A Novel Way of Occupying Rural Space
Birgy, Odile
A Novel Way of Occupying Rural Space - 2014.
52
Normanvillars provides an example of settlement of a minority religious community in a territory foreign to it. The wanderings of a few Anabaptist families led them eventually to the Sundgau, in the Southern part of Alsace. Their community was primarily dependent on seigniorial authorities, which had allowed them into their holdings, and, beyond this tolerance, provided them with housing and labor by employing them as seigniorial tenants, and tasked them in exchange with the improvement of poorer-quality lands in the seigniory. The Anabaptists slowly settled the forest of Normanvillars, developing agriculture and arboriculture, exploiting local ponds and generally prospering while adding to the domain’s wealth. Moreover, Anabaptist farmers differed from local populations in their ability to undertake cattle-raising, though they did not specialize in it the way neighboring marcaires did in the Vosges. Hard working and tending to multiply experiments and innovations, the desecndants of these religious dissenters, who had been expelled from Switzerland in the sixteenthth century, ended up benefitting from a positive public image in the eighteenth century.
A Novel Way of Occupying Rural Space - 2014.
52
Normanvillars provides an example of settlement of a minority religious community in a territory foreign to it. The wanderings of a few Anabaptist families led them eventually to the Sundgau, in the Southern part of Alsace. Their community was primarily dependent on seigniorial authorities, which had allowed them into their holdings, and, beyond this tolerance, provided them with housing and labor by employing them as seigniorial tenants, and tasked them in exchange with the improvement of poorer-quality lands in the seigniory. The Anabaptists slowly settled the forest of Normanvillars, developing agriculture and arboriculture, exploiting local ponds and generally prospering while adding to the domain’s wealth. Moreover, Anabaptist farmers differed from local populations in their ability to undertake cattle-raising, though they did not specialize in it the way neighboring marcaires did in the Vosges. Hard working and tending to multiply experiments and innovations, the desecndants of these religious dissenters, who had been expelled from Switzerland in the sixteenthth century, ended up benefitting from a positive public image in the eighteenth century.
Réseaux sociaux