For twelve hundred years the monks held the ink and the Mergeners held the oar. Then the abbey was gone. This is the story of the generation that grew up after it: of Matthias Mergener, born in 1816, who lost the world his ancestors had known but gained something none of them had, the ability to read. It carried his family across an ocean.

Key takeaways

• For centuries Mergener tenants ran a complex river economy without writing, using tally sticks, house marks and village memory, while the abbey kept the written records.
• The 1802 dissolution took away their landlord, their employer, their safety net and their reason for being "Mergeners" at all.
• Matthias Mergener (born 1816, Wasserliesch) grew up a smallholder and day-labourer on one or two acres of scattered strips, growing potatoes, rye and Elbling grapes.
• In Trier the same upheaval made the lawyer Heinrich Marx prosperous and turned his son Karl Marx into a critic, whose first economic writing (1842–43) was about the poverty of Moselle winegrowers.
• Prussia, which took over the Rhineland in 1815, required village children to go to school. Matthias was among the first generation to learn to read and write.
• In 1853, literacy let Matthias handle emigration papers, spot fraudulent brokers and guide his six children to America. His son Nicholas became the family's translator in the New World.

Timeline at a glance

Part 1 · The old balanceThe Ink and the Oar: 1,200 Years of Practical Wisdom

For more than a millennium, from the end of Roman rule through the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth century, the land around the Abbey of St. Mergen was divided by a line of knowledge.

On one side, inside the stone walls of St. Maria ad Martyres, were the monks: fluent in Latin, copying and illuminating manuscripts, keeping land registers (Urbare) and writing letters to archbishops and emperors. On the other side were the valley people, the tenant farmers, vineyard workers, coopers and boatmen known as Mergener. They spoke the local Moselle Franconian dialect and, almost without exception, had no formal schooling.

Business records without writing

It would be a mistake to call them uneducated. They managed a complicated river economy with their own practical systems of accounting and administration:

• Tally sticks (Kerbhölzer): to track debts, harvests or dues owed to the abbey, a stick was notched, one notch per measure of wine or grain, then split lengthwise. The abbey's steward kept one half and the worker the other. Because the notches had to match when the halves were put together, neither side could cheat. (The German phrase "etwas auf dem Kerbholz haben", "to have something on the tally stick", still means to have a debt or a misdeed on record.)
• House marks (Hausmarken): each family had its own geometric symbol, carved on boundary stones, burned into oak barrels and stamped on iron tools. It marked ownership without a single letter.
• Oral law and memory: village elders served as Schöffen, lay jurors who were living archives. They memorised field boundaries, water rights and customary law, and passed them down.

An apprenticeship in the river valley

A Mergener's schooling was hands-on and demanding. Life on the narrow strip between river and cliff called for real technical mastery:

• Viticulture: building dry-stone terraces on steep slopes, reading soils, grafting and training vines.
• River craft: making watertight barrels, reading the Moselle's seasonal currents, running boats and landing places at the ancient ford of the Treveri.
• Horses: breeding and handling the heavy draught horses that hauled barges along the narrow towpaths.

Part 2 · The rupture1802: When the Purpose Was Gone

In 1802, under Napoleon (then First Consul), the French state suppressed the monasteries of the annexed Rhineland. St. Mergen was dissolved, its monks sent away and its lands declared biens nationaux, national property. Forests, fields and vineyards were auctioned to the highest bidders: speculators, town merchants and the rising middle class. (For the full story of the sale see The Abbey's Balance Sheet.)

Contemporaries praised secularization as a victory of Enlightenment reason. For the abbey's tenants, it quietly took away almost everything that had given their lives structure:

• The landlord whose leases were hereditary and rarely broken.
• The employer that hired coopers, carters, bargemen and harvesters.
• The safety net: grain stores opened in bad years, charity, nursing.
• Customary rights such as gathering firewood and grazing animals in abbey forests.
• The identity itself. A Mergener was "one who belonged to St. Mergen." After 1802, there was no St. Mergen to belong to.

Part 3 · Matthias's worldDaily Life in Wasserliesch, 1816–1853

Matthias Mergener (also written Mathias) was born in 1816 in Wasserliesch, a wine village on the Moselle near Konz, a few miles upriver from Trier. His family had lived there since the upheavals of the late 1600s drove abbey tenants out of the Trier plain. He belonged to the first generation to grow up with no memory of the abbey at all.

