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In the ‘Wooden Age’ nearly everything involved wood at some point in its production. There was no iron without charcoal or wood for pit-props and pickaxe handles, no glass or soap without potash, no transport of anything above a minimal bulk without carts, sledges, wagons and rivercraft. The previous three chapters have identified the kinds of wood that people needed, the uses to which woodland was generally put, and the manner in which such flows were regulated. This chapter will develop these themes further, with two areas particularly in mind. One is the spatial distribution of the production and consumption of wood, the form of exchange involved, and the identification of what ecologists would call ‘sources’ (points of origin) and ‘sinks’ (points of consumption) of the resource. Tracing these patterns over time will allow us to address questions of the nature of economic development, and the causes of landscape and environmental change. Understanding these processes, however, requires more than the mapping of material flows. It is also essential to comprehend how people thought about such movements and exchanges in a world strongly shaped by both institutional imperatives, and a straightforward fear of suffering, illness and mortality. In the cold winter of 1743, for example, the ducal authorities attempted to enforce the mandatory limit of two ‘wood days’ for cutting and collection in the Vorstwald of Bietigheim. But the snow lay deep on the ground that December, and local authorities objected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conceptual framework that I have attempted to develop in this volume strives to be one adequate to the task of understanding how the state and the material world intersected, and to enable us to describe and explain what might be implied by early modern society living in the ‘wooden age’. One hopes the reader has been convinced of the degree to which early modern history is intertwined with what is usually considered the realm of botanists or environmental scientists in a ‘historical ecology’. The growth rates of plants to a large degree determined available energy supplies, setting the parameters for economic development. The high rate of friction of wooden surfaces against earthen or, very rarely, paved roads contributed to high transport costs and impeded exchange. The relatively lesser friction, and the continual downward surge born of gravity, gave a comparative advantage to those who could bear their wooden loads on waterways. These things have perhaps been so evident to historians, that they have rarely attempted to investigate their influence in depth or quantify the flows (ecology) or values (economy) of the resources involved. Yet were they any less worthy of detailed attention than rents, wages or profits, over which so much ink (if still not enough) has been spilt? Yet it should also be clear by now that the vegetation of a region, whether a river was navigable in any way or not, and so forth, is the product of human action and choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have long been seen as a key era in the development of the modern state in central Europe. After 1500, the consolidation of patrimonies and the promulgation of territorial laws, especially under the influence of Roman law, provided the legal grounds for ‘state’ action. A developing bureaucracy and the information technology of improving literacy skills and printing expanded the ability of officials to oversee the populace and divorced the exercise of authority from direct personalised relations of lordship. The increasingly expensive wars of the seventeenth century provided the greatest impetus towards the creation of a ‘tax state’ that moved beyond princely rulers' earlier reliance on more limited personal finance. Taken together these breakthroughs provided the underpinnings of the self-consciously interventionist and modernising state of the eighteenth century, whether in its ‘absolutist’ or ‘enlightened’ guises. These processes have been encapsulated in the term ‘state building’, describing the conscious centralisation of power. However, equally important for this process was the gradual accumulation of local loyalty across the entire period, integration of village powerbrokers into the machinery of government, and the ‘social disciplining’ of personnel to conform to centrally determined norms. These processes were far less directed and were subject to the approval of relatively lowly subjects. They were, however, essential for a state that bound the ambitions of ‘the centre’ and those of the ‘locality’ (or at least those who wielded influence locally) into a coherent unit that expected both to act to resolve problems, and was expected by its subjects to provide solutions to problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1544 the forester Hans Hagen stated that 150 oaks and pines that had been requested for a new barn at a ducal sheep station was beyond the capacity of any of his woodlands to supply. Mature timber was certainly in short supply in the Forstamt, but it is hardly likely that the 2,300 hectares of ducally owned forest could not supply a mere 150 pieces of timber. What Hagen presumably meant was that he could not fell so many in one place without jeopardising the staddles and mature trees that provided acorns for natural regeneration and fodder for wild boar and pigs. Scattered across