In the same issue of “ German Life ” as yesterday’s note was taken from, there is an article by Robert A. Selig on the life of servants in Eighteenth-Century Germany. In short, you would not want, in a reincarnation, to come back as a servant in the Eighteenth Century. There were several categories of servants, some of them as short term jobs, and some of them in a life time of hard work. In general, we are talking about maids, farmhands, coachmen, and domestic servants.
In order to give some meaning to the wages, here are the costs of a few things.
In 1732, a marriage permit cost 250 guilders in Würzburg.
The tone for the treatment of the servants was summarized by Christian Friedrich Schubart in “ Teutsche Chronik ”, in 1774, as follows:
“Who will bother with the servants? Let them work like cattle, throw their food out to them as you would throw it to a dog, chase them into church services and to communion and let them hear and receive there what they don’t understand, give them, or withhold from them, their wages as you like, and, after they have broken their bones in your service, throw them into the workhouse.”
Harsh as this sounds, it came close to the truth. There was wealth in the Eighteenth Century, the age of splendor, of baroque palaces and churches, and other ostentatious displays of wealth. At the same time, it was an age of abject poverty. Population had grown rapidly after The Thirty Years’ War in the previous century and there were too many people for the resources. And, the distribution of the capital was very uneven.
Domestics, stable hands, coachmen, and lackeys were ubiquitous. The city of Nuremberg, one of the largest population centers of the German empire with 25,000 inhabitants, had a domestic servant population of 5,000 or twenty percent of the population. On the eve of secularization in 1803, 23 servants cared for 29 clerics at Oberzell near Würzburg. It is hard to tell from the numbers given us just how pervasive the servant class was. The hamlet of Büchhold with 344 inhabitants had 36 of the people listed as servants. But at the same time, the Magistrate of Büchhold listed the servants' employers as “mostly beggars.” (That is, the Magistrate considered the "citizens" of Büchhold as little better off than the "servants" of the "citizens". A sad case, indeed!)
(22 Nov 02)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.