The History of Families and Households Central and Eastern Europe Regional Perspectives in Global Context

Series Editors

Constantin Iordachi (Central European University, Budapest) Maciej Janowski (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw) Balázs Trencsényi (Central European University, Budapest)

VOLUME 6

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cee The History of Families and Households

Comparative European Dimensions

Edited by Silvia Sovič, Pat Thane, and Pier Paolo Viazzo

LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Family portrait, c. 1910. Unterdrauburg, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Dravograd, Slovenia). Photo by Pietro Antonio Micelli (1846–1929).

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii Notes on Contributors IX

1 The History of European Families: Old and New Directions 1 Silvia Sovič, Pat Thane and Pier Paolo Viazzo

part 1 Commonalities and Diversities

2 North European Families in the Past: Family Ties Revisited 23 Beatrice Moring

3 From Modernity to Tradition: Households on Kythera in the Early Nineteenth Century 47 Violetta Hionidou

4 The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities in the Branković Region of Serbia in 1455 69 Mirjana Bobić

5 Variation Within: Regional Differences in Household Structures in Mid-Nineteenth Century Rural Serbia 93 Siegfried Gruber

PART 2 Church, State and Family

6 Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes in Protestant and Catholic Europe, 1500–1800 119 Daniela Lombardi

7 The Reformation, the Council of Trent and the Divergence of Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood across Europe: A Long-run Analysis 142 Guido Alfani vi contents

8 Household Structure in the Nineteenth Century in a Transylvanian Village 168 Judit Ambrus

PART 3 Family Strategies

9 Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants at the Turn of the Middle Ages 189 Piotr Guzowski

10 Succession Choices of Small Farmers and Women Farmers’ Wills in the Area around Trieste in the Nineteenth Century 207 Marta Verginella

11 Inheritance Practice and the Elderly in Central Europe: The Example of Western Bohemia, 1700–1850 232 Alice Velková

Index 257 List of Figures and Tables

Figures

4.1 Map of Central Balkan States, 1375–1395 72 4.2 Map of the Region of Branković in 1455 74 4.3 Ideographic representation of various family (agnatic) forms in the village of Vrbuča 87 5.1 Household typology in 13 districts in Serbia in 1863 116 5.2 Married couples per household in Serbia in 1866 116 8.1 Family book of Vista 173 10.1 The area of Breg 208 10.2 The age of testators from Dolina 211 10.3 Percentage of testators regarding the number of deaths and according to gender between 1833 and 1904 – Dolina 212 10.4 Percentage of testators regarding total number of deaths between 1833 and 1894 – Dolina 212 11.1 Age of heirs at the time of their fathers’ retirement 249 11.2 Still active full peasants holders and smallholders by their age 252 11.3 Still active cottagers by their age 253

Tables

2.1 Residence patterns of widows in Northern European localities 27 2.2 Age distribution of widows in local communities, percentages 31 2.3 Occupational distribution of widows in 19th century rural parishes 34 2.4 Widows co-residence and gender 35 2.5 Co-residence partners of urban widows, percentages 41 2.6 Age distribution of widows 42 2.7 Classification of occupation or known source of income of widows in census of Helsinki and Moss 1900, Lichfield 1851, percentages 43 2.8 Age distribution of widows in the Nordic countries, percentages 45 2.9 Age distribution of widows in England and Wales 1861–1911 46 3.1 Census year and population of Kythera 51 3.2 Percentage of migrants by sex and age group, Kythera 54 3.3 Percentage distribution of households, Kythera 57 3.4 Singulate mean age at marriage, Kythera 59 3.5 Percentage distribution of households by type, year and head’s gender 60 3.6 Percentage distribution of households for male heads by type and by reported status of the father 61 viii list of figures and tables

3.7 Living arrangements by marital status of older people, Kythera 62 3.8 Percentage of male married heads among all married men by age group, conjugal family and complex households only, Kythera 65 4.1 Houses according to the number of heads/tax payers, share of total in percentages, Branković Region, 1455 86 4.2 Distribution of houses and taxpayers in Branković Region, 1455 87 4.3 Family households in Branković Region, 1455 89 4.4 Distribution of the population of the Branković Region in 1455 90 5.1 Correlation of the number of married couples with household typology 107 5.2 Mean household size and mean number of married couples in rural Serbia 1866 by srez 109 5.3 Descriptive statistics of independent variables 112 5.4 Model estimates: Serbia 1866 114 7.1 Typology of godparenthood models 148 8.1 Household types in Vista (1883/1884) 177 9.1 Duration of economic activity of Trześniowa villagers 196 9.2 Duration of economic activity of Trześniowa’s social elite 197 9.3 Duration of economic activity of peasants in Trześniowa 197 10.1 Number of testaments by settlement and time period 209 10.2 Gender of testators by time period – Breg 210 10.3 Population change in Breg (1779–1910) 215 10.4 Testators as percentage of the number of people who died in Dolina 221 10.5 Marriage status of testator by 10-year periods – Dolina 227 10.6 Gender of testator by 10-year periods – Ricmanje 227 10.7 Marriage status of testators by 10-year periods – Ricmanje 228 10.8 Marriage status of testators by 10-year periods – Boljunec 229 11.1 Structure of the deceased broken down by age and sex in the Šťáhlavy region, 1708–1834 (in percentages) 238 11.2 Structure of the deceased at 50+ (in percentages) in the Šťáhlavy region broken down by age and sex in 1708–1850 239 11.3 Structure of heirs of fathers handing over only one holding to their children in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850 243 11.4 Property transfers broken down by economic continuity in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850 244 11.5 Age at which heirs took charge of the holding inherited from their fathers in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850 245 11.6 Age at marriage of heirs of paternal holdings, 1701–1850 246 11.7 Mean age of fathers at time of property transfer in 1701–1787 and their age at death 247 11.8 Age of fathers at the time of property transfer carried out in 1788–1850 and their age of death 250 Notes on Contributors

Guido Alfani is Associate Professor at Bocconi University, Italy. He is chief editor of the journal Popolazione e Storia and the organizer of the international scientific networks EI-Net (Economic Inequality Network) and, together with Vincent Gourdon, Patrinus. An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he published extensively on godparenthood and social alliance systems, on economic inequality, and on the history of epidemics and famines. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300–1800. His recent publications include Fathers and Godfathers: Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern Italy (Farnham, 2009) and Calamities and the Economy in Renaissance Italy (Basingstoke, 2013).

Judit Ambrus received her PhD in ethnography and cultural anthropology from Babes Bolyai University (Romania) in 2009. Since 2008 she has been an assistant professor at Kodolányi János University College (Hungary). She teaches history, ethnography and cultural anthropology, and has published most notably The Family Book as a Source of Ethnographical Research (Szolnok, 2007), and Old People in Peasant Society (Székelyföld Journal, Csíkszereda, 2008) on the social history and ethnography of the elderly in the second half of the 20th century in two Transylvanian villages. Her research interests include the history of population exchange between Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1940s.

Mirjana Bobić is professor of Social Demography, Contemporary Family Challenges, Partnership and Childbearing, Contemporary Migrations, at the Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Sociology, University of Belgrade, Serbia. She received her PhD in Social Demography from University of Belgrade in 2003. Since 2003 she has been a professor at the University of Belgrade. She is the author of the books Brak ili/i partnerstvo. Demografsko socioloska studija [Marriage and Partnership. Demographic and sociological study] (Belgrade, 2003), Demografija i sociologija. Veza ili sinteza [Demography and Sociology. Relationship or Synthesis] (Belgrade, 2007); Postmoderne populacione studije. Demografija kao intersekcija [Postmodern Population Studies. Demography as an Intersection] (Belgrade, 2013). She has written several articles related to her master thesis on the history of Serbian Family based on the Ottoman Census x notes on contributors from 1455, as well as on contemporary families and marital patterns in the times of current social transformation.

Siegfried Gruber received his PhD in history from the University of Graz (Austria) in 2004. Since 1993 he has been engaged in numerous research projects at the University of Graz, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (Germany), and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock (Germany). His main research areas include household structures in Southeastern Europe, historical demography, and quantifying patriarchy.

Piotr Guzowski is Assistant Professor of Medieval and Economic History at the Institute of History and Political Sciences at University of Bialystok. He teaches medieval history, economic history and historical demography. His major publications are: Chłopi i pieniądze na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych [Peasants and Money in Poland at the Turn of the Middle Ages] (Crakow, 2008); “Changing Economy – Models of Peasant Budgets in 15th and 16th Century Poland”, Continuity and Change, 20 (2005), 9–26; “The Influence of Exports on Grain Production on Polish Royal Demesne Farms in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century”, Agricultural History Review, 59 (2011), 312–27; “Money Economy and Economic Growth: the Case of Medieval and Early Modern Poland”, Questiones Medii Aevi Novae, 18 (2013), 235–56; “Village Court Records and Peasant Credit Market in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-century Poland”, Continuity and Change, 29: 1 (2014), 115–41.

Violetta Hionidou is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interests are in Modern Greece, particularly in historical demography, history of the family, famines and oral history. She is the author of Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944, published by Cambridge University Press and co-winner of the 2007 Edmund Keely book award. The book has been translated and published in Greek.

Daniela Lombardi is professor of Early Modern History at the Department “Civiltà e forme del sapere” at the University of Pisa, Italy. She teaches Early Modern History and Gender History. Research interests include charity and poor relief and marriage and family history in Early Modern and Modern Europe. Her major notes on contributors xi publications are Povertà maschile, povertà femminile. L’ospedale dei Mendicanti nella Firenze dei Medici (Bologna, 1988); Matrimoni di antico regime (Bologna, 2001); Generazioni. Legami di parentela tra passato e presente (co-editor, Rome, 2006); Storia del matrimonio. Dal Medioevo a oggi (Bologna, 2008).

Beatrice Moring attained her PhD in History in 1994. She joined the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social history in 1996 and the University of Essex in 2001. In 2007 she was appointed associate professor of Social and Economic History at the Department for Economic and Political Studies, University of Helsinki. Her research interests are women, the household and family, inheritance customs and family strategies, social stratification poverty and survival on the topics of which she has published extensively in academic journals. In 2012 she published the edited volume Female Economic Strategies in the Modern World, (Pickering & Chatto, London) and at present she is finishing a monograph about the life and economic situation of widows (based on collaborative work with Richard Wall d. 2011) to be published under the title The Welfare of Widows in European Society (Boydell and Brewer).

Silvia Sovič received her PhD from the University of Essex in 2001 for a thesis on ‘Peasant Communities, Local Economies and Household Composition in 19th-Century Slovenia’. Her publications on family history include ‘European Family History: Moving Beyond Cultural Stereotypes of “East” and “West”’, Cultural and Social History, 5: 2 (2008), 141–64. From 2007 to 2011 she was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, where in 2010 she organised the conference on ‘The History of Families and Households: Comparative European Dimensions’ on which this volume, and a special issue of The History of the Family (2014), are based. She has also researched widely in the pedagogy of higher education, notably teaching and learning in an international context (at University of the Arts, London, and University College London).

Pat Thane MA (Oxford), PhD (LSE), FBA is Research Professor in Contemporary History, Kings College, London. Publications include: The Foundations of the Welfare State (2nd ed. New York, 1996); Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, co-edited with Gisela Bock (London, 1991); Old Age in English History. Past Experiences, Present Issues xii notes on contributors

(Oxford, 2000); The Long History of Old Age, edited book (London, 2005); Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century. What Difference did the Vote Make?, co-edited with Esther Breitenbach (London, 2010); Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth Century England, with Tanya Evans (Oxford, 2012).

Alice Velková is a researcher at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and teaches historical demography at Charles University in Prague. She is the author of the books Krutá vrchnost, ubozí poddaní. Proměny venkovské rodiny a společnosti v 18. a první polovině 19. století na příkladu západočeského panství Šťáhlavy [Cruel Landlords, Poor Subjects? Transformations of the Bohemian Rural Family and Society in the 18th and in the First Half of the 19th Centuries] (Prague, 2009), and Schuld und Strafe. Von Frauen begangene Morde in den böhmischen Ländern in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2012). Research interests include the social structure of historical rural society, inheritance practice, marriage strategies and crimi- nality of women 1750–1900.

Marta Verginella is Full Professor of General History of the 19th Century and Theory of History at the University of Ljubljana. She is the author of several books and articles: Il confine degli altri. La questione giuliana e la memoria slovena (Rome, 2008); La guerra di Bruno: l’ identità di confine di un antieroe triestino e sloveno (Rome, 2015); Ženska obrobja: vpis žensk v zgodovino Slovencev [Women’s Margins: the Inscription of Women in Slovene History] (Ljubljana, 2006); “Between Rejection and Affinity: Slovene-German Relations on the Periphery of the Habsburg Monarchy, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte, 40 (2012), 44–59.

Pier Paolo Viazzo received his PhD in social anthropology from University College London. He was a research associate at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and is now professor of social anthropology at the University of Turin. He is the author of Upland Communities: Environment, Population and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989) and has published extensively on European social, environmental and demographic history as well as on family and marriage patterns, with special reference to the Alps and other mountain areas and to the Mediterranean region. CHAPTER 1 The History of European Families: Old and New Directions

Silvia Sovič, Pat Thane and Pier Paolo Viazzo

1 Pendulum Swings in Family History

Half a century ago any scholar venturing into the still unfashionable topic of the history of family and kinship would have confidently asserted that since the 16th century Europe had witnessed a gradual rise of the nuclear family under the influence of social and economic transformations.1 Common to most sociological theories, rather passively accepted by historians, was a belief in the passage of the traditional extended family, where married sons lived under the same roof with their ageing parents, into the modern conjugal family. It was assumed that in the past the size and composition of domestic groups had been very much the same all over Europe, and that the differences which could be observed in the 20th century were to be explained by economic or cultural lags caused by differential rates of modernization. It was nevertheless confidently predicted that national and regional differences would soon dis- solve and uniformity would reign again, with European families responding to similar policies. It was also generally assumed that the moral and practical significance of kinship was bound to decline and eventually fade away. This powerful ‘master narrative’, whose origins can be traced to key 19th-century social theorists such as Henry Sumner Maine, Ferdinand Tönnies, Lewis Henry Morgan, Frédéric Le Play and Émile Durkheim, held sway in the accounts of

1 This first section draws on the text of the keynote lecture delivered by Pier Paolo Viazzo at the conference on The History of the Family and Households: Comparative European Dimensions held in London at the Institute of Historical Research, 24–26 June 2010 (see Section 2 below). A somewhat different version of that lecture has been published, under the title “Looking East. What Can Historical Studies of Eastern Countries Contribute to Current Debates on Commonalities and Divergences in Family, Kinship and Welfare Provision in Europe, Past and Present?”, in the Italian journal Popolazione e Storia, 9: 2 (2011), 119–136.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_002 2 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo leading family sociologists in the 1960s and, indeed, of quite a few historians still in the 1970s.2 This master narrative began to be challenged in the late 1960s, not only as part of a general retreat from the rigid evolutionary framework which had long prevailed in the social sciences, but also – and more decisively – because of the surprising evidence brought to light by the first forays into the past made by pioneers of historical demography like John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. In a classic work, Hajnal contended that between the 16th and the early 20th century an imaginary line running roughly from St Petersburg to Trieste had separated eastern Europe, where marriage had been early and almost universal, from north-western Europe, which had been characterized by a pattern whose distinctive marks were a late age at marriage for both men and women and a high proportion of people who never married at all.3 A few years later, spurred by Laslett and his associates at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure,4 other studies located in western Europe a second demographic fault line, running across from west to east. To the north of this line, households had been small and simple in structure, as they overwhelmingly consisted only of parents, some unmarried children and possibly servants, and marriages had been almost without exception ‘neolocal’, in that bride and groom set up their own household instead of staying with the husband’s family. To the south, by contrast, households appeared to have been larger and often ‘complex’ in structure, and it was common for newly-wed couples to start their married life in the parental home. These findings strongly suggested that new maps of family forms and marriage and kinship patterns in historic Europe had to be drawn. As Alan Macfarlane remarked in a comparatively little-known but highly revealing article, “we thus have three demographic regions, the eastern, the western (north) and the western (south)”.5 Macfarlane’s article inaugurated a series of influential attempts by historians and historical demographers to map the European family, all put forward in rapid succession in the early 1980s: Richard Smith’s suggestion that

2 See Steven Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective”, Population and Development Review, 35: 2 (2009), 249–273 (249–250); Naomi Tadmor, “Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run: Reflections on Continuity and Change”, Continuity and Change, 25: 1 (2010), 15–48 (17–18). 3 John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in Population in History, eds. David V. Glass and David E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–143. 4 Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972). 5 Alan Macfarlane, “Demographic Structures and Cultural Regions in Europe”, Cambridge Anthropology, 6: 1–2 (1980), 1–17 (5). The History of European Families 3 a ‘Mediterranean’ marriage and family pattern was detectable before the 16th century;6 Hajnal’s distinction between a north-west European ‘simple household’ system of household formation and a ‘joint household’ system ultimately to be found in both southern and eastern Europe;7 and, finally, Laslett’s partition of Europe into four macro-regions: ‘Western’, ‘West-central’, ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘Eastern’.8 It is important to notice that all these attempts shared at least two significant features. The first one was their emphasis on long-term continuity, as shown most explicitly by Smith’s argument that the characteristics of marriage and the family encountered by Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber in 15th-century Tuscany – early marriage for women and late marriage for men, and a high proportion of joint family households9 – were not to be seen as indicators of a transition from a uniformly medieval pattern spread all over Europe to a more varied early modern scenario, but rather as evidence of a contrast between southern and northern European patterns already visible in the Middle Ages. A second common feature was their emphasis on culture. As explicitly argued by Macfarlane,10 the demographic structures uncovered by historians appeared to be coterminous with broad cultural regions: “is it a pure coincidence”, he had wondered, “that Hajnal’s line seems to follow the Slav/non-Slav division [and that] the extended household region is that of dominant Roman culture?” This is a story which has been told over and over again in the past two decades. A less familiar aspect of the whole enterprise, but certainly an increasingly important issue, especially in the agenda set by Laslett, was to investigate marriage and family patterns in the various parts of Europe in order to shed light on how, and to what extent, domestic groups had taken care of vulnerable categories such as orphaned children, widows, the elderly, and other needy people. The discovery that in pre-industrial times England and more generally north-western Europe displayed a marked prevalence of neolocal simple- family households implied that living in nuclear families inevitably left many individuals without familial support, in a condition of actual or potential

6 Richard M. Smith, “The People of Tuscany and their Families in the Fifteenth Century: Medieval or Mediterranean?”, Journal of Family History, 6: 1 (1981), 107–128. 7 John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System”, Population and Development Review, 8: 3 (1982), 449–494. 8 Peter Laslett, “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1983), 513–563. 9 David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: une étude du catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris, 1978), 393–419, 469–511. 10 Macfarlane, “Demographic Structures and Cultural Regions in Europe”, 14. 4 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo hardship. Far from being self-sufficient (as some scholars had argued), the small and structurally simple households of England and north-western Europe were therefore vitally dependent on external support. But where did this support come from? The existence in England of a deep-rooted and highly developed state system of poor relief led Laslett tentatively to suggest, in the late 1970s, that external support had come essentially from what he liked to call “the collectivity”.11 The clearest formulation of this claim was provided by Laslett himself some ten years later in the form of his “nuclear-hardship hypothesis”, which maintains that in England and north-western Europe, where simple- family households were dominant, transfers from the collectivity were of the highest importance, whereas transfers from the kin were of little significance.12 Once again, it is relevant to observe that these and other similar claims were largely based on cultural grounds: according to Laslett, in England and north- western Europe moral obligations to reside with one’s kin in order to provide support when needed were either absent or weak. In fact, the nuclear-hardship hypothesis entailed a set of opposite predictions for those European regions where the role of kinship was believed to have been of much greater importance for primarily cultural reasons, namely southern Europe and most likely eastern Europe. Laslett’s hypothesis also proposed that the macro-regional family and marriage patterns tended to correspond – geographically as well as typologically – to contrasting systems of welfare provision: the role of kinship and family had presumably been far greater in the southern and eastern parts of Europe than in the north-western countries, where the long-term prevalence of intrinsically vulnerable nuclear families had been made possible by support provided by the state, or had perhaps urged the creation of a system of state or otherwise public welfare. This argument was encouraged by the geographical contrast habitually drawn by historians between a northern welfare system (best exemplified by England, and characterized by comprehensive, parish-based outdoor relief) and a southern or continental system, “supposedly haphazard and limited in its finances and scope, and based on the ‘indoor’ assistance provided in large hospitals”.13 In the 1980s and early 1990s a favourite way of testing this hypothesis was the investigation of the living arrangements of the elderly. The evidence yielded by research on southern Europe appeared

11 Peter Laslett, “Family and Collectivity”, Sociology and Social Research, 63: 3 (1979), 432–442. 12 Peter Laslett, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-Industrial Europe: A Consideration of the ‘Nuclear-Hardship’ Hypothesis”, Continuity and Change, 3: 2 (1988), 153–175. 13 Peregrine Horden, “Family History and Hospital History in the Middle Ages”, in Living in the City, ed. Eugenio Sonnino (Rome, 2004), 255–282 (260). The History of European Families 5 to provide convincing corroboration as it showed that in the areas where joint or stem family systems prevailed, the great majority of old people lived in large complex households: no one had been left alone, and virtually no widows or widowers lived in households without at least one of their children.14 Roughly in the same years similar findings were reported for eastern Europe.15 However, already in the 1980s both the major statements which were at the core of the “revisionist” approach and the corollaries which followed from these statements were subjected to a severe critique. It was no accident that the attack came mainly from anthropologists or historians influenced by anthropology, who denied the legitimacy of macro-regional approaches for several reasons. One major objection was that the alleged cultural regions were hardly homogeneous, and that supposedly distinctive traits were detectable on both sides of boundaries which looked far more blurred than originally envisaged by the proponents of the macro-regional theses. A lot of criticism was attracted, in particular, by the ‘Mediterranean family model’ outlined by Smith and Laslett,16 but an array of studies also affirmed – contra Laslett – the salience of alliances of blood and marriage in England and other north-western countries in early modern times and beyond.17 As early as 1991 such a hail of criticisms entitled David Kertzer to assert, in a much-quoted sentence, that “the whole enterprise of branding major areas of Europe as having a particular type of household system” was ultimately misleading.18 Instead of looking for broad regional uniformities, he argued, the task of family historians was to develop a theoretically more comprehensive and sophisticated approach where economic, demographic, ecological and cultural factors were all taken into account in order to properly address the unexpected degree of variabil- ity. This was tantamount to proclaiming the superiority of micro-approaches

14 E.g. David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984); Patrice Bourdelais, “Vieillir en famille dans la France des ménages complexes: l’exemple de Prayssans, 1836–1911”, Annales de Démographie Historique, 22 (1985), 21–38; Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, “Aging in a Never-Empty Nest: The Elasticity of the Stem Family”, in Aging and Generational Relations over the Life Course, ed. Tamara Hareven (Berlin and New York, 1996), 75–99. 15 Andrejs Plakans, “Stepping Down in Former Times: A Comparative Assessment of ‘Retirement’ in Traditional Europe”, in Age Structuring in Comparative Perspective, eds. David I. Kertzer and K. Warner Schaie (Hillsdale, N.J., 1989), 175–194. 16 Pier Paolo Viazzo, “What’s So Special about the Mediterranean? Thirty Years of Research on Household and Family in Italy”, Continuity and Change, 18: 1 (2003), 111–137 (114–117). 17 Tadmor, “Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run”, 19–28. 18 David I. Kertzer, “Household History and Sociological Theory”, Annual Review of Sociology, 17 (1991), 155–179 (156). 6 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo over macro-approaches, indeed their triumph. By the middle of the 1990s what had come to be known as the ‘Hajnal/Laslett model’ had been seriously ques- tioned, and a further blow was inflicted a few years later by historical studies of assistance and poor relief, strongly suggesting either that the contrast between a ‘northern’ and a ‘southern’ model of welfare provision did not exist, or that its salience had been greatly exaggerated.19 Thus it was that the ‘revisionist approach’, which had ousted the ‘master narrative’, was itself supplanted by what Tadmor calls a ‘neo-revisionist approach’.20 Neo-revisionist stances had already acquired a dominant position in the literature on households and families in southern Europe in the early 1990s, and a few years later similar views were clearly detectable in the literature on north- western Europe. Their progress has apparently been slower for eastern Europe, owing to persistent assumptions about the distinguishing features, the alleged antiquity and the basic homogeneity of marriage patterns and household formation systems east of the Hajnal line. In the past few years, however, articles on eastern Europe challenging the Hajnal/Laslett model from various angles have started to be published in significant numbers.21 These critical reassessments of the validity of Hajnal’s and Laslett’s hypotheses when applied to eastern Europe are testimony to the vitality of neo- revisionism. It would be wrong, however, to infer that macro-regional approaches reminiscent in more than one respect of the Hajnal/Laslett model have completely disappeared from the scene. Quite the contrary; over the past fifteen years or so they have been given new life by the ambitious attempts

19 Cf. Peregrine Horden, “Household Care and Informal Networks: Comparisons and Continuities from Antiquity to the Present”, in The Locus of Care. Families, Communities, Institutions, and the Provision of Welfare since Antiquity, eds. Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith (London, 1998), 21–67 (24–31). 20 Tadmor, “Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run”, 16. 21 See e.g. Silvia Sovič, “European Family History. Moving Beyond Stereotypes of ‘East’ and ‘West’ ”, Cultural and Social History, 5: 2 (2008), 141–164; Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Rethinking Eastern Europe: Household-Formation Patterns in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and European Family Systems”, Continuity and Change, 23: 3 (2008), 389–427. But see already Maria Todorova, ‘Myth-Making in European Family History: the Zadruga Revisited’, East European Politics and Society, 4: 1 (1990), pp. 30–76 (44), and eadem, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern; Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, D.C., 1993); Jasna Čapo Žmegač, “New Evidence and Old Theories: Multiple Family Households in Northern Croatia”, Continuity and Change, 11: 3 (1996), pp. 375–398. The History of European Families 7 to map past and present family systems made by geographers,22 political scientists,23 sociologists24 and, not least, historical demographers like David Reher.25 The case of Reher is especially interesting, since he had previously been one of the most vigorous neo-revisionist critics of the Mediterranean model.26 It came therefore as a surprise when, in 1998, he rekindled the debate by publishing an article where he argued that contrasts between macro-regions in Europe – and particularly between the northern and southern halves of western Europe – not only had existed in the past but persisted in the present, as demonstrated by the continuing, much greater strength of family ties in the Mediterranean countries. What is especially surprising in this article is of course that Reher abandons the usual path trodden by most specialists of the area, who had emphasized the regional and sub-regional diversity of southern Europe, and proposes again a stark north/south boundary separating two fundamentally homogeneous culture areas. For Reher, too, the care of the elderly provides a critical test. He has no doubt that in Mediterranean Europe the family was far more essential for the well-being of its more vulnerable members than in northern latitudes, and that the care of the elderly in particular fell almost exclusively on the family – as shown still today by the much higher proportion of old people living in institutions in northern Europe than in Italy, Spain and Portugal. It should be noticed, however, that Reher stresses that co-residence was not the only means of taking care of the elderly: alternative means were, he says, “the circulation of the elderly among the households of their offspring, or the spatial proximity between the homes of the elderly and those of their children”.27 Indeed, in view of Reher’s own conviction that in southern Europe, too, nuclear arrangements have been historically much more frequent than complex households,28

22 Virginie Mamadouh, “A Political-Cultural Map of Europe. Family Structures and the Origins of the Differences between National Political Cultures in the European Union”, GeoJournal, 47: 3 (1999), 477–496; Gilles Duranton, “Family Types and the Persistence of Regional Disparities in Europe”, Economic Geography, 85: 1 (2009), 23–47. 23 Gunnar Grendstad, “A Political Cultural Map of Europe. A Survey Approach”, GeoJournal, 47: 3 (1999), 463–475. 24 Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power. Family in the World, 1900–2000 (London, 2004). 25 David S. Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts”, Population and Development Review, 24: 2 (1998), 203–234. 26 David S. Reher, “Marriage Patterns in Spain, 1887–1930”, Journal of Family History 16: 1 (1991), 7–30. 27 Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe”, 209. 28 This is of course highly debatable in view of extensive evidence demonstrating that in central and northern Italy, but also in northern Iberia, regional and local systems of 8 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo it is plain that he regards these two latter ways of providing welfare to have been definitely more important than co-residence. It is interesting, in this connection, to note that several historians and sociologists believe that a visitor from southern Europe would have been struck by the weakness of kinship in pre-industrial or early industrial England, a weakness that showed itself in the household structure, which was overwhelmingly nuclear with only few, if any, extended families.29 Reher agrees wholeheart- edly that a visitor from southern Europe would have been struck. However, such a visitor would have been astonished not so much by the lack of joint or extended families as by the divergent ethics almost palpable in northern and southern Europe, and most evident in the markedly greater propensity of the English to invest the collectivity with the ultimate responsibility of taking care of the elderly and other needy people. As has been fittingly remarked, Reher’s model is therefore characterized by a “shift of the analytical focus primarily towards culture and values, as made evident by his emphasis on ‘ties’, whose geography is divorced from the geography of co-residential structures”.30 This is an important point to keep in mind when evaluating the implications of some recent historical analyses of the residential arrangements of the elderly in north-west Europe and in the United States,31 whose findings are far more damaging for the Hajnal/Laslett model, where co-residence is singled out as the crucial way to provide support to the elderly, than for Reher’s significantly different formulation. Although Reher’s arguments and his reliance on the contrast between ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ ties may easily be accused of favouring simplified comparisons and dichotomous contrapositions, they have proved hugely influential among sociologists and demographers, and increasingly also among historians: even those who remain critical are now conceding that they cannot avoid coming to grips with his theses. This shows, first of all, that in the past decades

stem or joint household formation were far from exceptional, as remarked by Viazzo, “What’s So Special about the Mediterranean?”, 123. The relevant point is, however, that in this respect Reher departs from Laslett’s assertions about family structures in southern Europe. 29 See especially Alan Macfarlane, The Culture of Capitalism (Oxford, 1987), 145–146, 151, and Marzio Barbagli, Maria Castiglioni and Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna, Fare famiglia in Italia. Un secolo di cambiamenti (Bologna, 2003), 43–44. 30 Ida Fazio, “ ‘Legami forti’ e storia della famiglia in Italia. Questioni di metodo, questioni di genere”, Storica, 11: 3 (2005), 7–39 (12). 31 Steven Ruggles, “The Decline of Intergenerational Coresidence in the United States, 1850 to 2000”, American Sociological Review, 72: 6 (2007), 964–989; idem, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System”. The History of European Families 9 there has been no simple progression away from the ‘master narrative’ and then from ‘revisionism’, ending in a clear victory of post-revisionism and in a parallel final demise of macro-regional approaches. Rather, the pendulum has been swinging and keeps swinging today, although in hardly linear or regular ways. If Reher’s arguments look at least partly similar to those advanced by the proponents of the ‘revisionist approach’, other scholars are encouraged by the results of recent wide-ranging investigations of living arrangements across the Atlantic to urge a return to the ‘master narrative’.32 Second, the sheer number of quotations in sociological and demographic journals that Reher’s 1998 article can boast demonstrates that he has been able to link very effectively the historical work on families and households to the literature on 20th-century welfare systems. This is a literature that cannot be overlooked by family historians, as it raises again the question of the legitimacy, or otherwise, of macro-regions as ‘objects’ and comparative settings as well as crucial issues about change and continuity in European family systems. The past fifteen years have seen a spate of wide-ranging cross-national research projects, mostly sociological, which have investigated the relationships between family, social security and the welfare state in contemporary Europe.33 In addition, a number of works adopting a variety of macro-regional approaches to study trends in living arrangements and the relationships between family and welfare, in Europe and elsewhere, have also been published.34 Although space inhibits any detailed analysis, it seems fair to state that by and large these studies agree that by the beginning of the 21st century there is little evidence of the process of convergence foretold by modernization theorists. Research has mainly focused (at least initially) on western Europe, and survey data on such classic variables as household structure, residential proximity and frequency of contacts clearly indicate, to quote the authors of the final report of the most influential of these projects, that “there are important differences among the ‘strong family countries’ in the South and the ‘weak family countries’ in the North”.35 More recent studies also covering eastern

32 See especially Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System”. 33 For a review of these studies, and an evaluation of their relevance to family history, see Pier Paolo Viazzo, “Family, Kinship and Welfare Provision in Europe, Past and Present: Commonalities and Divergences”, Continuity and Change, 25: 1 (2010), 137–159 (144–149). 34 See e.g. Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power, and also Tineke Fokkema and Aart C. Liefbroer, “Trends in Living Arrangements in Europe: Convergence or Divergence?”. Demographic Research, 19 (2008), 1351–1418. 35 Martin Kohli, Harald Künemund and Jörg Ludicke, “Family Structure, Proximity and Contact”, in Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe – First Results from SHARE, eds. Axel Börsch-Supan et al. (Mannheim, 2006), 164–170 (170). 10 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo

European countries, while revealing a rather mixed picture for central and eastern Europe, seem to confirm that cross-national and macro-regional differences are not just a figment of classificatory imagination.36 What is especially intriguing is that the maps which emerge from these investigations ultimately look not too different from the ones drawn for historic Europe by Laslett: contemporary European family systems appear to be separated from one another by boundaries which coincide to a remarkable extent with the ‘fault lines’ identified by the pioneers of historical demography.37 Reher’s contention that macro-regional contrasts not only existed in the past but persist in the present would seem to be vindicated. One may wonder, however, whether it is correct to explore family life, either in the present or in the past, by paying attention only to quantifiable socio-demographic evidence such as household size and composition, marriage patterns, residential proximity and – increasingly nowadays – the frequency of contacts and exchanges between relatives. There might be other perspectives from which households, families and kinship ties can be observed, and other evidence to be tapped. Reflecting on these issues is all the more necessary today as we are on the eve of a major revolution in terms of both data and methods. Steven Ruggles has recently argued that one of the weaknesses of historical studies of families and households has been their reliance “on small data sets laboriously gathered by individual scholars to describe particular communities”. However, the launching in the past few years of large-scale international collabora- tions is going to change soon, and profoundly, the scope and the methods of family history by providing scholars “with access to hundreds of millions of records” extracted from censuses or census-like sources, population registers and genealogies with the aim of offering (when possible) continuous information on historical life courses and, more generally, of “maximizing comparability across time and space”.38 It is worth noting that the criticisms already levelled in the 1970s against the Laslettian paradigm emphasized the rigidity of its typology, its tendency to privilege cross-sectional analysis of census data and to ignore the developmental cycles of domestic groups, but also its pro-

36 See e.g. Fokkema and Liefbroer, “Trends in Living Arrangements”, and Patrick Heady and Martin Kohli (eds.), Family, Kinship and State in Contemporary Europe. Perspectives on Theory and Policy (Frankfurt, 2010). 37 See especially Therborn, Between Sex and Power, 220–222, 297–306, and Karsten Hank, “Proximity and Contacts between Older Parents and Their Children: A European Comparison”, Journal of Marriage and Family, 69: 1 (2007), 157–173. 38 Steven Ruggles, “The Future of Historical Family Demography”, Annual Review of Sociology, 38 (2012), 423–441 (424–427). The History of European Families 11 clivity to focus almost exclusively on census data, which promised more solid, systematic and easily quantifiable evidence than other sources.39 There can be little doubt that the “avalanche of data”40 which will be produced in the coming years by the international projects in historical family demography which are currently on course, and the armoury of new methods that are now available for analysis, will allow family historians to overcome many of Laslett’s short- comings, since in many cases they will enable them to assess family choices at the individual level, and more generally to inject dynamics into their accounts. It is nevertheless remarkable that these projects are still pursuing Laslett’s goal – comparability across time and space41 – by resorting to data which will be far more abundant and will be dissected with the help of immensely more sophisticated statistical techniques. However these projects remain squarely on the quantitative side and will also tend, by their very nature, to concentrate on co-resident groups instead of going ‘beyond the household’ as advocated by the ‘neo-revisionist’ critics of Laslett. Before accepting Reher’s theses about the existence of historical boundaries between European macro-regions and their persistence, or Ruggles’ contention that the future of family history lies in the opportunities for sophisticated quantitative analysis opened by the huge data sets amassed by the new wave of international projects, it seems appropriate to assess what is still vital among the traditions and practices of research that have shaped family history over the past fifty years and what can be gained by taking untrodden paths or adopting vantage points that have been so far neglected. This is what the present book aims to do by presenting a set of studies which differ in scale, sources, methods and historical and geographical location.

