Ordinary Prussians : Brandenburg Junkers and Villagers, 1500-1840 (Hardcover)

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Currencies, weights and measures employed in the text; Introduction: grand narratives, ordinary Prussians; 1. After the deluge: a noble lordship's sixteenth-century ascent and seventeenth-century crisis; 2. The Prussianization of the countryside? Noble lordship under early absolutism, 1648?1728; 3. Village identities in social practice and law; 4. Daily bread: village farm incomes, living standards and lifespans; 5. The Kleists' good fortune: family strategies and estate management in an eighteenth-century noble lineage; 6. Noble lordship's servitors and clients: estate managers, artisans, clergymen, domestic servants; 7. Farm servants, young and old: landless labourers in the villages and at the manor; 8. Policing crime and the moral order, 1700?1760: seigneurial court, village mayors, church, state and army; 9. Policing seigneurial rent: the Kleists' battle with their subjects' insubordination and the villagers' appeals to royal justice, 1727?1806; 10. Seigneurial bond severed: from subject farmers to freeholders, from compulsory estate labourers to free, 1806?1840; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.