Preservings $20 Issue No. 26, 2006 - Home at Plett Foundation

to their children, for all inheritances were absolutely
partible without regard to sex or age.
This inheritance [practice] doubtless forced
many peasants off the land, since all sons and
daughters divided their parents’ property. It
also forced many widows [and widowers]...
into the labor market. But these customs also
fostered commercial development, by forcing
frequent changes of ownership, regroupings,
and alienations of all assets except land. Some
family businesses escaped total ruin because
the wife’s half of the....property was not liable
for debts that her husband incurred without
her participation. Property exchanged hands
extremely rapidly in Flanders, and this is the
essence of the free market economy.” 9
Nicholas goes on to say that “literally
thousands of cases survive in the archives [in
Belgium] showing this property regime in
unchallenged use in Germanic Flanders after
1200.” He further suggests that these practices
“entered Flemish law in the mid-eleventh century,
just as...monumental economic changes
were occurring.” 10 .
Some of these ideas can be found in expanded
form in Nicholas’s book titled The Domestic
Life of a Medieval City: Women, Children
and the Family in Fourteenth Century
Ghent, published in 1985. Again in this book
he writes of the uniqueness of the Flemish
system: “throughout the Middle Ages the most
common form of handling the aspirations of
daughters and some younger sons was to give
them marriage positions, then exclude them
from the parental inheritance.” 11 This system,
he writes, stood in contrast to that in Flanders
which “had rigidly partible inheritance for
both rich and poor,” a system that encouraged
the development of nuclear as opposed to
extended families. And again, it was not only
partible, but “in a simple inheritance, in which
a couple had children only by each other, the
surviving parent [without regard to gender]
got half of the common property, while the
children divided the other half equally without
distinction of age or sex.” 12
He concludes that this system meant that
Flemish women “seem to have been in a
particularly favorable situation” and in fact
“exercised considerable behind-the-scenes
power over their men and [were] frequently
found in the business world, either as partners
of their husbands or sons or acting independently.”
13 At the very least when brothers, for
example, schemed to keep the property only
for themselves, sisters had recourse in courts
of the day. This practice is documented in a
case in 1365 when the daughters of deceased
Gillis Libbe stopped their brothers by successfully
appealing to the custom of “bilaterality,”
called by them, a division according to “where
the hearth was split.” 14
Another consequence of this system was
that a certain level of equality existed within
any one village. The fact was that this inheritance
system made “it very difficult for families
to hold substantial properties for several
generations,” a system that had an equalizing
affect among families. 15 The fact was that the
farm or estate was inherently unstable after
one of the spouses died. As Nicholas writes,
although “the property of children was normally
kept undivided as long as all remained
at home in the ‘common nest’...it might be
split into equal shares when all the children
reached their majority” at age 21. 16 Husbands
or wives of a first marriage were even legally
unable to get around this measure by willing
land or property to each other. In 1357, for
example, the sons of Jan Van der Ellen were
able to wrestle their share from a stepmother
who claimed that Jan had given her all of his
property. Problems of bitter sibling rivalry
could of course rise when heirs demanded
their exact shares; thus in 1378 local courts in
the city of Ghent “admonished the children of
Goessin Rijm to behave like kinsmen, not like
strangers who try to divide everything down
to the last penny.” 17
Finally, the system also meant that children
were protected, and it seems indeed
treasured. We might think of the middle ages
as a time when people were crude and violent,
but Nicolas writes that the Flemish inheritance
system pointed out a different picture. He
writes that “there can be no doubt that the
conjugal unit and the clan took their responsibilities
toward children extremely seriously
and expended considerable time, effort and
money in raising them properly....Children
were valued, cherished and protected by those
in authority over them. Hence we can consign
to the rubbish heap of history the notions that
‘childhood’ was suddenly ‘discovered’ in
the modern age; that the conjugal family in
preindustrial Europe was an economic rather
than an emotional unit.” 18
So, what does all of this mean? It certainly
suggests that what we know as the “Mennonite”
inheritance system has very deep roots
in the history of our people. It means too that
perhaps our ancestors already practiced what
we refer to as “Anabaptist” values of equality,
love and peace well before the 1500s. If as
Nicholas states there are thousands of records
on the medieval Flemish family, perhaps a
new rich area of research awaits our young
historians.
Endnotes
1. E.K. Francis, In Search of Utopia (Altona, MB: D.W.
Friesen and Sons, 1955).
2. For a thorough overview of Mennonite inheritance
practices see: Jacob Peters, The Waisenamt: A History of
Mennonite Inheritance Custom. Steinbach: Mennonite
Heritage Museum, 1985.
3. “Waisenverordnung von Russland, 1810,” trans. Ben
Hoeppner, Mennonite Heritage Village. I thank John Dyck,
Winnipeg, Manitoba, for bringing this document to my attention.
See as a variation of this document: “Teilungsverordnung
der an der Molochnaia im Taurichten Gevernament
angesiedelten Mennoniten, 1857,” Mennonite Heritage
Centre, Winnipeg. I thank James Urry, Wellington, New
Zealand, for bringing this document to my attention.
4. See: David G. Rempel, “The Mennonite Colonies in
New Russia: A Study of their Settlement and Economic
Development from 1789 to 1914” (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford
University, 1933), 110.
The administration of a Waisenamt usually had an
official seal which was used on all legal documents.
(Jake Peters, The Waisenamt: A History of Mennonite
Inheritance Practices, p. 9)
5. The scenarios were numerous: “how to deal with children
from more than one marriage?”; what to do “if the partner
in the second or third marriage dies without descendants?”;
“what to do when both parents die one after the other?”;
“what to do when two die one after the other without
leaving any physical heirs?”; “what to do when there are
no physical heirs?” The answer to each of these questions
was contained in a separate article, outlining in detail how
grandparents and grandchildren differed, when uncles and
aunts could expect an inheritance, and where step children
fit into the picture.
6. Royden Loewen, ‘If Joint Heirs of Grace, How Much
More of Temporal Goods?’: Inheritance and Community
Formation,” Hidden Worlds: Revisiting the Mennonite
Migrants of the 1870s (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba
Press; North Newton KS Bethel College, 2001). This
article was previously published in Spanish as “Si son
herederas de la gracia, más aún de los bienes temporales:
El sistema de herencia igualitario entre los Mennonitas
de Canada,” trans., Maria Bjerg in Reproduccion Social
y Sistemas de Herencia en una Perspectivea Comparada
Europa y los paises Nuevos, eds., Maria Bjerg, Herman
Otero and Orieta Zeberio (Paris: L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales, 1998): 145-170.
7. H.J. Habakkuk, “Family Structure and Economic Change
in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Economic History
15 (1955): 1-12. See also: George C. Homans, “The
Frisians in East Anglia,” The Economic History Review
10 (1958): 189-206.
8.David Nicholas, “Of Poverty and Primacy: Demand,
Liquidity, and the Flemish Economic Miracle, 1050-1200,
American Historical Review 96 (1991):17-41.
9. Ibid, 38.
10. Ibid, 39.
11. David Nicholas, The Domestic Life of a Medieval City:
Women, Children and the Family in Fourteenth Century
Ghent (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985),
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 119.
13. Ibid., 190 and 207.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 191.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 194.
18. Ibid., 208.
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