Nor was he allowed to sleep in a separate room but had to make do with a place under the stairs. When winter came and the father asked the son for a cloak because he could no longer bear the cold, the son gave the father two yards of cloth to mend his torn old coat or cover himself otherwise. The son’s little son also asked for two yards of cloth and, when his father asked him why, he replied: he would keep them until the time when his father was weak and old and would give them to him as father had just done with grandfather. The father came to his senses, took his son’s words to heart and sent the boy to the old father with a fur coat and an invitation to return to the table. He also provided his father with a room of his own. (anecdote from a German evangelical sermon, 1586)The persons in this story make up a stem family at a particular point in its life course; that is, they form a domestic group composed of parents (in this case, a single surviving parent) living with one married child who has taken over the family property and has begun rearing offspring of his own. There are a number of variations on this story in the folklore of early modern Central Europe. Each story treats the discords which can arise in such families. For example, in a shorter and somewhat coarser version than that given above, the father was hungry and a pig’s trough replaces the two yards of cloth. Despite differences in language and emotional content, however, the moral is generally the same: parents deserve to share in what they have helped create, and their presence in the family serves to teach intergenerational cooperation and respect to the young. In the version quoted here this point is made especially well by having the child remind the father of his obligations. We are confronted here by a thoroughly socialized child whose invocation of the Golden Rule reestablishes order and harmony in the family’s affairs.