Nobody Wants to Work for Free: Bregenz Clergy Complain in 1703

A surprisingly familiar complaint

In July 1703, the clergy of Bregenz sent a complaint to the city council. It begins with an appeal to what they considered simple common sense:

“The light of nature makes it easy for everyone to recognize that no one willingly serves in wars or otherwise at their own expense and provision.” [Demnach das Lieht der Natur einem ieden leichtlich zuerkhennen gibt, daß keiner gern Kriege, oder auch sonsten diene auf seine aigne Kösten und verpflegung.]

In other words: nobody wants to work for free.

The clergy then pointed out that this was, more or less, exactly what they had been doing.

“We clergymen here have already served for two years without having received the provided provisions.” [Nun aber wir geistliche allhier schon alberaith zwey iahr dienen, ohne das wir desswagen die gestifte verpflegung zugemessen gehabt.]

This was not where I expected a document about endowed anniversaries—Jahrtage—to go.

A document that almost turned the corner

I photographed this document because—yay!—it mentioned anniversary foundations. Those are very much my lane these days: endowed commemorations paid for Masses, vigils, prayers, bells, processions, and other acts intended to keep the dead present within a community’s ritual life.

For a moment, then, this looked promising.

But instead of telling me more about how Bregenz commemorated its dead in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, the document turned the corner into 1703 municipal finance.

Still: it is a pretty cool corner, so I’m sharing it here.

We find the clergy complaining that revenues that should have supported them had collapsed. Why? Military disruption -- the War of the Spanish Succession -- had made it difficult to collect rents, and this was BEFORE the attempted invasion of Bregenz that was to come a few months later. Likewise, income from endowed anniversaries had fallen sharply. And the local administrator had apparently stopped paying out the foundations altogether:

“This year the endowments were completely abolished by the administrator, and not a single cent has been paid to either the clergy or the poor.” [Die Stifftungen diß jahr von dem Pfleger gar aufgehebt, und weder der Geistligkheit noch den Armen das geringste ist bezahlt worden.]

Why were they grousing? They had cause.

The problem was not simply that the clergy wanted more money. It’s that parish life actually does cost money.

The priest complained that the loss of offerings had damaged what should have been one of his principal sources of support. Yet the obligations attached to his office continued.

Among them were meals associated with major feast days. The document mentions Corpus Christi, Christmas, Easter, the dedication feast, and the patronal feast. It also describes regular meals and payments connected with the clergy serving the parish.

In other words, the income could disappear more quickly than the expectations.

And the priests insisted that things were getting worse:

“Because of the growing population, the work and duties increase continually.” [Weilen dan wegen anwachsender Zahl … Sorg und geshafft immer dar mehr einwachser.]

Even the two previous priests, they noted, had complained that they could not maintain a respectable living in the parish—and that had been in better times, when the revenues actually arrived.

Their request to the council was therefore straightforward: stop reducing parish income by suppressing foundations and taking away offerings.

The infrastructure underneath devotion

This document probably will not make it into my book. It comes too late, and its concerns a point away from the story I am telling. But I think it offers a useful reminder.

An endowed anniversary was not simply a prayer written into a charter. It depended on a financial-administrative backbone: rents being collected, money being administered, clergy being paid, meals being provided, and institutions continuing to honor old obligations.

What that means is that war or political disruption did not have to abolish a religious practice directly. It could simply damage the financial machinery underneath it.

And suddenly a Jahrtag was not only about memory, prayer, and the dead.

It was also about who still had the money.

Politics will politic. Meanwhile, somebody has to pay for lunch.

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Resources

Image: Matthäus Merian, view of Bregenz, 1647, Theatrum Europaeum. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Document: Bregenz, Stadtarchiv, Historische Akten 516 (In Bregenz tätig oder ansässig gewesene katholische Priester, 1491-1926), Document 9: Complaint of the Bregenz Parish Clergy Concerning Unpaid Anniversary Endowments and Parish Revenues, 18 July 1703.

You might also be interested in:

Who Gets to Pick the Priest? Bregenz Remembers Its Church: A 1658 dispute over who gets to appoint Bregenz’s parish priest sends the town rummaging through more than two centuries of records. Old charters, remembered priests, and institutional history all become ammunition when Bregenz and Mehrerau disagree over who controls the parish.

