The Rural Municipalities Act that went into effect in the Baltic governorates on 1 October 1866, which relieved rural municipal courts (Gemeindegericht in German) from the duty of hearing administrative and economic cases, and liberated rural municipal agencies from the control of the local manor, is often thought to have paved the way for independent local governments. At the same time, the Act was a touchstone of the peasantry’s ‘level of educational and social development’. This article examines the establishment of the independence of rural municipalities by way of portraying rural municipal clerks. By combining biographical information with court cases and newspaper articles connected to clerks, the article traces how easy or difficult it was for rural municipalities at different times and in different locations to find individuals who were simultaneously both energetic and trustworthy for this position of key importance. In this way, we arrive at a broader and more fundamental question: what problems did local governments face after being liberated from the power of the manor, and how well did they cope with their independence? The professional group of rural municipal clerks has not hitherto been examined in historical literature.

The professional group of rural municipal clerks took shape with different aspects in the differing social-economic and educational conditions of the governorates of Livland and Estland. For a long time, official regulations that were quite far removed from the realities of life concerning age, level of education, the procedure for appointment to office, and the duration of the term of office were not followed in Livland. According to the law, the clerk was only supposed to look after the local government’s paperwork. Yet depending, on the one hand, on his own personality and knowledge of the law, and on the other hand on local power relations and the proficiency of other officials, his actual role and influence shaped up to be considerably more notable.

Since rural municipalities lacked the financial resources for paying their officials decent salaries, and educated farmers were scarce, the clerk often had to be recruited from some other professional group. The combination of the occupations of schoolmaster and clerk proved to be a functional model in the Governorate of Estland. Manor officials and tenant proprietors of manors, sextons, schoolteachers, and parish court notaries were hired as clerks in the mainland part of the Estonian-speaking territory of Livland. Alongside them, a number of professional clerks also operated in the Estonian part of Livland. They often worked in several rural municipalities simultaneously and thus earned a salary that was considerably larger than that of even manor administrators.

It turns out that by way of the rural municipal clerk, if he simultaneously happened to also be the manor’s clerk or administrator, even rural munici­palities in Southern Estonia that were liberated from the patronage of the manor remained more intricately connected to the landlord manor than has previously been thought. The emancipation of rural municipalities from manor control brought with it an increase in the rural municipality’s budgetary expenditures. The scarcity of educated persons, in turn, amplified the difficulties caused by the shortage of money. From the standpoint of the economical use of both financial and human resources, it made sense to hire one clerk for several rural municipalities. The hiring of manor officials and very young persons speaks of the shortage of suitable manpower. The wish to economise regarding expenditures on wages sometimes left the door open to swindlers. The at times scant literacy of other rural municipal officials on the one hand, and excessive trust in educated men on the other hand provided rural municipal clerks with the opportunity to misappropriate rural munici­pal property and its treasury, and other such abuses.