2 The Present Volume

The considerations outlined above were behind the idea of holding an international conference in June 2010 at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, on the theme ‘The History of Families and Households: Comparative European Dimensions’. The conference attracted over forty speakers from nineteen countries. As its title indicates, this event tried to

39 Lutz K. Berkner, “The Use and Abuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family Structure”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5: 4 (1975), 721–738. 40 Ruggles, “The Future of Historical Family Demography”, 424. 41 Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, “Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16: 1 (1974), 73–109. 12 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo assess developments and the current state of affairs in the field of family history. A specific aim of the initiative was to locate south-east European family history – under-represented in comparison to other European regions – in wider historiographical debates, as well as to give local and younger scholars from the region opportunities to engage with a wider audience and encounter different methodological approaches. In that respect the conference was organised as a broader follow-up to the Regional Symposium on ‘Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in the Balkans’ held at the New Europe College in Bucharest in June 2006. Some of the more regional papers with specific focus on south-eastern Europe have been published in a special issue of The History of the Family.42 The papers presented here relate to the broader European debate on family history discussed above. Not all were presented at the 2010 conference, and some have evolved considerably since that event. In this volume we have focused on three major themes. Part 1 of the book, ‘Commonalties and Diversities’, consists of contributions, from different angles, to the ongoing debate on what has been the dominant focus of family history for several decades, regional differences across Europe. The first contribution explores issues surrounding family co-habitation and collaboration in northern Europe, with specific attention to widows and their relations with children. Beatrice Moring, in her chapter on ‘North European Families in the Past: Family Ties Revisited’, questions the theory proposed by David Reher in which he argued that people in southern Europe in the past relied to a much greater extent on strong family ties, while in northern Europe the state played a more prominent role in providing support for the care of the elderly. She highlights serious methodological problems with the analysis of household studies, and suggests that “the only way to reliably measure inter-generational co-residence is not to approach all families, but the representatives of the older generations”.43 Violetta Hionidou’s study ‘From Modernity to Tradition: Households on Kythera in the Early Nineteenth Century’ assesses, identifies and explains the changes of household pattern in the case of the Greek island of Kythera, situated near the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Her analysis for the 18th century is based on the census-type document created by the Venetian administration, and for the 19th century, census manuscripts, which were registered during the period of British protection of the island. Contrary to expectations, Hionidou observes that Kythera represents a community that turned from ‘modern’ to ‘traditional’, i.e. “from a predominance of nuclear households to a

42 The History of the Family, Special Issue on South-Eastern Europe, eds. Silvia Sovič, Pat Thane and Pier Paolo Viazzo, 19: 2 (2014), pp. 141–234. 43 Below, p. 24. The History of European Families 13 significant presence of complex households” within a century and a half.44 The explanation for this is not found in the effects of industrialization or urbanization but in extensive migration from the island and the adaptability of existing practices such as the age of marriage, the household structure and inheritance practices. She concludes with the pithy observation that “the culture prescribes what economy dictates”.45 The two other chapters in this part both focus on Serbia. In ‘The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities in the Branković Region of Serbia in 1455’ Mirjana Bobić discusses problems relating to a specific source, the defter, the first detailed Ottoman poll tax of Serbian territory. She begins with a detailed history of the Branković region (in present-day Kosovo and Serbia) at the time, paying special attention to the Ottoman administration of the region. Bobić seeks to reconstruct families and households from this document, discusses the methodological issues involved, and warns that the results presented in this study are preliminary and speculative. A very different approach is taken by Siegfried Gruber. In ‘Variation Within: Regional Differences in Household Structures in Mid-Nineteenth Century Rural Serbia’, Gruber conducts an in-depth analysis of spatial variation across rural Serbia. Taking published results of the population censuses of 1866 in Serbia, and using the average number of married couples per household as a measure of the proportion of multiple family households, Gruber concludes that, notwithstanding the traditional picture for the region, “there was quite a high degree of variation within Serbia, and no uniform pattern”.46 A common feature of these two contributions is the degree of attention that both pay to the classification scheme of Laslett, discussed above. Bobić’s study is based on research completed twenty years ago; it is included in this volume because her work, as well as being unknown to Anglophones, gives us insights into a still neglected area – family historians are still insufficiently engaged with the history of the Ottoman system in the region – and raises methodological issues that have broader relevance. Both she and Gruber, while fully recog- nising that the Laslettian scheme is outdated and in need of replacement, take the line that until such a replacement is found and accepted, there is still some value in the adoption of conventions that allow for systematic comparison, even if those conventions are imperfect. Part 2 of the book considers themes that emerged as a central part of the 2010 conference, ‘Church, State and Family’. Daniela Lombardi’s ‘Women’s

44 Below, p. 68. 45 Below, p. 68. 46 Below, p. 114. 14 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo

Reputation and Marriage Disputes in Protestant and Catholic Europe, 1500– 1800’ takes a comparative European approach to investigate religious influences on marriage and family life. She argues that during the period under consideration marriage was transformed from a private act to a public ceremony which had many implications, especially for women. The expression and meaning of the word fama is discussed from the communal as well as the legal perspective, and Lombardi emphasises that “community relations and judiciary procedure were closely intertwined”, pointing out that “restoring peace and order to the community was the main goal for both the neighbourhood and the judicial authorities”.47 The focal point of this study is conflict during the phase of formation of the couple, as both Protestants and Catholic authorities imposed a considerable degree of interference during this process. Lombardi argues that medieval canon law offered concrete protection for seduced and abandoned women, and she exposes the ways in which Protestant and Catholic authorities attempted to reduce the force of these measures. The next chapter makes a substantial contribution to the growing literature on the history of godparenthood and baptism in Europe. In ‘The Reformation, the Council of Trent and the Divergence of Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood across Europe: a Long-run Analysis’ Guido Alfani investigates the notion of spiritual kinship before and after the Reformation. He reflects on transformations in the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches and analyses the implication of divergence across the European continent, “concentrat- ing on how godparenthood and spiritual kinship were used to pursue aims very different from those prescribed by religious teaching”.48 Alfani makes use of a variety of documents and seeks to reconstruct the meaning given to spiritual kinship and godparenthood by different religious authorities through studying conciliar decrees and discussions, diocesan statutes, theological treatises and other sources. Furthermore, the author discusses a survey he conducted on northern Italy to show the versatility of godparenthood choices. On the basis of its outcome Alfani proposes a typology of godparenting models according to the number and gender of godparents chosen, that can be applicable across Europe. Finally he assesses interactions between households, godparenthood and spiritual ties, stressing the importance of strategies adopted by the couple. Judit Ambrus addresses methodological issues by tracing household dynamics from the ‘under-researched’ family books compiled by the Hungarian Calvinist Church in Transylvania to shed more light on the complex picture of family life in south-eastern Europe. In ‘Household Structure in the Nineteenth

47 Below, p. 121. 48 Below, p. 142. The History of European Families 15

Century in a Transylvanian Village’ she questions the applicability of the classification system proposed by Laslett and his research group to this specific ecclesiastical source, and explores the wider social implications of the relationships between family, household and community. The chapter combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, stressing the importance of using a variety of sources as well as of disciplines in order to avoid simplification and misrepresentation of social realities in the past. Part 3 considers ‘Family Strategies’, and specifically the ways in which transmission of headship and inheritance could be handled. In ‘Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants at the Turn of the Middle Ages’ Piotr Guzowski outlines the situation of elderly people and their economic activity in a peasant community in south-eastern Poland. He illustrates the extent to which retirement arrangements were present among the older people of the community, examining different strategies in passing on their possessions and landholdings, and discussing their roles in a rural setting. Guzowski utilises a village court roll for the period between 1419 and 1609 which not only contains information about land and purchases but also records rents, wills, loans and pledges, criminal and civil cases, and conflicts between neighbours. The discussion includes an assessment of the roles played by women in these sources, a welcome addition given the low profile usually accorded to them in the historiography. The roles played by women is also a central theme of the next contribution, which offers valuable insight into inheritance practices and strategies in the south-eastern hinterland of the once important Habsburg port town of Trieste. In ‘Succession Choices of Small Farmers and Women Farmers’ Wills in the Area around Trieste in the Nineteenth Century’ Marta Verginella investigates men’s and women’s wills in the area of Breg, populated by Slovenian peasants, and highlights the women’s market activities. The proximity to Trieste enabled women to earn additional cash income to supplement what they might have possessed through dowry or inheritance. Verginella points out not only that baking and selling bread became an important economic activity for many women, but also that some women acted as creditors as well as debtors, thus becoming an alternative to village loan sharks. This situation changed at the beginning of the 20th century with the rise of farmers’ loan banks on one hand and, on the other, village authorities promoting passive and submissive roles for women. The decline of the economic power of women was exacerbated by the foundation by the clergy of the Society of Mary in 1904. Their mission was to create a new family role for women in Breg, following the example of Mary, as housewives who looked after their children but were also ‘allowed’ to do fieldwork. Verginella argues that clergy supported ‘spiritual wills’, especially for women without money and dowry, as in “the eyes of God they were freed 16 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo from chains of worldly possessions, but only at the price of a new subservience to men”.49 The final chapter addresses inheritance law, and particularly the position of elderly men, in the rural domain of Šťáhlavy, situated in Western Bohemia. In ‘Inheritance Practice and the Elderly in Central Europe: the Example of Western Bohemia, 1700–1850’ Alice Velková examines the inheritance law which was passed in 1787 and had profound implications for landowners and the retirement strategies they adopted. Until then the successor to the farm appeared automatically to be the youngest son. In practice this meant that fathers only rarely lived long enough to see the transfer of their holdings to an adult heir, and as a consequence they were forced to remain in charge of the farm for longer than they would have liked. After the 1787 reform it was the oldest son who inherited the property unless the father decided otherwise. Velková suggests that this act “enabled fathers to enjoy much more freedom in their decision on their specific family situations, since they were no longer obliged to wait for their youngest son’s coming of age”.50 The study also analyses retirement strategies among different social categories of land owner. The techniques of family reconstitution were applied to data obtained from population registers, registers of real property, cadastres and ‘Urbaries’ or tax-registers, to identify changes in family strategies associated with property transfers and old-age retirement agreements.

3 Family History: The Future?

What future trajectories for family history are suggested by these essays? Most obviously they call in question rigid typologies of regional differences in family structures within Europe. However, they do not deny the possible existence of certain regional variations which need to be explored in perhaps a more nuanced fashion than in the past. The essays – particularly Beatrice Moring’s contribution – also suggest the limitations of quantitative family reconstitution techniques for informing us about past relationships within families and households, as distinct from structures. This has influenced understandings of the lives of older people and their relationships with younger relatives, which several of the essays discuss. As Moring points out, techniques which count only biological kin as household members can seriously overstate the ‘aloneness’ of individuals who shared a

49 Below, p. 230. 50 Below, p. 254. The History of European Families 17 household not with kin but with friends or lodgers, as many older women did in particular. We should remember that in most times and places for which we have data women have outlived men. Old age was, and is, predominantly a female condition. Some older people were alone in the past, as now. But close ‘kin-like’ relationships might be formed between people who shared a home or supported one another in other ways without being related by biology or marriage. Alfani’s chapter in the volume reveals the importance of godparent relationships, one form of many such relationships concerning all age-groups that remain to be explored. Similarly, the belief that kin support one another only or mainly when co- resident in households and that, for example, older people who did not live with close relatives were neglected by them and therefore required support from collective welfare systems overlooks relationships which are revealed when quantitative is combined with qualitative data such as memoirs, diaries and local social surveys and commentaries. For example, there is strong evidence that in medieval and early modern times, and indeed up to the present, in England older people often lived alone for as long as they were fit and active enough to do so, not because they were neglected by their relatives, but because they preferred to keep their independence for as long as possible, often moving to live with children or other relatives only when decrepitude finally got the better of them. Or, as quantitative data can inform us, they lived alone because they had no children in times of relatively low marriage rates and high death rates at younger ages i.e. most historical times before the mid-20th century. Or younger relatives might have moved far away in search of work, as they have long done. In the past when communications were poor and not everyone was literate, it was much harder for the generations to keep in contact over even quite short distances than in these days of modern communications technol- ogy and fast transport. Though the ways in which younger migrants did keep in contact with parents, and send remittances, even over such a distance as from Australia to Britain in the 19th century, merits research. Also, commonly, children or other relatives might live close to older people, the relationship hidden in the censuses because, for example, a daughter had changed her name on marriage. There is strong evidence for England of support exchanged between generations living nearby: daughters providing food, performing housework, sons carrying out repairs and other services for ageing parents, grandparents caring for nearby grandchildren or giving financial support to children and grandchildren, as they still do. Sometimes younger people did not support their ageing parents because they were simply too poor and needed support themselves from the older generation. Support was commonly exchanged both ways between the generations, not just from younger to older. 18 Sovič, Thane and Viazzo

Older people living in English welfare institutions, at least since the 19th century when we have data, were and are most likely to have no close surviving relatives or to be so infirm that they require specialist care beyond the capacity of the family, rather than to be victims of family neglect.51 As Moring argues, family care for older people has always been important wherever it has been researched in northern Europe. We should be wary also of taking for granted that when the generations did share a household all household members were affectionately ‘cared for’. There is strong evidence from modern Japan of the extent of physical abuse of older people co-residing with younger relatives, and no reason to believe that this is a phenomenon only of Japan or of modern times.52 Indeed folktales in medieval Europe warned older people of the danger of neglect if they shared a home with their children.53 Similarly, quantitative sources tell us nothing about other severe tensions among co-residing kin: the extent of domestic violence – or ‘wife-beating’ as it was once known – or of physical or sexual abuse of children, though such cruelty also – tragically widespread as it is today – is unlikely to be a modern invention. Such events are also often hidden in qualitative sources since they were sources of shame, not readily admitted even in private diaries. Also hidden in both quantitative and qualitative data can be other family secrets regarded as shameful within the culture, such as unmarried motherhood.54 Official sources can provide the numbers of illegitimate children but cannot always tell what happened to them, what were their subsequent family situations, if they survived. In England it was only in the mid-20th century, when social researchers began to research family relationships, studying sam- ples from local communities, that it was realized that, while some children went to institutions, or were adopted, lived alone with their mothers or with cohabiting parents, as many as one-third of unmarried mothers and their children lived with the mother’s parents. Sometimes the parents brought up the child as their own, keeping the real relationship secret even from the child,

51 Susannah Ottoway, The Decline of Life. Old Age in Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 2004), 141–172; Pat Thane, Old Age in English History. Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000), 119–146, 287–307, 407–435. 52 Mayumi Hayashi, “The Care of Older People in Japan: Myths and Realities of Family ‘Care’ ”, Policy paper, www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-121.html (accessed 15 May 2014). 53 Shulamith Shahar, Growing Old in the Middle Ages (London, 1997), 94; Thane, Old Age, 73–74. 54 Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets. Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (London, 2013). The History of European Families 19 who might suffer a severe shock if it was revealed. In times when families were large and births spread over many years such subterfuge was possible, though neighbours were rarely deceived. Such relationships were hidden in the English census which recorded only the relationship of each household member to the household head (as ‘daughter’, ‘grandson’) and not to each other, so the mother/child relationship was obscured in the quantitative source as it was sometimes hidden from the child.55 Again, it is unlikely that such households existed only in England or only in the recent past. Such reflections are finding lively echoes in emerging research in other parts of Europe and beyond. A recent special issue of The History and the Family explores the themes of violence, family and sexuality in early modern Europe.56 Patrinus, an international and interdisciplinary research group of around a hundred scholars, established in 2006, focuses on the cultural and social history of baptism and godparenthood.57 In 2013, the fourth of the series of activities of the ‘Balkan Family History Network’, initiated by the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History in Bucharest, took as its theme Paupers in the Midst of Others: Orphans and Abandoned Children in Europe (17th to 20th Centuries).58 The steady broadening of the horizons of family history are undoubtedly making their mark. We have learned much about the history of the family in recent decades, these essays suggest how many fascinating and important facets of family life remain to be explored. The pendulum will go on swinging.

55 Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth Century England (Oxford, 2012). 56 See The History of the Family, Special Issue: Domestic Disturbances, Patriarchal Values: Violence, Family and Sexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Marianna Muravyeva, 18: 3 (2013), pp. 261–277. 57 Publications include: Guido Alfani and Philippe Castagnetti eds., Baptiser. Pratique sacramentelle, pratique sociale (XVIe–XXe siècles) (St-Etienne, 2009); and Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon (eds.), Spiritual Kinship in Europe, 1500–1900 (London, 2012). 58 Publication is in preparation.

part 1 Commonalities and Diversities

⸪

CHAPTER 2 North European Families in the Past: Family Ties Revisited

Beatrice Moring

1 Introduction

In his article in Population and Development Review (1998), David Reher put forward a theory that in the past and today, there were and are considerable differences in family behaviour between northern and southern Europe. Because of strong family ties in the south people relied on their family members, while in the north the state provided the care when people were no longer able to work for their living.1 The role of poor relief and the absence of family care has also been a central theme in the Rowntree model of life cycle poverty and that of the ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’ of Laslett. While the Reher theory contains many interesting and valuable observations, particularly about present- day society, studies of the elderly in Britain in the past have revealed that a disregard of the family as a provider of care is highly questionable. Robin and Rose have shown close cooperation between the generations, particularly in the case of mothers and daughters.2 Wall has demonstrated that survival in widowhood was built on multiple strategies; poor relief would not have been sufficient. Family assistance, work and poor relief in combination formed the building-blocks for existence in old age and widowhood.3 Anderson and Cohen have drawn attention to close-knit family networks in industrial areas

1 David S. Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe; Persistent Contrasts”, Population Development Review, 24: 2 (1998), 203–234. 2 J. Robin, “Family Care of the Elderly in a Nineteenth Century Devonshire Parish”, Ageing and Society, 4 (1984), 505–516 (508–511); Sonya Rose, “The Varying Household Arrangements of the Elderly in Three English Villages: Nottinghamshire 1851–1881’, Continuity and Change 3: 1 (1988), 101–122 (113–115); Pat Thane, “Intergenerational Support in Families in Modern Britain”, in Gender Inequalities, Households and the Production of Well-Being in Modern Europe, eds. Tindara Addabo, Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga, Chrisina Borderias and Alastair Owens (London, 2010), 109–122. 3 Richard Wall, “Relationships Between Generations in British Families Past and Present”, in, Families and Households, Divisions and Change, eds. Catherine Marsh and Sarah Aber (London, 1992) 63–85; idem, “The Residence Patterns of Elderly English Women in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_003 24 Moring of Lancashire and Ireland.4 Ruggles has more recently presented national level data revealing high rates of co-residence between the elderly and their children in 19th-century England and Scandinavia,5 higher than those presented by Reher. One might ask what the reasons are for the assumptions of lack of inter- generational co-operation in northern Europe of the past. These can first and foremost be divided into the nature of registration, particularly census registration, the methods of household classification and the interpretation of the terms household and family. In addition there are the questions raised by problematic analysis of defective methodologies.

2 Problems, Definitions, Methodologies

A serious problem with methodologies used in household studies is the prevalence of the Laslett-Hammel household classification scheme. Based on calculation using the scheme, sweeping statements have been made, not only about inter-generational co-residence in north-west Europe, but also about preferences for particular types of behaviour.6 Steve Ruggles has repeatedly raised the problem that the method does not take into account the consequences of the demographic situation. In areas with high age at marriage, whatever the preference, the children were unable to co-reside with their dead parents. In situations of increasing survival of the offspring it would not be possible for parents to reside with all their living children in old age. Therefore the only way to reliably measure inter-generational co-residence is not to approach all families, but the representatives of the older generation.7

Comparative Perspective’, in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, eds. Lynn Botellho and Pat Thane (London, 2001), 139–165. 4 Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971); Marilyn Cohen, “Survival Strategies in Female-Headed Households, Linen Workers in Tullyish, County Down 1901”, Journal of Family History, 17 (1992) 303–318. 5 Steve Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective”, Population Development Review, 35: 2 (2009), 249–273 (265, 269). 6 Peter Laslett, “Family, Kinship and Collectivity as Systems of Support in Pre-industrial Europe: a Consideration of the ‘Nuclear-hardship’ Hypothesis”, Continuity and Change, 3: 2 (1988), 153–175. 7 Steve Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth Century England and America (Madison, Wi., 1987), 75–88; idem, “Multigenerational Families in 19th Century America”, Continuity and Change, 18: 1 (2003), 137–165 (140–143). North European Families in the Past 25

When embarking on household studies, decisions also have to be made about how the family or household is understood. The Laslett-Hammel scheme8 only registered biological relationships. As a result of such an analysis the share of persons living alone would be seriously inflated. The same problem can sometimes be found in urban censuses that used biology or economy as criteria for household boundaries. In urban areas many householders sub- mitted schedules that included lodgers and the census bureau divided up the household, defining each lodger as living in a household of their own unless they were related to each other thereby enhancing the proportion of single person households.9 Oral history records have shown that such an attitude provides a false image. In actual fact unrelated lodgers could reside in re- constituted family-like structures sharing not only sleeping quarters and beds but also food and services.10 It is therefore of some importance to assess the household definitions of the data collection; whether the definition was joint residence, joint economy or the sharing of meals. Where a joint economy was used as the criterion, examples have been found from rural Nordic datasets showing that old mothers who held a retirement contract were registered as living in separate households. There have even been cases where taxation authorities separated adult children with earnings from an outside employer into single person households.11 This paper will focus on widows and their co-residence systems. We will avoid the problems pointed out by Ruggles by approaching the issue from the older generation. We will analyse a set of households of widows in detail in a number of 19th-century local communities. We will analyse co-residence patterns, age and availability of children, gender issues, the socio-economic position of the families and geographic locality. When looking at the households we want to determine if there are any indications not only of the north-south but also the east-west patterns that has coloured a lot of thinking. The localities include a community from north-west Russia in the east and progress over Finland to communities in Norway and Britain in the west, from communities

8 Peter Laslett, “Introduction: the History of the Family”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), 28–32. 9 The Census of Helsinki 1900, Original sheets, the National Archive, Helsinki. 10 Beatrice Moring, “Widows, Children and Assistance from Society in Urban Northern Europe 1890–1910”, The Family History Quarterly, 1 (2008), 105–117 (112–113). 11 Beatrice Moring, Skärgårdsbor. Familj, hushåll och demografi i filändsk kustbygd 1635–1920 [Household, Family and Demography in Finnish Coastal Societies from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century] (Helsinki, 1994). 26 Moring on the northern Baltic, Sweden and Finland to the southern Baltic, north Germany. Both rural and urban datasets are included. The data has been extracted from censuses and census type records from the period 1800–1900. The questions that are going to be raised in this presentation are: How did the composition of widows’ households reflect the issue of co-residence between generations? To what extent can we see and effect of engagement in agrarian or non-agrarian pursuits? What is the effect of demography on a study of micro level cohorts? What kind of household arrangements did the widows embark upon in urban areas that were different from those in a rural environment? Did widows rely more on sons than on daughters? Are there any indications of an east-west effect? Was the situation in Northern Europe really that different from that in the South? One of the hypotheses that will be tested is that co-habitation patterns should not be assumed to have their background primarily in geographic location. Rather one should look at the economic capacity of families to collaborate or assist one another. Siding with Ruggles, we expect that where landholding farmers had the capacity, space and economy, making family collaboration possible, other groups were not in the same position. Where a farm or a business needed the young while providing for the old, both parties could profit from the arrangement. Families with no land or capital were in a different position. Therefore if there are many landholding farmers we expect higher levels of co- residence than in localities with high levels of landless workers. If however the local economy provided earning opportunities, alternative systems could be set up. We expect to find that in rural families without land or property, and in urban families, depending on wage labour, higher levels of co-residence with daughters can be detected. On the other hand if land, property or a business was the basis of existence we envisage higher levels of co-residence with sons.

3 Household Structure: Co-residence, Married or Unmarried Children

To answer the question of co-residence, information about the households of widows from 10 localities in the 19th century from Britain, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Russia has been collected. The households have been located in tax registers, communion books and censuses with detailed information about household composition. The aim has been to gather information about the household arrangements of widows; did they predominantly live with their children and or kin, or did they live alone? Efforts have also been North European Families in the Past 27

TABLE 2.1 Residence patterns of widows in Northern European localities, percentages

Year, locality Alone With Child Child Kin Non Widow Nr wid. child Married Unmarried relative head

1. Britain 1851 0 60 27 33 15 24 60 33 (100%) 2. Britain 1851 3 79 25.5 53 5.5 12 83 90 (100%) 3. Germany 1867 8 81 41 40 4 7 53 157 (100%) 4. Norway 1801 1 68 36 32 10 21 26 94 (100%) 5. Finland 1800 15 74 41 33 6.5 5 60 107 (100%) 6. Finland 1809 10 86 60 26 1 2 42 88 (100%) 7. Finland 1809 4 90 59 31 0 4 37 49 (100%) 8. Finland 1859 10 89 35 54 0 0 68 48 (100%) 9. Finland 1890 10 87 48 39 1 1 51 89 (100%) 10. Sweden 19c 8 73 58 15 0 19 37 185 (100%) 11. Finland 1851 4 84 44 40 11 1 74 231 (100%) 12. Fin/Rus 1835 4 81 39 42 5 10 68 126 (100%) 13. Finland 1876 12 85 41 44 3 1 43 282 (100%)

1. Grasmere and Langdale UK (north) 1851; 2. Berkhamsted UK (south east) 1851; 3. Mecklenburg, Germany (north) 1867; 4. Ullensaker, Norway (south east) 1801; 5. Kalanti, Finland (west) 1800; 6. Korpo-Houtskar, Finland (south west) 1809; 7. Kumlinge, Finland (south west) 1809; 8. Houtskar, Finland (south west) 1859; 9. Houtskar, Finland (south west) 1890; 10. Sundsvall district, Sweden (north) 1880s; 11. Virolahti, Finland (east) 1851; 12. Kitela, Russian Karelia (easten Finnish border) 1835; 13. Virolahti, Finland (east) 1876. Sources: Censuses and census type records

made to find potential effects of social and economic position on co-residence patterns. Instead of using the Laslett-Hammel classification scheme the widows have been divided into groups depending on whether they lived with their married or unmarried children, with relatives, with strangers or on their own. Information about age and occupation has also been recorded. When we study the household composition of these widows we find that the overwhelmingly dominant co-residence partner was a child. Depending on time and place between 70% and 90% of the widows shared household with a son or daughter or several sons and daughters. The proportions living with a married child varied between 27% and 60%. It does not seem, however, that there are any clear east-west or north-south gradients in this category. While it seems that a higher proportion of widows in Finland lived with married 28 Moring children than in Britain, it is interesting to notice that the proportion living with married offspring was no higher in Kitela in western Russia than for example in Mecklenburg, northern Germany (see Table 2.1). Co-residence levels of similar magnitude, based on national level census data for a number of Northern European countries, have been presented by Ruggles in a comparative analysis of inter-generational co-habitation.12 Whether or not children would be available would of course be affected by age at marriage, fertility and mortality. Studies of 18th-century Sweden have revealed that while women in their 60s tended to live with offspring and less than 10% lived alone, 50% of the children to which these women had given birth were no longer alive at this point in time.13 The loss of children in the past did not hit all families identically; some couples were childless from the start while others became childless over time. In some cases mobility affected the availability of kin.14 A large proportion of the datasets used for this study do not include a family reconstitution element, which makes it impossible to tell if the widows had children elsewhere in the community or further away. However, where it has been possible to follow this line of thought, it transpired that the widows of farmers, who did not reside with children, did not have any children living in the parish. The widows living with kin only were either young childless widows returning to the parental home or old widows without children living with siblings or nephews and nieces. Living alone seems to have been relatively rare. A comparison with some southern European communities indicates, if anything, similar levels of co-residence. In 1881 58% of the widows over 50 in the community of Casaleccio in Italy, lived in the household of one of their children, 13% lived with other relatives and 13% with non-relatives.15 In 1880s Majorca 40% of widows over 60 lived with married children while 21% shared

12 Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System”, 265–266. 13 David Gaunt, “Household Typology: Problems-Methods-Results’, in Chance and Change, eds. Sune Åkerman, Hans-Christian Johansen and David Gaunt (Odense, 1978), 69–83 (76–79). 14 Yrjö Kaukiainen, Social Structure and Demographic Development in a Southern Finnish Parish, Lohja, 1810–50 (Helsinki, 1979), 27; Richard Wall, “Economic Collaboration of Family Members Within and Beyond Households in English Society 1600–2000”, Continuity and Change, 23: 1 (2010), 83–108 (95–96); David S. Reher, Perspectives on the Family in Spain Past and Present (Oxford, 1997), pp. 250–252. 15 David Kertzer and N. Karweit, “The Impact of Widowhood in Nineteenth Century Italy”, in Aging in the Past, eds. David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (Berkeley, Ca., 1995), 239–240. North European Families in the Past 29 a household with a single child.16 A study by Reher himself has shown co- residence levels of less than 10% in 19th-century Spain, although the northern parts of the country revealed 30–40% extended families in the previous century.17 Similar differences, with low levels of co-residence in the south and higher in the north, have been presented for Italy by Da Molin18 and Viazzo and Albera.19 One would feel inclined to conclude that the evidence so far does not support the idea of a less family-orientated Northern Europe and an integrated south. It would seem that drawing conclusions about patterns for such large geographic regions would be slightly precarious. We will progress to analyse individual factors that might promote or make difficult maintaining systems for family collaboration.

4 Age, Widowhood and Co-residence

The question about co-residence with married or unmarried children is naturally linked to the age of the widow, as has been discussed by Wall in 2002. He demonstrated that of a cohort of widows in England and Wales in 1891, 29% of those over 65 lived with married children, but only 13% of those aged between 40 and 64. However, 64% of the younger widows lived with an unmarried child but only 31% of those over 65.20 This progression through the life course then creates a biological framework that affects all studies of co-residence, with little or no links to preference by the individuals concerned; it only reflects what is biologically possible. To determine the effect of the age distribution of the widows included in this study, the ages have been tabulated and will be analysed. The widows from the Sundsvall district in northern Sweden have not been tabulated as all the

16 Antonia Gomila Grau, “Residence Patterns of Aged Widows in Three Mediterranean Communities and the Organisation of Care”, The History of the Family, 7 (2002) 157–173 (164). 17 Reher, Perspectives on the Family in Spain, 33. 18 Giovanna Da Molin, “Family Forms and Domestic Service in Southern Italy from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Family History, 15: 4 (1990), 503–528 (508). 19 Paolo Viazzo and Dionigi Albera, “The Peasant Family in Northern Italy 1750–1930”, Journal of Family History, 15: 4 (1990), 461–482 (466–467). 20 Richard Wall, “Elderly Widows and Widowers and their Co-residence in Late 19th and Early 20th Century England and Wales”, The History of the Family, 7: 2 (2002), 139–155 (143). 30 Moring widows were in their 50s or 60s which of course partly explains the high co- residence rates with married rather than unmarried children. It is fairly interesting to notice that considerable variation in age distribution among the widows can be observed. The highest proportion of widows over the age of 60 can be found in Mecklenburg in northern Germany and Kalanti on the western Finnish mainland. Both parishes were not only rural but also orientated toward agrarian activity. Houtskar on the south west coast of Finland shows certain similarities with these areas. The age distribution is also similar to that on the Finnish national level.21 On the other hand Berkhamsted in south-east England and Grasmere in the Lake District had a more even spread of widows over the age categories. The most surprising age distribution is however to be found in the parish of Kitela on the north west Russian border. Here only 33% of the widows were over 60 years old. The reason for the unexpected pattern is likely to be the fairly low age at first marriage in the parish, with a tendency to cluster around the age of 20 rather than 25, with the opportunity to become widowed at an earlier age, and with as much as 4% of the widows being under the age of 30 (Table 2.2). Considering the relatively high age at first marriage in Britain it is interesting to note the high proportions of young widows, exceeding both Kitela with early age at marriage and the coastal parish of Replot with considerable risks of male drowning. Naturally the sizes of the cohorts might slightly distort the results because of the impact of a few cases on the outcome. I would however be inclined to suggest that the explanations could be linked to the ‘urban traits’ of rural English society in comparison with other parts of Europe. The conclusions that can be drawn about opportunities for co-residence with married or unmarried children are however that the age of the widows con- tributes to explain the relatively high co-residence rates with married children in Finland and Germany. The high proportion of young widows in Kitela also explains the relatively high headship rates and the high rates of co-residence with unmarried children.

5 Farm, Workshop or Other Property: Socio-Economic Distribution and Opportunities

In a paper of 2010 Moring demonstrated that a variation can be found in the co-residence patterns between different socio-economic groups. In rural

21 SVT, kolmas vuosikerta, (Helsinki, 1905), 30; FOS VI, 41, Finlands befolkningsstatistik 1750– 1890, (Helsingfors, 1909). North European Families in the Past 31

TABLE 2.2 Age distribution of widows in local communities, percentages

Age Kalanti Kitela Houtskar Replot Mecklenburg Berkhamsted Grasmere Finland 1835 Finland Finland Germany Britain Britain 1800 1890 1890 1867 1851 1851

20–29 0.9 4 1 1.1 0 2.2 0 30–39 4 8 6 12.3 4.5 13.4 18 20–40 5 12 7 13.4 4.5 15.6 18 40–49 12 23 16 17.9 12.3 17.9 9 50–59 23 38 20 23.5 25.3 23.5 24 60–69 44 24 22.5 22.4 36.3 20.2 24 70–79 16 8 22.5 17.9 18.8 16.8 21 80+ 0.9 0.8 9 4.5 2.5 5.6 3 60+ 60.9 32.8 54 44.6 57.6 42.6 48 Nr (100%) 107 126 80 89 157 90 33

Sources: Kalanti (West Finland) tax register and communion book 1800; Kitela (Russian Karelia, the Finnish border) communion book 1835; Houtskar (south west Finland) tax register and communion book 1890; Replot (North west Finland) tax register and communion book 1890; Mecklenburg (Germany) census 1867; Berkhamsted (south east England) census 1851; Grasmere (North England) census 1851.

Scandinavia it was common for proletarians to marry later than farmers, and landless marriages could also be of shorter duration. Therefore an increase in the number of proletarians in a community could result in higher proportions of families with children under the age of 15 at the time of the death of the husband. There also seems to have been a stronger tendency to neo-locality among the landless.22

22 Beatrice Moring, “Rural Widows, Economy and Co-residence in the 18th and 19th Centuries”, The History of the Family, 15 (2010), 239–254 (242–248); eadem, “Nordic Family Patterns and the North-west European Household System”, Continuity and Change, 18: 1 (2003), 77–110 (86); eadem, “Systems of Survival – Continuities and Discontinuities after the Death of the Household Head”, in When Dad Died – Family Stress and Household Dynamics in Historical Societies, eds. Renzo Derosas and Michel Oris (Berne, 2002), 173–193 (187, 190); Orvar Löfgren, “Family and Household among Scandinavian Peasants”, Ethnologia Scandinavica (1974), 17–52 (40–43); Gaunt, “Household Typology”, 81–82; Christer Lundh, “Households and Families in Pre-industrial Sweden”, Continuity and Change, 10: 1 (1995), 33–68 (45, 55). 32 Moring

Such behaviour was not unique to the Nordic countries. Jürgen Schlumbohm has demonstrated that while the practice of cohabitation between generations was particularly pronounced in the German landholding group, lack of capital could prevent collaborative strategies among the landless. However, in the north German community of Belm, where co-habitation of widows with their children was common on farms and smallholdings, proto-industrial textile work increased co-habitation rates between adult children and their widowed mothers.23 In Austria the difference in co-residence rates between widows and their adult children varied considerably depending on social group in the first half of the 19th century. While 52% of the widows of farmers resided in the households of their adult children, only 12% of the widows of inmates did so.24 The differences in co-residence patterns between social groups have also been detected in studies of Spanish households, where the family held land or capital the levels of co-residence were higher.25 Since the Middle Ages the Nordic countries and the Germanic area operated a system whereby the care of the older generation was part of the land transmission system (syting, kar, Ausgedinge, Altenteil). The duty of care embraced both old fathers and mothers, and it was often practiced through co-residence between generations. Even though changes in legislation, landownership and demography over the centuries increased the need for specific procedures, such as detailed retirement contracts, the co-residence between the heir to the land and old mothers continued into the 20th century in the farming class.26 Widows also inherited one third or one half of the marital property. In farming households or workshops property relations could be intertwined, and as long as the property was held together all parties could profit from its use. If the husband died early the widow became the guardian of her children. As the mother of the prospective heir her power could be considerable. She could even remarry and still remain running the holding while her son or daughter

23 Jürgen Schlumbohm, Lebenslaufe, Familien, Hofe ((Göttingen, 1994), 253–255. 24 Jim Brown, “Rural Widows in Lower Austria 1788–1848”, The History of the Family, 7 (2002), 117–124 (120–122). 25 Reher, Perspectives on the Family, 35. 26 Moring Beatrice, “Conflict or Co-operation – Old Age and Retirement in the Nordic Past’, Journal of Family History 28: 2, (2003), 231–257 (236–242); eadem, “Retirement Contracts and the Economics of Widowhood in the Nordic Countries”, Continuity and Change, 21: 3 (2006), 383–418 (391–392); Onni Koskikallio, Maatalouskiinteistöjen eläkerasituksesta Pirkkalan ja Ruoveden tuomiokunnissa vuosina 1800–1913 [The Burden of Retirement on Farms in the Parishes of Pirkkkala and Ruovesi 1800–1913] (Helsinki, 1927), 19–26. North European Families in the Past 33 from the first marriage was growing up to adulthood. If the farm originated from her own family her position was secure.27 In eastern Finland and western Russia aged parents could retain formal headship until death, even though the actual farming was in the hands of the younger generation. Where formal transfer of land took place, with court registration, such transfers were generally very simple and did not include specifi- cations about the rights of the parents.28 In 1775 one in four widows in Finland headed a farm, while one in five lived in retirement with their children. By 1805 10% of the widows headed farms while 38% were registered as living in retirement. By 1875 12% of widows were running farms but the level of retirement was less well registered. In Sweden the situation was fairly similar in the late 18th century.29 In Britain the widow usually had the right to remain on her husbands’ tene- ment until death (free bench) unless she remarried. Even in such cases the tenancy could sometimes be held onto. 16th- and 17th-century wills indicate that although many men preferred their property to be transferred to their children, particularly sons, when they reached adulthood, arrangements were usually put in for the widow to continue residence in a particular room of the house and have a specific part of the holding tilled for her by her son. There are even examples, similar to 19th century Finnish contracts, that in case of a land sale, the widow retained her right of residence.30 The situation of the landless labouring class was different. Generally they had to take work where it could be found, which made them more mobile.

27 Ake Holmbäck and Elias Wessen, Svenska landskapslagar 3, Hälsingelagen [Swedish Regional Laws 3, the Law of Hälsingland] (Stockholm, 1940), 351; Anu Pylkkänen, Puoli vuodetta, lukot ja avaimet [Half the Bed, Locks and Leys] (Helsinki, 1990), 98–103; Rudolph Huebner, A History of Germanic Private Law (London, 1918), 621–623, 628; Fr. Hallager. and Fr. Brandt, Kong Christian den fjerdes Norske Lov af 1604 [The Law for Norway of King Christian the Fourth, 1604], (Kristiania, 1855), 73, 77. 28 Moring, Beatrice, “Family Strategies, Inheritance Systems and the Care of the Elderly in Historical Perspective’, Historical Social Research, 23: 1/2 (1998), 67–82 (72–77). 29 Gunnar Fougstedt and A. Raivio, Suomen väestön sääty ja ammattiryhmitys v. 1751–1805 [The Occupational and Social Structure of the Population in Finland 1751–1805] (Helsinki, 1953), 26–29; Kaarina Vattula, “Kvinnors forvarvsarbete i Norden under 100 ar 1870–1970” [Female Employment in the Nordic Countries 1870–1970], Studia Historica Jyvaskylaensia, 27 (Jyväskylä, 1983), 36–39; FOS VI, 41, Finlands befolkningsstatistik 1750–1890, (Helsingfors, 1909); Nils Wohlin, “Jordbruksbefolkningen i Sverige” [The Agrarian Population of Sweden], Emigrationsutredningen Bilaga, IX (Stockholm, 1909), 197–207, 236. 30 E. P. Thompson, “The Grid of Inheritance: a Comment”, in Family and Inheritance, eds. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk and E. P. Thompson(Cambridge, 1976), 328–360 (334–335, 352, 356); Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities, English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 112–115. 34 Moring

In 19th-century Scandinavia the choice could be between working as an in-living servant or living as lodgers. If a croft or a cottage was acquired, kin collaboration was practiced when possible. However, their economic or employment situation could pose restrictions on the ability to care for family members or have the means to do so. Therefore it would not be unlikely that members of this group would have to seek assistance from society in old age.31 An analysis of the occupational distribution in some of the localities supports the hypothesis that localities with a high rate of farmers of families with access to land did increase the level of co-residence between widowed mothers and married children if account is taken of age distribution (Table 2.3). However the gender preferences in co-residence patters also varied considerably.

TABLE 2.3 Occupational distribution of widows in 19th century rural parishes

Occupation Kalanti Houtsk Replot Sundsvall Ullensaker Mecklenburg 1800 1859 1855 reg. 1801 1867

Farmers widow* 53.3 43 42 44 26.6 39.9

Crofters widow 23.3** 34 23 25 16.6 Inmate, lodger 6.5 18 27 12 33.3 Craftsmans 2.8 5 2 5 6.6 5.7 widow Cotter, lab. widow 7 4 16.6 9.9 Middle class 5.6 5? No info 37 Nr (100%) 107 49 60 185 94 157

* also retired widows of farmers **crofters and soldiers Sources: Kalanti tax register and communion book 1800; Kitela communion book 1835; Houtskar tax register and communion book 1859; Replot tax register and communion book 1855; Mecklenburg census 1867; Ullensaker census 1801; Sundsvall region late 19th century.

31 Beatrice Moring, “Widowhood Options and Strategies in Pre-industrial Northern Europe”, The History of the Family, 7: 1 (2002), 79–99 (94–95); Mats Hellspong and Orvar Löfgren, Land och stad. Svenska samhällstyper och livsformer från medeltid till nutid [Town and Countryside, Society and Life in Sweden from Medieval Times to the Present Day] (Lund, 1988), 242–243, 248–250; Ingrid Eriksson and John Rogers, Rural Labor and Population Change (Uppsala, 1978), 163, 166; Ståle Dyrvik et al., Norges ekonomiske historie I [The Economic History of Norway I (Oslo, 1979), 32, 186; Eino Jutikkala, Suomen talonpojan historia [The History of the Finnish Farmer] (Turku, 1958), 300. North European Families in the Past 35

6 Sons, Daughters and Co-residence

The tendency to transfer land to male offspring whenever possible has been predominant in Europe in the past. Elsewhere Moring has demonstrated higher rates of co-residence with sons in the rural Nordic countries.32 In Italy, similar gender preferences have been documented among widowed mothers. In 19th-century Casaleccio 50% of widows co-resided with married sons and only 10% with married daughters.33 Wall on the other hand has detected little effect of occupation on gender preference in the co-residence of widows.34 As a result the expectation would be that, for some of the localities, the more important the agrarian sector is to the local economy, the higher the rate of co-residence between widows and married sons. The results presented in Table 2.4 seem to support the hypothesis. In Kalanti, Kitela, Houtskar and the Sundsvall district where the proportion of farmers’ widows was 40% or higher, 30% or more of the widows shared a household with a married son. In Ullensaker, where the level of proletarianisation was higher, the level of co-residence with daughters was also relatively high. It would also seem that widows in Grasmere sought the company of their daughters rather than that of their sons. In the urban localities like Helsinki, Moss and Lichfield, the co-residence levels with sons was low, and in every case lower than co-residence with daughters.