Kin, Cash, and Convent: Providing for Nieces (and Nephews) in 1613 Bludenz: A widow’s 1613 bequest reveals the money behind religious choices: inheritances, convent dowries, family loyalties, and some carefully placed conditions. It’s another reminder that early modern devotion depended on very practical financial arrangements.

Not a Village, a Community: Building Thalbach’s Church (1609): Churches—and religious communities—run on more than devotion. When the Thalbach sisters needed money to build their new church, gifts came from priests, widows, officials, servants, monasteries, and donors scattered across the region, revealing the networks that sustained Catholic religious life.

Bregenz Shooting Confraternity of 1498

This post on the Bregenz “Schützenbruderschaft” is organized into three parts. Part 1 presents extended excerpts from the Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft regulations of 1498, based on transcriptions from a 1711 copy, given here in my own translations. (If you want the transcriptions, message me; I didn’t have the energy to give them final polish and put them up here, but I’m pretty happy with the translations.) That is followed by a discussion that explores the Bruderschaft’s civic, devotional, and memorial practices, placing them in both local and broader European contexts. Finally, I give a substantive works cited with archival sources and secondary literature for anyone who wants to dive deeper.

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PART 1: Translated excerpts from the Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft Regulations of 1498; sections 2-6 quoted in full. Transcribed from the copy of 1711, Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Ohne Herkunftsangabe, 5652 (“Die Armbrust- und Büchsenschützen zu Bregenz stiften eine Bruderschaft”); translations are the author’s own.

Know and understand all those who see, read, or hear this letter, that the common rifle and riflemen here in Bregenz, according to the principle, consider and decide that friendship, unity, and brotherly cooperation, where faithfully observed, is pleasing to God and brings peace and benefit to the people here in this time …. [Listing of various leaders who approved the brotherhood. All these] have conceived and established a brotherhood as follows:

Firstly, in the honor of the holy and indefatigable Trinity of the highly praised Virgin Mary and Mother of God, and of the dear saints named Saint Sebastian, Saint Anthony, Saint Gallen, Saint Agatha, and Saint Barbara, with these aforementioned ordinances and decrees, Namely, such a brotherhood shall henceforth, as long as it is worthy, stand in common rifle and crossbow shooting authority… [discussion of how it is to be constituted, with leadership including both riflemen and crossbowmen].

Secondly, the brothers shall have two annual services every year, namely on St. Sebastian's Day and St. Agnes' Day, and begin in honor of the aforementioned patron saints, with a sung service and several spoken masses, as many as two members of the brotherhood are able to perform, which shall always be announced to all brothers and sisters.

Thirdly, if someone in the brotherhood dies, a sung memorial service shall be held for them, and announced to all brothers and sisters on the Sunday before, and the brotherhood shall place two bare candles, and after the memorial service take them back and keep them, and give St. Gallen one schilling pfennig from them.

Fourthly, whoever wishes to join such a brotherhood who is a crossbowman or rifleman, shall give eight marks from himself and his wife at the beginning of the year, and if he has no wife, still pay as many, but whoever wishes to join such a brotherhood who is not a marksman, a soldier or woman, shall be summoned before the four marksmen masters. And those who are common marksmen from both lords as mentioned above, will then be taken into the brotherhood by them according to form and fairness.

Fifthly, all who join such brotherhood, whether they are members or not, shall give one schilling pfennig each, and one woman or girl alone shall also give one schilling pfennig on St. Sebastian's Day, for as long as she is alive. However, whoever does not give the schilling, is not obligated to do anything else in connection with such brotherhood.

Sixthly, The more people join such brotherhood, the more worship is promoted and maintained.

Seventh, the four rifle and crossbow masters shall be selected once a year on St. Sebastian's Day,...

