Sources of welfare support in early modern Württemberg, c.1500-1700

"This paper will examine the development and contexts of welfare provision in the Lutheran Duchy of Württemberg in south-western Germany over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is intended to be part of a larger session examining the form and implications of poor relief systems in early modern Europe, with special attention to the institutional background of particular welfare measures, and their scale and effect. The development of poor relief in the German countryside has received barely any attention, and no major study of any kind, despite extensive work on developments in some of the larger cities of central Europe. Hence researchers working on these issues in the wider European context have had access to only minimal comparative material, very little of which exists in the English language, allowing an assumption to persist that welfare provision was largely informal, kin based, or simply non-existent. This paper will present the results of a study designed in a small way to contribute to the redress of this imbalance. The core of the study is formed by research on the district of Leonberg, and area of around 10 000 inhabitants c.1600, based on consultation of the accounts of the poor relief administration, and related municipal and village accounts, petitions, court cases, and other government records. Formal, mandatory state poor chests developed from the middle of the sixteenth century, though with strong, parochially-based pre-Reformation antecedents. The paper will present a detailed examination of income and expenditure patterns for this relief system, which largely catered for extreme indigence and one-off costs for other households. Income came from a wide variety of sources, including effectively mandatory rating of the population, but with considerable local variation. It must, however, be viewed in the context of a strong tradition of regulation and local government by village and town communes. These institutions provided critical ‘disaster relief’ to secure food supplies in the event of dearth, especially tailored towards using communal finance to obtain large loans. Equally, evidence will be presented of the extensive use of communal and municipal granaries, which built stocks up as a buffer against famine in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These granaries were by no means only a strategy employed in large urban centres. These institutions are also viewed in the further context of broad access to landholding, common rights, and the local, intra-peasant provision of credit. Overall, the development of the relief system demonstrates the institutional wherewithal to engage a number of different strategies for relief, within the context of an economy enjoying only a small amount of surplus income subject to redistribution, multiple sources of income for most households, and a strong directing hand on the part of communal powerbrokers."