Lords' Rights and Peasant Stories. Simon Teuscher

but also many other lordly offices and competences that were not assigned as permanent hereditary tenures were carried out by rapidly changing personnel. Even though the litigating parties were presumably interested in recording details in witness deposition records from longstanding officeholders who accordingly had a wealth of experience, it is only the exceptional case that mentions people who had occupied an office for more than ten years.²³ In 1278 witnesses in one deposition named at least eight different men who had held the office of crop overseer in the small village of Les Chevalleyres for periods of one to three years, including one named Perronetus, who had held two one-year terms of office separated by ten years.²⁴ The circle of manorial officials and the people who owed these dues often overlapped. One witness from Les Chevalleyres was asked from whom he had collected dues as crop overseer; in addition to himself, he named another peasant who also appeared as a witness and stated that he had sometimes served as crop overseer.²⁵ In a witness deposition from 1446, the witnesses casually mentioned the names of no fewer than thirteen different people who held the office of the local representative (nuncius) of the bishop of Lausanne in the small village of Villars-Sainte-Croix over a short period.²⁶

       The Circulation of Lordship Rights

      The rotation of manorial officials who were responsible for small villages—sometimes including only a couple dozen households—suggests that a considerable part of the local male population participated personally in the manorial organization at one time or another. Although with different competences, most of them had the opportunity now and then to “officiate” (officiare),²⁷ to use the typical word with which the witnesses describe this occasional service. Although the social background of the rural officeholders is seldom accessible, it would seem, on the one hand, that they belonged primarily to the upper classes of the village. Yet on the other hand, this seems not to have been a case of oligarchy, in the sense of the exclusive ruling classes that monopolized different town and village offices in the early modern period, which observed rules of succession defined by kin relationships. One can easily find rural manorial offices that were held by a father and his son or by two brothers, one after the other.²⁸ Such successions were, however, disrupted by people with other names. The term of office was often short but variable; furthermore, repeated terms of office sometimes occurred at very different intervals. This makes it unlikely on the whole that the rotation followed specific rules. Instead the irregularity indicates that the succession of officials was determined by momentary needs, personal relationships, and the availability of qualified candidates.

      The circle of people who occasionally took part in the exercise of lordship responsibilities reached past the lowest holders of office and the shortterm leasers of shares in lordship rights. Even the small, sporadic leasers of tithe shares of the church of Hilterfingen hardly went from farmyard to farmyard themselves to fetch grain and fruit. In witness deposition statements the actual collection of manorial dues of all kinds is often described through the witnesses’ childhood memories of having to fetch and carry such dues as the son or the servant of the relevant official.²⁹ Thus in 1465 Cuonrat Würgler said that his father, a longtime substeward in the village of Mönchaltdorf, sometimes sent him around to the local farmyards to collect rents or assemble the “shrove chickens” (Fasnachtshühner) that were owed as a manorial payment.³⁰ And in 1433 Savoyard commissioners examined an eighty-year-old widow who described how, as a young, newly married woman, she had gathered a fee currently under dispute in the form of wine must (newly pressed grapes) for the lords of Blonay because the relevant official, who was her Gevatter (that is, related to her through godparenthood), had requested it.³¹ At the lowest levels of delegation, the vicarious exercise of lordship rights was a matter of sharing responsibility among the family or the household, or was a part of the everyday exchange of reciprocal assistance among acquaintances.

      Official activities could also be performed for a share in the accompanying earnings by people who were neither especially familiar with their direct employer nor aware of the legal basis of his assignment. In a witness deposition from 1413 about the tithe in Vernaz near Apples, two different witnesses affirmed that, years ago, they had collected sheaves on behalf of Ludovicus Rat without knowing on behalf of which lordship he had hired them.³² Perhaps they did not want to know. But for assistants at this level, the person to whom the proceeds of the tithe ultimately went would in fact have been of secondary importance.³³ The less glamorous duties that accompanied lordship rights were even more often assigned as contract work. A witness deposition from 1396 investigated which lordship was responsible for judging claims to the skins of animals that had died along the road in different villages, which served as an indicator of the practice of higher judicial rights. Most witnesses who had taken animal skins to a lordly headquarters were not actual officeholders but rather had taken on this assignment as contract labor. Thus Borcardus Rocual saw to the dead horse of a German-speaking man who was passing through the area. He had already received eighteen pennies and some wine for skinning the animal. Then he brought the pelt to the local official, the maior of the lords of Oron, who instructed him to take it to the lord’s castle. There he was served a memorable meal in the entrance hall. When Cuanetus de Perla brought to the castle the pelt of an ox that had broken its leg on the bridge, the lordship offered to sell it to him at a reduced price.³⁴