Eighthly, ...the four marksmen shall and may, as often as they deem necessary, summon the marksmen to gather for a Viertel (quarter) of wax. Anyone who does not come, and does not present a sufficient excuse, is liable to pay the Viertel of wax without exception. The validity of the excuse shall be judged by the four Schützenmeister…

Lastly, ...the aforementioned gentlemen, mayor and town council, shall know and agree to increase or decrease in one or more articles, always in the manner and occasion as is proper and necessary… [Followed by a lengthy list of those who approved these statutes.]

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DISCUSSION

I spent some time on the Bregenz shooting confraternity regulations, partly because confraternities are inherently interesting as a social force to be reckoned with, and partly because the regulations gave such helpful details about liturgical services at the parish church of St Gall. This mixture of civic, devotional, and occasionally quasi-military functions is exactly what scholars describe as typical of late medieval shooting brotherhoods; for example, Brown and Small emphasize that crossbow- and rifle-guilds across the Low Countries cultivated both military practice and socially cohesive festivity.

Section 2 reminds us that the Bruderschaft is more than just a shooting club; it provides two sung church services for its members along with “several spoken masses,” with an emphasis on abundance; this salvific work was an important motivation for joining a confraternity during the period of its foundation. Alyssa Abraham’s study of early modern confraternities stresses that liturgical visibility – the ability to stage sung or massed devotions – was a core way that such groups asserted corporate identity, and Bregenz fits that larger pattern. In Bregenz, these ceremonies are centered on St Sebastian’s Day, January 20^th, and St Agnes’s Day, January 21^st, so these Bruderschaft celebrations are essentially a mid-January event for which more remote members might come to town. This is also the date for the annual election, so there is a combination of salvation work and regular business meeting.

Section 3 continues into the memorial functions of the group. Confraternities of the period frequently held services for the deceased, and the Bregenz group is no exception. There is a sung memorial service, with enough lead-time that the members of the Bruderschaft can arrange to attend. Moreover, there is a candle-as-coin allusion, the “two bare candles,” used in the service, and then subdivided as a physical, material good, held by the Bruderschaft, but with a portion – one schilling pfennig – as alms for the parish church where that memorial was held. Jonathan Glixon’s research has shown that confraternities across Italy and the Low Countries played highly structured roles in funerals. Confraternities’ duties ranged from preparing bodies, processing to the church, and providing sung laude. (He even finds evidence for polyphony; I should be so lucky!) Although Bregenz services are less elaborate, their sung memorial service and candle obligations sit very comfortably within this wider funerary economy.

Thirdly, if someone in the brotherhood dies, a sung memorial service shall be held for them, and announced to all brothers and sisters on the Sunday before, and the brotherhood shall place two bare candles, and after the memorial service take them back and keep them, and give St. Gallen one schilling pfennig from them.

Wax is money during the service, and it is also the funds for the meetings during the year, for which a “Viertel (quarter) of wax” is due whether or not you attend. The organization is also funded by joining fees (8 marks) and by annual dues (1 schilling pfennig). And the organizers clearly understand the “more is merrier” trope, noting that the larger the Bruderschaft grows, the more involved and complex the church services can be (Section 6). Such wax-based economies match a long-standing Northern European pattern: Brown and Small note that archery confraternities were routinely fined in either sous or wax, and statutes from Bethune (1413) even required members to provide a wax candle each year for Corpus Christi processions. Material obligations supported ritual visibility.

While the initial affiliation of the Bregenz confraternity was with the holy Trinity, it became known as the Sebastian Bruderschaft over time. Of course, that listing of saints in clause 1 of the Bregenz Bruderschaft regulations allowed and perhaps encouraged such slippage over time. There is something wickedly delicious about the fact that the martyr, shot full of arrows, becomes the patron for a shooting organization. Comparable organizations elsewhere – in Modena, as researched by Alyssa Abraham, or in Rheinfelden, Switzerland – often had ties to Sebastian’s role as plague intercessor. Sebastian’s popularity grew rapidly over the fifteenth century, which saw repeated waves of plague, and it’s not impossible that the Bregenz confraternity founding had both his roles in mind. (I have discussed Sebastian’s presence in plague prayers in articles.)

