ABSTRACT
The previous chapter discussed the strong legal position of estate owners relative to that of agricultural workers. However, owners did not always make the best use of the legal powers available to them. This is well illustrated in a case from 1904 involving an estate owner near Bützow, who created a series of problems for himself by failing to draw up contracts properly. His difficulties began when a resident sharecropping family stopped working for the estate and instead started commuting to the town to work in construction, while continuing to live in estate-owned housing. An attempt to evict the family was declared unlawful by the district court, when it transpired that the sharecropper’s contract did not, in this instance, made it clear that eviction would follow if the family stopped working for the estate. On top of this, one family member then sold a pig which apparently belonged to the manorial farm and, in an example of how sluggish legal procedure could also temporarily spare workers, the owner’s efforts to prosecute over this matter were delayed because an earlier complaint over wages, which had been filed by the sharecroppers, had to be considered first. Insult was added to injury when another man, a cowherd on the estate also took on building work in Bützow, stopped greeting the owner, and began bringing social democratic newspapers back to the village.1
