Lords and ladies needed a substantial incometo finance their lifestyle and their country house. Up until the nineteenth century, the revenue stemmed from different sources: A substantial chunk of the incoming money was connected to the feudal economyin which the villagers were at the same time subjects to the local lord of the manor. They rendered their dues in form of cash or victuals. Added to that were levies on groceries and marriage fees,protection money demanded from Jews for rights of residence,fines, and many other larger and smaller duties. Wardens, tenants, and day labourers workedin forests, meadows, and fields surrounding the country house. The landlords sold the produce: They not only harvested wood in their forestsbut also took a large part of the whole harvest to market. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a plethora of laws abolished the feudal ties binding the peasants to land and landlord. By these measures, the masters’ revenues diminished considerably. The exact revenues differed from house to house but there always existed a great variety in the sources of income.

Many lords lost their vested rights but  they received compensation either in cash or in the shape of land. With the money, they bought either forests, fields, and meadows or they invested in shares or government bonds. Moreover, they improved their own agriculture and forestry to counter sinking prices with higher yields: New cultivation methods and fertilizer, better ploughs and steam-driven threshing machines, and even electric motors quite often found their first usage  on country estates. In the inflation of 1923, however, money and shares lost their value and many owners experienced difficulties: They lacked the funds to modernize their estates any further. Those that had a second income could count themselves lucky as did, for example, the barons of Liebenstein in Jebenhausen: they sold mineral water from their own spring.

After 1945, agriculture increasingly lost its former importance as the main source of income for country house owners. However, great differences existed between eastern and western Germany: The East German government redistributed land ownership and, beginning in 1945, expropriated the former squires, who lost house and farm without any compensation. The land was given at first to small-scale farmers and displaced persons, but later large-scale collectives were formed. The abandoned country houses often served as schools or shops, others were remodelled as housing for new residents. In West Germany, no such dispossessions took place, but country house owners faced severe problems all the same: Agricultural revenues no longer sufficed to maintain the houses. There were two possible solutions to this challenge: Some owners discovered new sources of income, others sold the house. Investors turned country houses into condominiums, some became stately hotels or the seat of the local administration.