The Bregenz confraternity leaves various footprints across the legal landscape over the next two centuries. In 1505, six years after its founding, the steward of the Bruderschaft was involved in a property transaction at court. As the Bruderschaft matured, it became the object of pious donation; Jakob, Bishop of Ascalon, Auxiliary Bishop and Canon of Constance, for instance, left legacies both to the clerics at the parish church of St Gall in Bregenz and to its Riflemen's Association there. (He also donates both to the women of Hirschtal and those of Thalbach, and provides for cousins. Generous guy!). Pious legacies of this sort are well attested elsewhere: Abraham observes that confraternities actively cultivated visual and devotional presence precisely because such visibility attracted bequests, commissions, and ongoing obligations of prayer. The Bregenz confraternity was still going strong in the mid-18th century, when it was involved in various bond transactions. That longevity likewise parallels the endurance of Sebastian confraternities elsewhere. From Andernach to Hagnau to Dornbirn, Sebastian confraternity statutes and indulgences show similar patterns of devotional stability and periodic updating.

The importance of such community organizations can be seen during the counter-Reformation as well. In Bregenz, a signal moment came with the establishment of the Holy Rosary confraternity at the Parish church in 16 July 1617. While that’s the story for another post, it is still worth noting that the persistence of the shooting Bruderschaft into the seventeenth century in Bregenz suggests that, as in Venice or Florence or Bruges, confraternities could coexist with new post-Tridentine devotional forms rather than being supplanted by them.

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WORKS CITED:

PRIMARY SOURCES (consulted via monasterium.net)

• Bregenz Schützenbruderschaft Regulations of 1498 in a copy of 1711: Bregenz, Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, Ohne Herkunftsangabe, 5652 (“Die Armbrust- und Büchsenschützen zu Bregenz stiften eine Bruderschaft”)
• Jörg Berkmann as steward to the confraternity: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 381: 1505 Dezember 10
• Jakob, Bishop of Ascalon, pious legacy to the “Priesterbruderschaft und der Schützengesellschaft” in Bregenz: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 606: 1565 Oktober 24, Konstanz.
• Bond transactions for the Bruderschaft:
  • Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 7005, 20. Dezember 1749
  • Vorarlberger Landesarchiv, ohne Herkunftsangabe 6175, 28. August 1766
• Founding of the Holy Rosary confraternity confirmed: Bregenz Stadtarchiv, Urkunde 771, 1620 April 15, Konstanz

SECONDARY LITERATURE

• Abraham, Alyssa. “Iconography, Spectacle, and Notions of Corporate Identity: The Form and Function of Art in Early Modern Confraternities.” In A Companion to Medieval and Early Modern Confraternities, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, Brill's Companions to the Christian Tradition, Vol 83 (Brill 2019): 406–432.
• Anonymous, “The Brotherhood of St Sebastian [in Rheinfelden]” [undated post], Living Traditions in Switzerland [Website] https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/tradition/en/home/traditions/the-brotherhood-of-st-sebastian.html
• Brown, Andrew, and Graeme Small. “Civic society and the Court Jousts, shooting fraternities and Chambers of Rhetoric in Court and civic society in the Burgundian Low Countries c.1420–1530.” In Court and Civic Society in the Burgundian Low Countries C.1420–1530, edited by Brown and Small (Manchester UP, 2007): 210-238.
• Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Prayers Against Pestilence from Women’s Monastic Communities.” Early Modern Women 16.1, [Forum on Early Modern Women and Epidemics, edited by Bernadette Andrea, Julie Campbell, and Allyson M. Poska] (Fall 2021): 63-71; https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/715811.
• Cyrus, Cynthia J. “Five Strategies in Sixteenth-Century Tertiaries’ Prayers Against Pestilence.” Academia | Letters (March 2021): Article 479; https://www.academia.edu/45687714 .
• Wegeler, Julius, “Das Schiitzenbuch der St. Sebastianus--Bruderschast in der Stadt Andernach, beginnend im Jahre 1426.” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, 1859, https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.7788/annalen-1859-7-jg01
• According to the Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek (https://vlb.vorarlberg.at/), statutes for similar Bruderschaften appear to be available in (somewhat) modern printed guise, but not to me, at least, not without interlibrary loan:
  • Die Bruderschaft vom heiligen Sebastian zu Hagnau: ihre Statuten, Ablässe und Gebete (Freiburg/Breisgau: Herder, 1888)
  • Bruderschaft unter dem Titel und Anrufung des hl. Martirers Sebastian in der Pfarrkirche zu Großdorf (Feldkirch: Sausgruber, 1901)
  • Statuten der Bruderschaft zum Heiligen Martyrer Sebastian in der Pfarrkirche Dornbirn-Oberdorf (n.p.: n.p., 1968)

Smells and bells? Just bells!