the woodlands, and according to the survey of 1583, rather better maintained in ducal woodlands than elsewhere, these fairly isolated mature trees would most likely have grown up fairly crooked with numerous large lateral branches, and thus often also been far from ideal building material. They would have been able to develop amid the clusters of juniper and thorns left alone by grazing animals. As such the ducal woodlands seem to have had enough trees to supply occasional construction needs, especially for repairs, but nowhere enjoyed the density of stock to supply large amounts of timber for even quite minor projects. Is this evidence of a ‘timber famine’? Certainly it shows the relative lack of a very particular kind of tree for a certain use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key to understanding the particular ‘peasant dynamic’ of early modern Württemberg is the collective institution that played the greatest role in governing village resources, the commune and its court. While there was little that was ‘immobile’ about this society, it nevertheless appeared little altered in the early eighteenth century from the world of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. This was true not only of its levels of productivity and agricultural techniques, but equally, as we will see, the social order. A major contributor to this degree of stability was the continued ambition of certain groups within the village to employ collective measures to regulate village life, measures that generally worked in tandem with those promulgated by central government. This world was generated by institutional effort, and the manner in which village institutions managed the resources available to them. Early modern Württemberg was clearly a very unequal society. Property holding conferred institutional power and thus societal development was shaped by particular interests. Nevertheless, communal institutions themselves allowed far wider access among the populace to resources held as communal property than was the case for the resources that were held as private property, access to which was more inequitably distributed. Even if shares in communal property were also ‘inequitably’ apportioned, by an overwintering rule, for example, or allotting wood according to the size of one's property, overall this property system still probably worked to the advantage of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamism is not a concept commonly associated with the peasant. A ‘peasant’ after all is certainly not ‘modern’, and as modernity is almost defined by its dynamism, its relentless adaptation and its ingenuity, a peasant by definition can partake of none of its qualities without ceasing to be himself. Country air makes one slow and cautious, tied to the bounty of the soil and the grind of seasonal tasks, where one remains caught in the grip of voracious landlords. The ‘peasantry’ are often not so much defined by their particular qualities as by a ‘lack’: a lack of resources, flexibility, information, knowledge, certainty, markets, freedom or imagination, and consequently their only virtue can be to disappear on acquiring some or all of these. Their rebellions are understandable but pig-headed and backward-looking. Although Marx's comments on the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and the inability of the French peasantry to act as effective political agents are much maligned today, they retain the salient point that under no model of social change ever applied to Europe can the peasantry, as a peasantry, be a vehicle for sustained progress. Their historical mission is to cease to be, and as they generally chose not to accept this, then other exogenous forces must be the agents of their destruction. In the lands of the middle Neckar and the Black Forest we can clearly identify a peasantry from at least the thirteenth century, that cannot reasonably be said to have disappeared until some decades into the nineteenth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will begin with two stories, stories that seem to provide contradictory accounts of the powers of the early modern state over the lives of its lowly subjects. Sometime in the late 1540s, a forest warden, a lowly paid official who was responsible for enforcing forest laws on the ground, was walking on patrol in an area of meadow in the wooded hills to the north-west of Stuttgart. ‘Young Hans’ was about thirty-five years old and had only recently begun what would be a long career as a warden. On the meadows he ran into his neighbouring warden, one Martin from Rutesheim. Hans commented that he hadn't seen Martin in a long while, and they agreed to go and have a drink of wine together, almost certainly the locally produced white wine, in the nearby village of Weilimdorf. On the way they ran into the swineherd of Weilimdorf with his pigs on the ‘wasted meadows’. The name was somewhat misleading, as the pasture there was in fact quite good owing to its open canopy and protected status. ‘Horstus Leckher’, Hans said to the swineherd, ‘I have forbidden you more than once’ to be taking his herd into the meadows. As he told the swineherd he would do, Hans went to the house of the ducal bailiff and village headman (Schultheiβ) of Weilimdorf to complain. The Schultheiβ, however, was not at home, and so Hans dropped the matter and we may presume went off for his drink with Martin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]