1. Limestone, not slate: the Upper Moselle exception

The famous Moselle of steep slate slopes and Riesling lies downstream of Trier. Wasserliesch lies on the Upper Moselle (Obermosel), where the rock changes from slate to shell limestone (Muschelkalk). Different soil meant different farming.

• Elbling, the working grape: one of Europe's oldest grape varieties, Elbling thrives on limestone, ripens early and gives large crops of crisp, very acidic white wine. For smallholders it was not a luxury. It was a cash crop, sold locally as everyday wine, blended for sparkling wine or distilled into brandy, to raise the money for Prussian property taxes.
• Potatoes: on the flat riverbanks and low terraces, potatoes were the main source of calories for working families in the 1830s–1850s. That is why the potato blight of 1845–1847 hit so hard.
• Rye and spelt: grown in small, scattered strips for bread.

2. A farm cut into ribbons

A medieval tenant might have worked a full Hufe, about 30 acres, enough for a family. By Matthias's time that was a memory. Land in the Moselle valley was divided equally among all children at each generation (Realteilung, partible inheritance). After a few generations a "farm" was a patchwork:

• Micro-plots: smallholders like Matthias worked one to two acres in total, split into dozens of narrow ribbons scattered over the hillsides.
• All by hand: land was worked with hoes and wicker backpack baskets (Bütten); there was no room for a plough team on strips that narrow.
• Day labour: a couple of acres could not feed a growing family, so men like Matthias were listed in the parish books as Tagelöhner, day-labourers. They cleared stone, hauled barges along the Moselle towpaths and worked seasonal harvests for large estate owners.

3. Working the Scharzhofberg for wages

Did Mergeners work on the famous Scharzhofberg, the abbey's old crown jewel? It is very likely. As the crow flies the vineyard, just outside Wiltingen in the Saar valley, is only about 7 km (4–5 miles) southeast of Wasserliesch. Before railways, day-labourers routinely walked one to two hours each way for harvest work or clearing shifts in the next valley.

When private estates like Scharzhof expanded their fine Riesling production in the nineteenth century, they relied on seasonal workers from villages like Wasserliesch. The work was brutal:

• carrying 80-pound wicker baskets of slate up the slopes to replace soil washed down by rain;
• pruning vines in the freezing damp of early spring;
• picking late-harvest Riesling for wealthy owners.

Then they walked home to their own small Elbling strips.

4. The family of Matthias Mergener

In December 1839 Matthias married Barbara Kohn (1813–1850). Over the next decade they had five children, and after Barbara's death Matthias had a sixth child with his second wife, Elisabeth Kronenbusch:

The 1840s squeezed the family from every side. The potato blight (1845–47) opened the "Hungry Forties." Then in 1850, shortly after Peter was born, Barbara died, leaving Matthias a widower with five young children. Without the abbey, without enough land, and now without his wife, he faced the choice that confronted thousands of Moselle families: sink into landless poverty, or leave.

Part 4 · The Moselle ParadoxHeinrich Marx, Karl Marx and the Mergeners

A few miles downriver in Trier, the same upheaval was shaping a very different family. The Mergener Archive calls it the Moselle Paradox: the dissolution of the abbeys created comfortable careers for some and ruin for others, and it helped produce one of the most influential thinkers in history.

1. The lawyer: Heinrich Marx

Heinrich Marx (born Heschel Marx) was a successful Trier lawyer, trained in French civil law during the Napoleonic years. When Prussia took over the Rhineland, Jews were barred from state legal offices, and around 1817 Heinrich converted to Protestantism in order to keep practising. His son Karl was born in Trier on 5 May 1818.

Heinrich, later given the honorary title Justizrat, made his living inside the new legal order that secularization had created. The work of a Trier lawyer in these decades included:

• drafting property transfers and confirming private titles, many descended from former church land;
• mortgages, debt collection and foreclosures for creditors and landowners;
• applying civil law that put individual private property above old communal rights.

He was an Enlightenment liberal who saw these changes as progress: rational law, secure property and a path to middle-class respectability.

2. The critic: Karl Marx

Heinrich hoped Karl would become a respected jurist. His letters, written before his death on 10 May 1838, fret over his son's spending, his late-night philosophy and his neglect of practical law. Karl went his own way.

In 1842 Karl became editor of the Cologne newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. Two of his first major pieces dealt with the world the Mergeners lived in:

• The wood-theft debates (autumn 1842): for generations poor villagers had gathered fallen branches in the forests for winter fuel. The Rhine Provincial Assembly moved to treat this as theft. Marx attacked a law that put forest owners' property, much of it former church and common land, above people's survival.
• The Moselle winegrowers (January 1843): Marx defended his paper's reports on the poverty of the Moselle winegrowers, who were sinking into debt on tiny plots despite working constantly. The Prussian government soon shut the paper down.

