Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg · 1872
The substantive work in the file is a single-author Festschrift monograph on the medieval Hofsystem in the German Alpine lands, especially South Bavaria, Tirol, and Salzburg. Inama-Sternegg writes between legal history, economic history, and settlement geography. His thesis is that the Alpine Einzelhof is not an exception to the village but an economically rational form: scattered farmsteads with compact holdings answered mountain agriculture and created distinctive forms of property, cultivation, and community.
The methodological premise is that sources must be read with national-economic questions in view. The decisive materials are the Weisthümer, Dorfrechte, and Öffnungen, because they preserve rural practice rather than only abstract law.
Hier und nur hier fließt der reiche Born, aus welchem vielleicht allein die Kenntnis der wirthschaftlichen Zustände der mittelalterlichen Landwirtschaft unserer Vorfahren geschöpft werden kann; und je mehr ich mich in diese schönen Documente des Volksthums vertiefte, um so klarer wurde mir der weittragende Unterschied, welcher durch das thatsächlich Nebeneinander von Hof- und Dorfsystem für das ganze Wirthschafts-, ja Culturleben der Gebirgsbewohner erzeugt wurde.
English translation: Here, and only here, flows the rich spring from which perhaps alone knowledge of the economic conditions of the medieval agriculture of our forebears can be drawn; and the deeper I immersed myself in these fine documents of folk life, the clearer became to me the far-reaching difference which the actual coexistence of the farmstead and village systems produced for the whole economic—indeed cultural—life of the mountain inhabitants.
The first section defines the Hofsystem by contrast with the Dorfsystem. The village implies close habitation, intermixed strips, field community, and Flurzwang; the Hof implies the Einzelhof and an arrondierter Grundbesitz. Inama-Sternegg makes arrondierung the analytic hinge.
Darum schlieszt sich auch an den Begriff des Einzelhofes der arrondirte Grundbesitz so innig, dass der Gegensatz von Hof- und Dorfsystem geradezu auch als Gegensatz des arrondirten und des in Gemenge gelegenen Grundeigenthums der Gemeindegenossen gefasst werden kann.
English translation: Thus consolidated landholding is bound so intimately to the concept of the individual farmstead that the opposition between farmstead and village systems can be conceived directly as the opposition between consolidated landholding and the intermixed landholdings of the community members.
This definition explains why the system predominates in mountain regions. Broken cultivable land, absolute pasture, woodland, wetlands, and steep terrain make village-centered intermixture wasteful. The Hofsystem concentrates labor around the farmstead, allows flexible use of meadow, arable, and pasture, and fits Feldgraswirtschaft without being mechanically identical with it. Where fields are compact and enclosed, the regulatory regime of the village loses its object.
Dagegen sind Anordnungen über die Fruchtfolge, über die Brachäcker etc., kurz alles, was der Flurzwang der im Gemenge liegenden Felder betrifft, hier entweder nicht möglich oder nicht nothwendig und daher gänzlich gegenstandslos.
English translation: By contrast, arrangements concerning crop rotation, fallow fields, and so on—in short, everything that pertains to the compulsory tillage regime of intermixed fields—are here either not possible or not necessary, and therefore altogether without object.
The structure then moves historically. Section II rereads Tacitus as evidence compatible with early hofweise occupation, separate holdings, and a weakly developed economic community. Section III turns to the Volksrechte, especially Bavarian and Alemannic law, where the signs are indirect: Sondereigen in fields, meadows, woods, curtes, fences, and boundary rules. He argues from legal traces—zaun, curtis, texaga, area, territorium—to agrarian life.
Die Schilderungen des Tacitus stehen der Annahme eines ursprünglichen Hofsystems nicht nur nicht entgegen, sondern lassen sogar in ihrem ganzen Umfange eine Beziehung auf junge germanische Ansiedlungen zu, welche hofweise vor sich gegangen sind.
English translation: The descriptions of Tacitus not only do not stand in the way of assuming an original farmstead system, but throughout their entire scope permit reference to young Germanic settlements which proceeded farmstead by farmstead.
Section IV broadens the comparison to Westphalia, the Odenwald, Upper Austria, Bavaria, Switzerland, and other regions, establishing the recurring bundle: isolated homesteads, compact holdings, limited or absent field community, and weaker need for crop regulation. Section V is the evidentiary center: it reads the Alpine Weisthümer for terminology, borders, fences, servitudes, pasture rights, and relations between Dorfleute and Bergleute, Gemeindsleute and Aussenleute, Mairleute and Sonderfeldter.
Vor allem ist hier wichtig, dass wir ungemein häufig Höfe als Grenzen der Gemeindegründe besonders der Gemeinweiden oder der genossenschaftlichen Brach- und Stoppelweide, ja sogar als Gemeindegrenzen überhaupt in den Weisthümern angeführt finden.
English translation: Above all it is important that we very frequently find farmsteads cited in the Weistümer as boundaries of communal lands—particularly of common pastures or of the cooperative fallow and stubble pastures—indeed even as communal boundaries as such.
This is a characteristic evidentiary move: the Hof is reconstructed from where documents locate roads, gates, pasture limits, hedge obligations, and water or timber rights. Inama-Sternegg avoids equating separation with social atomism. The Einzelhof can be outside Feldgemeinschaft while still inside Gemeinde or Markgenossenschaft. Pure Hofsystem communities, mixed Dorf-Hof communities, and Herrenhöfe that become Hofmarken or new villages all belong to a developmental spectrum.
The work’s relevance lies in separating communal belonging from field intermixture. It contests a simple village-centered model of medieval German agrarian life and offers a historical account of enclosure, compact holdings, and rural autonomy before modern reforms. Its deepest claim is that settlement form, property form, and economic regime must be read together: the Hofsystem is both a physical arrangement and a social-economic order.
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