TABLE 2.4 Widows co-residence and gender

Any child Married Married Married Unmarried No child son daughter child child

Kalanti 74 41 36.4 4.6 32.7 26 (Finland) 1800 Kitela (Russia) 80.9 38.8 35 3.9 42 19 1835 Houtskar, 87 35 30 5.6 54 13 (Finland) 1859

32 Moring, Beatrice. “Rural Widows”, 246–247; eadem, “Land Inheritance and the Finnish Stem Family” in The Stem Family in Eurasian Perspective, eds. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Emiko Ochiai (Berne and Oxford, 2009), 173–202; eadem, “Nordic Family Patterns”, 186–188, 191. 33 Kertzer and Karweit, “The Impact of Widowhood”, 239–240. 34 Wall, “Elderly Widows and Widowers”, 147. 36 Moring

TABLE 2.4 Widows co-residence and gender (cont.)

Any child Married Married Married Unmarried No child son daughter child child

Ullensaker 71.3 36 16 20 43 28 (Norway) 1801 Sundsvall distr. 73 58 33 26 15 27 (Sweden)1880s Mecklenburg 81.3 40.7 36.6 16.5 40.6 18.4 (Germany)1867 Grasmere 60 27 9 18 33 39 (Britain) 1851 Helsinki 80.7 4.5 1.2 3.2 76 18.9 (Finland)1900 Moss (Norway) 66.9 16.1 1.7 14.4 50.8 33 1900 Lichfield 64 18 7 11 46 36 (Britain) 1851

Sources: Kalanti tax register and communion book 1800; Kitela communion book 1835; Houtskar tax register and communion book 1859; Mecklenburg census 1867; Ullensaker census 1801; Sundsvall region late 19th century; Grasmere census 1851; Helsinki census 1900; Moss census 1900; Lichfield census 1851.

7 Urban Life and Widows

While pre-industrial urban economic life contained a strong element of crafts connected to guilds and citizenship rights, these systems were eroded if not before then in the 19th century. The urban dweller was no longer a specialist; employment could be secured in factories, mills and the growing sector providing urban centres with services and goods. In addition to housing problems, low-paid shift work, seasonal unemployment and a segregated labour market, urban life also brought the male bread-winner system. While the poor families in rural areas in Northern and central Europe had in many cases been able to keep some animals or engage in household production, and poverty had primarily been connected to illness and old age, this was not the case in town. While industrial work was available for women, and could bring in as much as 60% of the male wage in some industrial sectors, such income was not always North European Families in the Past 37 at hand. Old widows or widows with young children could encounter problems in working full time, and the remuneration for casual work like washing and cleaning was not very rewarding.35 One of the options for a widow would therefore be collaboration with family members or other women in a similar position. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux has demonstrated that although urban widows did practice co-residence with their children the level of co-residence seems to have been less pronounced than in the countryside, for economic reasons.36 However systems of cooperation of a different kind, female networks, mother and daughter systems, have been recorded in industrial and urban areas by Anderson,37 Cohen,38 Hahn39 and Moring.40 Studies of working-class biographies in the British Isles in the early 20th- century have evidenced strong economic ties between mothers and children. Many mothers seem to have controlled the earnings of the children, and the sense of obligation towards the mother could even extend into the time after the child had left home.41 In her study of female-headed households in an Irish textile area in 1901, Cohen revealed close knit families with adult children, particularly daughters, pooling their resources with their mothers to support siblings and maintain the family.42 Michael Anderson has drawn our attention to the variable systems of female collaboration in industrial Lancashire, including women at various stages in life and marital status.43

35 Sakari Heikkinen, Labour and the Market (Helsinki, 1997), 85, 160; Pirjo Markkola, Tyolaiskodin synty [The Birth of the Working-class Home] (Helsinki, 1994), 107, 110; Moring, “Widows, Children and Assistance’, 106–107; eadem, “Strategies and Networks: Family Earnings and Institutional Contributions to Women’s Households in Urban Sweden and Finland 1890–1910”, in Gender Inequalities, eds. Addabo et al., 82–85. 36 Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, “Widows and their Living Arrangements in Pre-industrial France”, The History of the Family, 7 (2002), 101–116 (104–105). 37 Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971). 38 Cohen, “Survival Strategies”. 39 Sylvia Hahn, “Women in Older ages – Old Women?”, The History of the Family, 7: 1 (2002), 33–58 (48–52). 40 Moring, “Strategies and Networks”, 85–87. 41 Ellen Ross, “Rediscovering London’s Working Class Mothers 1870–1918”, in Labour and Love Women’s Experience of Home and the Family, ed. Jane Lewis (London, 1986), 73–98 (85–87). 42 Cohen, “Survival Strategies”, 308. 43 Michael Anderson, “The Social Position of Spinsters in Mid-Victorian Britain”, Journal of Family History, 9: 4 (1984), 377–393 (390–391); idem, Family Structure, 139–144. 38 Moring

In the textile town of Norrkoping young workers tended to stay in the parental home, particularly if their mother was a widow. One third of the young people starting work in the 1870s were the children of widows and no less than 37% of young textile workers lived with parent(s). Longitudinal observations of this group revealed that women held the families together even after the loss of a husband. Through united efforts and pooling of income the family continued as a family, even though the economic situation could be difficult.44 A survey of women at the textile mills in the 1890s revealed that widows did combine full-time work with family duties but sharing household with mothers, adult daughters or other women was quite common.45 A survey of women in industrial work in 1890s Stockholm did show that more than 70% of widows and unmarried mothers shared a household with one or several children and in addition often co-resided with mothers, sisters or women in a similar situation. Half of unmarried female industrial workers lived with their parents, particularly mothers. Even though Stockholm had a long urban history, 60% of the female industrial workers were migrants, and only 40% had been born in Stockholm, which of course reduced the availability of kin outside the immediate family, for potential cohabitation.46 Studies in early 20th-century Finland revealed similar patterns. Young unmarried women often lived with family, and widows lived with children and other kin or lodgers.47 Textile towns like Tampere demonstrated high rates of co-residence between widows and children. Daughters in particular tended to stay with their mothers and provide assistance or support, and in old age many a poor widow is found in the household of her married daughter.48

44 Anita Goransson, Fran familj till fabrik [From Family to Factory] (Lund, 1988), 249–251, 259). 45 Birgitta Plymoth, Fattigvard och filantropi i Norrkoping 1872–1914 [Poor Relief and Philanthropy in Norrkoping] (Stockholm, 1999), 65; K. Key-Aberg, “Inom textilindustrien in Norrkoping sysselsatta arbetares lonevillkor och bostadsforhallanden” [The Wages and Living Conditions of Workers in the Textile Industry of Norrkoping], Skrifter ugifna af Lorenska Stiftelsen, 12 (Stockholm, 1896), 48–49. 46 Johan Leffler, “Zur Kenntniss von den Lebens und Lohnverhältnissen Industrieller Arbeiterinnen in Stockholm”, Skrifter ugifna af Lorenska Stiftelsen, 15 (Stockholm, 1897), 15–19, 25, 137. 47 G. R. Snellman, Undersokning angaende pappersindustrin [Survey of the Paper Industry] (Helsinki, 1912), 29; SVT (Official statistics of Finland), Sosiaalisia Erkoistutkimuksia 12, Yötyöntekijättäret (Helsinki, 1935), 8, 10–11, 14, 67, 98–99. 48 Moring, “Widows, Children and Assistance”, 111–112; eadem, “Strategies and Networks”, 86–87; Markkola, Tyolaiskodin synty, 111. North European Families in the Past 39

The data collected from urban areas for the present study have revealed, as was seen in Table 2.4, that the urban widows seemed to seek the company of adult daughters rather than adult sons. While more than 60% lived with their children, in most cases the children were unmarried. The co-residence rates with married children were considerably lower than in the countryside. In Moss, 16% of the widows lived with a married child, in Lichfield 17% but in Helsinki only 4%. Contrary to theories put forward about loneliness it would seem that living alone was not the norm. While more than 10% of the widows in Moss lived alone, in both Helsinki and Lichfield this was much rarer. These results are also supportive of previous findings by Sokoll,49 Wall,50 Moring,51 and Ottaway and Anderson.52 The numbers of single person households have been artificially inflated in censuses by using biological relationship as a household boundary. The levels of co-residence with kin were higher than the table indicates, as many widows lived both with children and relative often a mother or sister. Some had moved back into their parental household after becoming widowed. In Lichfield one third of the widows who lived with unmarried children also had a grandchild in the household. Of those living with kin only, more than half lived with sisters, and one in four with their parents. In Moss the widows living with kin only lived either with parents or siblings. In a couple of cases there were grandchildren in addition to unmarried children. In Helsinki, although only 4% of the widows lived with a married child, they lived more often with a daughter than with a son, some unmarried daughters also had illegitimate children. 7% of the widows had a grandchild in the household, 6% co-resided with a parent or sibling and 60% kept lodgers. 20% had only children under 15, but 29% had earning sons and 33% earning daughters. This illuminates the issue of the different collaborative strategies that were applied by families who had left the rural environment and opted for a new life in town. While sons could stay on to help their mothers or care for them in old age, it was more common for daughters to do so. The time of

49 Thomas Sokoll, “The Household Position of Elderly Widows in Poverty”, in Poor Women and Children in the European Past, eds. John Henderson and Richard Wall (London, 1994), 210–212. 50 Wall, “Economic Collaboration of Family Members”, 142–43. 51 Moring, “Widows, Children and Assistance”, 110. 52 Susannah Ottaway, “Women, Households and Independence under the Old Poor Law’, Female Economic Strategies in the Modern World, ed. Beatrice Moring (London 2012), 73–88; Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971). 40 Moring collaboration could extend from an early age and the first earnings into adulthood and marriage.53 A study of working-class households in Stockholm, conducted in the 1890s, indicated that married men would assist mothers economically even when they did not co-reside. On the other hand unmarried children, particularly daughters, would remain in the parental household, if the mother was widowed, and pool their income with her. Sometimes the daughter handed over all her earnings to the mother. Frequent examples can also be found of cohabitation between a widowed mother and a widowed, abandoned or unmarried daughter with children. Widows with young children seem to have sought the company of kin or taken in lodgers for the purpose of assistance with childcare.54

8 Age Distribution of Urban Widows

The considerable differences in results between Helsinki and the other two urban areas encouraged a more detailed look at the age distribution between the localities. Helsinki was an area of rapid in-migration between 1880 and 1910 while the other two represented a more stable urban development. As Table 2.6 reveals, the widows in Helsinki were very young in comparison with the other areas. Only 27% had reached the age of 60, unlike the 54% in Moss and 66% in Lichfield. A comparison of Helsinki with Finland as a whole also shows an anomaly. While 56% of the widows in Finland had reached the age of 60, in Helsinki only 44% were of that age. The explosion level of in-migration, particularly attracting young people, created a demographic situation where young adults formed a very considerable part of the population. Some of the migrants were widows seeking a better life; others came, married and lost their spouse, but lacked the security network of family present in the growing urban centre, i.e. the possibility of returning to the parental home. A possible reason for the particularly high proportion of young widows in the sample is linked to the fact that the widows have been extracted from the census for the working-

53 Moring, “Widows, Children and Assistance”, 111–112; Martta Salmela-Jarvinen, Kun se parasta on ollut [When Things were at their Best] (Helsinki, 1965), 110–115; Markkola, Tyolaiskodin synty, 111; Ross, “Labour and Love”, 75–77. 54 Gustaf af Geijerstam, “Anteckningar rorande fabriksarbetarnes stallning i Marks harad”. [Notes on the Position of Factory Workers in Mark County] Skrifter ugifna af Lorenska Stiftelsen 10 (Stockholm, 1894), 55, 57, 63; Leffler, “Zur Kenntniss”, 103, 110, 125. North European Families in the Past 41

TABLE 2.5 Co-residence partners of urban widows, percentages

Moss Norway Helsinki Finland Lichfield Britain 1900 1900 1851

Married child 16 4 17 Unmarried child 51 76 46.5 Relative 7 2.5 10.2 Non relative 13.5 14 18 Alone 13 2.5 7.9 Nr of widows 118 (100%) 158 (100%) 88 (100%)

Sources: census of Helsinki, Finland, 1900; census of Moss, Norway, 1900; census of Lichfield, Britain 1851. Widow head of household 73% Moss, 94% Helsinki, 71.5% Lichfield

class part of Helsinki. This would probably result in a particularly high level of in-migrants. This was also the case; more than half of the widows in the sample were born outside Helsinki. Because the widows were young their children were young, and fewer opportunities of co-residence with married children were available.

9 Work, Earnings and Strategy Opportunities

The opportunities for a widow in an urban environment were, as in the countryside, linked to her social position. While the working-class widow had to build strategies based on pooling restricted assets, women with capital could share a household with relatives of the same status or with fewerresources.55 Jane Humphries has suggested that widows with adult children tended to with- draw from active working life and acted as their housekeepers.56 This seems to have been the case sometimes. While the census of Moss states that the main

55 Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, “The Myth of the Victorian Patriarchal Family”, The History of the Family 7: 1 (2002), 125–138 (134–135). 56 Jane Humphries, “Female-Headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: The Vanguard of the Proletariat?”, Labour History Review, 69: 1 (1998), 31–65; eadem, “From Work to Dependence – Women’s Experience of Industrialisation in Britain”, Refresh, 21 (Autumn 1995), 5–8. 42 Moring

TABLE 2.6 Age distribution of widows

Age Helsinki Finland 1900 Moss Norway 1900 Lichfield Britain 1851

20–29 4 – 1.1 30–39 13 5 7.9 20–40 17 5 9 40–49 29 21 13.6 50–59 27 19 10.2 60–69 20 24.5 30.6 70–79 5 23 26.1 80+ 2 7 10.2 Of these 60+ 27 54.5 66.9 Nr (100%) 158 118 88

Sources: census of Helsinki 1900, original sheets; census of Moss 1900; census of Lichfield 1851. breadwinner in 25% of the households containing widows was the son, or daughter and son-in-law, many widows did have a registered occupation. The Lichfield census reveals co-residence between widows and children with an occupation, but does not state anything definite about support. The Helsinki and Moss censuses register doing housework as an occupation even when the other household members were children or relatives of the widow. Owning a house would be the same as having an income from rent paid by the other residents. Keeping lodgers was sometimes but not always seen as an occupation. Washing and ironing were often activities in which the widow was assisted by a daughter or a sister. Sewing or other textile work also sometimes engaged several women in the same household. Where the widow kept a shop, family members could also be engaged in the work. However, factory work and work in the service sector outside the home could not include any intra-familial collaborative strategies. It is interesting to observe that even within an urban economic framework there seem to have been certain efforts to engage in productive work that would benefit from some collaboration. In many cases widows mined the traditional feminine sectors of the production and provision of food, lodging, clothes and the cleaning of the same. The main restrictions to activity would naturally be found in availability of capital, but it would seem that the human capital element could when possible be provided from the bosom of the family. North European Families in the Past 43

TABLE 2.7 Classification of occupation or known source of income of widows in census of Helsinki and Moss 1900, Lichfield 1851, percentages

Occupation or source Helsinki Finland% Moss Norway % Lichfield Britain % of income

Kept by child (noc) 11.1 25.2 21(noc) Keeps lodgers (noc) 17.7 Keeps guesthouse 3.5 2.4 Housework 8.6 6.0 House owner 2.4 6.0 Lives of capital 6.0 7.3 Pension 1.2 0.8 8.4 Washing, cleaning 14.8 10.3 19.2 Labourer 13.5 2.6 Trade and petty trade 8.0 12.1 9.6 Textile work 6.1 6.9 6.1 Factory work 1.8 2.6 Craft 4.2 0.8 Service public, private 4.2 3.5 4.8 Poor relief 1.8 10.3 16.8 Professions 2.4 2.4 No information 2.2 3.5 1.9 Percent 100 100 100 Nr of widows 162 115 83

Noc=no occupation Sources: census of Helsinki, Finland 1900, original sheets; census of Moss, Norway 1900; census of Lichfield, Britain 1851.

10 Conclusion

The aim of this paper has been to address the theory presented by David Reher of a Europe in the past, divided into a northern zone with loose or defective family ties, and a south with close kinship connections. The intention has been to present data showing that families in Northern Europe did practice family co-habitation and collaboration. Particularly in the case of widows, the mother-child tie was very much in evidence. 44 Moring

The reasons for theories put forward about the loose family ties in the North are linked to widespread use of methodologies that do not take account of demographic effects. This problem was repeatedly highlighted by Ruggles but has been widely ignored. For an analysis of generational contacts to be reliable it has to be focused on the parental generation; co-residence with a dead parent is not possible.57 This study has used census-type documents to present evidence for co- residence and collaboration between widows and children of different ages. The influence of socio-economic circumstances, migration, demography and gender issues have been included in the queries. The empirical evidence from these localities in Northern Europe shows that co-residence between widowed mothers and married children was quite common in rural areas. Because of a general preference for males in land transfer, a higher proportion of farmers’ widows resided with married sons than with married daughters. The landless widows, however, do not demonstrate preference for male children and therefore it would seem that increasing levels of proletarianisation also resulted in higher levels of co-residence with daughters. Where opportunities existed for earning without leaving home, as in industrial areas, a number of children stayed with their mothers. Co-residence levels with children could be high, but it is more likely that the children were unmarried, widowed or single parents. Urban working class widows seem to have co-operated particularly with daughters. Sometimes they ran an economy of multiple elements consisting of earnings, children’s earnings, lodgers and even poor relief.58 Whether or not a woman lived with a married child in widowhood was naturally affected by her age. This study would indicate that generally one would be more likely to find older widows in the countryside and younger widows in urban areas. One of the reasons for this pattern is of course migration. Of the three urban areas included in the study Helsinki experienced explosive expansion around the years of the 1900 census. Therefore it is perhaps unsurprising that the sample included a high level of young widows and widows with young children. The study shows little evidence that the levels of family collaboration would have been less predominant than in southern Europe. While the localities were far from uniform, the variation generally seems to have been linked to demography, the economic situation of the family or the effects of migration.

57 Ruggles, Prolonged Connections; idem, “Multigenerational Families”; idem, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System”. 58 Key-Aberg, “Inom textilindustrien in Norrkoping”, 48. North European Families in the Past 45

Appendix

The national level statistics in Britain and the Nordic countries reveal that in the late 19th century and early 20th century widows were generally middle aged or older (see Tables 2.8 and 2.9). Therefore the opportunities of creating collaborative strategies with teenage or adult children were often possible from a biological point of view. If, however, the locality was affected by high levels of in- or out-migration the situation could be different. In Table 2.8 the national figures for Finland are compared with the figures for the town of Helsinki, a high in-migration area. In Helsinki the widows were considerably younger than in the nation as a whole, and would be expected to have younger children. From a purely biological point of view the availability of adult married children who could be drafted into collaboration must therefore be seen as less abundant than where the effect of migration was less pronounced. As many family studies focus on local communities, and relatively small numbers, the issue of migration should if possible be taken into consideration when drawing conclusions about what kind of structures were considered desirable.

TABLE 2.8 Age distribution of widows in the Nordic countries, percentages

15–29 30–39 40–49 50–60 60+

Sweden 1870 1 5.6 14 23 56.4 1900 0.8 4 10 18.2 53

Norway 1875 1.5 5.9 12.8 21 58.8 1900 1.5 5.7 11.7 18 63

Finland 1880 1.8 7.0 14.4 26.6 49.8 1900 1.6 6 13 23 56 1900 2.3 8.9 18.2 26.3 44.3 Helsinki

Sources: G. Sundberg, Historical Statistics of Sweden (Stockholm, 1969), 103; Norges offisielle statistikk (Oslo, 1978), 34; Official statistics of Finland (SVT), kolmas vuosikerta (Helsinki, 1905), 30; FOS VI, 41, Finlands befolkningsstatistik 1750–1890 (Helsinki, 1909); Statistsk årsbok för Helsingfors stad (Helsinki, 1908), 87. 46 Moring

TABLE 2.9 Age distribution of widows in England and Wales 1861–1911

Date 15–24 25–34 35–44 45–54 55–64 >65 N1

1861 1 6 13 19 24 37 7354 1871 1 6 13 19 24 37 7544 1881 1 5 12 19 25 37 7492 1891 0 4 11 20 25 39 7524 1901 0 4 11 19 26 40 7419 1911 0 3 9 18 25 44 7328

Notes: 1 Numbers per 100,000 females at all ages Sources: Census of England and Wales 1951 General Tables, Table 22B (HMSO 1956); Census 2001 National Report for England and Wales, Table S002 (Office for National Statistics 2003). CHAPTER 3 From Modernity to Tradition: Households on Kythera in the Early Nineteenth Century

Violetta Hionidou

1 Introduction

Greece, in Hajnal’s seminal paper where Eastern and Western European marriage patterns were distinguished, was put clearly within the former.1 Almost two decades later Laslett, in his map of European households, located Greece within the ‘Mediterranean tendency’. Though a final picture of Greek nuptiality and household formation patterns is still not in sight, the existing cases from Greece and the clear examples of Italy, Spain and Portugal suggest that we may eventually find a wide variety of patterns, both geographically and temporally.2 Most existing studies – just like those of Hajnal and Laslett – compare and contrast virtually contemporaneous populations or, more rarely, the same population over a few decades, attempting to explain the observed differences. In seeking to account for such differences, Ruggles, for example, following a thorough discussion of the current debates suggests that, at least for stem families, such differences in historical Northwest Europe and North America can be explained through variations in demographic characteristics and levels of agricultural employment.3 Therefore, according to Ruggles, culture is not

* During the Venetian and British years, the island Kythera was known as Cerigo. Since the island’s incorporation into the Greek state, the name was changed to Kythera which is the one that will be used throughout this chapter. 1 John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–143. 2 Violetta Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence: Household Formation Patterns in Eighteenth Century Kythera, Greece”, The History of the Family, 16: 3 (2002), 217–234 (217–218). 3 Steven Ruggles, “Reconsidering the Northwest European Family System: Living Arrangements of the Aged in Comparative Historical Perspective”, Population and Development Review, 35: 2 (2009), 249–273; idem, “Stem Families and Joint Families in Comparative Historical Perspective”, Population and Development Review, 36: 3 (2010), 563–577; Mikołaj Szołtysek, Siegfried Gruber, Sebastian Klüsener and Joshua R. Goldstein, Spatial Variation in Household Structure in 19th-century Germany, MPIDR Working paper WP 2010-030, October 2010, 7.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_004 48 Hionidou significant in creating the differences. Similarly Berkner, referring to changes over time, argued that, in a stem family situation, the diminution of complex households and concomitant prevalence of nuclear households may be explained by structural changes such as the declining numbers of the farming population.4 In contrast, Laslett as early as 1983 underlined the significance of culture in determining the household formation patterns of a region, an idea reinforced by many scholars culminating with the argument by Reher as late as 1998.5 Assessing temporal changes, as early as 1872 Le Play suggested (or more correctly lamented) that modernisation was transforming the strong, complex household unit into a weak, nuclear unit. Laslett, in contrast, argued that modernisation had very little impact on English households in the past few centuries. In line with Laslett’s argument, subsequent studies reveal a variety of situations where modernisation and its equivalents, industrialisation and urbanisation, at times had no effect on household formation.6 Thus social and economic change, it has been argued, does not necessarily bring changes in households.7 Still, the suggestion that the changes may appear following a ‘lag’ has also been put forward.8 Other authors have argued that industrialisation

4 Lutz K. Berkner, “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example”, The American Historical Review, 77: 2 (1972), 398– 418 (410). 5 Peter Laslett, “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1983), 513–563. David Sven Reher, “Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrast”, Population and Development Review, 24:2 (1998), 203-234. 6 See for example David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: Sharecropping, Wage Labor, and Coresidence (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984); Angelique Janssens, Family and Social Change. The Household as a Process in an Industrializing Community (Cambridge, 1993), 216–218. Janssens, who examined two occupational groups over time, the ‘industrialised’ factory workers and the ‘traditional’ domestic weavers, found no discernible differences in their propensity to form complex households. Interestingly, if the observation period had been shorter than the complete family cycle that Janssens used, the conclusions would have been different. 7 Mikołaj Szołtysek, Siegfried Gruber, Barbara Zuber-Goldstein and Rembrandt Scholz, Living Arrangements and Household Formation in the Crucible of Social Change: Rostock 1867–1900, MPIDR Working paper WP 2010-036, December 2010, 27. 8 Janssens strongly argued against an easy and immediate change of family behaviour and attitudes as a result of economic changes (Family and Social Change, 234); also, Joan W. Scott and Louise A. Tilly, “Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975), 36–64; and Hans Medick, “The Protoindustrial Family Economy”, in Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism, eds. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick and Jürgen Schlumbohm (Cambridge, 1981), 38–73. From Modernity to Tradition 49 did increase reliance on the family, with households displaying increased incidence of complexity and prolonging of the time that such complexity was present.9 In only a few instances, sources are available for a specific population over a long period of time, enabling the study of household formation within a population and its temporal changes. One such case is that of the population of the island of Kythera, for which such a study is possible for the 18th and first half of the 19th. This paper aims to assess the household patterns of this Ionian island population, to identify the changes it may have experienced during the one and a half centuries of observation, and finally to explain the observed changes.

2 Sources

The 18th-century sources are a series of census-like nominal population listings of the whole population of Kythera conducted by the Venetian administration.10 Though a good number of such censuses is available, only three have been analysed. The 19th-century censuses were conducted during the period of British protection.11 The 1836 census, like the 18th-century ones, are all hand-written in Latin characters and presented, in each case, in a single volume. The 1844 census is made up of a number of unbound documents, in

9 Thomas A. Arcury, “Industrialization and Households and Family Life Course Characteristics: Appalachian Kentucky Young Adults in 1880 and 1910”, Journal of Family History, 15: 3 (1990), 285–312; Stephen King and Geoffrey Timmins, Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution. English Economy and Society 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2001), 276. Anderson’s study of 19th-century Lancashire remains one of the most important illus- trations of such an example (Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire [Cambridge, 1971]). 10 Antonia K. Marmarele, Maria G. Patramane and Emmanouel G. Drakakes (eds.), Apographes Plethysmou Kytheron (18os ai.) [Population Censuses of Kythera (18th Century)] (Athens, 1997). For a discussion of the sources see Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 218–219. 11 The 1836 census manuscript is deposited in the National Archives, CO 1836/1248, 332954. The 1844 material along with that of the 18th century is deposited at the local archives of Kythera, folder Apografe tou pluthesmou tes nesou Kytheron 61, Β1 δ and Β4 δ. For the 1844 material, some of the subfolder covers, handwritten by the archivists, indicate that the census refers to 1830–32 or various dates in the early 1840s. None of the original material has any date indications. Nevertheless, linking individual families/households between 1836 and the rest of the material makes it clear from the ages of the individuals that the latest census material is from the 1840s and almost certainly forms part of the first stage of the taking of the 1844 census. 50 Hionidou which the author wrote, using his own template, the list of names and other information concerning specific parishes. There is good variation in the information provided in each list, and successive households are, for some parishes, clearly separated one from each other, while in other parishes such separation is not evident. Those lists where the separation of successive households is not made unequivocally were not used in this study. The information consistently given includes name, relationship to the head of the household, age, occupation and whether the individual was present or absent from the island at the time of the census. The language used in the 1844 lists is Greek. The use of Greek rather than Italian should not be taken as an innovation. Rather, I would argue that, as for all other censuses, the clergy was responsible for collecting the data. For the last census, what is available to us is the material collected by parish priests, all written in Greek, which was the only language they knew during both the Venetian and the British periods. For all the earlier censuses, the parish data were transcribed into a manuscript book by an educated administrator who could write in Italian.12 While the manuscript books refer to famiglie, the last census refers essentially to the same term translated into Greek, φαμελια ( famelia), both meaning family. But their use conforms more to the definition of household rather than that of ‘family’, since it includes not only conjugal units but also servants and relatives.13 The censuses reveal a constantly increasing population, slower in the eighteenth, much faster in the middle of the 19th century, with much of the increase

12 The Constitution of 1817 dictated that the Greek language would be the official language of the Ionian Islands. But it recognised the necessity to continue using Italian as this was the only language the educated elite could use (Constitutional charter of the United States of the Ionian Islands: ratified by the Sovereign Protector, the King of Great Britain, the 26th of August, 1817. Foreign and Commonwealth Office Collection (1817)). In reality, the official utilisation of the Italian language was not challenged by the British since the Ionian elites were exclusively educated in Italian; David Hannell, “The Ionian Islands under the British Protectorate: Social and Economic Problems”, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 7 (1989), 111 and 125. The uneducated peasants spoke and understood only Greek (op. cit., 125). “That language so long having been banished from official and even social use” was difficult to introduce quickly; Viscount Kirkwall (ed.), Four Years in the Ionian Islands. Their Political and Social Condition (London, 1864), vol. 1, 132. 13 In 1836 there are two girls and a boy referred to as servants in the census. In 1844, there is one case of a 12 year old male servant included in a household. Komis’s interpretation of the listings is also the same referring to similar listings for Preveza; Kostas Komis, Demographikes opseis tes Prevezas 16os-18os aionas [Demographic Dimensions of Preveza, 16th–18th Century] (Ioannina, 1999), 155. From Modernity to Tradition 51 taking place among the – numerically dominant – rural population (Table 3.1). While the 18th-century census records cover the whole island population, the available records for the 1836 census cover 41% of the population (rural only); the 1844 surviving and selected census records cover 25% of the population (rural only).

TABLE 3.1 Census year and population of Kythera

Census year Urban Rural Total

1724 838 4,222 5,060 1753 828 4,680 5,508 1770 828 5,243 6,071 1772 687 4,535 5,222 1784 737 6,224 6,961 1788 830 6,652 7,482 1825 1,293 9,858 11,151* 1830 1,065 7,595 8,660 1836 1,016 7,966 8,982 1843 1,040 8,475 9,515 1844 1,144 10,375 11,519 1850 1,326 11,234 12,560 1860 1,414 12,286 13,700

Sources: for 1724, 1784 and 1788, Kythera database; for 1825, Leontsinis 1987, pp. 193–4; for 1753, Marmarele et al. 1997, p. 340, vol. 1; for 1770, 1772 Marmarele et al. 1997, pp. 139, 261, vol. 2) * 908 of these were refugees from mainland Greece

3 The Island

Kythera is situated very near to the southern tip of Peloponnese. The island was administered by Venice from 1374 and occupied by the Ottomans between 1715 and 1718, only to revert to Venice until the end of the Venetian Republic in 1797.14

14 Emmanouel P. Kalligeros, Synoptike Istoria ton Kytheron [Short History of Kythera] (Athens, 2008), 4th edition, 34–36; Chrysa Maltezou, “A Contribution on the Historical Geography of the Island of Kythera during the Venetian Occupation”, in Charanis Studies. 52 Hionidou

France occupied Kythera between 1797 and 1799. In the 19th century a series of changes took place, the most significant being that the Ionian Islands, and thus Kythera, came under British protection between 1815 and 1864. Thereafter Kythera became part of the Greek State.15 While the British administration signalled some changes, the land tenure system, agricultural practices and inheritance practices remained untouched. 19th-century visitors referred to Kythera as a “desolate wind-bound, tree- less, unfrequented island”.16 The economy of the island was based almost entirely on agriculture at the start of the 19th; it was highly monetised and characterised by a high rate of land sales and exchanges.17 Being “poor, barren, and rocky”, Kytherian produce was consumed locally and virtually nothing was exported, unlike some other Ionian Islands.18 Moreover, it seems that foods had to be regularly imported for the consumption needs of the population.19 The 1820s seem to have been a decade of economic decline with a near famine situation being vividly described for Cephalonia in 1827.20 During 1831–2, there was a very rapid decline in the price of currants, as the Peloponnesian economy was recovering, something that caused distress in the Ionian Islands exporting the fruit, though Kythera was not one of these.21 Occasionally, even products grown on the island had to be imported, as in 1835 when local olive oil production was exceptionally low.22 The overall assessment of the British presence on the Ionian Islands is not positive in terms of supporting the economic prosperity of the Islands.23

Essays in Honor of Peter Charanis, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou-Thomadakis (New Brunswick, 1980), 151–175 (151). 15 Georgios Leontsinis, The Island of Kythera: A Social History of Kythera (1700–1863) (Athens, 1987), 19–20. 16 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, vol. 2, 301. 17 Leontsinis, The Island of Kythera, 75–6; Andreas Mazarakes, E adelphotes tes Kontoletou [The Brotherhood of Kontoletou] (Athens, 2010), 89–97. 18 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, vol. 2, 301. 19 Peter Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands: Kythera and the Ionian Islands 1809 to 1864 (Darlington, N.S.W., 2009), 196. 20 Ibid., 145–60; John Davy, Notes and Observations on the Ionian Islands and Malta: With Some Remarks on Constantinople and Turkey and on the System of Quarantine as at Present Conducted (London, 1842), vol. 1, 348–9. 21 Davy, Notes and Observations, vol. 2, 92. 22 Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 194. 23 Michael Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire. Reflection on the History of the Ionian Islands from the Fall of Byzantium (London, 1978), 115; Hannell, “The Ionian Islands”, 127. From Modernity to Tradition 53

4 Migration

Migration constituted, as among many other Greek populations, the major safety valve of the population balance.24 Though Kythera was always described as an isolated, remote and inaccessible island during the 18th and first half of the 19th century, migration nevertheless was taking place. So, at the turn of the 19th century and while Peloponnese was also under Venetian rule, it was seasonal migration from Kythera to Peloponnese that was taking place.25 Leontsinis argues that from 1770 onwards outmigration increased, though this was often interrupted by wars and other events.26 Wars or military operations in the area were a constant for Kythera in the first two decades of the 19th century, though the arrival of the British in 1815 signalled a less disturbed period for the island. However, the 1821 outburst of the Greek revolution on mainland Greece, which was at arm’s length from Kythera, wrecked any possibilities of migration there at least until 1828 when the outcome of the revolution was clearly determined.27 Still, it should be mentioned that, throughout this period, wars were not the only threat to potential migrants. The very real fear of piracy must have deterred most from migrating, except when the anticipated outcomes of migration were very significant. References to piracy and enslavement are abundant for the 18th and earlier centuries.28 For the early 19th century, the piracy threat seems to have been more to the goods and money carried rather than to enslavement.29 For a migrant who had worked for months and

24 See for example, Violetta Hionidou, “ ‘They Used To Go And Come.’ A Century of Circular Migration from a Greek Island, Mykonos 1850 to 1950”, Annales de Demographie Historique, 104: 2 (2002), 51–77. 25 Leontsinis, The Island of Kythera, 78–79. 26 Ibid., 29. 27 The 1820s saw the exceptional presence of approximately 1,000 refugees from Peloponnese who were allowed to remain in the safety of Kythera. All these left Kythera soon after 1828. The presence of immigrants was always very small, usually numbering less than 50 at any point in time. For example, in 1836 there were 37 resident aliens on the island; by 1858 there were 42 (Davy, Notes and Observations, vol. 2, 58; Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, vol. 2, 328). 28 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 35 referring to Katsonis in 1787–92. 29 Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 147–9 referring to the years 1823–9. Still, in 1821–22 a Kytherian philanthropic organisation, possibly based in Smyrna, offered money for the repurchasing – and presumably liberation – of slaves; Elias Marcellos, Mia apodemia eis Kythera. Istorika ereunemata [A Migration to Kythera. Historical Studies] (Athens, 1974), 69. 54 Hionidou returned home with his/her amassed income, the possibility of losing everything due to piracy must have been a deterrent. So, in 1825 only 498 Kytherians were recorded as absent from the island, totalling 4.9% of the whole population, with a clear urban bias since the percentage of urban migrants reached 8% of the urban population.30 The British resident in Kythera reported in the 1830s that on average 500 people migrated seasonally from the island, heading to Candia (that is, Crete) and Peloponnese.31 It is with the end of the Greek revolution and the establishment of a British presence on the Ionian Islands that migration becomes a safe and profitable venture, in which peasants start participating in large numbers. The issuing of British passports, despite the complaints of locals about the administrative complexity and the monies required for their processing, provided clear protection for their bearers whether they migrated to the Ottoman Empire, Greece or elsewhere.32 Moreover, the British presence ensured the absence of external attacks, a rare thing for the Ionian Islands.33 This led to a boom in migration leading to 19% of all males being absent from the rural parts of the island in 1844, that is one in five men (Table 3.2). For specific age groups the percentages of migrants were not far from half the men of that group; for example, 40% of those aged 30–34 were absent from the island.

TABLE 3.2 Percentage of migrants by sex and age group, Kythera 1844 (number of migrants in brackets)

Age group Females 1844 Males 1844

0–4 1.2 (2) 1.1 (2) 5–9 0.6 (1) 2.2 (4) 10–14 1.6 (2) 4.5 (7)

30 Archives of the Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece, Athens, record 14759, April 1825. This figure presumably included the absent sailors too. In the previous decade, the figure of 230 men being engaged in maritime pursuits was given (Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 38). 31 Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 190, 198, 203 citing National Archives, CO136/1359, List of Nobles and other proprietors of land possessing landed property above £50 a year in value at Cerigo, 20 July 1841. 32 Marcellos, Mia apodemia eis Kythera, 4–5 referring to an incidence in Smyrna in 1823 where those Kytherians with passports were spared by the Ottoman authorities but those without were massacred. 33 Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 109. From Modernity to Tradition 55

Age group Females 1844 Males 1844

15–19 7.9 (8) 32.7 (34) 20–24 9.1 (8) 38.5 (37) 25–29 1.3 (2) 34.8 (39) 30–34 6.3 (6) 40.3 (48) 35–39 6.9 (7) 29.0 (27) 40–44 2.6 (2) 27.7 (23) 45–49 0.0 (0) 21.2 (11) 50–54 0.0 (0) 22.7 15) 55–59 4.2 (2) 13.3 (6) 60–64 0.0 (0) 19.4 (6) 65+ 0.0 (0) 3.8 (3) All 3.0 (40) 18.8 (262)

Source: 1844 nominal census returns

So, what were their destinations? During the Venetian era, these were Peloponnese and Crete, both within the Venetian State. The movements were seasonal and the job was assisting in the harvest. At the same time, the more affluent would move further afield to Smyrna in Asia Minor where they would establish businesses.34 Their early presence there and the increased safety of travelling meant that many more peasants would travel to Smyrna, though still engaging in temporary/seasonal migration rather than permanent migration. The economic crisis of Greece in 1841–43 must have deterred many from migrating to Peloponnese and encouraged them to move to Smyrna which was becoming the new destination for Kytherians.35 During the British period, observers commented on the temporary nature of Kytherian migration, though the moves must have become longer

34 See the case of Georgios Zervos in 1776 (Marcellos, Mia apodemia eis Kythera, p. 72). Already in 1802 there is presence of a Kytherian community in Smyrna (Marcellos, Mia apodemia eis Kythera, p. 72). 35 Demetres Thrasuvoulos, “Agrotiki krise kai koinonikoi mehanismoi. E peina tou 1854” [Agricultural Crisis and Social Mechanisms. The Famine of 1854], in E Samos apo ta Byzantina hronia mehri semera [Samos from the Byzantine times to today], Conference Proceedings, vol. 2 (Athens, 1998), 168, citing A. Sideris, E Istorike exelixis tes georgikes mas forologias [The historical evolution of our agricultural taxation system] (Athens, 1931), 360. 56 Hionidou considering the numbers absent from the island.36 Towards the end of this period, an observer noted that Kytherians “abandon in youth their own happy land to make money abroad, but it is said that when they have made it they usually return to their own homes”.37 This suggests moves that lasted for much of someone’s adult life. It is after 1856, on the eve of the British presence, that the Kytherians started migrating en masse and permanently to Smyrna.38

5 Households, Inheritance and Marriage in the Eighteenth Century

The 18th-century household system of Kythera was one where single family households prevailed but where complex (extended and multiple) households had an unmistakable presence making up somewhat less than 10% (Table 3.3).39 Still, the presence of solitary households was more significant than that of complex households, ranging from 16.6% to 13.3% of all households and compris- ing mostly widowed women and – much less often – ‘single’ men (‘single’ men refers to either single or widowed since there is no distinction made between the two in the sources). It was married or widowed men and widowed women who were the heads of households. While age at marriage was remarkably stable for men, at 26, for women this seems to have experienced an increase during the century. Most of the newly married would establish an independent residence, usually in close proximity to the groom’s parental household. The new residence would be set up through the combination of resources from the parental families of the groom and the bride: the former contributing land and house, the latter mostly movables and cash, though occasionally it would include land and houses also. For some couples, and only occasionally, co- residence with the groom’s parental family would take place but in most cases this would last for a short period of time (less than four years). Only in a

36 According to Hannell Kytherians, in the late 1840s, migrated extensively to Crete and Smyrna but always returned home (Hannell, “The Ionian Islands”, 128). In 1849 the Colonial Secretary Earl Grey suggested the migration and permanent establishment of Kytherians to Western Australia. But the local British administrator rejected the idea because Kytherian migrants always returned to their island (Pratt, Britain’s Greek Empire, 179, cited in Hannell, “The Ionian Islands”, 128). 37 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, vol. 2, 301–2. 38 Marcellos, Mia apodemia eis Kythera, 71; John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Greece (London, 1884). The impetus for the move was given by the diseases that affected the local vines and later on the wheat. 39 Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 217–234. From Modernity to Tradition 57 minority of cases was such a co-residence permanent. Among the elderly (those over 65 years) in 1784, that is the year with the highest presence of multiple households, co-residence with their own single children was the most common (31.3% and 38.1% of women and men respectively), though more than a quarter of elderly women resided alone while among elderly men this reached only 14.4%. A not insignificant percentage of women and men lived with at least one married child (22.3% and 17.3% respectively). Nevertheless, among elderly women and men, only 8 and 11% resided in a multiple family household, that is, approximately 1 in 10 elderly persons. In the 18th century, and in situations of multiple households, the elderly father would always have been the head of the household in 1724, and almost always in 1788. So a married son would have to set up his own independent residence in order to become head in the 18th century.

