ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.
HIR—HIR
HIRING, in law, may be defined as a contract by which one man grants the use of a’thing to another in re- turn fora certain price. It corresponds to the locatio-conductio of Roman law. That contract was either a letting of a thing (locatio-conductio rei) or of labour (locatio operarum). The distinguishing feature of the contract was the price. Thus the contracts of mutuum, commodatum, depositum, and mandatum, which are all gratuitous con- tracts, become, if a price is fixed, cases of Locatio-conductio. In modern English law the term can scarcely be said to be used in a strictly technical sense. The contracts which the Roman law grouped together under the head of locatio- eonductio—such as those of landlord and tenant, master and servant, &c.—are not in English law treated as cases of hiring but as independent varieties of contract. Neither in law books nor in ordinary discourse could a tenant farmer be said to hire his land. Hiring would generally be applied to contracts in which the services of a man or the use of a thing are engaged for a short time.
HIRSCHAU, or Hirsau, a village within the amt of Calw and the circle of Schwarzwald, Wiirtemberg, on the Nagold, is a station on the Pforcheim-Horb Railway, and has and other factories. Population 800. It owes in and its historical interest to the now ruinous Benedictine monastery in the neighbourhood, the Monasterium Hirsaugiense, at one period one of the most famous in Europe. It was founded in 830 or 832 by Count Erlafried of Calw, at the instigation of his son, Bishop Notting of Vercelli, who enriched it with, among other treasures, the body of St Aurelius, Its first occupants (838) were a colony of fifteen monks from Fulda, disciples of Hrabanus Maurus and Walafridus Strabus, headed by the abbot Liudebert. During about a century and a half, under the fostering care of the counts of Calw, it enjoyed “reat prosperity, and became an important seat of learning ; but towards the end of the 10th century the ravages of the pestilence combined with the rapacity of its patrons, and the selfishness and immorality of its inmates, to bring it to the lowest ebb. After it had been desolate and in ruins for upwards of sixty years it was rebuilt in 1059, and under Abbot William “ der Sligo” (1069–1091) more than regained its former splendour. Py his Constitutiones Hirsaugienses, sort of new religious order, Ordo Mirgugiensis, was formed, of which the rule was afterwards adopted by many monastic establishments throughout Germany, such as those of Blaubeuren, Erfurt, aud Schaff- hausen. ‘The friend and correspondent of Pope Gregory VIL, and of Anselm of Canterbury, he took active part in the politico-ecclesiastical controversies of his time; while a treatise from his pen, De Musica et Yonis, as well as the Philosophicarum et astronomicarum institu- tionum libri IIL, bears witness to his interest in science and philosophy. About the end of the 12th century the material and moral welfare of Hirschau was again’ very perceptibly on the decline ; and it never afterwards again rose into importance. In consequence of the Reformation it was secularized in 1558; in 1692 it was laid in ruins by the French. The Chronicon Hirsaugiense, or, as in the later edition it is called, Annales Hirsaugienses of Trithemius (Basel, 1559; St Gall, 1690), is, although containing much that is merely legendary, an important source of information, not only on the affairs of this monastery, but also on the early history of Germany. The Codex Iirsau- giensis was printed at Stuttgart in 1844. See Christman, hte des Klosters Hirschau (1782); Steck, Das Hirschau (1844); Wolff, “Joh, Trithemius u. die jiilteste Geschichte des Klosters Hirschan,” in the Wiirttembergisches Jahrbuch for 18 and Helmsdirfer, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Abts Wilhelm von Hirschau (Gottingen, 1874).
