Rural Autonomy and Popular Politics in Imperial Villages

Abstract

Late medieval sources record over a hundred imperial villages without a territorial overlord. Apart from representation in the diet, their constitutional status resembled that of imperial free cities. Only a handful survived the early modern pressures of state formation and territorialisation. This essay examines the political culture and external relations of five rural communities which retained immediate ties to the emperor until the end of the Ancien Regime. Gochsheim and Sennfeld near Schweinfurt, Sulzbach and Soden near Frankfurt am Main and Gersau in present-day Switzerland exercised self-government with minimal external interference. Political regimes were relatively inclusive and integration attempts by neighbouring powers—often their official ‘protectors’—met with sturdy resistance. Communal statutes and chronicles, visual representation and copious litigation reveal strong attachment to the Empire, even at Gersau, where direct contacts ceased in the fifteenth century. Occasionally fierce inner tensions were balanced by the villagers’ pride in their collective freedom. Key imperial characteristics such as representative institutions, the authority of custom and jurisdictional means of conflict resolution scaled right down to the smallest units. More generally, the often overlooked case of imperial villages highlights early modern alternatives to centralization, the multilateral negotiation of local autonomy and the resilience of rural republicanism in the Holy Roman Empire.