TABLE 3.3 Percentage distribution of households according to the Hammel-Laslett classification, Kythera 1724, 1784, 1788, 1836, 1844

Type 1724 1784 1788 1836 1844

Solitaries 16.6 13.3 14.4 12.4 5.8 No conjugal family 2.6 2.6 2.6 3.2 3.2 Conjugal family 70.6 74.0 75.7 64.2 69.1 Extended 7.7 4.7 4.5 10.1 11.3 Multiple 1.1 4.5 2.7 6.2 9.9 Indeterminate 1.5 0.9 0.2 3.9 0.7 Number of 1,407 1,883 2,031 902 567 households

Source: Kythera database. The eighteenth century censuses cover the whole island population. The nineteenth century ones cover only part of the rural population.

But even when a married son had independence of residence, this did not bring financial independence. The inheritance system, with its equitable distribution of immovables among sons, prescribed that dowered sons received upon their marriage the usufruct of what they would receive in full after the death of the father. Thus, financial links and dependence upon the parental household remained while the father was alive, and despite the residential independence of the married son. 58 Hionidou

6 Marriage

Marriage patterns are strongly associated with the prevailing household structures in a society.40 That is, early or late marriage can influence, to a degree, how many nuclear or complex households exist at any one time in the locality. Also, the timing of marriage dissolution – virtually only through death in this case – opens up issues of headship of the household. Though there are no data available on age at marriage for the island population, the censuses and the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage (thereafter SMAM) have been used to assess marriage in 18th- and 19th-century Kythera.41 For the 18th century, despite problems associated with the sources, evidence suggests that marriage was widespread, with as few as 7.4% and 5.2% of women never married in 1784 in the age groups 45–49 and 65–69 respectively. The lowest percentage of never-married men among the various five-year age groups was just under 10 in 1724, 5.9 in 1784 and 4.1 in 1788. While for women, the SMAM figures describe a moderately early age at marriage that fluctuated from 20.6 to 23.3, for men this was moderately high and virtually fixed between 26 and 27. In the first half of the 19th century, there are distinct and significant increases in the SMAM for women and men, reaching 26.3 in 1844 and 29.9 in 1836 (Table 3.4). That both such increases in age at marriage and permanent celibacy were taking place at the time, was evident and discussed by contemporaries. So, Baron Theotoki’s reading of the situation in Corfu in the first half of the 19th century was that celibacy and late marriage were very common among urban elites, whereas among peasants “celibacy is almost entirely unknown”.42 Though evidence of increasing age at marriage is clear for Kythera, there is no clear evidence of increasing celibacy. While this may simply reflect the quality of the data, it could also be attributed to the overwhelming predominance of peasants among the Kytherian population (see Table 3.1).

40 John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation Systems”, Population and Development Review, 8: 3 (1982), 449–494. 41 For the problems associated with the specific data sources in relation to marriage see Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 223–9. In relation to the SMAM measure please see Kevin Schürer, “A Note Concerning the Calculation of the Singulate Mean Age at Marriage”, Local Population Studies, 43 (1989), 67–70. 42 Davy, Notes and Observations, vol. 2, 123; David Thomas Ansted, The Ionian Islands in the Year 1863 (London, 1863), 200 referring to Leukada. Serelea’s calculations for later dates also confirm the widespread celibacy and high age at marriage in the Ionian Islands; Gariphalia Serelea, “Regards sur la nuptialité et la fécondité au Grèce pendant la Second moitié du XIXeme siècle”, Greek Review of Social Research, 67: 1 (1978), 42–50. From Modernity to Tradition 59

TABLE 3.4 Singulate mean age at marriage, Kythera (number of total persons aged 10–49 in brackets)

Year Females Males

1724 20.6 (1,324) 26.6 (1,524) 1784 23.3 (2,135) 26.6 (1,862) 1788 22.3 (2,157) 26.2 (2,035) 1836 25.7 (1,087) 29.9 (985) 1844 26.3 (817) 29.6 (813)

Note: For the calculation of SMAM the age range 10–49 was used and the average of the 45–49 and 50–54 groups is taken as expressing those never married.

7 The Nineteenth Century: Continuity and Change?

The availability of the 19th-century censuses provides a rare opportunity to examine households and their changes in the long term and under different administrations. To start with, the observation should be made that the population increased substantially during the years of British administration (Table 3.1). Thus this is a time of significant population pressure. Interestingly, British observers thought the population increase was negligible and that the availability of land could sustain a much greater increase of population.43 We can only speculate on the reasons for such an increase. It could not have been immigration, except for the 1820s when refugees arrived on the island from mainland Greece, fleeing the war situation there due to the Greek revolution. All left the island once things settled in mainland Greece. The rapid population growth was certainly due to natural increase. For example, in 1858, 210 deaths were registered as opposed to 326 births, indicating a high natural growth.44 A clear change seems also to have taken place in the 19th century regarding households. The incidence of nuclear households was reduced for the first time to below 70%; complex households amounted to 16% and 21% in 1836

43 Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 151; Ansted, The Ionian Islands, 254–255. 44 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, vol. 2, 328, table K. The trend observed in Kythera represents the wider trend for the Ionian Islands, though Kythera seems to have been the island with the largest gap between births and deaths and the one with the largest population increases. The assumption is made here that the under-reporting of deaths and births was approximately the same. 60 Hionidou and 1844 respectively, whereas in the 18th century it never surpassed 10%; and solitary households were reduced to 6% in 1844, less than half of what they had been in the 18th century (Table 3.3). These changes affected households headed by both men and women. For those headed by women, the change was clearly seen in the 1844 census, with 1836 resembling more the 18th century (Table 3.5). For male heads, the changes were already taking place in 1836, with sharply declining conjugal households, significant increases in extended households and somewhat less significant increases in multiple households. It is the significant increase in complex households, both extended and multiple, and the concomitant decline in solitary households that characterises the households of 1844, both male and female headed. So, for a shift that had already started by 1836, its effects were startlingly visible by 1844.45 The fundamental changes of the system become evident when we also look at the differences between those household heads whose father was dead and those with a father alive. For both groups, similar changes took place, with multiple and extended households increasing significantly while solitary households declined in both groups (Table 3.6).

TABLE 3.5 Percentage distribution of households by type, year and head’s gender

Female Heads

Type 1724 1784 1788 1836 1844 Solitaries 38.4 30.6 35.5 29.4 18.8 No-family 4.4 3.5 5.0 6.1 10.9 Conjugal family 51.7 54.3 49.6 53.1 46.5 Extended 4.9 7.4 6.5 4.4 12.9 Multiple 0.5 2.8 3.0 2.6 7.9 Indeterminate 0.0 1.3 0.4 4.4 3.0 Numbers 203 457 504 228 101

45 The observed differences remain unchanged when only the rural population is examined. Though the figures do change for the 18th century, the changes are very small. From Modernity to Tradition 61

Male Heads

Type 1724 1784 1788 1836 1844 Solitaries 12.9 7.8 7.5 6.7 3.0 No-family 2.2 2.3 1.8 2.2 1.5 Conjugal family 73.8 80.4 84.2 68.0 74.0 Extended 8.1 3.8 3.9 12.0 10.9 Multiple 1.2 5.0 2.6 7.4 10.3 Indeterminate 1.7 0.7 0.1 3.7 0.2 Numbers 1407 1426 1527 674 466

TABLE 3.6 Percentage distribution of households for male heads by type and by reported status of the father (Dead, Alive, Unknown), Kythera 1724, 1788, 1844

Type 1724D 1724A 1788D 1788A 1844D 1844A

Solitaries 10.6 7.5 7.1 2.8 3.1 2.7 No conjugal family 2.0 1.0 2.1 0.4 1.6 0.0 Conjugal family 72.7 86.5 82.2 95.6 72.3 81.3 Extended 10.9 3.5 5.2 0.8 11.0 12.0 Multiple 1.2 0.0 3.4 0.4 11.8 4.0 Indeterminate 2.5 1.5 0.1 0.0 0.3 0.0 Numbers 689 200 1009 249 382 75

Source: Kythera database. Note: For 1844 those reported as ‘outsiders’ were not included in the calculations.

The increasing co-residence of widowed parents – mothers and fathers – with a married child is also evident when the residence patterns of the elderly are examined (Table 3.7). This seems to have taken place by 1836, with 35% and 18% of widows and widowers co-residing with a married child compared to 15% and 6% in 1788. This coincides with a corresponding significant reduction in solitary male households but less so for females. In 1836 there is no increase in the co-residence of married parents with a married child, if anything a reduction can be seen. 62 Hionidou

TABLE 3.7 Living arrangements by marital status of older (over 65 years) people, Kythera 1784 and 1844

Living arrangements Females Males Females Males Females Males

1784 1836 1844

Single/unknown alone 3.4 14.4 13.5 6.8 7.7 1.5 with kin 3.4 7.4 1.4 9.7 0.0 1.5 Married with spouse only 11.7 21.8 10.8 12.6 5.1 10.3 with own non- 10.1 27.7 6.8 44.7 5.1 32.4 married children with at least one 7.8 11.4 5.4 0.0 10.3 23.5 married child Widowed alone 25.1 0.0 9.5 0.0 10.3 0.0 with own non-mar- 21.2 10.4 16.2 6.8 10.3 10.3 ried children with at least one 14.5 5.9 35.1 17.5 41.0 14.7 married child other kin 2.2 0.0 1.4 0.0 5.1 0.0 Indeterminate 0.6 1.0 0.0 1.9 5.1 5.9 Numbers 179 202 74 104 39 68

Source: Kythera database. Note: The indeterminate cases refer to the unknown marital status.

The major change that occurs between 1836 and 1844 is the significant increase of elderly married women and men who reside with a married child. The percentage doubles for women to 10.3 from 5.4 in 1836 while for men it jumps from zero in 1836 to nearly a quarter in 1844. In relation to solitary households, there is a virtual disappearance of solitary male households while for women there was reduction from 23% to 18% of all elderly women. Thus, in the 19th century an expansion of extended households seems to take place in the first instance. Following that, increasing co-residence between parental couples and a married child takes place, mostly at the expense of solitary households. The question arising is why such a change took place. From Modernity to Tradition 63

8 What Caused the Change? Culture Prescribes, Economy Dictates

There are a number of reasons for the observed household patterns. To start with, it should be clarified that the household formation system was not based on the stem family since all male children inherited the immovable part of the parental estate equally.46 This was the case in the 18th century and also in the 19th century, as reports make it clear that land was shared among all male children. As contemporary observers noted on Kythera and the Ionian Islands of Santa Maura (Leukada) and Cephalonia, almost every peasant was a landed proprietor.47 Furthermore, there is an almost complete absence of servants. Berkner’s argument on how the developmental cycle of the family and household affect the observations on aggregate data explains why we observe the existence of complex, extended and nuclear households at a certain moment.48 Still, for 18th-century Kythera there is evidence that even when live parents resided on their own, married children in many cases did not reside with them, though some did.49 Thus, there is a clear element of ‘choice’ of what is desirable and what is not for the 18th century and co-residence with elderly parents was not a universally desired or culturally imposed option. The significant increase in numbers of extended households in 1836 and multiple households in 1844 cannot be explained through the impact of the life-cycle. Nor can it be explained solely through changing demographics, as the major change from extended to multiple household seems rather sudden, happening within eight years. Indeed significant demographic changes were taking place in the first half of the 19th century enabling substantial increases in the population, in all probability due to declining mortality, especially among adults. We know that age at marriage was rising in the 18th century and in the first half of the 19th century for women, so increased fertility could not have been the main

46 The British Resident Colthurst reported that “I do not believe there exists a single family, or almost an individual, in the island who does not possess a certain portion of ground” (Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 190 citing National Archives, CO136/1359, List of Nobles and other proprietors of land possessing landed property above £50 a year in value at Cerigo, 20 July 1841). 47 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, 334. Davy, Notes and Observations, 321 and 385. Similar remarks were made for Corfu along with references to the “constant subdivi- sions of property” (British Parliamentary Papers 1850, Despatches between the Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, respect- ing the state of Cephalonia in 1849; the Proclamation of Martial Law, and the punish- ments inflicted under it, volume XXXVI, 45, cited in Hannell, “The Ionian Islands”, 109). 48 Berkner, “The Stem Family”, 410. 49 Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 228–9. 64 Hionidou reason for the increasing population. Assuming that most of the mortality decline concerned adults, this would have lengthened the period that fathers and mothers remained alive, thus prolonging the period that married children would have to wait before assuming full ownership of the land for which they had usufruct rights.50 This to a good degree was counterbalanced by an increase of three years in the SMAM of men and women between 1788 and 1836. If the given percentage of landowners among the male population in 1856 is taken as a guide, for 1844 this would mean that all men over the age of 35 were landowners.51 This, taken in conjunction with evidence from Table 3.8, suggests that, while most men would be married when in the 30–34 age group, they would be owners of land in the 35–39 age group and almost certainly would be heads of their own household while in the 40–44 age group, though many would become heads earlier. Therefore, what we observe in Kythera is an actual change in the household formation system that came about through adaptation rather than as a rupture with the past. The most significant reason for such a change was the mobilisation of the population through migration along with the increase in the life expectancy of adults. While migration itself was partly a result of changing demographics, the increased security that British protection offered and also the ailing economy of the island were other reasons that encouraged its increase and the change from seasonal to long- term moves, even if not permanent for most. So, in the changing early 19th- century situation, the increased life expectancy of the older generation made them more reluctant to let go of their economic resources. Despite the increasing age at marriage of the younger generation, which could be seen as coun- terbalancing the increased life expectancy, the increased life expectancy led to the creation of more multiple unit households. Nevertheless, migration, which was perceived by all as temporary, even if eventually becoming permanent for some, had other significant effects apart from the obvious one of relieving the island of its excess population.

50 The observations of a British visitor regarding the care of infants and young children of the Kytherians were referring to the “carelessness” of the mothers of the labouring class who were nevertheless “fruitful” (Davy, Notes and Observations, vol. 2, 123). Earlier, the British resident commented that “infants were destroyed before or after birth to a considerable extent” (Prineas, Britain’s Greek Islands, 198 citing National Archives, CO 136/1338 Fraser to Colthurst, 23 March 1836). 51 Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, 334. Kirkwall reports that in 1858, in a male population of 7,281, there were 2,300 freeholders. If we were to assume that the 1844 and 1858 age and sex population structures were identical then Kirkwall’s figures suggest that essentially every adult male over the age of 35 was a landowner. From Modernity to Tradition 65

TABLE 3.8 Percentage of male married heads among all married men by age group, conjugal family and complex households only, Kythera (number of married men who reside in conjugal family or complex households given in brackets)

Age group 1724 1784 1788 1836 1844

15–19 66.7 (15) 66.7 (9) 45.5 (11) (0) 0.0 (1) 20–24 88.2 (51) 68.8 (48) 74.5 (47) 27.3 (11) 22.2 (9) 25–29 92.1 (101) 86.6 (127) 81.2 (133) 75.0 (32) 63.4 (41) 30–34 96.9 (90) 86.2 (210) 87.4 (183) 79.0 (62) 75.7 (74) 35–39 96.9 (127) 86.4 (176) 91.2 (193) 76.7 (86) 77.8 (63) 40–44 98.4 (125) 92.6 (162) 94.3 (192) 94.4 (71) 95.5 (66) 45–49 96.3 (80) 92.9 (156) 100.0 (157) 91.3 (80) 79.5 (39) 50–54 97.1 (69) 97.7 (133) 97.3 (146) 100.0 (66) 91.1 (56) 55–59 95.2 (63) 97.0 (103) 100.0 (106) 97.7 (43) 94.4 (36) 60–64 98.6 (74) 97.3 (74) 100.0 (109) 100.0 (43) 100.0 (23) 65–69 100.0 (68) 98.0 (50) 100.0 (49) 100.0 (28) 96.8 (31) 70–74 97.3 (37) 97.2 (36) 97.7 (44) 100.0 (30) 92.9 (14) 75+ 100.0 (28) 100.0 (37) 100.0 (31) 100.0 (20) 100.0 (8)

Note: In 1844, all ‘outsiders’ were excluded from all calculations.

In the late 18th century, when sons reached adulthood there was increasing pressure for the father to distribute the estate, with the clear understanding of continued co-operation between the father and his sons in the cultivation of the land and also other kinds of help that would flow across the households, such as nursing in times of illness or providing cooked food on occasions. As migration increased, the prospect of some sons making a living elsewhere also became significant, and, as sons were not present on the island to cultivate their share of the land, a reassessment of the situation became necessary. First, greater co-operation was required among those male family members present on the island so that the family land could be cultivated, including what were perceived to be the parts that, one day, would be inherited by the migrant son(s). Second, the migrant sons could decide never to return to the island, or they would become so wealthy that their share could become minimal, reflecting the increasing input of the sons present on the island into the household economy. Early partitioning of the parental land would disadvantage those who remained on the island, since its postponement, in all probability, would 66 Hionidou be to their benefit.52 Evidence from 18th-century Kythera and mid-20th- century practices on a neighbouring island demonstrate that those who remained on the island would cultivate and retain the produce for themselves, the service provided to the probable future owner being that of ‘looking after’ their land.53 This seems also to have taken place in 1844 for some, beyond the father’s death, since of the 32 single migrants who were not included in their father’s household, 22 were listed as members of their brother’s household, suggesting that the brother was in charge of the migrant’s share of land after the father’s death. Fifteen of these households were complex, though the absence of the migrant brother made these households de facto simple ones. For the father, the postponement of sharing his land would have further enhanced his control over the younger generation, a control that in earlier times he would have partly, though never entirely, foregone, since he continued to retain ownership of the land until his death. For the sons who remained on the island, the vision of a more beneficial sharing of the inheritance for them seems to have been a strong enough reason to adapt household structures. For the migrant sons, when there was a more profitable alternative where they migrated, they remained away. If and when this alternative ceased to be good enough, they could return and claim their share of the parental inheritance and initiate the sharing of the inheritance, if other sons were not away. Some would marry and leave their wives and sometimes children behind, constant reminders of their claim to the parental estate. 14 out of the 96 married migrants had their wives and young families co-residing with their fathers. Still, 80 were heads of their own independent household, suggesting that either partitioning had already taken place or that the migrant had established an independent household irrespective of the partitioning of the parental estate. Yet there were also two cases where the married migrant was brother of the head of the household, suggesting that the parental estate had not been partitioned even after the death of the father. Thus, all in all, in the new situation the older generation prolonged the time that they remained in full authority, and continued to ensure their old age

52 Such a case was observed in the late 18th century leading to the creation of a multiple family household. Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 230. 53 A similar situation was observed on Hios among those who left the island during the 1941–43 famine; Violetta Hionidou, Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944 (Cambridge, 2006), chapter 5; and, Roger Just, A Small Island Cosmos. Kinship and Community on Meganisi (Oxford, 2000), 191. From Modernity to Tradition 67 economic security.54 Just as in the 18th century, in the early 19th century the main ingredients of the household formation system were built around the cultural prescriptions of this society: ensuring the marriage of children; providing them with the economic resources to do so but also ensuring the provisioning of the elderly. These were clear constants for this population, essentially the cultural prescriptions. When changes occurred – demographic and economic – adjustments had to be made: age at marriage increased significantly, migration grew, inheritance customs were adjusted and so were household structures. Nevertheless, all these were adjustments, not ruptures with the past as, even in the 18th century, there were some complex households and inheritance customs that were always flexible enough to accommodate the specific needs of individuals.55 Moreover, the change in the structure of households seems to have taken place gradually, leading to more extended households in 1836 and to more multiple households in 1844. Gradual it may have been, nevertheless it was significant.

9 Conclusions

The effects of industrialisation, urbanisation and, in general, modernisation, as argued by some authors, brought the adaptation of traditional family structures to a new form, i.e. from complex to nuclear, though for some the change was from nuclear to complex. Kaser specifically argued the former for Eastern Europe, in which Greece was included, except for the Aegean islands where simple households prevailed before the transition.56 Others conceded that no such change took place, but argued that the cultural elements conserved the main elements of the household formation system. The case of Kythera outlines a case where the change took place from ‘modern’ to ‘traditional’, i.e. from

54 Couroucli also suggests that the inheritance customs seem to have changed in Episkepsi since the 19th century, with parents delaying the moment of the division of the parental estate so that they could ensure their old age; Maria Couroucli, Erga kai emeres sten Kerkyra. Istorike anthropologia mias topikes koinonias [Works and Days in Corfu. Historical Anthropology of a Local Society] (Athens, 2008), 125. 55 Hionidou, “Independence and Inter-dependence”, 230–232. 56 Karl Kaser, “The Stem Family in Eastern Europe: Cross-cultural and Trans-temporal Perspectives”, in The Stem Family in Eurasian Perspective. Revisiting House Societies, 17th– 20th Centuries, eds. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Emiko Ochiai (Berne, 2009), 255–258 citing Joel M. Halpern, “Memoirs of Recent Change: Some East European Perspectives”, in The Process of Rural Transformation: Eastern Europe, Latin America and Australia, eds. Ivan Volgyes, William P. Avery and Richard E. Longsdale (White Plains, 1980), 242–268. 68 Hionidou a predominance of nuclear households to a significant presence of complex households. This happened in the space of a century and a half, but not as a result of industrialisation or urbanisation, though it could be argued that a process of significant, structural change was at play, its main element being the extensive possibility of outmigration from the island and all that that entailed. What is significant to observe in the case of Kythera is the adaptability of existing practices, when changes required such adaptations. Inheritance practices were somewhat adjusted, the age at marriage increased, the household structures were also modified accordingly. In none of these was there a rupture with the past. In all of them, whatever occurred had happened before. These changes took place because of the changing economy of the island and its increasing connection with migration. But while the essential ‘cultural’ elements remained stable – the obligation of parents to marry off their children and to finance their long-term independence, to provide equal inheritance of the estate among the male children – how these were achieved, was modified. The causes of the modification were economic. Thus, it could be argued that culture prescribes whereas economy dictates. CHAPTER 4 The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities in the Branković Region of Serbia in 1455

Mirjana Bobić

1 Introduction

After the death of Prince Dušan The Great (1308–1355),1 who had conquered great territories and thus created a most powerful medieval Serbian state

* The present contribution is based on research carried out for the author’s MA thesis, “Teorijsko – konceptualni i metodološki problemi u istraživanju porodice i domaćinstva na osnovu turskog popisa Oblasti Brankovića iz 1455. Godine” [Theoretical-Conceptual and Methodological Problems in the Study of Family and Household on the Basis of the Turkish Census of the Branković Region from Year 1455], Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Belgrade, 1995. Several studies have appeared since then, which it has not been possible to take into account here. The author and editors are most grateful to one of the anonymous review- ers for drawing their attention to the following, which are included as indications of recent work: Ema Miljković, Смедеревски санџак 1476–1560: земља – насеља – становништво [The Sanjak of Smederevo 1476–1560: Land – Settlements – Population] (Belgrade, 2004); eadem, “Породица у пљеваљском крају у првом веку османске владавине” [Family in the Region of Pljevlja in the First Century of Ottoman Rule], Гласник Завичајног музеја (Пљевља), 2 (2001), 103–117; eadem, “Османске пописне књиге као извор за историју српског народа под османском влашћу (О постојећим критичким издањима и планираним пројектима)” [Ottoman Census Books as a Source for the History of Serbian People under Ottoman Rule: on Present Critical Editions and Planned Projects], Бањалучки новембарски сусрети “Наука и образовање”, Филозофски факултет у Бањалуци, Научни скупови, 6: 1 (2006), 269–281; eadem, “Studies of Ottoman History in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia (Modern Serbian, Montenegrin and Croatian Historiography on the Ottoman Empire)”, Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, Cilt 8, Sayı 15, XX, (2010), 1–18; eadem and Siniša Mišić, “Structure of the Serbian family in the late Middle Ages”, Romanian Journal of Population Studies, 6: 2 (2012), 5–18; Aleksandra Vuletić, Porodica u Srbiji sredinom XIX veka [Family in Serbia during the 19th Century] (Belgrade, 2002); eadem, Брак у Кнежевини Србији [Marriage in the Principality of Serbia] (Belgrade, 2008); eadem, “Породичне везе јавних личности Србије током друге половине 19. века у мемоарским делима” [Family Relations in Serbia During the Second Half of the 19th Century in Memoir Literature], in Перо и повест: зборник радова (Belgrade, 1999), 163–172; eadem, “Из породичног живота Илије Гарашанина” From the Family Life of Ilija Garašanin], in Писмо: зборник радова (Belgrade, 2001), 129–139; eadem, “Структура сеоске породице у Кључу средином 19. Века”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_005 70 Bobić in political and military terms, there came a period of huge decline and disintegration.2 His son and inheritor, Prince Uroš V, was too weak to resist the selfish interests of local nobles who jeopardized central administration and were therefore threatening to bring about the disintegration of the country. There were several families who were struggling to overtake the power, the most dominant being the Mrnjavčević. Although some of them approved the sovereignty of Prince Uroš V, such as Lazar Hrebeljanović in southern parts of Serbia (see Figure 4.1) and Vuk Branković in Kosovo, generally speaking they nevertheless ruled their territories independently. These were the circumstances when Serbs came across Ottomans, the newly emerging military force arriving in the Balkans. The ultimate debacle of Serbs in the battle of the Marica (a river in today’s Bulgaria) in 1371 and the resulting death of Prince Uroš V spelt the total demise of Serbian medieval empire. The most outstand- ing among the prince’s successors was Lazar Hrebeljanović, who enlarged his territories to include great parts of lands with the towns of Niš, Užice as well as his later capital town of Kruševac (see Figure 4.1). He also came into possession of the renowned medieval mines of Novo Brdo and Rudnik. Apart from him, the other two great nobles were his two sons-in-law: Vuk Branković, lord of the region of Kosovo and Skoplje, and Đurađ Balšić of the County of Zeta. Lazar’s ambition to unite Serbian lands and impose restrictions on the power of local nobles was blocked by the Turks’ penetration of the territory which began in 1381. The resulting historic and military clash took place, famously, in Kosovo valley in 1389 and ended up with a huge Serbian defeat when the country lost the majority of its nobles. Both armies were headed by their

[The Structure of the Rural Family in Ključ in the Middle of the 19th Century], Баштиник 6 (2003), 192–199; eadem, “Породица Јована Илића – пример српске грађанске породице средином 19. века” [The Family of Jovan Ilić – An Example of Serbian Bourgeois Family during the Middle of the 19th Century], in Зборник радова Πородица Илић у српској историји и култури (Belgrade, 2003), 37–43; eadem, “State Involvement in the Institution of Marriage in Serbia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century”, in Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in the Balkans (16th–20th Centuries) (Bucharest, 2008), 161–180; eadem, “Колико душа живи у једној кући?: Број чланова сеоског домаћинства у Србији [How many persons live in one house? Volume of peasant’s household in Serbia] 1834–1910”, Српске студије 3 (2012), 219–244; Nebojša Šuletić, Сремски санџак у XVI веку [Sanjak of Syrmia in the 16th Century], Unpublished PhD dissertation, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, 2013. 1 His empire had spread from the Danube in the North to the Gulf of Corinth in the south (today’s Greece), and from the Adriatic Coast and Dubrovnik (today’s Croatia) in the west to the town of Cavalla and the Aegean Sea (Greece) to the east. 2 This paper is a part of my work on a project entitled “Challenges and actors of new social integration in Serbia: concepts and actors”, No 179035, funded by the Ministry of Education and Science, Republic of Serbia. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 71 rulers (Sultan Murat and Prince Lazar), and both were killed. Vuk Branković was one of the few to survive, a historic fact which paved the way for myths for centuries ahead, blaming him for his alleged betrayal of Prince Lazar and his compatriots. Later on the narrative of the Kosovo defeat became a part of the national history, cultural heritage and identity of Serbs, and has remained so until today. However after the victory at Kosovo and the occupation of Serbian lands, the Turks temporarily withdrew from the Balkans in order to solve inner political turmoil and consolidate their Empire. Serbia occupied the position of vassal for the next 70 years,3 a status which greatly contributed to its restoration and preservation up to 1459.4 The Serbian noble Vuk Branković, having also become a Turkish vassal, was obliged to take part in military operations, but since he refused to follow these requests on a regular basis, the Sultan Bayazid, the son and a successor of the late Sultan Murat, recalled him granting the greater parts of his lands to the Despot Stefan Lazarević, the son of the late Prince Lazar. Small parts were given to Vuk Branković’s wife and sons, whilst the Sultan retained the towns of Zvečan, Jeleč and Trepča. The Branković family returned all their lands just before the battle of Ankara (1402) and Đurađ Branković, Vuk’s son, was appointed the new Despot of Serbia after the death of Despot Stefan Lazarević in 1427. However, the Ottomans were enraged because of Đurađ’s relations to the Hungarian King and they therefore pushed deeply to the inlands and conquered the towns of Niš and Kruševac. In that way the whole Despotovina was defeated. In between the temporary occupation and the re-establishment of Despotovina (1439–1444), timar organization was approved (distribution of fiefs into hasses and timars), as had been documented in the tax poll (defter) of the Region of Branković, and as will be discussed below in the text. Later on, when Mehmed II the Conqueror, the successor of Bayazid, had come to the Ottoman Turkish throne (1451–1481), he established links to both European and Asian parts of the Empire and pushed its borders towards the Danube and Hungary. In 1454 he attacked Despotovina and the Turkish army conquered a good part of it. Thus Ottoman rule was finally established in the Region of

3 The position of vassal denotes partial independence, an intermediate state between total occupation and independence. It meant that previous holders resumed ruling their lands, but with clear obligations towards the Turkish conqueror in terms of military service and civil duties (taxes and imposts were to be paid in cash and kind). 4 Lazar’s son, Stefan Lazarević, was given the title of despot in 1402. By then he was a Despot, and therefore the period (known as the Despotovina or despotate) was marked by a restoration of national identity, territory, culture and politics. However the Turks took over the country in 1459 after they defeated the despot Đurađ Branković (Vuk’s son) in the battle of Smederevo. This was when the whole country came under their full occupation and administration. 72 Bobić

Hungarian Kingdom

Vlaška

Land of Lazar Hrebeljanović Kingdom of Bosnia Bulgarian Empire

Land of Vuk Branković

Ottoman Empire Land of Zeta Land of Konstantin Dragaš

Adriatic Sea King Marko’s Albanian Land Rulers Byzantine Empire

figure 4.1 Map of Central Balkan States, 1375–1395 Source: Wikipedia

Branković and the Despot had been required to pay tribute to the Ottomans and send auxiliary troops when necessary. It was at that very time when the detailed local tax poll (defter) of the Region of Branković was accomplished.5

5 The original title of the document was Defter-I Vilayet-i Vlk (defter za Vukovu Oblast); Hamid Hadžibegić, Adem Handžić and Ešref Kovačević (eds.), Oblast Brankovića, opširni katastarski popis iz 1455. godine [Detailed Census of the Region of Branković in 1455] (Sarajevo, 1972), v–xiv. This is actually the first detailed Turkish tax poll of Serbian countries which has been preserved to the present time and translated into Serbo-Croat. However the Turkish administration undertook regular tax polls during the reign of Mehmed II the Conqueror. There The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 73

2 The Tax Poll of the Region of Branković in 14556

When the tax poll had been carried out, the Region of Branković included Kosovo Polje, parts of the territory at the border of Montenegro, the Raška region and Toplice (the latter two being parts of central Serbia),7 with the exception of the territories taken by the Turks after 1392, such as Zvečan, Jeleč and some other settlements, which were registered in another document – the Summary Land Register of 14558 (see Figure 4.2). According to the editors of the Serbo-Croat translation, registration of land, settlements and population was a rigorous and highly institutionalized process.9 In their introduction the editors wrote about the instructions on how the whole action was to be performed. The sultan’s vassals responsible for carrying out of the tax poll were obliged to document relevant information on all holders of hasses and timars as well as on the subordinated population. Hasses were enjoyed by holders of the highest positions in Turkish administration (mir-i-alem Vukove Oblasti), who had to be Turks (Muslims). These fiefs brought them an income of over 100,000 akçes per year (Turkish currency at the time). While hasses were linked to the proprietor’s place in the social hierarchy, the other two types, timars and zeamets, were attributed to persons and their revenue ranged from up to 19,990 akçes (from timars) while zeamets

were two types of Turkish tax polls: summary and detailed. Summary ones were taken on the ascension of a new sultan or at regular points in time, while detailed ones were conducted following major changes either in the territory, tax laws or after shifts in administrative organization which occurred in the Region of Branković. 6 This analysis is based on the thorough research carried out by the interdisciplinary team of scholars headed by academician Miloš Macura, then the President of the Department of Population Studies of Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. The researchers undertook the reconstruction of the tax poll of the Branković Region in 1455 from various standpoints, and published their results in the extensive monograph entitled “Settlements and Population of the Region of Branković in 1455”; Miloš Macura (ed.), Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića 1455 (Belgrade, 2001), 793 pp. There were five key authors whose contributions were as following: Historic and Geographic Circumstances (Relja Novaković), Settlements and Population; Osman’s Feudalism (Miloš Macura), Demographic Characteristics and Population (Miroslav Rašević), Houses, Families and Zadrugas (Mirjana Bobić) and Anthroponomy and Toponymy (Milica Grković). 7 Macura, M. (ed.), Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, 5. 8 Hazim Šabanović, Krajište Isa-begaIshakovića, Zbirni katastarsk i popis iz 1455. Godine [Summary Land Register of of the Frontier Territory of Isa-bey Ishakovich in 1455] (Sarajevo, 1964). 9 Hadžibegić, Handžić and Kovačević, Oblast Brankovića. 74 Bobić OKUPLJE PR BRDO VO GNJILANE NO CE A BLA KURŠUMLIJA PRIŠTIN ŠTRPCE VUČITR N MIT RO VICA ANJSKA B AZAR VI P NO Č TUTIN PE RO ŽAJ Map of indicated of of in 1455, with the village the Region Vrbuča Branković VRBICA figure 4.2 The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 75 contributed 20,000 to 99,999 akçes per year.10 Timars were granted to lower strata of feudal nobles, who could also be non-Muslims, Christians (Orthodox Serb nobles), and thus loyal to the emperors. These fiefs were listed by their names, familial origin (agnatic links), (e.g. ‘timar Umura, sina (son of) Hasan- begova’), but sometimes through geographical, ethnic or some other feature. As stated above, holding a timar presupposed military obligations, as well as safeguarding the territory and imposing a social system of feudalism.11 Serbian authors who have studied this document thoroughly argue that the defter offers a solid basis for the reconstruction of the Ottoman feudal system.12 There were 177 fiefs registered in the Region of Branković in 1455 in total, containing four hasses and 173 timars. Their distribution followed the territorial division into seven territorial entities called nahiyes and one vilayet (Trgovište, Klopotnik, Dolci, Morava, Vučitrn, Topolnica, Lab and a vilayet of Priština).13 These 177 fiefs listed in the document were altogether headed by 262 nobles, hierarchically organized. The first two ranks were filled exclusively by Muslims (four in the highest one and eleven in the middle ones) while the lowest stratum included 86 Orthodox Serbs (out of 247 from the low rank).14

10 There is no mention on zeamets in this defter. 11 Ema Miljković “Turski feudalni sistem na Balkanu u prvom veku vladavine” [The Ottoman Feudal System in the Balkans in the First Century of its Rule], in: Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 533–549 (537). 12 Ema Miljković, op. cit.; Miloš Macura, “Osmanski feudalizam” [Ottoman Feudalism], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 471–611. The ongoing debate on how the Ottoman system should be defined is beyond the scope of this study. 13 Nahiyes denoted geographical parts, regions, units or countryside. More information on the distribution of fiefs and their holders can be found in Hadžibegić, Handžić and Kovačević, Oblast Brankovića, viii. 14 The total number of fiefs-holders is greater than the actual number of fiefs because some of the timars were administered by more than one person (Macura, “Osmanski feudalizam”, 481). This is especially case for fiefs that had been attributed to Serbs (86 Serbs ruled 25 timars with the lowest level revenues). The highest rank was occupied by a frontier and chief commander, Sandjakbey for the Vuk Region (Ilyas-bey, mir-i-alem), and his hasses included nahiyes or parts of nahiyes: Trgovište, Klopotnik, Dolci, Morava and the town of Vučitrn itself. The other three hasses were granted to: (1) Muhamed bey, subaşi of Morava nahiye (subaşi was a military commander of the territory, nahiye or the town): (2) Kasim-bey, subaşi of Novo Brdo, nahiye of Topolnica and (3) Mehmet-beyBahsayis- agha son, subaşi of the Lab nahiey. Timars were distributed among middle and lower ranks of military hierarchy. As said before, at the very bottom of the Ottoman hierarchies there were 86 Orthodox Serbs heading 25 timars in total. As local scholars argue these Serbs became timar holders either because they were previous lords on these lands (so-called ‘spahije’ – sipahis) or they had become loyal to the emperor and as such were 76 Bobić

The tax poll enumerates 646 villages which constituted parts of fiefs and were territorialy located in nahiyes. That said, one fief could cover villages and towns of several nahyies, and hence territorial and feudal organisation and distribution did not overlap. The census also brings data on families and households as well as on the production of the common population located in villages, while the towns were populated by military troops and Turkish administrators and therefore were not subject of the document’s registration. Thus villages have been listed along with data on economy which served as the main source of revenues for fiefs’ holders.15 Each registered village is accompanied by a list of names of men, heads of households, coresident males (provided they were of age), and widows (if there were not males of age in the house, in which case these females acted as heads). Altogether there were 497 widows registered in the tax poll. Otherwise heads’ wives were not declared; nor their under-age offspring, which is in line with the very purpose of this register. At the end of the listing for each village there is a recapitulation of the number of houses, widows and unmarried men. Military personnel of the fort of Novo Brdo, and monasteries (clergy), were registered as persons and not as houses with their members, therefore they were not the subject of our analysis. Thirdly, there was a category of soldiers whose obligations were tightly related to military operations.16 What we however do learn from the introductory part of the translated defter is that they had been obliged to pay only personal taxes, and since they were thus a privileged part of subordinated people they have not been included in our reconstruction of households and families. In the

awarded territory with population. However most of these timars were enjoyed jointly by two or more brothers and rarely by a father and a son, while only one was independently headed (Macura, “Osmanski feudalizam”, 521). The holders of these timars were identified according to their (Serbian) names, which means that maybe some who were Islamicized or had some different Orthodox names were not taken into consideration in this registration. Despite the fact that these fiefs were the poorest in terms of income generation, a supply of military force and civil service, it emerges that in this way Turks expressed their willingness to incorporate lower parts of local feudal holders in their system. 15 The editors claim that there was a great number of unidentified settlements indicating ethnic changes, reflecting armed conflicts and political turmoil. There are also traces of migration, reflected in the disappearance of some settlements and their names as well as in the creation of new ones, Hadžibegić, op. cit., X. 16 Besides the lack of data in the tax poll, we also do not hold information on whether military personal, soldiers and clergy were admitted to marry, therefore we do not discuss their family and household issues in the text. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 77 nahyie of Klopotnik there were 11 villages with houses which served as a reserve of voynuks17 and likewise 22 villages with such houses in the nahyie of Lab.18 Just a few lines on type of settlements and local economy in the Region. The vast majority of the registered ordinary or dependent population lived in villages and engaged predominantly in agriculture and natural production, with low levels of trade and manufacture developing as well as with the emerging monetary economy.19 Besides farming and animal husbandry, there are some mentions of occupations closely related to agriculture (8 out of 40) whilst 32 were non-agricultural. In the first group, the most frequent was cattle herder (govedar) with 92 persons registered. In the non-agricultural group, the most cited was a hammer-smith (kovač), in 60 cases. Still, the most widespread non- agricultural occupation was linked to the (Orthodox) church, with 288 priests and clergy (1.7% of total). Even though there was some dispersion of occupations in the Region of Branković at the time, the fact is that division of labour was still in its initial phases, with a general preponderance of farming with production and consumption aimed at the fulfillment of personal needs only.

