Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 242

This is not a modest book, in any sense of the word. William Hagen has not only undertaken a momentous task in his ambition to convey the experiences of ‘ordinary Prussians’ over three and a half centuries and produced a monumental tome to match; he equally desires to banish forever perceptions of an interminably oppressive Junker regime east of the Elbe, and a perpetually cowed and submissive rural population. Such a conclusion speaks as much to twentieth-century history as that of the ancien régime. There is no direct line between the social relations of the absolutist or indeed feudal state and a receptiveness to Nazi ideology. Neither, according to Hagen, should we see ordinary folk of the eighteenth century as much different from ourselves. They are ‘more brother than Other’ in his terms. In these endeavours Hagen to some degree follows a trail laid out by Peter Blicke in his attempt to rehabilitate, still controversially, the consultative and at times querulous political traditions of southern and western German village life.

The means to do this is a ‘micro-history’ of the lordship of Stavenow in the Prigntz district of Brandenburg, only a few miles north-east of the Elbe. This lordship comprised several villages (in part subject to other lordships, though they appear in the story relatively seldom) and manors that passed through several families over these centuries. The most prominent owners, and those given by far the most attention in the record, were the von Kleists of both literary and military fame. Hagen follows the micro-historical tradition that has inspired numerous local studies in the past three decades, seeking large-scale structural change as manifested in everyday experience. Indeed, his approach perhaps owes more to the ‘history of everyday life’ (Alltagsgeschichte) as a genre, rather than the more demographically based studies associated with historians of early modern German villages such as David Sabean, Jürgen Schlumbohm and Hans Medick. Hagen does not eschew quantitative approaches, but neither does he make rigorous use of them. Indeed, he does not appear to have actually employed the parish registers that apparently survive, but a summary drawn up by a twentieth-century local pastor. Aside from the implications for the reliability of the demographic sections, this means that we are repeatedly told that people share the same surname, but not whether they are actually related.

The study proceeds, in part chronologically, through the developing estate economy, the conditions of life of the tenant farmers, the estate stewards, officials and workers, labourers and inmates, the regulation of village life and morals, and the dissolution of the ancien régime. Before the latter part of the seventeenth century, sources largely consist of estate surveys and lordly correspondence, but thereafter increasingly consist of court records, petitions, and inventories of various kinds. The lordship of Stavenow was as much of the east Elbian lands, although personal serfdom did not exist in this part of Brandenburg. ‘Subject’ status pertained to the (fairly onerous) terms of farm tenancies. More significant than demesne farming were fairly rigidly defined ‘fullholdings’ of up to 34 hectares, surrounded by smallholdings and a limited cottage economy. The three-field system of grain cultivation predominated until the nineteenth century, although forms of convertible husbandry made inroads on the demesne lands from the 1740s onward. The abolition of subject status and tenurial servitude, along with enclosure of the tenant farms, arrived in the 1810s.

Hagen’s strategy is to use the Stavenow records to the full, and he presents us with an exhaustive account of all recorded aspects of life. He provides an archive unlike any other on the villagers of Brandenburg, especially in the English language. However, while many impressions are vivid, others are simply superfluous. The approach of letting the sources speak for themselves seems least productive in discussing conditions of material life, where Hagen for the most part simply lists the complete contents of numerous inventories. This might provide useful raw material for a study, but for most readers, one suspects, it will not be especially helpful.

This is despite the fact that Hagen repeatedly asserts the importance of comparison, claiming relatively bountiful conditions for Stavenow that compare favourably with other parts of Germany and western Europe. Yet comparative data are barely ever brought to bear, even from other areas of Brandenburg, or indeed lordships that shared the same villages, never mind other parts of Europe. Neither do they appear to any great degree in the footnotes. Hagen may well be right, and some of the material wealth of the farmers and widows, or wages of the labourers, are indeed impressive. But he does not provide the means to demonstrate this.

Among the welter of information, agricultural historians will have much to glean. We can see here a gradual improvement of yields, especially of livestock numbers and quality, and gradual innovation during the eighteenth century. Certainly the commercialized manorialism of Brandenburg displays little of the inertia and under-investment long-argued for the manorial estates of Poland. Antagonism between the lordship and its subject farmers over corvée labour and rents gave rise to strikes, long drawn-out legal cases where the farmers at times won the backing of the ‘enlightened’ state, and all the usual arts of resistance in badly-performed and tardy labours. Hagen’s sections on these are (literally?) striking, and evidence, he claims, of the real ability of Brandenburger farmers to meliorate their working conditions and dues. By the Napoleonic period both lordship and tenants unsentimentally sought to reap the most profit from the onrushing transition to free land markets and a liberalized world. There was little nostalgia for the old order on display. These trends, probably reflected in much of central Europe, hardly justify Hagen’s adoption of the term ‘agricultural revolution’; in this case a rise of seed to yield ratios from about 1:3–4 to 1:4–5.

This book will be important for a long time to come. There is no study like it in English, and it can rightly claim to make some original contributions to German history. The evidence for women’s activities is particularly wide-ranging, although scattered throughout the book. One feels however that the volume may have been too long in gestation. The traditional divide of ‘east- Elbian’ and ‘western’ Germany is treated with suspicion nowadays, and peasant agency and vigorous, even violent, negotiation of terms with lordship are everywhere in the historiography. And as Hagen admits, the seigneurial regime often remained oppressive and violent although not arbitrary. The methodological strategy adopted indubitably strongly imprints the mind with much detail of the lives of ‘ordinary Prussians’, yet leaves the theoretical or macrohistorical generalizations (and generalizations they most certainly remain) feeling somewhat disconnected, while genuine comparison remains scarce. Nevertheless, the book is a significant challenge – in many senses of the word.