Taxation records as data source for the historical climatology, Prácheň Region (Czech Republic), 1655–1827

This deposit contains two .xlsx files related to the study of taxation records for the Prácheň Region (south-eastern Bohemia, recently Czech Republic) during the 17th–19th centuries and their potential for historical climatology. In the study, administrative documentation connected with requests for tax relief, where summarising data on the governmental and regional levels were preserved for the studied region, is used to create database of damaging events to crops (hailstorms, water torrents), fields and meadows (water torrents), and buildings (fires caused by lightning). Occasionally, some other events damaging crops significantly, but not allowing the tax relief (freezing of crops, drought, wind), were also mentioned.

The file “01_taxation data” contains the basic database of damaging events extracted from archival sources. The structure is as follows: date of the damaging event, type of the event (hail, water, lightning, freezing, drought, wind), affected domain and municipalities, accepted tax relief, estimated damage, remark to the event, and archival source. Concerning the measure of the damage, tax relief is expressed as a number of taxation units called “osedlý” (representing the ideal peasant farm in Bohemia, from which it varied in different regions depending on fertility) in the period 1655–1748 and in gulden (money) afterwards. The estimated damage is expressed in “strych” (area unit) for fields, in wagons of hay for meadows, and in gulden in case of fires.

The file „ 02_climatic characteristics“ contains annual temperature and precipitation for the period 1655–1827, expressed in deviations relative to the 1961–1990 reference period. The series are reconstructed temperatures for central Europe (Dobrovolný et al., 2010) and reconstructed precipitation for the Czech Lands (Dobrovolný et al., 2015).