17 Hadžibegić, Handžić and Kovačević, Oblast Brankovića, xi. The vast majority of soldiers came from subordinated people and to a lesser extent sipahis; Macura, “Osmanski feudalizam”, 485. 18 This tax poll does not mention Vlachs, a social category that was in between the upper strata of spahije (sipahis) and the dependent population, which is most probably the reason why they were not registered in the Region. Unlike meropahs and voynuks, they were directly subordinated to the Ottoman central administration in that they were privileged both under the previous Serbian state and later under Ottomans. They were primarily used to guard frontiers (to Austria to the West and Hungary to the North), as well as to preserve forts and to transport goods and people. They lived in relatively independent villages in the mountains and under their own headmen, most probably in complex family households. There are however some other Ottoman tax polls of vlachs, also translated into Serbo-Croat, in a collection of historical documents (Šabanović, Krajište Isa-bega Ishakovića, Zbirni katastarski popis), mentioned above. This group was also thoroughly analyzed and discussed by E. A. Hammel, “The Zadruga as Process”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds, Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), 337–375. The latter pertain to tax polls of villages of the county of Belgrade (Beogradska nahija) from the 16th century (1528 and 1530). As Hammel points out (344), the term Vlach was used by Slavs to denote Romanized Illyrians, whom they displaced after having arrived in the Balkans. As time passed this meaning was transformed into ‘stockman’ or ‘shepherd’, and as such applied in administrative documents of the medieval Serbian state and the Ottoman Empire. 19 Macura, Milos, “Naselja i naseljenost” [Settlements and Population], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 217. 78 Bobić

As stated above, the document does not include complete information on towns, since they were populated by Ottomans and their troops, but it is quite obvious that they played an important role as political and economic centres. As can clearly be seen from what has been said above on the economy, the population of villages must have been mutually dependent and their settlements had multiple functions: demographic (socio-biological reproduction), economic, religious and social ones, thus creating a world of their own.20 Tax poll data on houses, although specific in its nature, is highly important because it allows various perspectives in the study not only of occupations and social status, but of family and household, ethnic and migratory structures, as well.21 Specifically, in the vast majority of cases, each name of a head of a house in a settlement is followed by the name of his father and/or his brother (for more than 16,000 houses collated from the document) and only to a lesser extent by some position, either professional, social, ethnic or migratory.22 The document also registers various taxes based on the village economy of the dependent population. Taxes paid in cash were personal (so-called ispence) and counted annually according to the number of dependent Christians, heads of houses, co-resident males and widows presuming they had been heads of households. There were also other fixed dues (so called tithe and resm) for animals (pigs), mills and income generating from agriculture, vegetables (onion, garlic, cabbage, beans), bees, fruit orchards, etc. Taxes in kind were demanded from cereals (uşr and tithe) such as wheat, barley, husked oats, millet, legumi- nous plants (beans, vetch) as well as from vineyards (hassa vineyards belong-

20 Macura, op. cit., 206. 21 Macura, M., “Oblasti Brankovića u susret” [Towards the analysys of the Region of Branković] in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 5–29. 22 On the basis of the compilation of census data, it emerged that there were altogether 16,915 male taxpayers in the Region; Miroslav Rašević, “Demografske prilike i stanovništvo” [Demographic Conditions and Population], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 411–457 (442–454). Among them, a minority had been registered according to the following characteristics: (1) a profession (a hammer-smith – kovać, a shoemaker – obućar, a shepherd – govedar, etc., 643 in total, or 3.80%); (2) migrant’s status (prišlac, došlac, etc., 574 or 3.39%). For a minority of males there were (3) three social categories recognized: aged, poor (we don’t know exactly what were the differences in between these two) and persons with a physical disability (hrom, slep, etc.), (altogether 816 persons or 4.82% of the total); (4) As to the ethnic structure, the vast majority were Serbs (12,985 in villages and towns). Ethnic minorities were as few as 104 or 0.61% (48 Vlachs, 36 Albanians, 16 Bulgarians, only three Greeks and one Croat). As Rašević argues, however, there is some doubt as to the consistency and accuracy of the registration of all these statuses. So for example there was certainly more than one Croat house (registered in Janjevo village). There is no information on the methodology of how these personal characteristics had been notified. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 79 ing to timar holders and the other ones of villagers). Therefore, this document offers quite solid information on the total annual crop coming from different branches of the agricultural economy at that time. When considering how to process evidence on houses and family relations contained in the census, we have kept in mind Hammel’s warning that “it is incumbent on any author to make explicit what his analysis is and what is not about”.23 Thus the main aim of our paper is to reconstruct family and household, based on the data presented in this document. Therefore, we have posed two main goals: to discuss relevant concepts and appropriate definitions of domestic groups compiled in the document (kuća) (house), as well as a method for reconstruction of families and households out of the listing. As Sovič suggests, in order to study the geography of households and families of Balkans24 it is highly important to set “a rigorous and formal set of definitions” which is “a central preliminary stage”.25 I therefore adopted part of Peter Laslett’s basic rules for interpreting English documents, presupposing that historians working on the issues of families and households elsewhere meet the same problems of definitions, their accuracy and cross-cultural comparability.26 Finally, after we analyzed and interpreted the results, we reconsidered the main findings not only in the light of the academic controversies and ambigui- ties concerning single vs. multiple families and households, but also through the lens of the perpetuation of a specific historic and anthropological thread, preserved up to date as part of a social and collective unconscious in East Europe and the Balkans (Hajnal’s line, or the so-called or East/West divide in terms of marriage and family).27 It should however be stressed that the study of historic forms of family in Serbia as well as in the Balkans more generally (as is often the case in the other parts of the world) is complicated by two major issues: the lack of reliable, objective and systematic evidence, and the ideological biases which interfere

23 Hammel, “The Zadruga as Process”, 366; Silvia Sovič, “Definitions and Documents in Family History: Towards an Agenda for Comparative Research”, in Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in the Balkans (16th–20th Centuries) (Bucharest, 2006), 137–158 (138). 24 Sovič, “Definitions and Documents”, 137. 25 Sovič, loc. cit. 26 Peter Laslett, “Introduction: The History of the Family”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Laslett and Wall, 86–88. (“Appendix to Introduction: Suggested Rules for Interpreting English Documents”). I recognize, of course, that Laslett’s classification system has in many respects become outdated. It is retained in the present study (which is based on research completed twenty years ago) as its use at least has the merit of clarity and comparability with other studies that have conformed to the same standard. On this issue see Sovič, “Definitions and Documents”, 138. 27 Sovič, “Definitions and Documents”, 137. 80 Bobić with academic research and therefore hinder the distinction of facts from artifacts, reality from myths of family life in past times.28

3 Main Paradigms

Family household was at the core of social life for all human communities in pre-modern times, as is well documented in literature. It represented the entirety of biological and social reproduction concerning both individual and community. Male solidarity, rooted in firm kinship ties, generated material production and economic exchange in a pre-modern village, while a hierarchy of power, positions and roles were endorsed according to age and sex.29 The clear segregation of male and female duties and responsibilities is one of the main features of house communities in medieval Serbian and Balkan peasant society.30 When discussing the history of Balkan family and household, Todorova suggests introducing a complex model which best describes the interplay between vital events of pre-transitional population (fertility, mortality and nuptiality), along with an inheritance system as well as all the ensuing effects on household size and its complexity.31 The fact is, however, that we do not know much about all these historic facts and figures, while at the same time there is a need for a multidisciplinary historic demographic, anthropological and sociological research for each specific region. What we can speculate, on the basis of our scholarly knowledge of demographic transition and history of the family, is that, due to short life expectancy, the succession of generations must have been occurring rapidly. Therefore elderly sons were inheriting patrimony soon after a father’s death. Under conditions where only one son undertook the position of a head, other offspring, presumably females, ought to have left the patrimony. However in the case of an absence of a son, there were daughters who could have brought husbands into a house, and these sons-in-law were termed domazet. In cases where

28 Hammel, “The Zadruga as Process”; Sovič, “Definitions and Documents”, 146–147; Maria Todorova, “Situating the Family of Ottoman Bulgaria within the European Pattern”, History of the Family, 1: 4 (1996), 443–459 (452). 29 Maurice Godelier “Načini proizvodnje, odnosi srodstva i demografske strukture” [Modes of Production, Kinship Relations and Demographic Structures], in his Marksizam i antropologija [Marxism and Anthropology] (Zagreb, 1982); Joel Halpern, Karl Kaser and Richard A. Wagner, “Patriarchy in the Balkans: Temporal and Cross-Cultural Approaches” The History of the Family – An International Quarterly, 1: 4 (1996), 425–442. 30 Anđelka Milić, Rađanje moderne porodice [The Rise of the Modern Family] (Belgrade, 1988). 31 Todorova, loc. cit. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 81 there was more than one son, they might have continued living together in one house, headed by one of the brothers, who was usually married and called descendant by the will of the father.32 Therefore complex or multiple households consisting of two or more married sons have frequently formed fraternal unions. Finally, if a father died (or was killed in one of the frequent armed conflicts) while his offspring were still under age, it was a mother who managed a house (e.g. widow’s houses in the Region of Branković) until sons had grown up and could take control.33 However historic demographical evidence and relevant methodological approaches are underrepresented among East European scholars. These, together with the dearth of reliable empirical evidence, further worsen the study of already poorly preserved historical evidence. Therefore our analysis of the tax poll of the Branković Region in 1455 has followed the arguments of Peter Laslett and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure34 because they: (a) used historical census type documents as sources of evidence; (b) created suitable definitions and concepts referring to the pre-modern family and household, as well as a set of hypotheses and methodological suggestions as to how to use these specific artifacts to study domestic groups; and (c) as a result they created a typology of households which encompasses various forms, starting from single person households, through small up to extended and/or multiple family households; (d) they also suggested an ‘ideographic model’ of representation of kinship structures within houses. This model of presentation depicts the household head as the central figure and thereafter points to the links with other (male) co-residents. The model illuminates kinship ties in a household, and by doing so reconstructs agnatic communities in particular time and space (cross-sectional approach).35 Laslett introduced three basic criteria for a domestic group to be treated as a family and/or household. These are: local criterion or co-residence (common dwelling of its members), functional (common work), kinship (all members of the group have to be related by marriage or blood). This means members of the households were men and women and their socially recognized children, including sometimes other ‘co-residents’ – servants, dwellers, lodgers, visitors,

32 Stojan Novaković, Selo [Village] (Belgrade, 1965). 33 Novaković, loc. cit.; Milan Milićević, Život Srba seljaka ]The Life of Serbian Villagers]. Zbornik SAN I (Belgrade, 1874); Henri Mendras, Seljačka društva. Elementi za jednu teoriju seljaštva [Peasant Societies. Elements for a History of Peasantry) (Zagreb, 1986); Milić, loc. cit. 34 Laslett and Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time. 35 Peter Laslett, “Introduction: the History of the Family”, in op. cit., 28–31. 82 Bobić who lived with the main family household (headed by a man/husband).36 Thus we have adopted a part of the larger list of Laslett’s definitions relevant to house communities (a household, marital status, child, servant, kin, conjugal family unit) “for the treatment of census-type documents” as well as the rules for presumption (interpretative principles).37 In his typology of family households, Laslett distinguishes three main forms: ‘simple family household’, ‘extended family household’ and ‘multiple family household’.38 Single family unions could emerge through several variations: a marital couple with/without children, a widowed parent with a child. The other form is extended family households which might consist of a conjugal family with one or more relatives, other than offspring, presuming that the whole group is living together on its own (independently). This extension is always defined according to the head of the household or the first mentioned person in the listing, and might be vertical (lineal), when the resident relative is either a member of the generation preceding (upwards) or succeeding (downwards) that of the conjugal family unit (say married head’s father, or mother, or in the latter case a grandchild, a niece or a nephew). The horizontal (lateral) links denote family households where the co-resident relative is a brother, sister or a cousin. Finally multiple family households consist of two or more conjugal families living together and mutually related by kinship or marriage. These constitutive families could also have been simple or extended. Similar to Laslett, Serbian medieval law acknowledges two types of domestic groups, small and complex ones, the latter including extended and multiple family households. The older historic sources, medieval in particular, do not recognize the terms used above. Family appears under the concept of house [kuća].39 However whether it is simple or complex cannot be judged by its title but its structure. Its structure is reflected in the listing of its members, and it sometimes encompassed and denoted immediate members (‘children’) or wider kin (‘brothers’, ‘relatives’).

36 Ibid. O 88 (‘Appendix to Introduction: Suggested Rules for Interpreting English Documents’). 37 Ibid. 86–87. Laslett also makes a distinction between the ‘compiler’, referring “to the person who in the past made out the document being analyzed, and the word researcher which denotes present day enquirer” (86). So, for example, the compiler will use both household and family to denote domestic groups in history, while a researcher will avoid using the term family in such a wide sense in case that might cause ambiguity. Furthermore, Laslett warns that researchers “should draw attention once more to the uncertainties of the task in hand, for it will be evident that they are somewhat arbitrary”. 38 Ibid. 29 (‘Terminology and Scheme of Analysis’). 39 Hammel, “The Zadruga as Process”, 338. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 83

Jovan Cvijić, Serbia’s leading geographer, geologist and anthropogeographer, who also excelled as ethnographer and ethnologist, wrote that the popular notion of house for South Slavs referred to a place where there was a fireplace and where one could access from outside or a porch. The other terms for house were ‘hearth’, ‘fire’, and ‘chimney’. A house consisting of one room with the hearth at its centre represents the evolutionary standard in the development of Serbian houses, while the married sons and their wives moved to the separate space within the house, called vajat.40 After having adopted Laslett’s concepts we undertook a reconstruction of family households of the Region of Branković in 1455, based on the preserved and translated Turkish tax roll. As mentioned above, we adopted Laslett’s cross-sectional methodological approach as the most appropriate one in the absence of comparative datasets and valid additional sources which would allow the performance of comparisons and analysis of anthropological features of familial processes and changes in a longitudinal perspective. Such an approach, however, suffers from a reflection of ‘accidental demographic circumstances’ instead of the underlying live household structures. “In other words, a cross-sectional analysis can tell us how many simple family households there were in a society at a given point in time, but it cannot tell us how many of those households would eventually become complex households”.41

4 Discussion

The Ottoman tax poll (defter) of the Branković Region in 1455 registered 15,162 houses, headed predominantly by males (14,665 houses, or 96.7%), and to a much lesser extent by females, widows (497, or 3.3%). Such a breakdown, with males prevailing, corresponds to pre-transitional populations with surpluses of men. However due to continuous armed conflicts with Ottomans for several decades before there had also been a massive loss of males, which explains

40 “It might be that this form of house had been preserved throughout medieval times with Yugoslav agricultural workers and shepherds, particularly in its mountain areas. Moreover we know that this primitive one-room house . . . appears in many cases in all villages under the Turkish occupation, as well as a shelter . . . The simplest form of old Serbian houses was ‘sibara’. This house was shaped as a cup, with a round room and the fire in the centre, without holes for windows in the walls and without a ceiling, and a radius of two metres. Only later was another room added, but without a fireplace at the beginning . . .” Jovan Cvijić, Antropogeografski i etnografski spisi [Anthropo-geographic and Ethnographic Writings], book 4 (vol. I) (Belgrade, 1987), 268 (my translation). 41 Tracy K. Dennison, “Serfdom and Household Structure in Central Russia: Voshchazhnikovo, 1816–1858”, Continuity and Change, 18 (2003), 395–429 (403). 84 Bobić widows’ houses in the document. Finally, the defter counts 1,783 unmarried males of age, which altogether makes up 12.2% of the total registered men. To illustrate the census we have listed below the inhabitants of the village of Vrbuča (nahiya of Trgovište, hasses of Ilijas beg, the great commandment – mir-i-alema Vukove Oblasti) (for location see Figure 4.2).42

Selo Vrbuča (Village of Vrbuča)

Kosta, son of Berislava Radovan, son of Kosta Radenko, son of Radislav Berislav, his brother Radin, son of Šilja Radovan, his son Radivoj, son of Bogođa Đurađ, son of Radivoje Stepan, his brother Radojin, son of Vlkašin Jovan, his brother Rašojko, son of Vlkašin Vladislav, son of Vlkašin Dimitrij, son of Vlkašin Radohna, son of Boban Vlkašin, his brother Radoslav, brother of Radihna Oliver, son of Radašin Vladko, his brother Oliver, brother of Radihna Dobrašin, brother of Ivan Radica, son of Kosta Total: houses 14, unmarried 8.43

It seems pretty clear that the term ‘house’ represents the nucleus of the village in terms of its organization. The relationship between a village and a house is formulated by Novaković in the following manner:

42 Hadžibegić, Handžić and Kovačević, Oblast Brankovića, 4. 43 The complete data on the village as cited in the defter is given in Figure 1. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 85

Just as a village was the smallest administrative unit of the state, the house was the smallest unit of a village. The house was looked upon with greater rigor than the individual. Old statistical notes count houses (hearths, fireplaces) and it seems that taxes were taken according to houses. The house was responsible for all of its members . . . and dues from vassals villages were also demanded from houses.44

The question arises as to how to treat males listed one after another. We adopted Laslett’s definitions of kin described above, as well as Hammel’s model of analysis of the 1528 census of Vlachs in Belgrade County,45 which presupposed that blocks of males depicted

core sets of agnatically related men . . . and the base on which patrilocal extended and fraternal joint households were formed. The structure of these, actually work groups, however, cannot be assumed to be identical with that of complex households formed by the combination of conjugal families, since some undetermined number of men in the work groups of the listing of 1528 was probably not married.46

Relying on Laslett’s proposed ideographic model,47 we reconstructed these agnatic groups out of 617 peasants’ settlements of the Region.48 Through statistical analysis we came to a total of 9,989 domestic groups (family households) of various forms and structure. As we can see, this outcome is profoundly different from the initial figure of houses registered in the Ottoman document (14,665 houses). From Table 4.1 we can draw conclusions about the distribution of houses or households and the overall population. Obviously small family units headed by one person, mostly males, were prevalent, while those consisting of two or more males were less frequent. This raises the next question: what was actually

44 Novaković, Selo, 70 (my translation). 45 Hammel, “The Zadruga as Process”, 347–348. 46 Ibid. 350. 47 Laslett, “Introduction”, 41. We however used the term ‘sociograms’; Mirjana Bobić, “Kuća, porodica, zadruga” [Houses, Families and Zadrugas], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 316–275 (373–375). 48 The number is less than the total (646), because for some houses there were no family members registered, while some settlements were depopulated. Miroslav Rašević, “Demografske prilike i stanovništvo” [Demographic Characteristics and Population], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 407–471. 86 Bobić

TABLE 4.1 Houses according to the number of heads/tax payers, share of total in percentages, Branković Region, 1455

Number of Heads 1 2 3 4 5 + Total

Total 5,705 2,624 1,032 388 240 9,989 % 57.11 26.27 10.33 3.88 2.40 99.99

Source: Own calculation based on the defter (census) a ‘house’ registered in the tax poll? We treated a ‘house’ as both a tax unit and a household.49 To put it more precisely, the former must have been a part of a domestic group, given the lack of information on other members, who were not subject to feudal dues (wives, dependent children, elderly, etc., and who were therefore not compiled). When we relate the total number of houses per village (houses + widows) to the number of people counted (houses + widows + ‘co-resident persons’), the outcome is that a house is a small unit, with a mean size of slightly above one (tax payer) (Table 4.2). The village of Vrbuča lists 22 taxpayers, out of whom 14 were heads, while eight were co-resident males. We assumed that all inhabitants registered were members of ‘houses’. It is however unclear who was a head and who was a co-resident male, and therefore it is difficult to determine the ‘borders’ of a house. What we do know is that both heads and co-resident males were obliged to pay the same amount of personal tax (25 akçe).50 By closely observ- ing the listed relations (kinship ties) among the inhabitants of the village, we determined that there were actually seven extended and/or multiple family households in the village. Among them two were headed by a father and five by one of the listed brothers51 (ideograph representation in Figure 4.3). The

49 Dennison, “Serfdom and Household Structure”, 402. 50 Widows were considerably less burdened, with 6 akci of personal tax. Hadžibegić, Handžić and Kovačević, Oblast Brankovića, x. 51 Again the question arises whether these closely related kin were dwelling together or living in the neighborhood. Todorova suspected this in some cases, and therefore treated them as a phenomenon of ‘modified extended family structure’; Todorova, “Situating the Family”, 446. In the latter case they could also be considered a houseful in the Laslettian sense. The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 87

TABLE 4.2 Distribution of houses and taxpayers in Branković Region, 1455

Total number Total number of Number of tax payers of houses tax payers per house

Total 15,162 16,945 1.12

Source: Own calculations

1. Father headed 2. Brother headed 3. Father headed

Berislav Radislav Šilja

Kosta Radenko Berislav Radin

Radovan Radovan

4.a Brother’s union with late father’s name 4.b Brother’s union with late and head (brother’s) descendant father’s name

Bogođa Radivoj

Radivoj Stepan Đurađ Stepan

Đurađ

5. Union of 5 brothers with late father’s name

Vukašin

Radojin Jovan RašojkoVladislav Dimitrij

6. Brothers’ union 7. Brothers’ union 8. Brothers’ union Boban Radošin Radoslav Radihna Đurađ Stepan Oliver Vladko

9. Two brother’s form 10. Two brothers’ form (the other one is dead) 11. Small family Kosta Oliver Radihna Dobrašin Ivan

Radica FIGURE 4.3 Ideographic representation of various family (agnatic) forms in the village of Vrbuča 88 Bobić following were headed by fathers: (1) the (extended) family of Kosta, the son of late Berislav and Kosta’s son Radovan; and (2) Radin, son of Šilja with his descendant Radovan. The complex or multiple families headed by a brother were as follows: (1) Radenko (son of Radislav) and Berislav; (2) Đurađ (son of Radivoje) with his brother Stepan; (3) Radojin (son of Vlkašin), who was the head of a large family household, with his brother Jovan52 as well as other brothers (probably married and/or widowers): Rašojko, Vladislav and Dimitrij; (4) Radohna (son of Boban) with brothers Vlkašin, Radoslav and Oliver; (5) Oliver (son of Radašina) with his brother Vladko. There were also two small or nuclear family households, headed by single males: (1) Dobrašin, the brother of late Ivana; (2) Radica (Kosta’s son). Dobrašin had evidently been a member of the complex family together with his brother, who had died, and who could have been either married or unmarried. If, say, his late brother had been a wid- ower, then his surviving under-age children could have been living with their uncle Dobrašin, and therefore would not have been counted in the tax poll. Therefore these units might have been treated as either “small or nuclear” (inokosne), or the remainder of brother-headed multiple families. Radica, Kosta’s son from the end of the list of dwellers, might have been in a nuclear family household, but he might have also been the son of the first listed Kosta (the son of Berislav), who was also the brother of Radovan. In that case Kosta’s first son Radovan might have been co-resident (and unmarried). Unmarried co-residents living in multiple family households were most probably sons or younger brothers. There are two other reasons that another son of Kosta might be listed at the end of the entry for the village. In the absence of empirical evidence we can only speculate that it might have been the case, either because of the fission of the household (after he had got married), or due to inner family conflicts which could also lead to dissolution and which had happened occasionally, as ethnographers like Novaković, Cvijić and others claimed. On the other hand, it might also have been a single family, not linked to the patrimony. Thirdly, the reasons might be methodological. Each village had its head (kmet) who could have deliberately skewed the evidence on his dependant population before the tax poll commission, for various reasons. Fourthly, it might also be that Ottoman administrative personnel were not always fully precise when compiling the evidence gathered from the ground.

52 According to the way in which the agnatic links were presented in the listing, we presupposed, arbitrarily, that Jovan was an unmarried brother, and thus registered as ‘his brother’ (Jovan, brother of Radojin, son of Vlkašin), while other brothers who were listed thereafter might have been either married or widowers and therefore listed as ‘son(s) of Vlkašin’, like the head (Radohna). The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 89

5 Forms of Households

By reconstructing kinship structures and then processing data on houses and their inhabitants we arrived at 45 various forms which we grouped into four main types or classes: (1) simple or small family households; and complex (extended and multiple) family households, the latter headed either by: (2) a father; (3) brother(s): or to a much lesser extent by (4) (other) kin (relatives). As stated, the nuclear or simple family type includes two modalities headed either by a male or a female (a widow). By contrast, extended and multiple family households were much more divergent. Those headed by a father included seven modalities, covering at least two persons up to a maximum of six. The most numerous complex unions were those headed by brothers. We do not know whether they were married or single, but since they were listed one after another, we have assumed they had been residing in the same house. Brother-headed unions included as many as 23 different modalities, ranging from two to eight members (adult males), a fact which speaks not only to the absolute prevalence of brothers’ unions but also to their great diversification. Finally, there was also a form identified in the tax poll headed by (other) ‘kin’ or ‘relatives’.53 In our calculations this form was represented by 12 modalities ranging from three to eight people. We can therefore conclude that forms consisting of one generation or laterally extended kin were actually the most widespread.

TABLE 4.3 Family households in Branković Region, 1455

Type Small (nuclear) Complex (strong) unions headed by: Total father brother ‘Other relative’

Number 5,705 1,018 3,130 136 9,989 % 57.11 10.19 31.34 1.36 100.00

Source: Own calculations

53 We cannot say what this category consists of. Supposedly it denotes distant relatives, other than those from family of procreation and/or orientation (e.g. ‘son in law’). No detailed information on status or gender or kinship is provided, either in the document or in the introduction to the Serbo-Croat translation. 90 Bobić

When, however, we look at the level of population contained in households, we see that the vast majority (66.3%) of registered people lived within extended and multiple family households (complex unions), with those headed by a brother prevailing (50.53%) (Table 4.4).

TABLE 4.4 Distribution of the population of the Branković Region in 1455, according to household subtype (in percentages)

Small or Extended and/or Extended/or Extended/or Total nuclear multiple family multiple family multiple family households households households headed by headed by headed by other fathers brothers relatives

% 33.67 13.63 50.53 2.17 100.00

Source: Own calculations

6 Conclusion

Our study of the defter for the Region of Branković in 1455 aimed to identify and reconstruct families and households. However many questions arose when we considered how to analyse this tax poll, since it only offered lists of inhabitants (with their first names and agnatic links) including recapitulation of houses, co-resident males (sons and brothers of age) and widows, presupposed the latter were heading a house. Since the very nature of the document determined the quality of the evidence, we had to search for a proper method for combating the lack of systematic information on all family members, their mutual relations, including other/distant relatives, and how to elucidate the boundaries of a household (who was living together and who separately). We came to the conclusion that ‘house’ – the term which is in use in the document – was used to depict a nucleus of a village/settlement in terms of its economic, social and biological reproduction, thus representing a part of family and embracing adults – males responsible for work, personal burden and military service. In order to further reconstruct family groups and find out about their inner structure, we adopted a list of definitions and rules for presumptions set out by Cambridge Group for the History of Population and The Reconstruction of Domestic Communities 91

Social Structure. It is nonetheless obvious that our endeavour to carry out the whole reconstruction has remained speculative and tentative, involving some decisions that were necessarily arbitrary, and constrained by a lack of accuracy and straightforwardness in the documents. Additional and complementary sources are actually missing, in particular those from cultural and social history, ethnology and anthropology. They are needed in order to tackle these issues more convincingly for this historical time and space. Our reconstruction has led us to mainly confirm that pre-modern households in the Region consisted of small families which had been overwhelmingly represented by one adult member, therefore conforming to historic demographic viewpoints. This finding has also been confirmed by socio- economic and historic analyses of the everyday living conditions of the ordinary, subordinated (Orthodox) population. On the other hand the defter provides evidence on somewhat different (multiple) family structures of nobles (either native Serbs or Islamicized populace). They were registered as holders of the lowest rank fiefs (timari), who were obviously integrated by Ottoman conquerors into their system and who therefore won some privileges. On the basis of the defter data we learn that they used to administer their territories as a family group (timar braće – timar of brothers). Thus one can assume that social hierarchy was more prevalent in moulding familial structure compared to cultural or ethnic features. On the other hand, when speaking of multiple family households of the ordinary population of the Region, laterally extended unions were most frequent, especially those headed by brothers. This was obviously linked to a short life span (of around 22–24 years).54 From the historical and ethnographic literature referred above55 we have also learned that unmarried males were co-residing either with a father or with a married brother. Under the conditions of patriarchy, with a virtual absence of neo-locality, males were socially supported to enter early marriages and create families, even though they did not have the prerequisites for this (independent housing and resources). We should also take into account that the demographic and social conditions of the Region must have been very severe, with a calculated loss of population for the period 1385–1455 of as much as 25.4 to 30.7%,56 due to frequent armed

54 Rašević, “Demografske prilike i stanovništvo”, 440–441. 55 Cvijić, Antropogeografski i etnografski spisi; Valtazar Bogišić, O obliku zvanom inokoština u seoskoj porodici Srba i Hrvata [On the Form called inokoština (nuclear family) in the Peasant Family of Serbs and Croats] (Belgrade, 1884). 56 The estimated number of subordinated Christians in 1455 was 67,500; Rašević, “Demografske prilike i stanovništvo”, 432, 453. 92 Bobić clashes with Ottomans, epidemics of contagious diseases (plague, variola vera) and occasional famines, all of which decreased fertility and forced people to emigrate to other Serbian lands.57 These circumstances could have also been beneficial to the strengthening of mutual dependence and networking among families of the subordinated agrarian population.

57 Budimir Pavlović, “Socijalno-epidemijske prilike u Oblasti Brankovića sredinom XV veka” [Social and Epidemiological Conditions in the Region of Branković by the Middle of the 15th Century], in Naselja i Stanovništvo Oblasti Brankovića, ed. Macura, 457–469. CHAPTER 5 Variation Within: Regional Differences in Household Structures in Mid-Nineteenth Century Rural Serbia

Siegfried Gruber

1 Introduction

Studies of household structures in the eastern half of Europe still represent only a small proportion of the body of research on household structures in Europe. The reasons for this situation are manifold, including a lack of sources, less interest from Western scholars, and less orientation to international research among scholars from the region. Generally, impressions of the region have been based on ethnographic studies or scattered quantitative studies of a few villages or cities. The absence of databases covering the whole country, with the notable exception of Albania, makes it very difficult to paint a picture of the whole of Southeastern Europe based on quantitative results. Published statistical data in a highly aggregated form did not seem to provide researchers with enough evidence for calculating rates for different kinds of households. But recent results on the spatial variation in household structures in 19th- century Germany1 have shown that aggregate data can in fact be used for this type of research. Another aspect is spatial variation, which has not yet been intensely investigated. Because the only in-depth studies have concentrated on small areas, the general view of the region is based on these scattered studies, ethnographic evidence, and mere assumptions. In the following, we will use Serbian data to conduct a more detailed analysis based on the census of 1866. Our goal in this chapter is to provide answers to the following questions: · Can we distinguish between different regions of household structures in rural Serbia in 1866?

1 Mikołaj Szołtysek, Siegfried Gruber, Sebastian Klüsener and Joshua Goldstein, Spatial Variation in Household Structure in 19th-century Germany. MPIDR Working Paper WP 2010- 030 (Rostock, 2010).

2 Household Structures in Rural Serbia

2.1 Definitions of the Joint Family Household in Serbia The work of Karadžić remains important for research on household and family in Southeastern Europe, largely because he coined the term ‘zadruga’ for the Serbian type of a joint family household in his dictionary of the Serbian language. This term was increasingly used because no term existed before to distinguish this kind of household from nuclear families. Following his work, the interest of researchers was often directed towards very large and complex households, because Karadžić had, for example, found evidence for a household with 62 members, 13 couples, 1,400 sheep and goats.2 At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, many ethnographers asserted that the number of joint family households was declining. They published studies about single large joint family households, and therefore helped to create and perpetuate a certain image of this kind of household. Such publications were also common later in the 20th century.3 Large and complex households were often used as examples, even at the end of the 20th century: a household with 13 men, 12 women, and four servants served as an illustration of the Serbian census of 1863: “This extended family, heavy in lands, properties and financial assets, employing several living-in servants, is of the type around which the notion of the powerful, influential zadruga was based.”4 The term had different connotations, and was often seen as a national custom or an essential characteristic of Slavic culture.5 The zadruga as national custom was postulated for Serbs (by Serbian scholars) or Croats (by Croatian scholars) and connected with many positive attributes of the own rural

2 Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Lexicon serbico-germanico-latinum (Vienna, 1818) (p. 191). 3 See e.g. Milan Karanović, “Nekolike velike porodične zadruge u Bosni i Hercegovini” [Some Large Joint Families in Bosnia and Herzegovina], Glasnik zemaljskog muzeja, 42 (Sarajevo, 1930), 133–56; Mirko R. Barjaktarović, “Die Sippenhausgemeinschaft Osmanaj im Dorfe Djurakovac”, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 85: 2 (1960), 214–27. 4 Michael Palairet, “Rural Serbia in the Light of the Census of 1863”, The Journal of European Economic History, 24: 1 (1995), 41–107. 5 Maria Todorova, “Myth-Making in European Family History: the Zadruga Revisited”, East European Politics and Societies, 4: 1 (1990), 30–76. Variation Within 95 population.6 The term has also been used uncritically for any kind of “large family” and has misled generations of scholars, because this kind of household was not restricted to South Slavs. Moreover it has been used for two different kinds of household complexity.7 The use of this term should therefore be avoided in scholarly publications,8 and it is restricted to citations in this chapter. The term ‘joint family household’ will be used instead, because this term is not loaded with (partly ideological) meanings. The Serbian Civil Code of 1844 defined this kind of household as having property in common, with clothing, weapons, and jewelry being the only things owned personally. The household head needed the consent of the other adult and married men for all property transactions. The death of the household head or of any other member of the household did not alter the status of the common property. Only the division of the household or the death of all members led to the end of the household and the dissolution of the common property.9 Halpern defined it as follows:

An expanded definition of the zadruga is a residential kin unit composed of at least two nuclear family units, often including other relatives as well, who work and live together and jointly control and utilize the resources of the household. Usually heads of the nuclear units and others who may be members of the zadruga are related by common descent, mainly in the male line. Thus the zadruga can be considered primarily a patrilocal unit existing within a society which places stress on patrilineal descent and where the formal authority patterns are patriarchal. The term zadruga, in addition to referring to such a household unit, is

6 Karl Kaser, “Peoples of the Mountains, Peoples of the Plains: Space and Ethnographic Representation”, in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield. Austrian Studies, 5 (Oxford and New York 2003), 216–30. 7 Karl Kaser, Familie und Verwandtschaft auf dem Balkan. Analyse einer untergehenden Kultur (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 1995), 37ff. 8 Todorova, “Myth Making”, 64; Kaser, Familie und Verwandtschaft, 37; Jasna Čapo Žmegač, “New Evidence and Old Theories: Multiple Family Households in Northern Croatia”, Continuity and Change, 11: 3 (1996), 375–98 (379). 9 Gojko Nikolić (ed.), Zbirka zakona Kraljevine Srbije. Protumačen odlukama državnog saveta, opšte sednice i odeljenja kasacionog suda, glave kontrole itd. Vol. 1: Gradjanski zakonik [Collection of Laws of the Kingdom of Serbia. Commented Decisions of the State Council, General Sessions and Department of the Court of Cassation, etc.] (Belgrade, 1909); Holm Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik Serbiens 1834–1914. Mit europäischen Vergleichsdaten. Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 87 (Munich, 1989), 72. 96 Gruber

often translated from Serbo-Croat as cooperative or partnership, and this reflects its ideal ethos.10

The joint family household in Southeastern Europe is therefore connected to a patriarchal kinship system and a system of equal male inheritance in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.11 The positive aspects of these joint family households, relative to nuclear families, included the greater availability of people to perform farm work, and more positive personal relationships.12 These households were also depicted as the ideal foundation for the societal order, and as a bulwark against the destructive forces of modernization in 19th-century Croatia and Slavonia.13 Others envisioned them as the basis for the creation of a socialist society, because they could protect individuals from impoverishment, a problem that was widespread in the industrialized West.14 Sicard stated that the economic advantages of these households were more important than the fact that they involved communal living, and that the head of the household was chosen based on economic ability, and not simply age.15 The negative aspects of joint family households included increased hard- ships for women, and the dissatisfaction of the female members of the household was often the reason for their division.16 The conservative, traditional structure hindering new developments17 and the curbing of individual initiative have also been mentioned as negative characteristics of these households,

10 Joel M. Halpern and Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, A Serbian Village in Historical Perspective (New York, 1972), 17. 11 Karl Kaser, Macht und Erbe. Männerherrschaft, Besitz und Familie im östliche Europa (1500–1900) (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 2000). 12 Milan Đ. Milićević, Pregled zadružnog stanja Srba seljaka [Overview of the Joint Family of the Serbian peasant]. Glasnik SUD, 9 (Belgrade, 1857), 145–61. 13 Ognjeslav M. Utiešenović, Die Hauskommunionen der Südslaven (Vienna, 1859). 14 Svetozar Marković, Srbija na istoku [Serbia in the East] (Belgrade, 1946). 15 Emile Sicard, Osnovni elementi jugoslovenske porodične zadruge (studija socijalne sta- tike) [The Key Elements of the Yugoslav Joint Family (a Study of Social Statics)], Arhiv za pravne i društvene nauke, 32 (49) (Belgrade, 1936), 564–75. 16 Milićević, Pregled, 145–61. 17 Milovan Gavazzi, Seljačka zadružna obitelj kao činjenica i kao problem [The Peasant Joint Family as Fact and as Problem] (Sarajevo, 1934); Rudolf Bičanić, Kako živi narod. Život u pasivnim krajevima [How the People Live. Life in the Passive Regions] (Zagreb, 1936); Vera St. Erlich, Family in Transition. A Study of 300 Yugoslav Villages (Princeton, 1960); Milenko S. Filipović, “Zadruga (Kućna Zadruga)” [Joint Family], in Communal Families in the Balkans: The Zadruga, ed. Robert F. Byrnes (Notre Dame, In., 1976), 268–79. Variation Within 97 along with the cultivation of a slave mentality and the fostering of provincial- ism and xenophobia.18 A household classification system which can be used not only for one European region, but theoretically all over the world was introduced by Hammel and Laslett. The central concept of this classification system is the ‘conjugal family unit’ (CFU). A CFU consists either of a couple (with or without children) or a single parent with an unmarried child (or children). The system consists of six different categories which can be subdivided into several classes each: Solitaries (no CFU, one person), No family (no CFU, more than one person), Simple family households (one CFU), Extended family households (one CFU plus other relatives), Multiple family households (more than one CFU), and Indeterminate (households which cannot be classified into the other five categories). This classification system has become widely used among family historians and the category ‘Multiple family household’ includes the household types referred to as zadruga and stem families.19

