Rights and right holders in Saxony
Structuring space through complex legal affiliations
The Saxony work package in DigiKAR focuses on the structuring of early modern space through the complex legal affiliations of individual landmarks (e.g. bridges and mills), non-inhabited areas (e.g. forests), settlements and individual estates within settlements.
INFO
This part of the documentation is still missing. It should give a brief summary of what the Saxony work package does and why this is important.
Also, finding an overarching definition of early modern "Landesherrschaft" is difficult. Researchers have focused on military organization, imperial taxation, and certain offices or legal instruments as key elements, but they remain contested.
Data collection
INFO
This part of the documentation is still missing. It should explain where the data comes from, in which formats it is available and how it is collected. Add link to "Datenverfügbarkeitsstudie"?
Challenges of divergent data structures
In the course of normalizing database entries which we could import from the historical gazetteers HOV and RepSax, we encountered, among other things, an inconsistent recording of the rights holders, especially regarding the so-called "Grundherrschaft" in the manorial system. Right holders are sometimes indicated as individuals, but the family seat is mentioned in other cases.
In the Repertorium Saxonicum (RepSax), for instance, we find the variants "von Taupaddel" and "Heinrich von Taupaddel" - the former being an instance of the class 'family,' the latter an instance of the class 'person.' In HOV, editors often entered non-person entities like "Rittergut Schleinitz" for data simplification.
It can be difficult to discern if rights were held by a person or by someone representing a specific hereditary line. This is complicated because groups exercising power became more diverse during the early modern period. In the study "Bürgerliche Rittergüter : sozialer Wandel und politische Reform in Kursachsen (1680 - 1844)", the author states that "bourgeois groups [also] came into possession of the manors," which, in the sense of depicting social change, might require a more detailed categorization of right holders, based on the activities and functions/roles of persons.
Pages 41-42 explain:
"The current owner of a knight's estate was not considered an individual owner in Saxon feudal law. Rather, the property belonged to a social association. This was either a family, based mainly on continuity in father-son succession, or the group around a vassal and fellow vassal, possibly forming a 'familia' in the older pre-modern sense. (Flügel (2000. 54)"
The current diversity of data in repositories that cover the early modern period leads to problems with data preparation and integration into a new database structure. Ideally, each database field should contain a single type of data. Assigning several possible classes to data in one data column can cause issues with the long-term interoperability and reusability of the data. It is a challenge to structure diverse data in a way that makes different ontological classes immediately transparent.
If one database field in our own data model is used for differently granular information, this notation is possible:
| string | type |
|---|---|
von Taupaddel, Heinrich | individual person |
von Taupaddel | family or group |
Schleinitz, Rittergut | non-person entity |
Capturing only the information before the comma would allow a clear affiliation with the manorial family as a higher-ranking category in all three cases. Analogous to data modeling in WP3, it is clear that after the comma comes a refinement of the first specification. Here, refinement means a person as a family representative. Additional data enrichment may be needed depending on the research question's context.
Concerning the territorial administration, we find a similar diversity of agents. The category "(landesherrliche) Amtsträger" can include:
- Hof- und Justitienräte
- Kammerräte
- Akzisräte (affiliated with "Landesbehörden")
- Stiftsräte (affiliated with "Landesbehörden")
- Amtsschösser
- Amtsrentverwalter
- Amtmänner (of the local administration)