Years later, Marx wrote that these debates over wood theft and the condition of the Moselle peasantry were what first forced him to study economics (preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

3. From wood theft to Capital

In 1867 Marx published Volume I of Capital (Das Kapital). In the section on "primitive accumulation," the chapter "The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land" argues that capitalism began by separating peasants from the land by force and law:

"The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands … were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation." — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I

The process he describes matches what happened on the Moselle. Church estates were sold, customary rights were criminalised, and people who could no longer live on their land had to sell their labour by the day or leave.

Part 5 · The unexpected giftThe Prussian Shift: Compulsory Schooling

The same Prussian state that taxed the Moselle smallholders and enforced the new property laws also brought something the Mergeners had never had: schools for every child.

1. Schulpflicht comes to the Moselle

After Napoleon's defeat, the Congress of Vienna (1815) gave the Rhineland to the Kingdom of Prussia. Prussia already had one of Europe's most developed systems of compulsory elementary schooling (Schulpflicht), and in the following years it extended it to its new Rhine Province. Village children were required to attend the local Volksschule, usually a one-room school run with the parish, from about age six to fourteen.

Matthias, born in 1816, would have been of school age from about 1822 to 1830. That places him among the first generation of rural Rhinelanders required by law to go to school. For the first time in the family's twelve centuries along the Moselle, a Mergener could hold the ink as well as the oar.

2. What a village school taught

The curriculum was practical and strict:

• Reading Fraktur: the German blackletter type used in books, newspapers, notices and official forms.
• Writing Kurrent: the traditional German handwriting used for letters and signatures.
• Arithmetic: sums, and the conversion of the region's confusing mix of coins, weights and measures.
• Religion and the catechism, which in a Catholic village like Wasserliesch was taught alongside reading.

By the time Nicholas was born in 1841 the system was well established. Growing up in the 1840s and 1850s, he received a standardised elementary education in which reading, writing and arithmetic were basic expectations, not privileges.

Part 6 · 1853Literacy as a Survival Tool: The Journey to America

1. The last straw

The early 1850s brought new disaster to the Moselle vineyards: oidium, powdery mildew, a vine disease newly arrived in Europe that destroyed grape crops. It came on top of poor harvests, rising taxes and the loss of Barbara. In 1853 Matthias and Elisabeth decided to go, with six children, all under fifteen, on a journey of some 6,000 miles to America.

2. How reading protected the family

For Matthias and his eldest son Nicholas, literacy made the difference at three critical points:

1. Getting through the paperwork. Before leaving, Matthias had to obtain a Prussian Entlassungsurkunde (a certificate releasing him from Prussian citizenship), tax clearances and travel papers for the family. Emigrants who could not read were at the mercy of officials and middlemen, and some were turned back at borders.
2. Reading the fine print. Emigration agents (Auswanderungsagenten) and port touts were notorious for selling tickets on unseaworthy ships, overpriced passages and fake American land grants. Matthias could read a steerage contract and check what it promised in food, baggage and berth before handing over the family's savings.
3. Finding the way. From Moselle and Rhine riverboats to railway timetables and the ports, the journey was a maze of notices, warning signs, passenger lists and emigrant guidebooks. Matthias could read them.

3. Nicholas: the bridge between two worlds

Nicholas was about eleven or twelve when they left (he turned twelve in December 1853). He was old enough to remember Trier's stone walls and young enough to adapt quickly. During the crossing, roughly forty days in a wooden sailing ship, his father had him practise with slate and chalk. With a solid grounding in German script, Nicholas learned English quickly after they reached the American Midwest, and became the family's translator, contract reader and guide as they built a new life.

4. The route

According to family tradition the journey ran:

1. Wasserliesch, by riverboat down the Moselle and Rhine to a seaport.
2. The Atlantic, about forty days under sail.
3. The Erie Canal, from the Hudson across New York State to Lake Erie.
4. The Great Lakes, west by steamer.
5. About 200 miles overland through unbroken forest to their new land.

Part 7 · Two answers to one crisisKarl Marx and Matthias Mergener

Karl Marx and Matthias Mergener were born two years and a few miles apart. Both grew up in the aftermath of the same event, the dissolution of the Trier abbeys and the new property order that followed, and both answered it.