2.2 Distribution of Joint Family Households in Serbia There have been a range of explanations for the differences in the distribution of joint family households, including the origins of the population.20 Cvijić thought they were typical for the Dinaric regions, and were most common in dispersed settlements.21 Filipović stressed the importance of the economic conditions for the prevalence of these households: they appeared among cattle breeders, and were especially numerous in regions with cattle breeding and agriculture, because these households needed a large number of workers.22 Mitterauer emphasized the importance of the pastoral economy in relatively remote areas with an underdeveloped money economy. Other factors cited

18 Bojan Penev, Istoriia na novata bălgarska literatura [History of New Bulgarian Literature] (Sofia, 1936). 19 Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, “Comparing Household Structures over Time and between Cultures”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16: 1 (1974), 73–109; Peter Laslett, “Introduction”, in Household and Family in Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and Colonial North America, with Further Materials from Western Europe, eds. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (London and New York 1972), 1–89. 20 Ljubomir Pavlović, “Antropogeografija Valjevske Tamnave” [Anthropo-geography of the District of Tamnava in the Region of Valjevo], Srpski etnografski zbornik, 18 (1912), 363–635 (624–28). 21 Jovan Cvijić, Balkansko poluostrvo [The Balkan Peninsula] (Belgrade, 1922), 268, 363–65. 22 Filipović, “Zadruga”, 273. 98 Gruber included the absence of cities and of a strong church or state administration.23 Palairet found evidence for the association between the sale of livestock and the existence of joint family households in his analysis of the census of 1863.24 Stoianovich saw the structure and size of households as a result of geography and culture. Large families were present in areas with difficult terrain and low population density. The influence of feudal lords did not increase the size of the households, because large families were economically disadvantaged.25 He agreed with the Nimkoff-Middleton model, which postulated that extended families are typical of societies with a mixed agricultural-pastoral population.26 In Western Serbia in the late 18th century, the villages were small, the families were large, and the economy was mixed agricultural-pastoral; while in Eastern Serbia, the villages were larger, extended households were the exception, and agriculture predominated.27 Todorova saw this kind of household as a product of the conditions that were prevalent between the late 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The decentralization of the Ottoman Empire was the reason for the emergence of joint family households as a means of survival, especially in Western Bulgaria. In this region, the pastoral economy was well developed, but in Southeastern Europe, the relative importance of pastoral and agricultural activities shifted several times. The joint family household was therefore not seen as an archaic relic, but as a specific answer to a specific problem.28 In Bulgaria, this kind of household was to be found mostly among pastoralists.29

23 Michael Mitterauer, Historisch-anthropologische Familienforschung. Fragestellungen und Zugangsweisen. Kulturstudien. Bibliothek der Kulturgeschichte, 15 (Vienna and Cologne, 1990), 109–12; idem, “Medieval Roots of European Family Developments”, in Stredoeurópske kontexty l‘udovey kultúry na Slovensku [Central European contexts of folk culture in Slovakia], ed. Jan Michálek (Bratislava, 1995), 92–105. 24 Palairet, “Rural Serbia”. 25 Traian Stoianovich (ed.), Between East and West. The Balkan and Mediterranean Worlds, 2 vols. (New Rochelle, New York, 1992), 121ff. 26 M. F. Nimkoff and Russell Middleton, “Types of Family and Types of Economy”, American Journal of Sociology, 66: 3 (1960), 215–25. 27 Stoianovich, Between East and West, 142ff. 28 Todorova, “Myth-Making”, 55–60, 63ff.; Maria Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern. Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, 1993), 151–56. 29 Maria Todorova, “Recent Research on Household and Family in the Balkans (15–19th Century)”, in Von der Pruth-Ebene bis zum Gipfel des Ida. Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag von Emanuel Turczinsky, ed. Gerhard Grimm. Südosteuropaschriften, 10 (Munich, 1989), 11–22 (19). Variation Within 99

Stoianovich distinguished three belts of distribution of complex families between 1500 and about 1850. The first belt was along the coast, with a low proportion of joint family households (with the exception of the region of Poljica in the hinterland of Zadar). The second belt was the Western continental zone, with joint families making up 60 to 80% of households. The third belt was the eastern continental zone, with 40% of the population living in complex households. In some peripheral regions, like the Greek-Albanian highlands, these households were more prominent.30 Todorova’s model of distribution included a coastal zone populated mainly by nuclear families. The region of complex households was located to the east of this zone, in the mountainous zone of the pastoralists in Bosnia- Herzegovina, Northern and Central Macedonia, and Central Albania. Similar proportions could be found in the border region of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and in the Rhodope Mountains. The tribal areas of Montenegro and Northern Albania and the military border were separate entities with high proportions of complex families. Lower proportions of complex families were found in the valleys of Serbia, Western and Central Bulgaria, Southern Macedonia, and Southern Albania.31 Kaser identified a core area consisting of northern and central Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, western Bulgaria, northern Greece, and the former military border.32 In rural areas of Serbia, joint family households generally predominated in the mid-19th century; it was only east of the Lower Morava that other family forms were more prevalent.33 For Central Serbia, most of the available data confirm this household pattern. Later, Kaser divided Southeastern Europe into four different regions based on residence patterns after marriage and household type:34 · neolocal – nuclear: Romania and parts of Eastern Serbia · patrilocal – life cycle complexity: Hungary proper, Bulgaria, continental Greece · neo- or uxorilocal – nuclear: Aegean islands · patrilocal – household cycle complexity: Hungary proper, Croatia and Slovakia, most parts of Serbia, western Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia- Hercegovina, Montenegro, Albania, and northern Greece, with variants in

30 Stoianovich, Between East and West, 148. 31 Todorova, Balkan Family Structure, 149. 32 Kaser, Familie und Verwandtschaft, 258. 33 Kaser, Familie und Verwandtschaft, 321. 34 Karl Kaser, “Introduction”, in Household and Family Contexts in the Balkans, ed. Karl Kaser (= special issue of The History of the Family, 1: 4) (1996), 375–86 (380–83). 100 Gruber

the Maina region of the Peloponnesus and on larger islands like Crete, Corfu, and Cyprus.

Serbia belonged mostly to the fourth region, which was characterized by partible equal male inheritance, patrilocality, and complexity in the household cycle. “The transmission of property was not related to death or marriage and took place when the household divided into several different groups after generations”.35 This pattern had a northern and a southern variant, of which the latter was prevalent in Serbia.36 All of these maps were based on the accounts of travellers, ethnographers, or local studies. This model of four different regions and their distribution in Southeastern Europe has been challenged by Brunnbauer for the Rhodope mountains37 and by Gruber for Serbia.38

2.3 European Patterns Hajnal published his influential article on European marriage patterns in 1965.39 In the article, he distinguished two different marriage patterns in Europe, divided by a line from Leningrad/St. Petersburg to Trieste: a “(Western) European marriage pattern” characterized by a high age at marriage, especially for women, and a high proportion of never-married persons; and an “Eastern European marriage pattern” characterized by a low age at marriage and almost universal marriage.40 Subsequently, Hajnal added household formation patterns to marriage patterns. The formation rules common to joint household systems were early marriage for men and women, with young couples living in the household of an older couple, most often the husband’s parents, in con- formity with the prevalent agnatic kinship ideology. From the point of view

35 Kaser, “Introduction”, 383. 36 Loc. cit. 37 Ulf Brunnbauer, “Families and Mountains in the Balkans: Christian and Muslim Household Structures in the Rhodopes, 19th–20th century”, The History of the Family, 7: 3 (2002), 327–50. 38 Siegfried Gruber, “Lebensläufe und Haushaltsformen auf dem Balkan: das serbische Jasenica im 19. Jahrhundert” (PhD diss., Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 2004); idem, “Household Formation and Marriage: Different Patterns in Serbia and Albania?”, in Families in Europe between the 19th and 21st Centuries: From the Traditional Model to the Contemporary PACS (Romanian Journal of Population Studies Supplement), eds. Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Ioan Bolovan (Cluj-Napoca, 2009), 229–47. 39 John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–43. 40 Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns”, 101ff. Variation Within 101 of the individual, it was not necessary that the majority of households were joint households, but that the majority of people were members of a joint household at some stage in their lives.41 In the same volume, Laslett designed a model of domestic group organization in traditional Europe with four regions (West, West/Central or Middle, Mediterranean, and East). The criteria for creating these regions were the occasion and method of domestic group formation, procreational and demographic characteristics, the kin composition of groups, and the organization of work and welfare.42 Hajnal’s and Laslett’s divisions of Europe have been very influential, and many scholars have taken them for granted. Especially in East Central Europe, the applicability of this line has been challenged.43 The region that is the subject of this chapter is clearly east of this postulated line, but it has not been placed definitively into either the Mediterranean or the East category. Serbia was identified as the country with the lowest percentage of unmarried people in the famous article on European marriage patterns44 and in Sklar’s article.45 While there is still not enough material available from Eastern Europe to allow for a complete picture,46 Plakans and Wetherell have proposed dividing Eastern Europe into three subregions or subzones: northern, central, and southern.47 Generally, they observed, the

Hajnal line remains a good on-the-ground predictor for the Balkan peninsula, where strong tendencies toward household complexity and low marriage ages continued to exist well into the twentieth century. But as Todorova and others have noted, these tendencies cannot be attributed

41 John Hajnal, “Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation System”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall with Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1983), 65–104 (69). 42 Peter Laslett, “Family and Household as Work Group and Kin Group: Areas of Traditional Europe Compared”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Wall, Robin and Laslett, 513–63 (526ff.). 43 Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Three Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System in Historical Eastern Europe: A Challenge to Spatial Patterns of the European Family”, The History of the Family, 13 (2008), 223–57. 44 Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns”, 103. 45 June Sklar, “The Role of Marriage Behaviour in the Demographic Transition: The Case of Eastern Europe Around 1900”, Population Studies, 28: 2 (1974), 231–47 (245). 46 Andrejs Plakans and Charles Wetherell, “The Hajnal Line and Eastern Europe”, in Marriage and the Family in Eurasia: Perspectives on the Hajnal Hypothesis, eds. Theo Engelen and Arthur P. Wolf (= Life at the Extremes, 1) (Amsterdam, 2005), 105–26 (109). 47 Plakans and Wetherell, “The Hajnal Line”, p. 120. 102 Gruber

to the entire Balkan region, especially if that region includes Romania and Bulgaria.48

2.4 Critical Voices Jakšić, the head of the Statistical Department of the Serbian Ministry of Finances, calculated the mean household size based on the census of 1866. The finding that an average of six persons lived in each household was similar to household size estimates for other European countries, and therefore appears to contradict assumptions about the prevalence of the joint family household.49 Another reason for the development of joint family households in Southeastern Europe could have been a taxation system based on the household instead of individuals. Forming larger households would therefore have served as a means of reducing taxes.50 Based on her research on household structures in Bulgaria, Todorova concluded that families in Southeastern Europe were not very different from families in the other parts of Europe.51 She analyzed data from northeastern Bulgaria from the 1860s and a Catholic village in southern Bulgaria in the 1830s, but they yielded different results. Vuletić concluded that “in view of basic characteristics – size, structure and function, the Serbian family of the mid-19th century did not differ much from that in other European countries”.52 The simple family household was the predominant type of household, while the zadruga survived as a cultural concept.53 In Serbia in 1863, simple family households comprised 68.8% of all households, while zadruge made up only 16.7% of households.54 But these figures are based on the household typology used by Vuletić: nuclear families (including extended families), households with a son-in-law, households with a father and a married son, zadruga (father with more than one married son,

48 Plakans and Wetherell, “The Hajnal Line”, 112. 49 Državopis Srbije (Statistique de la Serbie), 3 (Belgrade 1869), 101ff. 50 Jan Peisker, “Forschungen zur Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Slawen, 3: Die serbische Zadruga”, Zeitschrift für Sociologie und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 7 (1900), 145–260 (164ff.); Oleg Mandić, Klasni karakter buržoaskih teorija o postanku zadruge [The Class Character of Bourgeois Theories on the Origin of Joint Families], Istorisko-pravni zbornik, 3–4 (Sarajevo, 1949), 144–49; Milovan Gavazzi, “The Extended Family in Southeastern Europe”, Journal of Family History, 7 (1982), 89–102 (100ff.). 51 Todorova, Balkan Family Structure, p. 110. 52 Aleksandra Vuletić, Porodica u Srbiji sredinom 19. veka [The Family in Serbia in the Mid- 19th century]. Istorijski Institut, posebna izdanja, 35 (Belgrade, 2002), 201. 53 Vuletić, Porodica, 153ff. 54 Vuletić, Porodica, 52. Variation Within 103 married brothers, household head with another married relative), solitaries, and children without parents.55 A conversion to the Hammel-Laslett scheme yields the following results: 49.9% simple family households, 18.9% extended family households, and 26.9% multiple family households (consisting of types 2, 3, and 4 of Vuletić’s typology).56 Sovič challenged the cultural myth of the existence of a mono-ethnic, uniform territory known as Eastern Europe, where people married young and lived in large patriarchal households.57 She argued that scholars do not pay enough attention to the variation within Eastern Europe.58 This is only partly true, because a large number of studies published in recent decades have noted that there was substantial variation within this region.59

2.5 Inheritance, Land Ownership and Taxation In Eastern Europe (including Southeastern Europe), equally partible male inheritance dominated according to Kaser. This is in contrast to Western Europe where large areas were characterised by a single-heir system, and the Mediterranean with its dominant system of equally partible male and female inheritance.60 The original economic basis for this inheritance system was animal husbandry and slash-and-burn agriculture. Both of them required the cooperation of the male members of the household or even larger groups. In the mountainous areas of the Balkans, the summer pastures were usually the joint property of these groups. Because security in these areas was not guaranteed by the Ottoman Empire, they had to provide the security themselves. The male members of the group were exclusively responsible for the livestock, and

55 Vuletić, Porodica, 35. 56 Gruber, “Lebensläufe”, 40. 57 Silvia Sovič, “European Family History: Moving Beyond Stereotypes of ‘East’ and ‘West’ ”, Cultural and Social History, 5: 2 (2008), 141–64 (141). 58 Sovič, “European Family History”, 148. 59 See e.g. Joel M. Halpern, “Town and Countryside in Serbia in the Nineteenth Century, Social and Household Structure as Reflected in the Census of 1863’, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Laslett and Wall, 401–27; Kaser, “Introduction”; Siegfried Gruber and Robert Pichler, “Household Structures in Albania in the Early 20th Century”, The History of the Family, 7 (2002), 351–74; Siegfried Gruber and Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Stem Families, Joint Families, and the European Pattern: What Kind of a Reconsideration Do We Need?”, Journal of Family History, 37: 1 (2012), 105–25. (This article was published after Sovič’s article.) 60 Karl Kaser, “Power and Inheritance: Male Domination, Property, and Family in Eastern Europe, 1500–1900”, The History of the Family, 7 (2002), 375–95 (378). 104 Gruber this rigid division of labour made a male monopoly on property and inheritance possible.61 This inheritance pattern is connected to the patriarchal organization of households and society as a whole. The property of the household was not owned by the household head, but by all of the adult male members of the household.62 Equally partible male inheritance was a logical consequence of this arrangement. The property was divided upon the division of the household, and not upon the death of the household head, since the death of the household head did not affect the ownership of the other members of the household. The death of the household head only led to inheritance when there were no other male members of the household. In such a case, the closest male relative in patrilineal descent was the heir. Normally, divisions of households took place after the death of the father, who could prevent the division of the household among his sons much more easily than a household head who was a brother of the other adult members of the household.63 During the 19th century in Serbia, there was considerable debate and interest among the public about the size of peasant farms, household divisions, and inheritance patterns. This society was primarily based on a land-owning peasantry without large estates. There were, however, serious threats to such an allegedly egalitarian society of small holders, including problems related to impoverishment through indebtedness, economic stagnation, and the fragmentation of property by inheritance. Access to loans was rather difficult for peasants because of the small number of banks in the country. Beginning in 1836, regulations were implemented regarding the minimum size of land property for a single household (including the house and some cattle). This minimum unit of property could not be auctioned off or used for mortgages to prevent excessive indebtedness, forced sales, and the pauperization of the peasantry.64 The size of the minimum landholding changed throughout the 19th century, and went as high as 3.5 hectares.65 This regulation prevented, however, easy access to loans, since potential creditors knew that they would find it difficult to get their money back if the debtor defaulted. Another possible factor influencing the composition of households is inter- vention by feudal lords. In Serbia, after it gained autonomy in 1830, Muslim

61 Kaser, “Power and Inheritance”, 385–87. 62 Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 72. 63 Gruber, “Lebensläufe”, 282–85. 64 Marie-Janine Calic, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens 1815–1941. Der aufhaltsame Fortschritt während der Industrialisierung. Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 92 (Munich, 1994), 49. 65 Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 198ff. Variation Within 105 landowners had to sell their property and leave the country. Ottoman administrative personnel lost their power over Serbian peasants, too. Serbian autonomy within the Ottoman Empire put an end therefore to possible interventions by Muslim landlords. The new leadership in this autonomous principality prevented also the establishment of a new Serbian feudal class and promoted a society of free peasants with medium sized or small landholdings: In 1839 all Serbs became the legal owners of the land they used.66 The situation in Serbia after 1839 was therefore different from countries like Russia, with its continued influence of feudal lords on the family life of peasants.67 Taxation can also affect the composition of the household in such a way that the population tried to form households which could minimize the tax burden. The situation in Serbia before 1835 was heterogeneous: besides tax- ing households (chimneys) there were also taxes on livestock independently from the household and taxes on individual persons. In 1835 all these taxes were combined into a head tax to be paid by every married man capable of work.68 This would therefore have been an incentive to marry late but on the other hand one was exempted from this tax if one had several married sons. In addition we know that the ages at marriage in Serbia were among the lowest in Europe.69 There were tax incentives to form joint family households with one’s sons, but the tax incentives for late marriage were not successful. Why therefore should the tax incentive to form joint family households have had an effect?

3 Methodology

3.1 Quantitative Research on Household Structures in Serbia Quantitative research on household structures in Serbia was presented at the 1969 conference which resulted in “Household and Family in Past Time.” This volume contains three chapters on Serbia.70 None of them can be assumed to

66 Holm Sundhaussen, Geschichte Serbiens. 19.–21. Jahrhundert (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 2007), 174. 67 See e.g. Tracy K. Dennison, “Serfdom and Household Structure in Central Russia: Voshchazhnikovo, 1816–1858”, Continuity and Change 18: 3 (2003), 395–429. 68 Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 451ff. 69 Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns”, 103. 70 Eugene A. Hammel, “The zadruga as Process”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Laslett and Wall, 335–73; Peter Laslett and Marilyn Clarke, “Houseful and Household in an Eighteenth-century Balkan City. A Tabular Analysis of the Listing of the Serbian Sector of 106 Gruber be representative of the whole country, because they each deal with only one city (Laslett and Clarke) or one region (Hammel; Halpern). The author’s own research has concentrated on the region studied by Halpern, but has included more households and three points in time.71 There are only two studies that have gone beyond the examination of just one region: Palairet’s study covered four districts and three cities in the census of 1863,72 while Vuletić covered 13 districts in the census of 1863.73 Both found a considerable degree of variation in the distribution of joint family households across Serbia, and, unfortunately, these large datasets have not been used to the full extent possible in exploring the regional differences within Serbia.

3.2 Married Couples per Household The published data of the census of 1866 does not allow us to calculate the proportion of people living in multiple family households or extended family households. In order to determine the number of married couples per household, we must have data on the number of married people and the number of households. In a society with only nuclear family households, the number of married couples per household would be 1.0. The presence of unmarried or widowed household heads results in figures below 1.0, while the co-residence of married couples leads to figures above 1.0. How good is the correlation between crude measures of household complexity at an aggregate level and measures of household complexity at the household level in Southeastern Europe? We can answer this question by using data from the Albanian census of 1918 at the sub-prefecture level on the one hand, and by looking at data at the village level from eight settlements of Jasenički srez from the Serbian censuses of 1863 and 1884 on the other. The results that can be used for correlating the number of married couples with the number of multiple family households are extremely good for the Albanian data and very good for the Serbian data.

Belgrade in 1733–4”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Laslett and Wall, 375–400; Halpern, “Town and Countryside”. 71 Gruber, “Lebensläufe”; idem, “Household Formation”. 72 Palairet, “Rural Serbia”. 73 Vuletić, Porodica. Variation Within 107

TABLE 5.1 Correlation of the number of married couples with household typology

measure correlation N

Albania 1918: sub-prefecture level share of multiple .95* 22 family households Serbia 1863/1884: village level share of multiple .81* 17 family households

* Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level. Note: In Albania in 1918, the two sub-prefectures with the lowest numbers of cases have been excluded from the correlation analysis.

4 Data Used

The investigation is based on the published results of the population census of 1866.74 This census is considered to be the first modern census in Serbia, because the previous eight censuses from 1834 to 1863 did not meet the statistical standards and the complete results were not published officially.75 The published results of the censuses beginning with 1866 provide information about the number of households and the number of married and widowed persons per administrative unit. Serbia was divided into 17 administrative units called okrug. The second administrative level, the srez, consisted of 61 units in 1866. The administrative unit of srez will be used in this analysis because the number of cases is too small at the highest administrative level. One problem that we must address is how we will define the household in Serbian censuses. The 1866 census has kuća (house) as a unit, while the 1874 census has both kuća and porodica (family) as units. The 1884 census again has only one unit: dom (house), which is translated into French as famille. The 1895 census uses the same term, dom, which is translated into French as maison (house). This census also has the term zadruga, which is translated into French as ménage (household). In rural areas, the numbers of houses and households were almost identical (1.04 households per house in 1874). In cities, the difference between houses and households was considerable (1.54 households per house) and therefore

74 Državopis Srbije (Statistique de la Serbie), 2 (Belgrade, 1865). 75 Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 58ff. 108 Gruber only the data for rural Serbia is used in this analysis.76 The proportion of households per house in 1874 will be used to correct for the difference between household and house in 1866, because there were differences between the different administrative units. Additional data for analyzing the reasons for the spatial variation in household complexity are based on the published results of the population and property census of 1863,77 the livestock census of 1866,78 the agricultural census of 1867,79 the population census of 1874,80 and the population movements in 1889.81

5 Household Complexity in Rural Serbia in 1866

Vuletić’s data show higher percentages of joint and stem family households (according to her typology) and of extended and multiple family households (according to the Hammel-Laslett typology) in the west and southeast of the country in 1863 (see Figure 5.1). Table 5.2 shows the results for the mean household size and the mean number of married couples per household for 1866. A mean number of married couples per household only slightly higher than 1.0 does not seem to indicate that there were many multiple family households. But the mean number of married couples per household was only 0.79 in Germany in 1885 with a maximum of 0.87.82 Only two out of 61 Serbian administrative units had numbers below the German maximum, while all of the others had numbers that were clearly above the German figures, reaching as high as 200% of the German mean.

76 The 17 administrative centers at the okrug level and the capital Belgrade are excluded from the analysis. 77 Državopis Srbije, 2. 78 Državopis Srbije (Statistique de la Serbie), 4 (Belgrade, 1870). 79 Državopis Srbije (Statistique de la Serbie), 5 (Belgrade, 1871). 80 Državopis Srbije (Statistique de la Serbie), 9 (Belgrade, 1879). 81 Statistika Kraljevine Srbije, Vol. 4: Statistika rođenja, venčanja i umiranja u kraljevini Srbiji za 1888. 1889. i 1890. godinu [Statistics of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in the Kingdom of Serbia for the Years 1888, 1889, and 1890] (Belgrade, 1895). 82 Siegfried Gruber, “Multiple Family Households East of the Hajnal Line: Evidence from Albania and Serbia”, Marriage as a System: Insights from the Hajnal’s Line and Current ‘East-European’ Family Patterns. Special issue of The Journal of Comparative Family Studies 43, 3 (2012), 373–388. Variation Within 109

TABLE 5.2 Mean household size and mean number of married couples in rural Serbia 1866 by srez

mean minimum maximum standard deviation household size 6.16 4.41 8.55 0.98 couples per household 1.15 0.81 1.65 0.16 households per house 1.04 0.97 1.17 0.04 1874

Figures are based on: Državopis Srbije, 3, pp. 49–100, 103; Državopis Srbije, 9, pp. 138f.

The census data of 1866 reveal a considerable degree of variation in household complexity and size within Serbia at that time. In the west, southwest, and southeast of the country, households were larger and more complex than the Serbian average. In the administrative units in the centre and the east of the country, households displayed a medium or low degree of complexity and size. Meanwhile, households in the region of Čačak in the south of the country tended to be smaller and less complex (see Figure 5.2). The minimum, the maximum, the mean, and the degree of variation in the number of married couples per household were roughly the same as they were in Albania in 1918.83 By contrast, the levels of household complexity were lower and the degree of variation was much less pronounced in Germany in 1885 and in France in 1876.84 How do these findings relate to the existing literature about the distribution of complex households in Serbia in the 19th century? The region to the east of the Lower Morava does not appear to be different from the rest of the country in terms of having smaller and less complex households. The mountainous regions in the west and south seem to have a higher degree of complexity than the average, which appears to confirm the assumption that complex households were more common in the mountains.

83 Gruber, “Multiple Family Households”. 84 Szołtysek, Gruber, Klüsener and Goldstein, Spatial Variation, 9. 110 Gruber

6 Possible Reasons for Regional Differences in Household Structures in Rural Serbia in 1866

In the final step of this chapter, we consider what factors may have influenced the degree of household complexity in rural Serbia in 1866. We apply the method of regression analysis to this census, because these are the first census data available and more independent variables are available for this point in time than for later ones. These variables are separated into four groups: economy and ecology, modernization, demography, and other variables.

6.1 Economy and Ecology The first group, which explores the influence of ecological and economic conditions on household complexity, is the largest and most important. The first variable is the number of livestock per capita in 1866.85 This includes the number of horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. Because animal husbandry has often been described as having a crucial influence on household complexity, we expect to find that higher numbers of livestock are associated with a greater degree of household complexity. The agricultural area per capita in 186786 allows us to assess the influence of farming on household complexity. This variable is defined as the area, in hectares per capita, that was used for the production of wheat, rye, barley, maize, spelt, oats, buckwheat, millet, potatoes, cabbage, tobacco, flax, and hemp. Because this variable is understood to represent a different way of earning a living in a peasant society, larger areas should be associated with lower household complexity. The property value in ducats per capita in 186387 helps us to investigate whether household complexity was associated with wealth or poverty. This includes only real estate, and no other forms of property. The share of the non-agricultural population in 186688 allows us to assess the influence of the non-agricultural population on household complexity. We expect to find that a higher share of non-agricultural population results in a lower degree of household complexity. The presence of urban population in 186689 indicates a possible influence of a different socioeconomic environment. The presence of an urban

85 Državopis Srbije, 4. 86 Državopis Srbije, 5. 87 Državopis Srbije, 2. 88 Državopis Srbije, 3. 89 Državopis Srbije, 3. Variation Within 111 population within a district should result in lower levels of household complexity. The urban population is defined here as the inhabitants of the administrative centers of each okrug. This is a dummy variable. The final variable is a dummy variable indicating mountainous districts within Serbia with an altitude of at least 500 meters. The use of this variable has been advocated in several models of the distribution of complex households in the Balkans.

6.2 Modernization The second group of variables is related to modernization, and will be used to determine whether the processes associated with urbanization, industrialization, education, and bureaucratization affected household complexity. We use as a proxy variable the share of literate people in 1866.90 A higher share of literate people should result in a lower share of complex households.

6.3 Demography The third group consists of variables that control for demographic influences on household complexity. The first is the mean female age at first marriage in 1889.91 Unfortunately, it is only available for the level of okrug and at a later time period. We expect to find that a lower age at marriage is associated with a higher degree of household complexity. As a second variable, we use the proportion of widowed persons in 1866.92 This is a proxy for the influence of mortality on household complexity and the availability of persons for forming households consisting of three generations. A higher proportion of widowed persons should lead to lower numbers of married couples because one partner has already died.

6.4 Other Factors The final group consists of three variables. The first is the proportion of non- Serbs in 186693 in the population. About 13% of the population was made up of ethnic minorities, mostly Romanians and Roma, and they were not evenly spread over Serbia. This information is also available only at the level of the okrug. Because Romania has mostly nuclear households, we expect to find that a higher proportion of non-Serbian population is associated with a lower degree of household complexity.94

90 Državopis Srbije, 3. 91 Statistika Kraljevine Srbije, Vol. 4: Statistika, 169. 92 Državopis Srbije, 3. 93 Državopis Srbije, 3. 94 Kaser, “Introduction”, 380ff. 112 Gruber

The second variable is the proportion of households per house in 1874.95 The census of 1866 used the unit of house instead of household. The number of households per house was not evenly distributed within Serbia, and therefore we use the ratio of the census of 1874 to control for a possible bias that could result from using houses instead of households in 1866. The third variable is a dummy variable indicating the districts east of the Lower Morava. This region is known to have had mainly nuclear households, and we want to explore whether there is a region effect, or whether other variables explain the lower proportion of complex households. It is important to bear in mind that the published results of the population and agricultural censuses do not always meet modern standards, and that the sums of the administrative units do not always match up with the overall sums. But the differences are generally below 1%. The agricultural statistics are known to be the weakest of the Serbian statistics, because the first official survey of the land was not done until after the First World War.96 We therefore cannot take the information about farm sizes and the number of domestic animals at face value, but rather as crude estimations. Nevertheless, these figures provide clear indications of regional differences within the country.

TABLE 5.3 Descriptive statistics of independent variables

N minimum maximum mean standard deviation livestock 61 2.61 7.23 4.60 1.09 agricultural area 61 0.10 0.83 0.29 0.12 property value 61 3.09 47.66 14.49 9.21 non-agricultural 61 0.01 0.14 0.05 0.03 urban 61 0.00 1.00 0.30 0.46 mountain 61 0.00 1.00 0.26 0.44 literacy 61 0.01 0.05 0.02 0.01 FAFM 61 18.04 21.13 19.95 0.68 widowed 61 0.04 0.07 0.05 0.01 non-Serbs 61 0.00 0.65 0.12 0.20 households per 61 0.97 1.17 1.04 0.04 house east of the Morava 61 0.00 1.00 0.25 0.43

95 Državopis Srbije, 9. 96 Sundhaussen, Historische Statistik, 195ff. Variation Within 113

7 Results of the Models

In Model 1 we include all the variables which have been explained above, while in Model 2 we include only those variables which result in the best explanatory power of the model. Model 1 (twelve independent variables) explains 38% of the variation in the mean number of married couples per household, and only the agricultural area and the property value are significant. All of the other variables are insignificant. Several variables have the opposite effect on household complexity than the one assumed: the agricultural area, non-agricultural population, female age at marriage, and the proportion of the non-Serbian population have a positive effect on household complexity. In a next step we exclude variables which do not help to improve the fit of model 1. In Model 2 (six independent variables), the dummy variable ‘east of the Morava’ and the variable ‘proportion of widowed persons’ are significant at the 0.05 level, and the adjusted R-squared increases to 0.42. The importance of the economic and ecological variables can be proved: the agricultural area is the most important determinant of household complexity in Serbia in 1866 measured by the mean number of married couples per household at the srez level, explaining 24% of its variation. In addition, it is positively correlated with household complexity, while the influence of the number of domestic animals is not significant. We therefore cannot confirm the influence of livestock herding on household complexity. This finding is strengthened by the insignificance of the influence of the variable for mountainous districts. The second important predictor is the property value per capita, which has a negative effect on household complexity. The other variable of importance is the share of the non-agricultural population, which is positively correlated with household complexity, but not in a significant way. The variable about modernization (literacy) is excluded from model 2, because it does not help to improve the model. The proportion of widowed persons has a significant negative influence on household complexity, while the female age at marriage is, interestingly, positively correlated with household complexity, and is almost significant (0.06). The proportion of the non- Serbian population was highest in the districts east of the Lower Morava. Thus, only one of these variables remains in Model 2 and it shows a significant regional influence towards lower household complexity. 114 Gruber

TABLE 5.4 Model estimates: Serbia 1866

expected Model 1 Model 2 influence estimates β β Intercept 0.604 0.416 Economy and ecology: livestock + 0.009 agricultural area − 0.740*** 0.771*** Property value ? −0.006* −0.008** non-agricultural − 1.207 0.723 Urban − −0.012 mountain + 0.028 Modernization: Literacy − −2.649 Demography: FAFM − 0.043 0.048 widowed − −5.103 −7.043* Other: non-Serbs − 0.098 households per house − −0.201 east of the Morava − −0.129 −0.095* diagnostics: adjusted R-squared 0.375 0.415 F (df, n) 3.995*** 8.107***

Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

8 Conclusions

The measure ‘mean number of married couples per household’ is highly correlated with the proportion of multiple family households in the data from Serbia and Albania. We therefore conclude that it makes sense to use this measure of household complexity in the absence of direct measures of household complexity. In Serbia in 1866, the degree of household complexity was higher in the west, southwest, and southeast of the country. We can see that there was quite a high degree of variation within Serbia, and no uniform pattern. The analysis of the variables for differences in household complexity show that the agricultural area is the most important determinant for Serbia in 1866. The variables of pastoral economy or of living in mountainous districts are not statistically significant for household complexity (or they may no longer be significant). An explanation for this could be that the shift from a Variation Within 115 predominantly pastoral economy to a predominately agricultural one97 was already more advanced than had previously been assumed. This analysis cannot reveal the causal link between household complexity and large agricultural landholdings: whether complex households could acquire more land or whether households with more land tended to become more complex than other households. The share of the non-agricultural population does, interestingly, appear to positively affect household complexity, which could suggest that household complexity was seen as a positive ideal. On the other hand, property value per capita has a negative influence on household complexity. The interplay of these two variables with the status of a household should be given more attention in a future study (household complexity as an effect of high status, or as the last resort of an impoverished population). The influence of demographic conditions on household complexity is also confirmed, although a higher female age at marriage is shown to have a positive effect on household complexity, which contradicts all of our theoretical assumptions about household organization in Serbia. This subject will require further analysis. The region east of the Lower Morava is, by contrast, nega- tively correlated with household complexity. This finding confirms previous research, although this effect cannot be seen directly on Figure 5.2. We therefore conclude that economic variables have a greater influence on the variation in household complexity than cultural variables. Demographic variables are important, while the effect of modernization cannot be proved. Maybe such an effect can only be seen later in the 19th century.

97 Joel Martin Halpern, “The Ecological Transformation of a Resettled Area, Pig Herders to Settled Farmers in Central Serbia (Šumadija, Yugoslavia) during the 19th and 20th Centuries”, in Transhumant Pastoralism in Southern Europe: Recent Perspectives from Archaeology, History and Ethnology, eds. László Bartosiewicz and Haskel J. Greenfield. Archaeolingua, Series Minor, 11 (Budapest, 1999), 79–95. 116 Gruber

figure 5.1 Household typology in 13 districts in Serbia in 1863 (Hammel-Laslett typology) based on Vuletić, Porodica, 39–52

figure 5.2 Married couples per household in Serbia in 1866

Part 2 Church, State and Family

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CHAPTER 6 Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes in Protestant and Catholic Europe, 1500–1800

Daniela Lombardi

1 Marriage, fama and the Law

In late medieval and early modern European countries the conjugal couple was immersed in a network of relations that accompanied it along its entire path. From this network came solidarity in hard times and disapproval in case of transgression. But above all, the couple received judgments of good or bad repute: in their sexual behaviour (both before and during the marriage), their handling of the house and the family, their relations between wife and husband and between parents and children. Love and hate had to be public, open to view, listening, and judgment on the part of the neighbours. This was not hard: not only because the daily life of the common people took part largely in the streets, but also because the restricted living quarters and quality of the building materials made it possible to hear, and in some cases to see through holes in the walls, what was happening next door. It was a neighbour’s duty to come running in cases of cries for help or domestic quarrels, not a violation of privacy.1 A good neighbour was someone who not only did not disturb the public peace but made efforts to restore it. The judgment of public opinion thus came continually into play when it was a question of resolving marriage disputes. The expression ‘public talk and fame’ (publica vox et fama) among the neighbours had a legal status. But what did the word fama precisely mean? And why it was so important in the courts? From ancient times, fama has had two meanings: on one hand what people were saying about a certain fact or event (from the verb fari, to speak), and on the other a person’s reputation. In both cases, the stress is on words expressed in public by the majority, if not all the people. Fama is what everyone is talking about, what everyone knows to be true. It is common knowledge. It enables communication, exchange, relations among the members of a community. But

1 James R. Farr, “Crimine nel vicinato: matrimonio e onore nella Digione del XVI e XVII secolo”, Quaderni storici, 22 (1987), 839–54. See also Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_007 120 Lombardi there is more: from the late Middle Ages, the ‘talk of the town’ took on legal status. Between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century, a new procedure emerged in criminal trials, the inquisitorial or ex officio procedure, which gradually replaced accusatory procedure and gave the judge the power to set a trial in motion on the basis of news he had received about a crime. The role of the judge became central: it fell to him to investigate, using all available means, rumours circulating among the public and arrive at punishment of the guilty party. In accusatory procedure, conversely, suit brought by one party initiated the judicial proceedings (an accusation), and the two sides conducted the reconstruction of the facts, without the judge being able to intervene. When talk acquired juridical importance, it was necessary to establish the criteria that could guarantee its reliability. According to the more authoritative jurists, it was necessary that the majority of the inhabitants of a certain place knew about the story and talked about it in public, and that at least two reliable and credible persons were willing to testify about the existence of this talk. In the ensuing centuries, these guarantees protecting credibility grew less strict in order to leave more room for the initiative of the judges and ensure a more effective prosecution of crimes. But since it was very difficult to have at hand reliable proof and direct testimony of the criminal event that had taken place, the other meaning of fama came into play, the reputation of the defendant. In this case, fame arose from the social standing of the individual and the degree of his or her integration into the community. A person who behaved properly and had good relations with the neighbours was recognized by the community as having a good reputation, and the community aided him/her by testifying in his/her behalf, for example. The defendant’s reputation thus assumed a probative value which, in the absence of certain proof, could go so far as to cancel out the report of the event. In other words, the good reputation of the person indicated as the possible guilty party took on in court a value superior to the testimony of those who attributed to him/her responsibility for the crime. Ill repute, conversely, became a presumption of guilt, because authoritative jurists like Alberto Gandino (b. between 1240 and 1250 – d. after 1310) felt that someone who had done wrong once would be very likely to do the same thing again.2

2 Massimo Vallerani, “I fatti nella logica del processo medievale. Note introduttive”, Quaderni storici, 36 (2001), 665–93; Chris Wickham, “Fama and the Law in Twelfth-Century Tuscany”, and Thomas Kuehn, “Fama as Legal Status in Renaissance Florence”, in Fama. The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe, eds. Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail (Ithaca- London, 2003), 15–26, 27–46. See also Antonella Bettoni, “Voci malevole. Fama, notizia del Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 121

Fama as reputation thus assumed a greater importance than fama as talk, and this was the meaning that has prevailed until today. An individual’s reputation – which was never separate from that of the members of his family – was not only an instrument of integration or exclusion from the community, but also an important factor in determining the outcome of a trial. Community relations and judiciary procedure were closely intertwined. Their influence was mutual. Moreover, recent studies have shown that justice in the courts, similarly to the practices of community justice, often had the objective of reconciling the litigants more than punishing the guilty. Restoring peace and order to the community was the main goal for both the neighbourhood and the judicial authorities. Community justice and justice in the courts were not necessarily alternatives to each other. Private agreements were provided for in the judiciary procedures of many European courts and were recognized as a formal part of the legal process.3 They enabled the saving of time and money: once achieved, the trial usually came to a halt. There was no need to wait for a judge’s decision, because the objective of a peace settlement had been reached in any case. Therefore, stopping a trial did not mean that the judiciary process had failed, but rather, as Bernard Capp has observed, that it succeeded, because the judge had achieved the aim of reaching a solution to the conflict that was accepted by both sides.4 Control of a woman’s sexual reputation was at the centre of numerous conflicts. The obsession with certainty concerning offspring – the premise for passing inheritance only to legitimate children – forced men to keep a close watch on their women: on their reputation, more than on their bodies. I shall focus here on conflicts during the phase of formation of the couple, which constituted the bulk of litigation in court in many early modern European countries. The formation of the couple was the object of specific interven- tion, at different times, both on the part of Protestant and of Catholic authorities; therefore I shall attempt to compare interventions in the Italian States

crimine e azione del giudice nel processo criminale (secc. XVI e XVII)”, Quaderni storici, 41 (2006), 13–38. 3 E.g., Benoît Garnot (ed.), L’infrajudiciaire du Moyen-Âge à l’époque contemporaine (Dijon, 1996); Mario Sbriccoli, “Giustizia negoziata, giustizia egemonica. Riflessioni su una nuova fase degli studi di storia della giustizia criminale”, in Criminalità e giustizia in Germania e in Italia. Pratiche giudiziarie e linguaggi giuridici tra tardo medioevo ed età moderna, eds. Marco Bellabarba, Gerd Schwerhoff and Andrea Zorzi (Bologna, 2001), 345–364; Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2006), 222–228. 4 Bernard Capp, “Life, Love and Litigation: Sileby in the 1630s”, Past and Present, 182 (2004), 55–83 (77). See also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 178. 122 Lombardi

(focusing on Florence and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), in other Catholic countries as France and Spain, and in some cities and territories passed under the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, as well as in Anglican England and Calvinist Holland. As we shall see, the central question was the promise of marriage and its binding nature, established by medieval canon law, which acted as an effective tool to protect a woman’s reputation even in the case of seduction and premarital pregnancy. Protestants and Catholics aimed to re- examine this longstanding legal protection in order to reinforce the control of fathers over children, but they met with the resistance of many women and the persistence of traditional ideas also among the judges of the courts to which they appealed. Despite the new laws, the promise continued to protect the good fame of seduced women, even if the conflict with the partner often ended in financial remuneration rather than a wedding.