So, I’m working through my memoria documents – charitable endowments for commemorative services – for a paper I’m writing. These are two sets of Charters from Bregenz, one cluster from the early 15^th century, and another from a century later, right at the start of the 16^th century.

I’ll save the big observations for the paper itself, but thought it interesting that the documents are very clear, abundantly clear, about many things. The donor wants this service and that one, done in this order, with this personel. That’s the what and the who. They want their services done in this place and that one, by these personnel. That’s the where and the who. (“Who” matters twice because payment depends on it).

In these documents, we also know the why and the how.The why has been well-studied; memoria are services of remembrance for the donor and his ancestors and descendents. The prayers given at the service help all these people toward salvation, and so engage with a different “who” than the question of who performs. The people being prayed for are often named family, and include marital family as well as natal. Sometimes, they include aunts and uncles, cousins (particularly those in orders), and even second spouses. They include the dead and the living, a point which has always struck me as a bit odd. What does it mean to be praying in remembrance of someone who might themselves be standing at graveside?

And the how is clear. With crosses and processions. At graveside. With singing and speaking and reading. With standing and sitting and bowing heads, and all the other choreography of ritual. Or, as Ursula Speckerin (1405) puts it in her own Alemannic dialect,

with worship and beginning with proclamation, with singing and with reading, with standing and with prayers, and with all other things in the way previously prescribed. [mit libtind (?) und begiengingt mit verkundung mit singet und mit lesent mit stende und mit genbent und mit allen andren dingen in der wiscz als vorgesteben stat.]

To this, we add the gifts to the sacristan for the provisions for service. There’s bread, and more specifically bread for the poor. There’s wine for the service. There are lights – candles – not just for the vigil, but for both masses as well. And there are bells, bells for the vigil, bells to be rung at mass, bells to announce the service.

All these things are mentioned, for all these things have costs.

And so we can run through the multisensory modalities of these memoria services:

• Sight: procession, cross, lights, people

• Sound: singing, reading, reciting, saying, bells

• Taste: bread, wine, “Tisch” or food at table (improved over their normal fare, in Ursula’s provisions)

• Feel: bowing, standing, sitting: all the embodied shifts of orientation of an active quasi-choreographed worship

• Smell: ???

The documents I’ve looked at, I realized, are completely tacet on the sense of smell. No mentions of incense or flowers or herbs or smoke or any other proxy for smell. The closest we get is the bread and the wine, placed on the altar and distributed to the poor, but the memoria endowments, for all their sometimes surprising specificity, don’t think to cover the sense of smell. And yet smell is typically a key part of liturgy. Its absence is striking.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of that. One plausible answer is because your incense for the censor is budgetted separately, and that in paying the sacristan you have already covered “the goods” necessary for the service.

But it is an interesting omission, and speaks to the question of what goes without saying and what must be specified when you’re seeking control of events-of-remembrance for after your demise.

Smell, it seems, was so woven into the fabric of ritual life that it didn’t need to be written down.

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RESOURCES:

Bregenz, Stadtarchiv Urk. 19. (Ursula Speckerin, 1405). Consulted via monasterium.net. (A list of other relevant charters is available from the author.)

For more on movement during prayer, see:

Cyrus, Cynthia J. 2025. "Praying Before the Image of Mary: Nuns’ Prayerbooks and the Mapping of Sacred Space" Religions 16, no. 10: 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16101277

Two standard works on memoria are:

Geuenich, Dieter, and Otto Gerhard Oexle. 1994. Memoria in der Gesellschaft des Mittelalters. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte, Bd. 111. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Geary, Patrick J. 1994. Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the end of the first Millennium. Princeton: Princeton UP.