Servants have attracted relatively little attention in German rural history. This neglect is quite striking, since in many parts of Germany peasant farms passed on undivided, and fluctuations in the workforce provided by family members were balanced by additional workers. From the perspective of the peasant household, servants helped to bridge family phases with either a high burden of small children or after adult children had left the paternal home. The employment of servants, or alternatively day labourers, depended on regional practices and ecotypes, such as the prevalence of animal husbandry, grain cultivation or other forms of agriculture. Agricultural modernization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to a large degree driven by increasing labour input, but in general there has been little research on rural labour markets. J. Schlumbohm has shown that many landless families were affiliated to peasant farms as ‘Heuerlinge’, renting rooms or small houses from peasants, often with the obligation to work on demand. In return, peasants made their farming equipment available, and supported their lodgers in times of crises. His analysis of a series of contracts between peasants and lodgers revealed the highly individual relationships between peasants’ and day labourers’ households. If arrangements and relations between peasants and day labourers are one open research issue in German rural history, the relationship between peasants and servants is another. After discussing the current state of scholarship on servants, this chapter analyses a set of census lists, gathered on the instruction of the prince-bishop of Munster, for Munsterland in 1749/50. This source has been little used for academic research, although parts have been incorporated into a larger research project on European census lists. With the exception of one detailed village study discussing many aspects of historical life and economy, it has not previously been used to investigate servants.

Legal relationships between servants and their masters have attracted the attention of historians for a long time. The concept of the ‘Ganze Haus’, put forward by Otto Brunner in 1968, provoked research but also severe criticism by historians of early modern Germany. The basic idea of paternalistic and attentive togetherness within premodern households was criticized as a modern romanticizing of unequal and authoritarian relationships.