2 Rough Paths in the Formation of the Couple

Before the Lutheran Reformation (1517) and the Council of Trent (1545– 1563), it was not always easy to distinguish between the status of married or unmarried. Marriage was not an instantaneous act, but a long process with a beginning and an end. It began with negotiations on the size of the dowry and the methods for its payment and continued with the gestures which ratified the exchange of the promise, in many cases a handshake between the groom and the father of the bride. The next step was the exchange of consent between the partners and the gift of a ring to the bride. Finally, it concluded with the bride moving into the groom’s house.5 ‘Beginning’, ‘continuing’, and ‘perfecting’ a marriage were customary expressions, which contrast with the rigidity of our definitions of unmarried and married.6 Furthermore, despite the fact that marriage fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, it was not necessary to celebrate it in a religious form in front of a

5 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Zacharie, ou le père évincé. Les rites nuptiaux toscans entre Giotto et le concile de Trente”, Annales ESC, 34 (1979), 1216–1243; Beatrice Gottlieb, “The Meaning of Clandestine Marriage”, in Family and Sexuality in French History, eds. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Hareven (Philadelphia, 1980), 49–83. For the pre-Reformation ritual sequence in Augsburg, see Lyndal Roper, “ ‘Going to Church and Street’: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg”, Past and Present, 106 (1985), 62–101 (65–8). 6 Daniela Lombardi, Matrimoni di antico regime (Bologna, 2001), 228–41; Raffaella Sarti, Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione. I percorsi di Clio (Europa occidentale, secoli XVI–XX), in Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI–XX), eds. Margareth Lanzinger and Raffaella Sarti (Udine, 2006), 145–318. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 123 priest and in a sacred place. Twelfth-century canon law had established that in order for a marriage to be valid and to have legal effects – the legitimacy of the children and the right of inheritance – the consent of the bride and groom was sufficient. However, their consent had to be expressed in the present tense – “I take you as my husband/wife” – so as to distinguish it from the promise, in the future tense. Only consent in the present tense entailed the indissolu- bility of the bond, while the promise could be broken under certain conditions and upon a decision by the ecclesiastical authority. Thus it was consent in the present which determined married status. But complicating matters was the fact that the promise was considered binding at the same time; canon law required it be kept if there were no impediments to the marriage and it had been exchanged freely. Consequently, the promise was perceived as the moment initiating the process which would conclude with the wedding; it is no coincidence that from this moment the couple considered themselves to be husband and wife and were recognized as such by the community.7 The uncertainties did not end here. Since neither a public celebration nor the presence of a clergyman was obligatory, even marriages contracted between the two partners without anyone else being present were fully valid. But how could it be demonstrated that the marriage had in fact been celebrated? If one of the two maintained that he or she had not consented and thus considered himself or herself to be unmarried, how could the abandoned partner prove the reverse? So-called clandestine marriages – that is to say, non- public in nature – created numerous problems and endangered the stability and order of the community. In the absence of certain proof, that is of witnesses who testified to the words or gestures exchanged by the partners, it was necessary to turn to ‘presumptions’, in other words to the signs and clues that could be helpful to the judges to bring the case to resolution. The existence of the marriage bond was presumed if the couple had lived together for a long time, if they had behaved as though they were married – for example, referring to each other as husband and wife or sharing meals – or if they were recognized by the community as a legitimate couple. That is to say, appeal was made to public opinion, to common knowledge of the fact, which, as we have seen, had to be shared by at least the majority of the community. Alone, however, this was not enough: among canon law experts, the stricter interpretation prevailed, according to which,

7 Adhémar Esmein, Le mariage en droit canonique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1891); Jean Gaudemet, Le mariage en Occident: les mœurs et le droit (Paris, 1987); Richard H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1974). 124 Lombardi if it was a question of attesting to the validity of a marriage, the presence of a tangible sign like a wedding ring was required.8 In any case, having roots in the community and relations with neighbours were crucial factors for solution of a lawsuit concerning marriage. If the couple was not part of a community, if they did not have acquaintances on whom they could rely, if they did not share local rites and customs – in short, if they did not enjoy a good reputation – it was difficult to have the evidence necessary to show if they were married or not. A person’s marital status depended in large part on the community’s opinion of him or her.

3 A New Model for Marriage

The fight against clandestine marriages was undertaken first by Lutherans and Calvinists and only subsequently by Catholics. It was necessary to subject marriage to rules, controls, and registrations that would enable a clearer distinction between married and unmarried persons. Certain proof, no longer ‘presumptions’, had to attest to the married status. In fairly short time, a common battle transformed marriage into a public, solemn ceremony which took place in the presence of witnesses, celebrated by a clergyman in a sacred space, preceded by the posting of the banns for three Sundays beforehand, and finally recorded in dedicated books kept by the parish. Thus the consent of the bride and groom was no longer enough. The status of a married person had to be clearly proven by the statements of the witnesses and the parish records. For Protestants, parental consent was also required if the bridal couple were minors. The purpose was to combat more effectively the plague of clandestinity, given that recourse was often had to clandestine marriages precisely in order to evade family opposition. To be sure, for Luther marriage was not a sacrament instituted by God; therefore, jurisdiction over it fell to the secular power and no longer to the ecclesiastical one. Nonetheless, it was an institution regulated by divine laws and one to be honoured as divine work, as he stated in his leaflet Traubüchlein für die einfältigen Pfarrherrn, in which he gave advice on how to celebrate wedding ceremonies.9 Therefore in Protestant areas too the attempt was made to impose a silent, austere rite, purged of the profane elements that had

8 Helmholz, Marriage Litigation, 46–47. 9 Martin Luther, Scritti pastorali minori, ed. Stefano Cavallotto (Naples, 1987), 149–74 (165). The date of the pamphlet is uncertain: 1529 or 1534. See Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London, 1997), 209, nn. 26–27. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 125 characterized it until then. It was forbidden to all, bridal couple and guests alike, to arrive late, to laugh and joke, sing and dance, or pronounce magical formulas to ward off possible evil spells.10 Up to then, wedding rituals had been chosen by the couples and their families, permitting them to construct their marital path with a certain freedom, albeit within the bounds of local customs. With the new ordinances, they were compelled to respect rules imposed from above which had to be the same for everybody. In contrast with the Catholic world, where the Council of Trent prescribed the same rules for all of Catholicism, the German-speaking cities and territories which passed under the Reformation moved autonomously, at different times, following the ideas and programs of the various reformers. The first ordinances concerning marriage were issued as early as the 1520s.11 The break with the doctrine of consent was thus a clean one. In the Catholic countries the most important innovation was the role assigned to the parish priest. A number of tasks was concentrated in his hands which, over time, made him the central figure in the various steps that made up the formation of the marriage: from the first contacts with the future bride and groom, aimed at ascertaining their free will, degree of spiritual preparation, and requisites of age and freedom from other ties, also by means of careful investigation in the case of persons without a fixed residence, up to the recording of the act – sacramental and civil at the same time – in the marriage register. For the first time, the celebration of marriage was subjected to the control of the clergy. In the areas which passed under the Reformation, too, the pastor acquired a more important role than in the past. But for a different purpose: to make the couple responsibly aware of the tasks awaiting them. Luther suggested that the pastor recite some passages from the Bible instructing the bridal couple about the roles assigned to them in their married life. In the following centuries these sermons grew increasingly rich in Scriptural references and became an important part of the wedding ritual. They dwelt on the shared responsibilities of husband and wife, but without calling into question the rigid

10 For Germany, see Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, passim; for the Italian states, see Arturo C. Jemolo, “Le disposizioni sul matrimonio in alcune sinodo italiane post- tridentine”, Archivio di diritto ecclesiastico, 1 (1939), 6–32; for France, see André Burguière, “Le rituel du mariage en France: pratiques ecclésiastiques et pratiques populaires (XVIe– XVIIIe siècle)”, Annales ESC, 33 (1978), 637–49. 11 Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989); Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge, 1995). 126 Lombardi family hierarchies. Rather, stress was placed on the necessary submission of wives to their husbands.12 Nonetheless, the importance assigned to religious education in the family accentuated the collaboration between the parents in a constant effort to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth and to bring up their children in the fear of the Lord.13 In the Catholic countries, on the other hand, despite the value given to the educational role of parents, the responsibility for the family was subordinated to the authority of the clergy.14 The distinction between clergy and laity, emphasized by the Council of Trent, fostered this subordination. Unity of the couple and order in the family, to be achieved by maintaining the hierarchy between genders and generations, were goals pursued both by Catholics and Reformers. The introduction of divorce in the Lutheran and Calvinist territories (with the exception of England and Scotland) did not place in doubt the importance of the stability of marriage. Albeit among different positions, there was a general consensus in limiting the granting of divorce as much as possible to particularly serious cases (like adultery by the wife and abandonment of the family home) and conceding the possibility of remarriage only to the innocent party.15 Among the Protestant countries, England and Scotland were unusual cases. Aside from the abolition of priestly celibacy, very little changed, to the point that both remained firmly anchored in medieval canon law, even more than the Catholic countries, where the Council of Trent, as we have seen, had brought profound innovations to the marriage doctrine. The principle of spou- sal consent remained in force as the only condition for validity of the marriage bond. Nonetheless the churches, the Anglican Church in particular, commit- ted to spreading the usage of a public ceremony in church in the presence of a pastor, punishing transgressors with excommunication and other spiritual censures. Only in 1753 did England – but not Scotland – fall into line with the

12 Luther, Scritti pastorali, 13–16, 149–174; Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 13–22. 13 Heidi Wunder, He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1998, first edition Munich, 1992). 14 Adriano Prosperi, “Intellettuali e Chiesa all’inizio dell’età moderna”, in Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 4: ed. Corrado Vivanti, Intellettuali e potere (Turin, 1981), 246–248. 15 Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge, 1988); Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1990); Jeffrey R. Watt, “The Impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation”, in The History of the European Family, eds. Marzio Barbagli and David I. Kertzer, vol. 1: Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789 (New Haven and London, 2001), 125–154. On judicial separations in a Catholic town see Chiara La Rocca, Tra moglie e marito. Matrimoni e separazioni nel Settecento a Livorno (Bologna, 2009). Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 127 other Protestant countries. The Hardwicke Marriage Act imposed, this time on pain of annulment of the marriage, parental consent for minors under 21 and celebration in the same church where the banns were posted, in the presence of the pastor and witnesses.16

4 Promises and Sexuality

Besides the battle against clandestine marriages, Reformers and Catholics shared another commitment, against illicit sex. Not only against concubinage and adultery, but also against sexual relations between the betrothed couple before the wedding. This meant that not even the customary practices of courtship like evening gatherings (variously known as veglie and veillées in Italy and France, or Spinnstuben in German-speaking Europe) and balls could be tolerated, because they were considered an incentive to sexual activity between the bride and groom-to-be.17 To attempt to uproot these habits, it was necessary to turn them into sins of the flesh, to charge them with transgressive significance.18 The battle was fought using sermons and missions, treatises by lay and ecclesiastical moralists, laws of the state and precepts of the Churches, civil and criminal courts. In the Catholic world, it was fought above all through confession, which right in the Age of the Counter-Reformation was being transformed from an obligation to be fulfilled once a year at Easter into an experience of introspection and excavation into the soul to be engaged in fairly assiduously.19 But it was not an easy battle. It encountered significant resistance, not only on the part of the faithful but also of many pastors and priests,

16 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977); John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987); Richard Brian Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London, 1995); Joan Bailey, Unquiet Lives. Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England (Cambridge, 2003). 17 E.g., Hans Medick, “Village Spinning Bees. Sexual Culture and Free Time among Rural Youth in Early Modern Germany”, in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, eds. Hans Medick and David W. Sabean (Cambridge and Paris, 1984), 317– 339; Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden, 2001). 18 Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1994), 155–156. 19 Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996); Giovanni Romeo, Ricerche su confessione dei peccati e Inquisizione nell’Italia del Cinquecento (Naples, 1997). 128 Lombardi who were more in contact with the faithful, and of judges, both ecclesiastical and secular, who were called to judge these transgressions – to the point that I believe one can say that it was not very successful, either among the Protestants or among the Catholics. In order to understand the reason for so much resistance, we have to turn our attention to the meaning that the promise (sponsalia) and sexuality assumed in the very often long and arduous course leading up to marriage. As we have seen, the promise was the beginning of this process. Furthermore, if after the promise the partners had sexual relations, medieval canon law presumed the existence of consent in the present tense, that is to say, of an indissoluble conjugal tie. This was the so-called ‘presumed marriage’, which attributed to sexual activity between the engaged couple the strength of consent de praesenti.20 Therefore, it is anachronistic to speak of premarital relations: this sexual activity took place within the bounds of a process which was already matri monial; thus it had to be considered licit. It is no coincidence that in the 15th- and 16th-century trials which had to adjudicate the validity or nullity of a bond, a clear distinction did not emerge between promise and marriage: for both, the terms sponsalia and matrimonium were used indiscriminately. In the Germanic world, both because of the influence of Germanic law and for linguistic reasons, the distinction between promise and marriage was even fainter.21 Let us not forget, too, that the binding nature of the promise enabled sons and daughters to make autonomous marriage decisions: it was sufficient to exchange a promise and then to claim its fulfilment. What solutions were adopted to circumscribe legitimate sexual activity within the marriage bond, separating it from the promise, and to avoid the use by young people of the promise as a means to enter into marriages opposed by their families? Luther rejected canon law’s distinction between the present vows of marriage and the promise to exchange vows in the future, because it was not found in the Scriptures. Any consent, freely given, constituted a valid marriage. Therefore, he imposed also for the promise the obligation to exchange it publicly, in the presence of witnesses and with the consent of the parents. The parties to the marriage could be obliged to keep their promise only if it had been made in this form. In this way, the battle against clandestinity became more

20 Gaudemet, Le mariage, 134–135. 21 François Wendel, Le mariage à Strasbourg à l’époque de la Réforme, 1520–1692 (Strasbourg, 1928), 27–28. In German the same words (Ich will dich nehmen) could mean either promise or marriage. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 129 effective, and children lost their ability to use secret promises which, not being considered valid, carried no obligation to be fulfilled.22 The primary objective was to eradicate clandestine marriages. In fact, the first marriage ordinances issued in the Lutheran territories were aimed at punishing anyone who entered into secret promises or marriages, especially if these were followed by sexual relations, which by virtue of the principle of presumed marriage would transform the promise into marriage. Only later, when clandestinity was under control, did the concern move towards punishing illicit sexual activity. From the end of the 16th century, as the public celebration of marriage began to be a widespread practice, repression turned towards the couples who, after having properly exchanged their consent in public, then had sexual relations before the actual wedding in front of the pastor and witnesses.23 Sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage, which more and more tended to be identified with the religious ceremony, was persecuted in that it was fornication, lust, impurity (Unzucht, Hurerei). Fornication was the term used to define carnal relations between a bachelor and a prostitute or in any case a dishonest woman – thus these were a mercenary type of relations. From the end of the 16th century, fornication took on a broader meaning which included also the sexual activity between betrothed partners, until then widely tolerated as long as the couple ‘ended up’ getting married. The Council of Trent did not intervene in the matter of the promise and left it up to local and family custom, which assigned to the promise the function of establishing the exchange of property between the two families. Nonetheless, by giving value to the solemn public celebration of the marriage bond in front of a priest, the Council undermined the role of the promise as first step towards marriage. Betrothal and marriage became two institutions clearly distinct from each other, because precise forms of celebration were required, without which the bond was null and void, for marriage but not for the promise. Moreover, the institution of presumed marriage was no longer valid, because marriage could not be presumed if it had not been celebrated according to the Tridentine norms.

22 John Witte, Jr., “The Reformation of Marriage Law in Martin Luther’s Germany: Its Significance Then and Now”, The Journal of Law and Religion, 4 (1986), 1–59. 23 Guilty couples were punished with imprisonment, monetary fine, and sometimes public penance. See Terence McIntosh, “Confessionalization and the Campaign against Prenuptial Coitus in Sixteenth-Century Germany”, in Confessionalization in Europe, 1550–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bobo Nischan, eds. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot, 2004), 155–174. 130 Lombardi

Despite this, the promise did not lose its importance in the social customs of Catholics. Indeed, it became a battleground. Before the Council of Trent, the ecclesiastical courts were filled mainly with marriage cases seeking to obtain the confirmation or annulment of a marriage that had been celebrated without any form of publicity. These began to diminish starting in the closing decades of the 16th century, as the margins of uncertainty concerning the validity or nullity of the bond had shrunk drastically, making an appeal to the courts useless, since by this point they possessed certain proof to establish if a couple was legitimately wed. On the increase, instead, were lawsuits to obtain fulfilment, or more rarely dissolution, of the promise, whose validity continued to be based only on the exchange of consent in the future tense, which was difficult to ascertain in the absence of witnesses. In the diocese of Florence, where it has been possible to reconstruct the course of civil matrimonial cases over a span of three centuries, from the 16th to the 18th, the shift of conflict from marriage to betrothal emerges clearly.24 It was above all women who asked that the promise be kept. They had prevalently been the ones who used the institution of presumed marriage to formalize ambiguous relations, obtaining recognition as legitimate spouses. Now that they could no longer have recourse to this, they had to appeal to the binding nature of the promise to put pressure on the partner who no longer wanted to go through with the wedding. The outcome, however, was more uncertain, because he could only be persuaded to keep the promise he had made. Thus women lost an important instrument for their legal protection.25 Another possibility remained, especially in the case the woman was pregnant, since the pregnancy supplied certain proof of her loss of virginity: this was a charge of non-violent rape – or seduction – preceded by a promise, and it could only be brought by individuals (ad instantiam), not prosecuted on judges’ initiative (ex officio). At this time, the word ‘rape’ (stuprum) did not primarily mean carnal violence, but rather defloration of a virgin or sexual relations with an honest widow. The victim’s respectability – virginity or honesty – was a requirement

24 Lombardi, Matrimoni, 169–75. See also Giovanni Ciappelli, “I processi matrimoniali: quadro di raccordo dei risultati della schedatura (Venezia, Verona, Napoli, Feltre e Trento, 1420–1803)”, in I tribunali del matrimonio (secoli XV–XVIII), eds. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna, 2006), 67–100. 25 It is worth to note that in England the opponents of the Marriage Act of 1753, which required a public wedding ceremony as condition for validity, observe that the new law would have been “the ruin of a multitude of young women”, because they could no longer get the easy recognition by the courts of the bond. Quoted in Eve Tavor Bannet, “The Marriage Act of 1753: ‘A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex’ ”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1997), 233–254 (235). Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 131 for this crime, and violence was only an aggravating circumstance.26 Stuprum was a crime with mixed jurisdiction, which could be tried either by an ecclesiastical or by a secular court. In the ecclesiastical court, it was possible to utilize civil as well as penal procedure (which was more effective, because it provided for imprisonment of the defendant): in the civil procedure it was a question of a suit for fulfilment of a promise followed by carnal union; in the penal one the same story could be told as a suit for non-violent stuprum. Accusations of violent rapes were brought only in the secular criminal courts.27

5 The Reputation of Betrothed Women

In ecclesiastical and in secular courts, the reputation of a seduced woman was crucially important. In this case, the fame of the plaintiff, not the defendant, conditioned the course of the trial. Even if canon law had established that in rape trials, the honesty of the plaintiff had to be presumed and it fell to the defendant to prove the contrary, in practice it was more usual that the victim, from the moment of bringing suit, presented a version of the facts, supported by witnesses, intended to dispel any doubt about her honesty. The seduced woman had to demonstrate that she had yielded to male lures only after having received a promise of marriage. And this was not easy. In the Catholic countries, not only carnal union but also the promise was very hard to prove, given that it was not necessary to make it in front of witnesses. Many people, obviously, protected themselves from possible challenges by making their promises as public as possible; but for the most part it was the hard-to- solve cases that went to court, those where no witnesses had been present and the promise had not been put in writing. Protestant courts, too, sometimes found themselves having to judge cases in which there was no certain proof of

26 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London, 1987); Giovanni Cazzetta, Praesumitur seducta. Onestà e consenso femminile nella cultura giuridica moderna (Milan, 1999). 27 Daniela Lombardi, “Il reato di stupro tra foro ecclesiastico e foro secolare’ ”, in Trasgressioni. Seduzione, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia (XIV–XVIII secolo), eds. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna, 2004), 351–382; Georgia Arrivo, “Raccontare lo stupro. Strategie narrative e modelli giudiziari nei processi fiorentini di fine Settecento”, in Corpi e storia. Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’età contemporanea, eds. Nadia M. Filippini, Tiziana Plebani and Anna Scattigno (Rome, 2002), 69–86. On narratives of violent rapes see Miranda Chaytor, “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century”, Gender & History, 7 (1995), 378–407. 132 Lombardi the promise, despite the fact that this was prescribed as a requisite for validity.28 It was even more difficult to establish if the couple had engaged in sexual relations after the promise. In the case of a woman who was a virgin, proof of the crime could be constituted by the breaking of the hymen, which had to be ascertained by at least two midwives. But physicians and jurists entertained many doubts about the possibility of examining with certainty that the hymen had been broken, and some even doubted the very existence of the hymen. Consequently, also in these cases recourse was made to ‘public talk and fame among the neighbours’. The neighbourhood was called to express its opinion about the couple’s behaviour, and from this the judge could draw his conclusions as to the exchange of the promise and the sexual relations, as well as the woman’s honesty.29 What made up a woman’s honesty? The fact that she was a devout Christian, that she did nothing to make people talk about her, and that she was faithful to just one man: the one who had deflowered her. The good opinion of the neighbours about the woman’s conduct during the entire period before the loss of her virginity was the indispensable premise for taking the matter to court. But this was still not enough. In reconstructing the facts, the woman had to project an image of herself that corresponded perfectly with the honest person that the law was obligated to protect. Her story had to follow a precise narrative strategy that spotlighted the long courtship, her resistance to attempts to seduce her, up to her final surrender justified by repeated promises of marriage. Even the language used to describe these facts – in particular the sexual act – was meant to express the passivity and ‘natural repugnance’ towards sex felt by an honest young woman.30

28 For example in Holland: Manon van der Heijden, “Punishment versus Reconciliation: Marriage Control in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Holland”, in Social Control in Europe, vol. 1: 1500–1800, eds. Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus, Oh., 2004), 55–77, and some Swiss cantons: Anne-Lise Head-König, “Forced Marriages and Forbidden Marriages in Switzerland: State Control of the Formation of Marriage in Catholic and Protestant Cantons in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”, Continuity and Change, 8 (1993), 441–465. 29 Anton Maria Cospi, Il giudice criminalista (Florence, 1643), 521–530; Marco Antonio Savelli, Pratica universale (Florence, 1681), § “Stupro”, no. 23, 376. On midwives in the courts see Alessandro Pastore, Il medico in tribunale. La perizia medica nella procedura penale d’antico regime (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Bellinzona, 1998). 30 Arlette Farge, La vie fragile. Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1986); Georgia Arrivo, Seduzioni, promesse, matrimoni. Il processo per stupro nella Toscana del Settecento (Rome, 2006). Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 133

Honesty – proven by the publica vox et fama and confirmed by the way the woman presented herself in court – enabled the presumption of the existence of a promise of marriage. For it was not credible that an honest woman would give up her virginity without being sure that marriage was the outcome. Theologians and jurists presupposed that the woman, by giving the gift of her body, entered in that very moment into a tacit contract with her partner which ensured a forthcoming wedding.31 Sexual activity was part of the course towards marriage which began, as we have seen, with the promise. In this context, we should not be surprised if the loss of virginity was not perceived as irredeemable. The women were demanding the ‘restitution’ of the honour that had been ‘taken from’ them by illicit defloration.32 How could honour be regained? Marriage would erase all trace of illicit sex, restoring the woman to the condition she was in before she was deflowered. Here came into play a concept of virginity as a spiritual good which was present in Christianity alongside a material view that insisted on the physical integrity of the hymen. According to Saint Augustine, a woman who had undergone sexual violence preserved her chastity if she had not been a willing party to the crime: the victim’s moral purity permitted the body to remain intact.33 Even while exalt- ing the purity of the soul, some Catholic moralists adopted a concrete image of virginity: that of a crystal vase that would shatter into a thousand pieces if not safeguarded very carefully. According to the Jesuit Paolo Segneri, once honour was lost it could not be restored, just as a shattered crystal vase could not be

31 Paul Laymann, Theologia moralis (Venice, 1760, first edition Munich, 1625), lib. V, tract. X, pars I, cap. I, no. 11, 124; Giovanni Domenico Rinaldi, Observationes criminales, civiles, et mixtae (Rome, 1688–90), vol. 2, cap. XXIII, §§ IV–VI, no. 151, p. 401. 32 Sandra Cavallo and Simona Cerutti, “Female Honor and the Social Control of Reproduction in Piedmont between 1600 and 1800”, and Lucia Ferrante, “Honor Regained: Women in the Casa del Soccorso di San Paolo in Sixteenth-Century Bologna”, in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective: Selections from Quaderni Storici, eds. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, 1990), 73–109, 46–72; Margherita Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualità a Roma nell’Ottocento (Rome and Bari, 1994); Daniela Hacke, Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice (Aldershot, 2004). The same way of speaking is in a suit for breach of promise in a Protestant court: Susanna Burghatz, “Tales of Seduction, Tales of Violence: Argumentative Strategies before the Basel Marriage Court”, German History, 17 (1999), 41–55 (49). 33 Clarissa W. Atkinson, “Precious Balsam in a Fragile Glass: The Ideology of Virginity in the Later Middle Ages”, Journal of Family History, 8 (1983), 131–143; Alain Boureau, ‘ “L’imene e l’ulivo. La verginità femminile nel discorso della Chiesa nel XIII secolo”, and Giulia Sissa, “La verginità materiale. Evanescenza di un oggetto”, Quaderni storici, 25 (1990), 791–803, 739–755. 134 Lombardi repaired. He did not share the opinion of those who, like the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Toledo, admitted the possibility of fully reintegrating the deflowered woman onto the marriage market, “as though she were a virgin”.34 In fact, the punishment prescribed for the seducer – to marry or give a dowry to the woman – favoured the marriage of the seduced to the seducer or, thanks to her dowry, to another man. Despite the diverse opinions of the moralists, honesty and the promise enabled women to pass unscathed through behaviours that otherwise would have been judged illicit. Feelings of modesty and shame were not part of trial debates in the Old Regime. In the plaintiffs’ words we do not find a perception of sexual activity between engaged couples as a serious sin of which they should be ashamed. Guilt – and thus shame – accrued to the man who had not kept his promise. Many women had recourse to justice after their pregnancy revealed the illicit nature of their behaviour. In the secular criminal court of Florence, between 1777 and 1790, only 10% of the plaintiffs were not pregnant or had not very recently given birth. Pregnancy was indirect proof of defloration which inspection by the midwives had not been able to ascertain with certainty. Therefore, pregnant women had a greater chance of being believed in court. But above all, pregnancy brought to light sexual behaviour that would otherwise have remained secret. More than the loss of virginity, it was pregnancy that set in motion formal and informal attempts at reconciliation. This leads us to think that the good which needed to be protected was not the woman’s virginity but her reputation. According to authoritative jurists, even the seducer who, although not actually deflowering the woman, had black- ened her reputation by getting her pregnant and making public the loss of her virginity, which had remained hidden until then, deserved punishment.35 In short, an unexpected pregnancy was what threatened a woman’s good name. As long as illicit behaviour remained secret it had no consequences, except in a person’s conscience. In the secrecy of the confessional, not in the public courtroom, was where it should be revealed. The promise was in any case able to protect even the reputation of the pregnant woman. The status of bride-to-be gave her juridical privileges similar to those enjoyed by a married woman. Even while considering it a less perfect

34 Paolo Segneri, Il cristiano instruito nella sua legge (Florence, 1686), vol. 1, cap. XXV, 236; Francisco Toledo, Instruttione de’ sacerdoti, e penitenti, nella quale si contiene la somma assolutissima di tutti i casi di coscienza (Venice, 1657, original edition Summae de instruc- tione sacerdotum . . ., Milan, 1599), 497. 35 Arrivo, Seduzioni, 92–3, 40–1. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 135 status than that of wife, the jurist Carlo Rota called it not too far from this latter, to the point that some rights of a wife were extended also to the bride- to-be.36 Thus this was a condition judged more similar to that of wife than of an unmarried woman. Lying at the root of this interpretation was the concep- tion of the promise as the path to marriage which had been worked out by medieval canon law. For the female gender, the current definitions of nubile and married were even stricter than for males, since they could not include the status of bride-to-be. What happened if the woman did not succeed in persuading the seducer, either by recourse to justice or extra-judicial agreements, to go through with the marriage? Did the loss of her virginity, by this point public knowledge, not restrict the marriage prospects of the seduced young woman? This is not an easy question to answer. It could be that she had to be content with suitors of a slightly lower social rank or somewhat older,37 but the fact of receiving a monetary award from her seducer, which she could then offer as a dowry, certainly helped favour marriage to another man. The amounts of those monetary compensations, which were often out-of-court agreements, were rarely mentioned. Probably they were modest but assured, since their payment brought litigation to an end. Financial compensations became frequent in both Protestant and Catholic courts in the 17th and 18th centuries, since the judges aimed to prevent forced marriages which would produce adverse consequences on married life, as well as marriages to whom the couple’s parents were opposed, and marriages which (above all in the protestant’s opinion) were obtained by means of illicit sexual behaviour. To be sure, when a child was involved, the attitudes of judges were more cautious. Sometimes, however, the same women plaintiffs preferred to receive a sum of money rather than to get married to a partner with whom there had been a final break, especially if he provided for the maintaining of child born from their love affairs.38

36 Carlo Rota, Legalis androgynus, sive tractatus de privilegiis mulierum (Naples, 1665). 37 Ingram, Church Courts, 310–1; Leah Leneman, Promises, Promises: Marriage Litigation in Scotland, 1698–1830 (Edinburgh, 2003), 132–3. 38 Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 91–7, 206–10; Allyson Poska, “When Love Goes Wrong: Getting Out of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Spain”, Journal of Social History, 29 (1996), 871–882 (874–877); Abigail Dyer, “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Spain”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 34 (2003), 439–455; Daniela Lombardi, Storia del matrimonio. Dal Medioevo a oggi (Bologna, 2008), 130–9. 136 Lombardi

Canon law, also welcomed by civil legislation, in fact required fathers or paternal grandfathers to take custody of the children, including illegitimate ones.39 It was thus important to look for the fathers in order to make them pay for child support. Seduction (stuprum) trials could turn into procedures over questions of paternity. Yet other practices were used to identify the fathers of children born out of wedlock. In some Protestant countries, where the abandonment of a child was forbidden and the costs of social aid fell onto the parish communities, the mothers of illegitimate children were asked, generally by midwives, to declare the father’s name during the labour pains, when they found it difficult to resist.40 In Catholic countries, the presence of foundling hospitals enabled mothers to free themselves of the ‘children of sin’ and the fathers to avoid any responsibility. In practice, however, nursing abandoned infants was among the highest costs of the hospitals. Therefore their directors were compelled to look for the child’s parents and lay on them the expenses incurred for abandoned children in the hospitals.41 The results were probably not as effectual as in Protestant countries, because the declaration of the father’s name was seldom a compulsory procedure.42 At any event one point is relevant here: paternal responsibility for all the children was a common opinion in many European countries. Because of this, until the end of the 18th century the weight of an illegitimate motherhood did not fall exclusively on the woman. Moreover, as we have seen, the fact that she had received a promise protected her reputation. We should add that a woman’s reputation was not based exclusively on her sexual behaviour. Other elements contributed to forming a good or bad reputation, so much so that a woman could be judged positively even if the way she conducted her sexual life was not entirely irreprehensible. “She is of ill repute only in letting herself be mounted and for the rest I consider her a proper lady,” were the words of a peasant from the hills around Florence concerning a young unmarried woman who was about 26 years old.43 Female honour

39 Fathers were required to give alimenta, that is, maintenance and education. See Gian Savino Pene Vidari, Ricerche sul diritto agli alimenti, I: L’obbligo ‘ex lege’ dei familiari nei giuristi dei secc. XII–XIV (Torino, 1972). 40 E.g., Alan Macfarlane, “Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in English History’ ”, in Bastardy and Its Comparative History, eds. Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard M. Smith (Cambridge, Ma., 1980), 71–85 (73–74); Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage, 102–104. 41 Daniela Lombardi (ed.), Legittimi e illegittimi. Responsabilità dei genitori e identità dei figli tra Cinque e Ottocento, Ricerche storiche, 27 (1997). 42 On déclarations de grossesse en France see Marie-Claude Phan, Les amours illégitimes. Histoires de séduction en Languedoc (1676–1786) (Paris, 1986). 43 Archivio Arcivescovile, Florence, Cause civili matrimoniali, 24, no. 10, years 1578–1579. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 137 concerned also the ability to defend the social and economic fortunes of own family, manage credit and debts relationships, exercise control over dowries, and so on.44 Certainly, sexual behaviour was studied more closely, because on this depended the guarantee of legitimacy of one’s heirs. The virginity of unmarried girls and the honesty of married women were symbolic values that expressed the ability of the head of the household to keep control over his women. Whenever it was said that a young woman – and maybe even her mother – was excessively loose in her relations with the opposite sex, the man who was considered responsible for their behaviour was also automatically discredited. The court proceedings are full of these accusations. In fact, sexual defamation was prevalently aimed at the female gender, as demonstrated by the numerous cases debated in the English ecclesiastical courts of the 16th and 17th centuries.45 But the language of honour was often a tool for negotiating disputes with their neighbours that had little to do with sexual conduct. On the other hand, a woman could lose her good name much more easily if there were no credible plans for marriage, whether because the man was already married or belonged to a higher social class or practiced an itinerant occupation – including soldier – which permitted him to disappear after seducing the young lady. In these cases, the woman – not the man – was considered responsible because she naively yielded to the wiles of a man who would never have been able to keep his promise. With no hopes of proceeding to a wedding, these women were easily likened to prostitutes and punished with banishment.46

6 The Loss of Juridical Privileges

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, the women of some European countries began losing the legal privileges that derived from the medieval con- ception of the promise. Called into question was the principle of canon law

44 Anna Clark, “Whores and Gossips: Sexual Reputation in London, 1770–1825”, in, Current Issues in Women’s History, eds. Arina Angerman et al. (London and New York, 1989), 231–248 (236–237); Garthine Walker, “Expanding the Boundaries of Female Honour in Early Modern England”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6 (1996), 235–245; Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven, Ct. and London, 2008), 157–193. 45 Ingram, Church Courts, 302–303; Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), 98–111; Laura Gowing, “Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London”, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), 1–21. 46 Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), 134ff. 138 Lombardi according to which it was necessary to facilitate passage from the promise to the wedding, if there were no impediments. In the Lutheran and Calvinist territories, the requirements of paternal consent and public celebration of the promise ensured greater control on the part of families in the initial phase of the path to marriage as well. Consequently, it became easier to punish transgressors. In Zurich, Basel, and other German-speaking cities, the crime of ‘premature carnal knowledge’ ( früher Beischlaf ) was invented, which punished even the couples who subsequently married. Responsibility for the crime was attributed to both partners.47 Conversely, medieval canon law had considered only the male partner responsible, on the condition that the woman’s honesty was demonstrated. In the case of seduction, canon law, referring to some passages from the Bible (Exodus 22:15–16; Deuteronomy 22:28–29), obligated the seducer to marry and pay the bride-price for the seduced woman. In practice the church courts – and later the secular ones – interpreted this obligation as separate, that is to marry or remunerate, in order to preserve the principle of marriage freely contracted. If seduction was achieved via a promise of marriage, the obligation was to wed. Marriage, for the seduced woman, to the seducer or another man, was thus able to redeem the offence and restore the woman to an honourable condition. From these laws protecting honest women from male wiles – based on her good name – the shift was made towards laws which considered both partners guilty of sexual behaviour that had been broadly tolerated until then and was now punished with afflictive penalties (fines or prison). Consequently, these behaviours began to be prosecuted on the judges’ initiative,48 as well as after the filing of a complaint by the seduced woman. The penalties were, however, lighter than those assigned to the parties to concubinage unions or casual relations which did not have marriage as a goal.

