The case histories in Chapter 4 indicate that tool distribution is as important for understanding social hierarchies and household interdependencies as land distribution. Other sources available to us suggest further complexities in family relationships. In this chapter, we examine marriage and postmortem inventories for clues about tool ownership and agricultural production, and about the exchange of labor for cash, which linked parents and children or senior and junior kin in two ways. The wealthy, established producers could offer work with a plow team and equipment, while the poorer, less well equipped could offer hand labor in return. We also discuss some of the ways handicraft production supplemented land for part of the life cycle before the junior generation emerged as full-time agricultural producers.

Agricultural implements

We saw in Chapter 9 that young Johann Georg Bauknecht received no agricultural implements at his marriage and fought with his stepfather, Leonhard Weiler, over a piece of the plow. Mathes Weiler, sometime after his oldest son married, divided up the rights to the wagon, plow, harrow, and cart so that each of them owned “half.” (Perhaps he had learned something from the earlier conflict between his father and half-brother.) When the old man died, his younger son, not yet married, took over the father's rights, each of the two brothers sharing the entire set of tools. When Michael Hentzler decided to pull out of cultivation altogether and devote himself to his pub, he gave the implements of cultivation and the horse to his son-in-law.