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The Legal Status of Subject Villagers in Prussia, as reflected in the General Law Code for the Prussian States (1794)

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Manorial Service of Subjects’ Children

185. Children of all subjects who wish to enter outside service must first offer themselves as servants or laborers to their lordship. [ . . . ]

Disciplinary Rights of the Lordship

227. The lordship may hold lazy, disorderly, or insubordinate servants to their duty by moderate physical punishment, and may extend this right to estate-lessees and estate officials.

228. The lordship possesses the same authority in relation to servants whom their subject farmers send to perform manorial service, if they are lazy, disorderly, or insubordinate.

229. In the course of such disciplinary punishment the servants’ health must not be endangered, much less their life.
[ . . . ]

232. The lordship can also hold farm-possessing subjects and their wives to their duty with imprisonment or punitive labor if these, in the course of manorial labor services not under legal challenge, are guilty of insubordination, persistent laziness, deliberate neglect or other similar infraction. [ . . . ]

Fifth Section. On Rights and Duties of Subjects Concerning Their Property.

Basic Principle.

240. Subjects, like other citizens of the state, may acquire and possess freely-held property. [ . . . ]

Subjects’ Rights to Their Landholdings.

1) When They Possess These as Their Own Property.

246. As a rule, unless provincial laws and practices do not make the opposite clear, subjects settled on landholdings are to be regarded as owners of their homesteads and lands, and to be judged accordingly.

a) In Legal Arrangements Among the Living

247. But they may not, without lordship’s consent, sell or otherwise alienate these, nor trade them, nor diminish them through detachment of separate plots of land.

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