• Karl Marx answered with analysis. He spent his life diagnosing the forces that dispossessed rural families, much of it in exile and poverty in London. He left a philosophy that sought to change the world through critique.
• Matthias Mergener answered with action. He could not change the system, so he left it. He traded a squeezed acre of Elbling in Wasserliesch for land and independence in America, and left a family that is still here.

In Capital, the dispossessed peasant often appears as a victim of forces too large to resist. The Mergener story adds a human counterpoint. A man with a little schooling, a lot of determination and six children in tow took the one path the system left open, and made it work.

ConclusionFrom the Oar to the Pen

1. Before 1802: the monks keep the written records; the Mergeners keep the vineyards, barrels and boats, with tally sticks, house marks and memory.
2. 1802: St. Mergen is dissolved; the family loses its landlord, safety net and purpose.
3. 1815–1830: Prussia arrives and sends Matthias's generation to school.
4. 1839–1850: Matthias raises a family on one or two acres and day wages; blight and bereavement close in.
5. 1842–43: in Trier, Karl Marx begins writing about people in exactly this situation.
6. 1853: literacy lets Matthias steer his family through bureaucracy, fraud and a 6,000-mile journey.
7. America: Nicholas, schooled in German script, becomes the family's voice in English.

The abbey had given the Mergeners their name. Prussia, without intending to, gave them the means to take it somewhere new.

ReferenceGlossary

Kerbholz (tally stick)

A notched stick split in two so that both parties held matching records of a debt.

Hausmarke (house mark)

A family's geometric sign, used on stones, barrels and tools in place of a written name.

Schöffe

A lay juror and village elder who remembered boundaries and customary law.

Urbar

A register of a lordship's lands, tenants and dues.

Obermosel

The Upper Moselle above Trier, with limestone rather than slate soils.

Muschelkalk

Shell limestone, the rock of the Upper Moselle vineyards.

Elbling

An ancient, high-yielding white grape suited to limestone.

Bütte

A wicker or wooden backpack basket for grapes, soil or slate.

Tagelöhner

A day-labourer, paid by the day.

Realteilung

Partible inheritance: land split equally among all heirs.

Hufe

The medieval family farm, about 30 acres.

Oidium

Powdery mildew, a vine disease that reached European vineyards around 1850.

Schulpflicht

Compulsory school attendance.

Volksschule

The village elementary school.

Fraktur

The German blackletter typeface used in print.

Kurrent

Traditional German handwriting.

Justizrat

An honorary title for senior lawyers in Prussia.

Entlassungsurkunde

Certificate of release from Prussian citizenship, required to emigrate lawfully.

Auswanderungsagent

An emigration agent who sold passages and arranged travel.

Primitive accumulation

Marx's term for the historical separation of producers from their land and means of living.

ReferenceFrequently Asked Questions

ReferenceSources and Further Reading

The four Mergener Archive notes combined here

1. (note) Daily Life in Wasserliesch 1850
2. (note) Education vs Practical Wisdom at St. Mergen – Part 1
3. (note) The Prussian Shift: Literacy as a Survival Tool – Part 2
4. (note) The Moselle Paradox: Marx and Mergener

Companion articles in this series

• The Land and the Name: how St. Mergen gained Scharzhof and how the Mergener surname was born
• The Abbey's Balance Sheet: how the abbey's wealth was built and sold off

Outside sources

• Lars Carlberg, How Scharzhof Came into Private Hands in the Early 19th Century (the 1797 sale to Johann Jakob Koch)
• Karl Marx, "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood" (Rheinische Zeitung, 1842) and "Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel" (1843)
• Karl Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (1867), Part VIII, "So-called Primitive Accumulation"

Archives for primary records

• Bistumsarchiv Trier: Wasserliesch parish registers (baptisms, the 1839 marriage, Barbara Kohn's 1850 burial)
• Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz: Prussian emigration files and Entlassungsurkunden for the Trier district
• U.S. passenger arrival lists, 1853

Open research questions

• Did Matthias sign his 1839 marriage record, or make a mark?
• Which ship, port and arrival date carried the family in 1853?
• Where exactly in the Midwest did they settle?
• Are there Wasserliesch wage or estate records naming Mergeners as workers at Scharzhof?
• Do Trier notarial records link Heinrich Marx to any former St. Mergen property?

© Mergener Archive. All rights reserved. This article consolidates four earlier notes and updates them with published research where noted.