47 Susanna Burghartz, “Ordering Discourse and Society: Moral Politics, Marriage, and Fornication during the Reformation and the Confessionalization Process in Germany and Switzerland”, in Social Control, eds. Roodenburg and Spierenburg, 78–98 (85–87); eadem, Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Schöningh, 1999). In England as well, albeit with pronounced differences from one place to another, from the late 16th century church courts became stricter about premarital sex, which was punished even if the couple had in the meantime already celebrated their wedding in church. See Ingram, Church Courts, 219–37; Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London, 1979), 125–133. 48 Burghartz, “Ordering Discourse”; Thomas M. Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest. A Comparative Study, 1550–1600 (Kirksville, Mo., 1984), 160–162: in Basel, more than half of all ex officio cases were clandestine marriages or secret promises to marry accompanied by sexual intercourse. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 139

The close tie between promise, sexual activity, and marriage thus was beginning to fray. The case of Holland appears different: if the matter concluded with a wedding, the secular criminal courts did not proceed to punishment of the couple. Here, as in some Calvinist cities in Germany, premarital sex was considered a serious sin because it violated the Reformist rule requiring a religious ceremony before consummation of the marriage, but it was not severely punished; the idea prevailed of tolerance towards the traditional concept of sexual activity which led to marriage and thus did not transgress the Christian principles of faithfulness and responsibility within the couple. This same tolerance was practiced by the Calvinist Church through its consistories, which did not set in motion any disciplinary procedure if the couple went on to wed.49 In Calvinist France, on the contrary, in Languedoc, marriage did not cancel the obligation to repent in front of the consistory – but only the woman was required to confess her sin in order to free herself from the infamy of transgressive sexual conduct.50 In the long run, changes can be perceived: in Calvinist Neuchâtel (now a Swiss canton), during the 18th century the judges showed themselves more open than in preceding centuries to favouring an outcome in marriage, even without direct proof of a promise, if the woman was pregnant and of the same social rank as her partner.51 In the Catholic Italian States, some diocesan synods expressed themselves in favour of fines and penances, but in the top echelons of the Church of Rome, a cautious attitude prevailed which entrusted to confession the task of repress- ing sexual behaviour among betrothed couples.52 Nonetheless, also in the Catholic world, criticism of the binding nature of the promise was circulating.53 It was first in the courts that the tendency emerged to require certain proof of the promise and not to obligate its fulfilment, even if it had been followed by

49 Heinz Schilling, “Reform and Supervision of Family Life in Germany and the Netherlands”, in Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition, ed. Raymond A. Mentzer (Kirksville, Mo., 1994), 15–61 (50, 54); Heijden, Punishment versus Reconciliation. 50 Bernard Vogler and Jeanine Estèbe, “La genèse d’une société protestante: étude comparée de quelques registres consistoriaux languedociens et palatins vers 1600”, Annales ESC, 31 (1976), 381–382. 51 Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage, 202–203. The author suggests that 18th-century judges “were more interested in procuring the legitimate status for their [pregnant women] children than in forcing men to marry them” (204). 52 Prospero Lambertini, Raccolta di alcune notificazioni [. . .] pel buon governo della sua diocesi (Bologna, 1733–38), vol. 3, 67. 53 Arturo C. Jemolo, Stato e Chiesa negli scrittori politici italiani del Seicento e del Settecento (Turin, 1914). 140 Lombardi sexual relations. Thus even in cases of seduction preceded by a promise the judges – whether secular or ecclesiastical – moved very cautiously in imposing a reparatory marriage. In France, these orientations emerged more rapidly and radically: the parliaments – which were state courts of appeal – as early as the 17th century reached the point of judging cases of validity or nullity of the marriage bond, encroaching on ecclesiastical jurisdiction in matters of marriage and reinforcing the control of fathers over children.54 In Italy and Spain, it was necessary to await 18th-century reforms by enlightened rulers who had among their objectives the limitation of the power of the Church. Two centuries after the Lutheran marriage ordinances, Italian and Spanish laws also required the promise to be proven by written documents or the presence of witnesses, and by paternal consent if the young people were underage. The definitive solution – the avocation on the part of the secular courts of jurisdiction over betrothal and the abolition of its binding nature – was adopted in Lombardy under the rule of Joseph II of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty (1780–1790) and Tuscany under his brother Leopold of Habsburg Lorraine (1765–1790). In 1779, the Kingdom of Naples abolished the crime of seduction preceded by a promise, in that it was consensual sexual activity and thus not subject to criminal punishment.55 In Spain (and in Spanish America), the same Bourbon dynasty which ruled the Kingdom of Naples issued more moderate laws. They required certain proofs of the promise (the paternal consent if children were younger than 25, in 1766, and a written document too, in 1806), but its binding nature was not challenged.56 Despite the growing climate of diffidence in the courtrooms surrounding seduction and promises, Catholic women did not stop appealing to justice, whether secular or ecclesiastical. It was unlikely that they would obtain a sentence obligating their seducer to marry them, but they could expect to

54 Anne Lefebvre-Teillard, “Ad matrimonium contrahere compellitur”, Revue de droit canonique, 28 (1978), 210–217; Véronique Demars-Sion, Femmes séduites et abandonnées au 18e siècle. L’exemple du Cambrésis (Lille, 1991); James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730) (New York, 1995). 55 Giorgia Alessi, “L’onore riparato. Il riformismo del Settecento e le ‘ridicole leggi’ contro lo stupro”, in ed. Giovanna Fiume, Onore e storia nelle società mediterranee (Palermo, 1989), 129–142. 56 Daisy Rípodas Ardanaz, El matrimonio en Indias: realidad social y regulación jurídica (Buenos Aires, 1977), 266–267; James Casey, “Le mariage clandestin en Andalusia à l’époque moderne”, in Amours légitimes, amours illégitimes en Espagne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), ed. Augustin Redondo (Paris, 1985), 57–68; Isidro Dubert, “Église, monarchie, mariage et contrôle social dans la Galice rurale, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles”, Annales de Démographie Historique, 2009, no. 2, 101–121. Women’s Reputation and Marriage Disputes 141 be awarded compensation for the harm they had undergone or, more probably, reach an agreement with the counterparty without pursing the trial to its conclusion. In the secular criminal court of Florence, more than half the trials for seduction debated in the years 1777–1790 were halted because of an agreement reached between the parties; a good 64% of these agreements resulted in marriage and the remaining 36% awarded financial compensation. This means that marriage could be the outcome of private negotiations, especially when the woman was pregnant. Faced with a pregnancy, men tended to accept their responsibilities and chose more frequently to marry than to give a dowry to the woman, even without being obligated by a judge.57 But even obtaining financial compensation evidently had its merits: otherwise we could not explain the large number of lawsuits brought before the secular and ecclesiastical courts of Florence in the late 18th century. From this we can deduce that women who appealed to justice did not fear a loss of reputation; rather, in all probability the courts enabled them to argue their case in public and to demonstrate to the community that they had behaved properly. Medieval canon law, which presumably to a certain degree still influenced the popular mores, had allowed it. Even if both Catholic and Protestant courts were more likely to hand down a decision for financial compensation rather than requiring the promise be kept, and even if some Protestant courts charged them with shared responsibility for illicit sex, many women continued to defend their reputation by appealing to the promise, whether true or false, made to them by their partner. What was changing was the very definition of betrothal: no longer an obligation to contract marriage in the future, but a guarantee against the damage resulting from the failure of marriage plans to go through, which was considered more significant for a woman than for a man. In this new meaning, the promise continued to be used as long as a woman’s honesty constituted a premise for her protection under the law.

57 Arrivo, Seduzioni. CHAPTER 7 The Reformation, the Council of Trent and the Divergence of Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood across Europe: A Long-run Analysis

Guido Alfani

The presence of one or more godparents still remains a requirement at Catholic and Orthodox baptisms. The same is true for almost all versions of the Christian religion related to the Reformation. The Orthodox also continue to believe that the baptismal ceremony creates a specific kind of kinship, called ‘spiritual kinship’, and subsequently establishes impediments to marriage between some of the actors involved in the ceremony. This concept of spiritual kinship does not exist under the Reformation (having being removed by Luther himself) whereas the Catholics renounced it in the course of the 20th century. However evidence suggests that everywhere in Europe, in the Middle Ages as in Early Modern times, godparenthood was mostly used to pursue aims very different from those prescribed by religious teaching, and that the results of religious innovations regarding the celebration of baptisms (particularly, but not exclusively, innovations in the rules of selection of the godparents) were very different from those the reformers hoped for. This chapter explores how key religious divides, and particularly that created between Catholic and Orthodox at the time of the East-West schism in the 11th century and that created by the Reformation in the 16th century, were also able to create divergence in social structures and social behaviour. The first section briefly reconstructs the emergence, in the East, of the notion of spiritual kinship and its spread to the West, up until, and including, the Reformation and the Catholic Reformation. It also discusses the early developments of godparenthood. The second section provides an overview of the differences between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant social customs, particularly regarding the selection of godparents and the social and economic role they played in the late Middle Ages and in the Early Modern period. The third section explores the link between godparenthood and family structures, focusing in particular on the selection of godparents as part of household strategies of social alliance.

The chapter makes use of a variety of sources. Conciliar decrees and discussions, diocesan statutes, theological treaties and the like are used to reconstruct the meaning given to spiritual kinship and godparenthood by religious authorities accepting different versions of the Christian faith. Parish books of baptism, family books, sumptuary laws and similar sources provide information about actual practices. The chapter also relies on a growing literature about the history of godparenthood and baptism.1 As will be shown, such literature suggests that this is a perspective from which to view key historical transformations of the European families in a new light.

1 A Short History of Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood from the Origins to the Reformation

On the eve of the Reformation, Europeans – be they Catholic or Orthodox – believed that the baptismal rite conferred new ties of kinship on the people involved in the ceremony. This was known as ‘spiritual kinship’, and was accompanied by an impediment to marriage between all those who were tied by it. As will be seen, the extension of spiritual kinship (the number and kind of people among which it was established) changed between East (Orthodox) and West (Catholic) and also changed in time, but by the fifteenth century it involved all the key actors of the baptism (the baptized, his or her parents, the godparents and the person officiating – usually, a priest). The origin of the notion of spiritual kinship dates back to the first centuries of the Christian era. It appeared more or less as the same time as the other social and religious institution considered in this chapter, godparenthood, but it can also be noticed that the latter had antecedents in the ‘sponsorship’ practice used by the early Christians. In this section, the historical developments of godparenthood and spiritual kinship from the late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages will be synthetically reconstructed,2 paying particular attention to the reciprocal influences between the Eastern and Western Churches.

1 For an updated synthesis of such literature, see Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon (eds.), Spiritual Kinship in Europe, 1500–1900 (London, 2012). More particularly about the history of baptism, Guido Alfani, Philippe Castagnetti and Vincent Gourdon (eds.), Baptiser: pratique sacramentelle, pratique sociale (St Etienne, 2009). 2 For a fuller reconstruction, see Joseph H. Lynch, Godparents and Kinship in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1986); Guido Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern Italy (Aldershot, 2009); Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon, “Spiritual Kinship 144 Alfani

The early Christians were normally baptized as adults. Between the second and the fourth centuries a series of practices, called together ‘catechumenate’, evolved to test and instruct aspiring Christians. To be admitted to this course of instruction, it was necessary to be accompanied and presented by two guar- antors ( fideiussores, sponsores) who vouched for the dignity and the trustwor- thiness of the candidate. This practice, although suitable for the religion of a minority living in a mainly pagan world and at risk of facing persecution, was no longer necessary when Christianity prevailed and infant baptism became customary. We are not sure when the second process was completed, but by the fifth century AD, Saint Augustine was viewing infant baptism as the norm.3 Baptizing infants created a ritual and theological problem, given that the rite demanded an active participation and the use of speech. Godparents, direct descendants of the ancient sponsores, were introduced to answer the priest’s questions in place of the child, and the Church soon attributed them the role of tutors in his or her Christian education. An early development was the exclusion of parents as godparents of their own children, a prohibition that was connected to theological elaboration, notably to the distinction between the ‘carnal generation’ and the ‘spiritual generation’.4 This prohibition was clearly stated by the Council of Mainz of 813. The notion of spiritual generation and the exclusion of parents from godparenthood of their own children does not automatically explain the emergence of new impediments to marriage. It was the taboo of incest, so strongly rooted in European societies, and the deeply disturbing suspicion that even the ties between people related by godparenthood could create barriers not to be crossed, which led civil and religious authorities to lay down rules establishing matrimonial bans also for the spiritual generation.5 Where there is incest there is certainly kinship; the safest foundation for spiritual kinship (far more

and Godparenthood: An Introduction”, in Spiritual Kinship in Europe, eds. Alfani and Gourdon 1–43. 3 Lynch, Godparents, 120. 4 Anita Guerreau-Jalabert, “Spiritus et Caritas. Le baptême dans la société médiévale”, in La parenté spirituelle, eds. Françoise Héritier-Augé and Élisabeth Copet-Rougier (Paris, 1995), 133–203 (161–162). 5 Canonical tradition recognised four ‘forms’ of kinship (cognatio) which prohibited marriage and sexual relations: natural kinship or blood-relations, kinship due to alliances or affinity (ensuing from marriage), legal kinship or adoption, and spiritual kinship. François Cimetier] “Parenté (empêchements de)”, in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, eds. Alfred Vacant, Eugène Mangenot and Emile Amann] (Paris, 1932), 1995–2003. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 145 than any theological reflection) was, right from the outset, the restriction on sexual intercourse.6 The idea of spiritual incest first developed in the Eastern Church. The first ban on marriage on account of spiritual kinship dates to 530 and was later included in the Justinian Code. The ban concerned marriage between a godfather and his goddaughter, and was justified by the fact that the very relationship of godparenthood, more than anything else, can generate paternal affection; and therefore this kind of union is ‘incestuous’. In the following centuries, the extension of spiritual kinship would grow and impediments would include marriage between a godfather and the mother of the godson (Trullan Synod of Constantinople, 692), from which the notion of compaternitas, that is the spiritual kinship relation between godparents and the parents of their godchildren, would develop.7 These early developments took place mainly within the boundaries of the Eastern Church, while the Western one was slow to accept such theological and regulatory innovations. Only after the Council of Rome of 721 AD, which accepted most of the canons of the Trullan Synod, was the development of spiritual kinship assured also in the West, with bans on marriage due to spiritual kinship being included in the edict of the Longobard king Liutprand of 723. Such bans included marriage between a godson and the daughter of the godparent. This is the principle of the fraternitas spiritualis (‘spiritual brotherhood’); when fully established, it resulted in a ban on marriages between all the children of a given godfather or godmother and all their godsons and god- daughters. Also fraternitas spiritualis developed first in the Eastern Church. In particular, the Ecloga, an ambitious project of reform of the Justinian code put forward by the emperor Leo III and his son Constantine V, published in 726 or in 741, recognized fraternitas spiritualis as well as bans on marriage between the children of the godfather and his compatres (that is those who were connected to him by compaternitas spiritualis), and between the baptiser and the person baptized.8 On this point at least, the Western Church welcomed innovations from the East and was fairly quick in accepting the new bans included in the Ecloga. However, the spread of the notion of spiritual kinship in the West was not without opposition, particularly because it implied unpopular impediments to marriage. The situation appears different from the East, whence came most innovations in the field and where the Church continued to extend the

6 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. 7 Lynch, Godparents. 8 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers; Lynch, Godparents. 146 Alfani interdictions on marriage due to baptism to include all the blood relations of the godson, and all the blood relations of the godparent to the degree already recognised for consanguinity.9 After the Schism of the East (1054), the capacity of the two sides of Christi- anity to influence each other was abruptly reduced, even though not entirely interrupted. As far as spiritual kinship is concerned, the Schism did not determine any deep differences among Orthodox and Catholic versions of Christi- anity, as the notion of spiritual kinship continued to develop and to expand in both areas. In the West for example, in the canonical collection of Gratian (1140), which had a wide circulation and was largely used also in the following centuries, we find a clear description of the three components of the ‘system’ of spiritual kinship in use at the time: the paternitas, or the direct link between godfathers, godmothers, the person who administered baptism and the godchild; the compaternitas that linked godfathers, godmothers and the minister of baptism to the parents of their godchild; the fraternitas that established spiritual kinship between the natural children of the godfathers, of the godmothers and of the minister of baptism and their godchild.10 In time, however, the commentaries to Gratian added to the ‘direct’ relationships quoted above, other ‘indirect’ ones: between the godchild and the spouses of the godfathers, of the godmothers and of the minister of baptism; between the parents of the child and the spouses of his (or her) godfathers, godmothers and of the minister of baptism.11 Both in Catholic and Orthodox Europe, then, spiritual kinship continued to expand throughout the Middle Ages. As will be seen, only after the Reformation and Catholic Reformation (or ‘Counter-Reformation’) in the West would a deep fissure develop with the East regarding spiritual kinship. The situation is different, though, if we look at an aspect of considerable social importance: the number of godparents admitted per baptism. If one looks only at regulations, then we find the same tendency both in the Eastern and Western Churches during the Middle Ages, but the same is not true if actual practice is considered. Here it will suffice to recollect the main points.12 In the early times of infant baptism, it seems that each new Christian was given only one godparent, normally of his or her same sex. It also seems that a tendency very soon developed to increase the number of godparents; what is sure, is that in the West from the 9th century the Church began to oppose the

9 Agnès Fine, Parrains, marraines. La parenté spirituelle en Europe (Paris, 1994), 25–26. 10 Decretum Gratiani, in Jean-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina (Paris 1855), CLXXXVII. 11 Guerreau-Jalabert, “Spiritus et Caritas”. 12 See Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, for a complete reconstruction. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 147 spread of these new practices (Council of Metz of 89313), promoting instead the ancient custom of just one godparent per baptism. In spite of this the new practices spread far and wide developing not only into specific local customs, but also into a fragmented local regulation with synod rules being applied instead of canons coming from ancient and obscure councils. For example in France, the synod statutes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries allowed only one spiritual parent at Dax and Cahors, one or two at Bourges, two at Châlons, three at Bayeux, Nantes and Arras, three or four at Chartres, four at Cambrai.14 It is difficult to know which of the many rules regulating the matter were really applied, and which were the most widespread customs in different parts of Catholic Europe. The available studies on specific areas from the late Middle Ages suggest that there was a clear difference between law and practice, and in fact much legal innovation in both spiritual kinship and godparenthood aimed at reforming or banning entirely specific practices. This has two implications. First, it suggests that new research on practices is surely needed, especially for Orthodox Europe. Secondly, and with reference in particular to Catholic Europe, the insistence of the Church on specific regulations which were repeated over time (in particular, the attempts to limit the number of godparents) provides additional proof of the resistance of European societies to reform in the field, which in itself is proof of the importance they attributed to their own godparenthood practices. At present, the best documented case (the one for which we have more information about actual practice) is that of Italy. Here, libri di famiglia (‘family books’) recording relevant events such as baptisms, marriages and burials have existed since the fourteenth century. They suggest that the selection of numerous godparents and godmothers was common in regions as diverse as Tuscany and Veneto.15 At the end of the fifteenth/beginning of the sixteenth century, books of baptism were introduced in many places, well before the Council of Trent (ended 1563) made them mandatory for all Catholic parishes.

13 Lynch, Godparents, 205–206. 14 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 24–25. 15 Christiane Klapisch, “Parrains et filleuls: Une approche comparée de la France, l’Angleterre et l’Italie médiévales”, Medieval Prosopography, 6 (1985), 51–77; eadem, La maison et le nom. Stratégies et rituels dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Paris, 1990); Louis Haas, “Il mio buon compare: Choosing Godparents and the Uses of Baptismal Kinship in Renaissance Florence”, Journal of Social History, 29 (1995–96), 341–356; idem, The Renaissance Man and his Children: Childbirth and Early Childhood in Florence, 1300–1600 (New York, 1998); James S. Grubb, Provincial Families of the Renaissance: Private and Public Life in the Veneto (Baltimore and London, 1996). 148 Alfani

They demonstrate that, where local customs allowed, the number of god parents participating at baptisms was very large, in certain cases rising to twenty to thirty and even beyond. A recent survey which I conducted on Northern Italy showed that the abundance of godparents was not limited to social and economic elites and was largely independent of status.16 The survey also showed that each community indeed had its own model of godparenthood, often markedly different from that of communities nearby. On the basis of the survey results I elaborated a typology of godparenthood models, based on two fundamental distinctions: ‘multi-godfather’ models (characterized by many godfathers and/or godmothers) versus ‘single godfather’ models (only one godfather and/or one godmother); ‘symmetric’ models (each infant baptized receives both godfathers and godmothers) versus ‘asymmetric’ models (each infant baptized receives either godfathers or godmothers). Multi-godfather models can be further differentiated between ‘limited’ models (when in at least 99% of baptisms there are no more than four godparents) and ‘unlimited’, or ‘pure’, ones. Combining these three variables produces the typology presented in Table 7.1.

TABLE 7.1 Typology of godparenthood models

Multi-godfather Single godfather Symmetric Asymmetric Symmetric Asymmetric

Unlimited Pure multi- Asymmetric godfather multi-godfather (type 1) (type 2) Limited Limited Limited Pure single Asymmetric multi- asymmetric godfather single godfather godfather multi-godfather (couple model) (type 6) (type 3) (type 4) (type 5)

Source: Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, p. 42

16 The survey was conducted on some of the earliest (pre-Tridentine) parish books of baptism preserved in Italian archives. It collected new information for 35 communities in the North of the Peninsula, to which available information for an extra eight communities was added. Details about the cases included in the survey are published in Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 47–48. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 149

This typology, which is discussed in much greater detail elsewhere,17 is aimed at making possible extensive comparisons, across time and space, of the customs of godparenthood. On this point it should be noticed that until recently, the only work comparing godparenthood practices across Europe was an article by Klapisch-Zuber18 covering Tuscany, France and England. Striking differences were found between Tuscany, where godparents were abundant, and France/ England where two godfathers and one godmother were given to male children and two godmothers and one godfather to females. This French-English model, which I will call ‘ternary’, is a specific kind of ‘limited multigodfather’ model. However, we now know that this is only part of a more general distinction between Northern Europe (England, Holland, Denmark, perhaps Sweden and the North of Germany) and France, where the ternary model prevailed, and Central and Southern Europe (Italy, probably Spain and Central-Southern Germany) characterized by a greater propensity to multiple godparenthood and probably by a greater fragmentation in the practices in general.19 For Eastern (Orthodox) Europe, we have to accept that there is a severe scarcity of studies on the early developments of godparenthood. It seems, however, that here the custom of the single godparent, characteristic of early Christianity and transformed into law by a series of councils during the Middle Ages, resisted longer than in Catholic Europe. Indeed, when referring to the custom of giving two godparents (a godfather and a godmother), the late fourteenth century Orthodox theologian Kiprian called this a ‘Latin’ custom which was consequently to be rejected in favour of the single-godparent tradition.20 It seems, then, that contrary to the process of expansion of spiritual kinship (a process that saw the Eastern Church influencing the Western), regarding the model of godparenthood the Orthodox were fighting against Western influences, apparently with some success since, in the case of the Russian patriarchate, for example, the presence of both a godfather and a godmother at baptism was accepted only in 1666 (see next section). It should be remembered that these broad distinctions are based on tendencies. For example, in areas where the ternary model was prevalent we also find communities following different customs.21 However, it seems clear that

17 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 41–45. 18 Klapisch, “Parrains et filleuls”. 19 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 36–40. 20 Marianna G. Muravyeva, “Godparenthood in the Russian Orthodox Tradition: Custom Versus the Law”, in Spiritual Kinship in Europe, eds. Alfani and Gourdon, 247–274. 21 For example in France, in the late Middle Ages Lyons already followed the ‘couple model’ (one godfather and one godmother) which the Council of Trent would generalize to 150 Alfani overall Orthodox Europe was hostile to multi-godfather models, and that in central and southern Europe the variety of models was altogether greater (and, very often, the number of godparents larger – although single godfather models were not entirely unknown) than in the northern part of the continent. By applying the typology described above to the available information it is possible to propose the following broad distinction, which would be valid for the late Middle Ages:

1. Northern Europe (Catholic): ternary model (limited multigodfather model) 2. Central-southern Europe (Catholic): multigodfather models (limited or not, asymmetric or not) 3. Eastern Europe (Orthodox): single godfather models (asymmetric or not)

As will be seen in the next section, these differences were of no little consequence regarding how godparenthood could be used as an instrument for pursuing social strategies. In Catholic Europe the Council of Trent was a turning point as after it, and for the first time, the Church was able to impose (some of) its views on godparenthood on a recalcitrant population. As I said earlier, even after the East-West Schism in 1054, theology and legislation about spiritual kinship continued to proceed along the same path in different areas of Christianity. Differences were to be found, instead, regarding godparenthood practices, with the number of godparents per baptism increasing in the West over time, while seemingly in Orthodox Europe these ‘Latin’ tendencies were kept at bay. However, this development was not related to the accepted version of the Christian religion, but was the result of the inability of Western Church authorities to fully control religious behaviour as it related to social practice. The Reformation ended this situation of unity-in-diversity. Luther himself rejected entirely the idea that a ‘spiritual’ kinship could exist, as there was no reference to it in the Holy Scriptures. Therefore, it had to be abandoned, along

most of Catholic Europe. Etienne Couriol, “Godparenthood and Social Relationships in France during the Ancien Régime: Lyons as a Case Study”, in Spiritual Kinship in Europe, eds. Alfani and Gourdon, 124–151. On the other side of the spectrum, we also find cases of abundant godparents like that of Joan of Arc who, at the moment of her trial, recalled two godfathers and three godmothers. Bernhard Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice. Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages (Cranbury, 2000). Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 151 with all the impediments to marriage it implied.22 On the contrary, godparents had to be preserved, as they could play a useful role as tutors of the Christian education of their godchildren.23 As shall be seen in the next section, this decision allowed traditional customs regarding godparenthood to survive almost unchanged under the Reformation. Calvin was more radical. Not only did he reject the very notion of spiritual kinship, as Luther had, but he also tried to eliminate godparents: they were to be replaced at the baptismal font by the parents of the infant (a practice forbidden since at least the Council of Mainz of 813). Indeed, Calvin tried to impose his views upon the citizens of Geneva, but found himself faced with strong opposition, and in the end he had to accept many compromises,24 including the presence at baptism of godparents, whose role, however, was scaled down, as now they shared the task of presenting children at the baptismal font with the natural parents and the congregation as a whole. Calvin also faced strong opposition on a number of other aspects, including his attempts to forbid baptismal banquets and parties25 and his reform of the baptismal rite and rituals. Opposition to Calvin’s attempts at reform is yet further proof of the affection of European societies for ancient customs regarding godparenthood, and suggests that this social institution was important to them: important enough to become a source of harsh conflict with the preachers whose lead they were ready to follow in other matters.26 Generally speaking, the Reformed churches followed the same path, reject- ing spiritual kinship whilst preserving godparents. This is true, for example,

22 According to Luther, spiritual kinship had to be counted among the ways the Catholic Church had devised to reap a profit from the sacraments (through the venality of marriage dispensations). He expressed his thoughts on the topic in De captivitate Babylonica ecclesiae praeludium of 1520. On this, Guido Alfani, “Geistige Allianzen: Patenschaft als Instrument sozialer Beziehung in Italien und Europa (15. bis 20. Jahrhundert)”, in Politiken der Verwandschaft, eds. Margareth Lanzinger and Edith Saurer (Göttingen, 2007), 25–54; idem, Fathers and Godfathers, 67–69. 23 John Bossy, Christianity in the West (Oxford, 1985); Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers; idem, “Geistige Allianzen”; Karen E. Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva (Aldershot, 2005). 24 Spierling, Infant baptism. 25 Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon, “Il ruolo economico del padrinato: un fenomeno osservabile?”, Cheiron, 45–46 (2006), 129–177; eidem, “Fêtes du baptême et publicité des réseaux sociaux en Europe occidentale. Grandes tendances de la fin du Moyen-Âge au XXe siècle”, Annales de Démographie Historique, 1 (2009), 153–189. 26 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. 152 Alfani of the Church of England27 and the Church of Sweden.28 Indeed, of the many churches and sects adhering to the Reformation, only those that rejected infant baptism totally, such as the Anabaptists, abolished godparenthood. Without spiritual kinship, godparents became simply ‘witnesses to baptism’ and were defined as such in some Protestant areas, but this change in definition does not seem to have had any relevant implication for actual social practice. In other words, the loss of theological relevance did not imply any loss of social relevance, and under the Reformation we find godparenthood models and practices which are very similar, if not identical, to those that had been in use during the Middle Ages.29 The Catholic Church, in reply to criticism and derision from Protestants (particularly about spiritual incest, at the time quite widespread and harbin- ger of scandal), resorted to introducing a reform of the sacrament of baptism which led, from the point of view of social customs, to much more drastic transformations. The Council of Trent is a turning point in the history of Catholic godparenthood as a social institution. The Council acted on two fronts: the extension of the ties of spiritual kinship and of the relative impediments to marriage, and the admissible number of godfathers and godmothers. Regarding spiritual kinship, wanting to reduce the incidence of spiritual incest, the Council stated that spiritual kinship existed only between godfathers and godmothers on one side, parents of the baptised child on the other; between the child and his godfathers and godmothers; between the child and the person who baptised him. This innovation did not bridge the gap with the Protestants (who had cancelled spiritual kinship entirely) but distinguished the Catholic from the Orthodox, who continued to recognized the older, wider boundaries to spiritual kinship. As for the admissible number of godparents, the Council stated that one godparent was enough, be it male or female, but a maximum of two of different gender were acceptable: one godfather and one godmother. The new rules about godparenthood encountered a great deal of resistance which was

27 Will Coster, Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2002). 28 Tom Ericsson, “Witnesses, and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Sweden”, in History of the Family, 5 (2000), 273–286; Kari-Matti Piilahti, “Kin, Neighbours or Prominent Persons? Godparenthood in a Finnish Community in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century”, in Spiritual Kinship in Europe, eds. Alfani and Gourdon, 207–226. 29 Guido Alfani and Vincent Gourdon, “Entrepreneurs, Formalization of Social Ties, and Trustbuilding in Europe (Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries)”, The Economic History Review, 65: 3 (2012), 1005–1028. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 153 finally overcome by means of the new control powers quickly acquired by the ‘counter-Reformed’ Church, and their application caused a significant shift in the distribution of godparenthood models across Europe. Applying my typology to the new situation, the following broad distinction is to be found, valid from late 16th/early 17th century (when adaptation to the new rules was completed across Catholic Europe) until today:

1. Protestant Europe: multi-godfather models 2. Catholic Europe: couple model (single godfather model, symmetric) 3. Orthodox Europe: single godfather models (asymmetric or not)

The Catholic reform of spiritual kinship and godparenthood, and particularly the new rule regarding the maximum admissible number of godparents, caused the crisis of those traditional models based on the abundance of godfathers and godmothers. The complex social networks based on spiritual kinship ties had to be reduced to much simpler structures, which from a qualitative point of view were also very different from the original ones. This process started a path of divergence in social practices, as well as in social structures, which progressively differentiated the Catholic not only from the Protestant, but possibly also from the Orthodox. These aspects are analyzed in the next section.

2 Religious Divides as Cause for Divergence in Social Structures? Godparenthood in Europe after the East-West Schism and the Reformation

The Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation that followed, increased the religious differences across the European continent. Not only did the Protestant move away from Catholic traditions, but both the Protestant and the Catholic started on paths diverging from that followed by the Orthodox. From our specific point of view, this is particularly clear considering spiritual kinship. In the case of godparenthood, one could argue that in southern Europe, godparenthood models became more similar to those characterizing the Orthodox – but this is without considering the unexpected social consequence that the change brought forward in Catholic areas. Before analyzing this process, which is one of divergence in social structures and behaviours and not only in religious ideas and regulations, it is necessary to say something more about the social significance of godparenthood in late Medieval Catholic Europe. 154 Alfani

As has already been mentioned, the Medieval Church attributed to god parents religious and ritual functions, adding to these a responsibility as tutors of the Christian education of the godchildren (a function, it seems, that they rarely truly performed). On the other hand, the tasks assigned to godparents by the clergy were only a small part of their range of functions, many of which escaped the control of the religious authorities to a greater or lesser degree. Research on this topic has greatly increased in the last few years, and here it will be possible to provide only a succinct account.30 The first and fundamental point to underline is that the tie of spiritual kinship considered the most important was that of compaternitas between the godparents and the godchildren’s parents, and not the one between the godparents and their godchildren (a tie made fragile by high infant mortality). A consequence of this was that, in the selection of godparents, the sex of the newborn had far less influence on the number and quality of those given to him, or her, than one might expect.31 Furthermore, while many works underline the relative rarity of material help of godparents to godchildren, relationships of compaternitas were the vehicle of much more frequent and relevant social and economic interaction. The main social use of godparenthood, and particularly of compaternitas, was to weave or activate ties between individuals and households or families. Contrary to other forms of relationship, the baptismal ceremony gave to these new ties a ritual character, holy and public given that they were established in facie communitatis (in front of the social and religious community that witnessed the baptism). All this conferred on such ties a much stronger value than that of simple social contacts. Through the relationships established at baptism, individuals and families became publicly bound by a set of social rules regarding forms of solidarity, cooperation, friendship, and forbidding hostile behaviour.32

30 For an updated synthesis, Alfani and Gourdon, “Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood”, 17–25. More specifically about the economic use of godparenthood, Alfani and Gourdon, “Entrepreneurs”; eidem, “Il ruolo economico del padrinato”; Guido Alfani, “Reformation, ‘Counter-reformation’ and Economic Development from the Point of View of Godparenthood: an Anomaly? (Italy and Europe, 14th–19th Centuries)”, in Religione e istituzioni religiose nell’economia europea. 1000–1800, ed. Francesco Ammannati (Florence, 2012), 477–489. 31 Guido Alfani, “L’attribuzione dei padrini di battesimo secondo il genere e l’ordine di nascita: una gerarchia del privilegio (secoli XVI–XVII)”, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, 123: 2 (2011), 337–346; idem, Fathers and Godfathers, 134–140; Klapisch, “Parrains et filleuls”. 32 Alfani and Gourdon, “Entrepreneurs”; eidem, “Fêtes du baptême”. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 155

To better understand the utility of godparenthood as a social institution, it is useful to compare it to marriage. Being a form of social alliance, it indeed shared some characteristics with the marriage alliance. However, while marriages were established mostly according to a multi-faceted logic of endogamy taking into account social and economic status, religion and ethnicity, compaternitas could bind different and unequal actors and so appears to be more open and much less strictly regulated than marriage alliance.33 More generally, we can say that what characterized a tie such as compaternitas, strong in its regards but much weaker than marriage, was its flexibility, a point stressed first by anthropological research on contemporary societies,34 and confirmed by more recent research into societies of the past. By ‘flexibility’ we mean the ability of godparenthood in general and compaternitas in particular to give a ritual and public character, and a lasting social content, to a set of social relationships that could not be reinforced by consanguinity or marriage alliance, and whose exact nature could vary according to time and space. In other words, even though godparenthood as a social institution was regulated by customs and social norms that changed only slowly in time, it nevertheless offered important openings for improvisation and furnished solutions in individual or one-off situations. Its strong point was its capacity to adapt to exceptional needs, for which there was no social norm to dictate procedure, acting as the catalyst for otherwise unexpressed potentialities.35 In the areas of Europe where it was customary to select many godparents per baptism, strategies of selection were very complex and varied. As I have shown in earlier research mostly related to Northern Italy at the end of the fifteenth/beginning of the sixteenth centuries, the selection of godparents did not follow a single logic, for example the choice of high-status godparents able to provide social, economic or political protection, but obeyed a variety of motivations. Both at the level of whole communities and of single households, upwardly orientated choices coexisted with horizontal ones (within the same social or professional group), or even with choices regarding individuals of lower social status than the baptized parents. Consequently, and as is to be expected from such an adaptive social institution, we find empirical evidence of a large number of possible uses of godparenthood ties: creating or

33 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. 34 See in particular Sidney W. Mintz and Eric R. Wolf, “An Analysis of Ritual Co-parenthood (Compadrazgo)”, SouthWestern Journal of Anthropology, 6 (1950), 341–368. 35 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. 156 Alfani reinforcing economic ties or political alliances;36 pacifying a conflict between great families or even between neighbours;37 strengthening a tie of friendship; being charitable towards the poor; and so on. From the specific point of view of economic activity, five main fields in which godparenthood was relevant have recently been enumerated:38 protection of common or complementary economic interests between economic actors; formalization and ritual protection of business relationships; economic mediation and access to information; establishment of ties of patronage or of clientele; financial and material help from godparents to godchildren (this last field is the only one in which the relationship of godparent-godchild rather than godparent-parent of godchild, is relevant). In Catholic Europe, the establishment of the Tridentine model of godparenthood had largely unexpected consequences which in many ways compro- mised most of the traditional uses of godparenthood. The Council of Trent had aspired to transform godparenthood and compaternitas into ‘horizontal’ relationships, in which godparents of equivalent social rank to the parents would truly assume the responsibility for the spiritual education of their godchildren. Instead, what they obtained was a ‘vertical’ relationship, in which, with only one godfather permissible, he was the most prestigious possible and so the whole institution of godparenthood tended to become a means for establishing and reinforcing social clienteles. The lower ranks of society tended to concentrate their choices on the elites, both noble and non-noble, a process that can be measured statistically thanks to the parish books of baptism. In Italy for example, between 1540–49 and 1600–09, among the children of fathers without title (neither noble nor belonging to the productive elite of master artisans and similar) the share of ‘Signori’ (high social rank) godfathers rose from 18% to 52% at Voghera in Lombardy, from 64% to 89% at Mirandola in Emilia, from 5% to 28% at Finale in Liguria, from 7% to 37% at Turin and from 20% to 42% at Ivrea in Piedmont, and from 7% to 11% at Gambellara in Veneto. At the same time, the highest ranks of society intensified choices made within their groups (fellow nobles, political partners, etc.). In Turin, the proportion of Signori godparents given to children of other Signori rose from 46% to 93%, while in Ivrea it went from 58% to 88%.39

36 Christiane Klapisch, “Compérage et clientélisme à Florence (1360–1520)”, Ricerche Storiche, 15: 1 (1985), 61–76; Haas, “’Il mio buon compare”. 37 Claude Gauvard, “Violence citadine et réseaux de solidarité. L’exemple français aux XIVe et XVe siècles”, Annales ESC, 48: 5 (1993), 1113–1126. 38 Alfani, “Reformation, ‘Counter-reformation’ and Economic Development”. 39 Data from Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 120–131. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 157

All the research carried out on this process of transformation suggests that it is during the Early Modern period that Catholic godparenthood acquired the strong vertical character (to establish social clienteles) that is so apparent to historians and historical anthropologists of Mediterranean Europe from the 17th to the 19th or, in some areas, even the 20th centuries. In Portugal as in Spain there is a clear tendency, during the Early Modern period, to transform godparenthood into a system of patronage. For the great noble landowners, acting as godfather – not only for the children of their peasants, but also for those of their higher-level employees or providers of services such as notaries and merchants – was a common strategy for publicly reaffirming their social dominance.40 There are indications that the procedure was also the same in France.41 Across Catholic Europe, this situation would start to change only from the late 18th or the 19th century, when it became the custom to choose godparents from within kin, a choice which was almost entirely avoided in the Medieval and Early Modern period (see next section). As already noted, verticalization of godparenthood in Catholic Europe was an unwanted consequence of the Catholic reform of baptism. This is even more striking if we consider that, in Protestant Europe, godparenthood continued to be mainly horizontal, and was used in ways entirely similar to those common throughout the continent before the Reformation.42 Godparents continued to act as economic mediators in 18th-century rural Germany;43 artisans and guild masters protected their common interests by acting as godfathers of each other’s children in 18th- and 19th-century Sweden;44 and probably most significantly, merchants continued to formalize and ritualize their economic ties by recurring to the baptismal rite.45 Recent research on Protestant entre- preneurial communities in Catholic areas during the Industrial Revolution (for

40 Joaquim Carvalho and Rosário Campos, “Interpersonal Networks and the Archaeology of Social Structures”, paper presented at the XXV Encontro da Associaçao Portuguesa de Historia Economica e Social (Evora, 2005); Francisco Chacón Jiménez, “Identidad y par- entescos ficticios en la organización social castellana de los siglos XVI y XVII. El ejemplo de Murcia”, in Les parentés fictives en Espagne (XVIe–XVIIe siècles), ed. Augustin Redondo (Paris, 1988), 37–50; Francisco García González and Cosme J. Gómez Carrasco, “Parentesco ficticio y red social en la España meridional (Albacete, 1750–1808)”, Popolazione e Storia, 1 (2008), 35–54. 41 Alfani and Gourdon (eds.), Spiritual Kinship in Europe. 42 Alfani, “Geistige Allianzen”. 43 David W. Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge, 1998). 44 Ericsson, “Godparents”. 45 Thomas M. Safley, Matheus Miller’s Memoir: a Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2000). 158 Alfani example, the Swiss cotton entrepreneurs in Piedmont and Lombardy, or the Protestant businessmen in Paris, active in key sectors such as finance) showed that these patterns of behaviour were still common in the second half of the 19th century, and later.46 In Catholic Europe, by contrast, the verticalization of godparenthood affected the economic elites as well. Not only did merchants begin to systematically choose nobles as godparents to their children, but doing so also seems to have fed their ambition to become nobles themselves, which usually implied abandoning trade to invest capital in land. This tendency might also have favoured a change in the attitude towards how to do business, and in particular, might have favoured the appearance of customs which could easily involve moral hazards.47 In fact, a different propensity when looking for patrons, favoured by the Catholic reform of godparenthood, might help to explain behaviour testified to by anthropological research on contemporary societies, for example the selection of politicians as godparents in the hope of receiving favours and protection from them.48 More generally, in Catholic Europe and especially in Italy, the verticalization of godparenthood might have acted as a force for the closure of societies, bringing increasing rigidity of social-economic structures and ultimately weakening the vitality and innova- tiveness of the economy.49 Contrary to what one might expect, in post-Reformation Europe, and notwithstanding abstract theological positions, the practices of Protestant godparenthood were much more similar to the Medieval ones than the Catholic: large groups of godparents were still selected, the strategies regulating choice of godparents were complex and varied, and pious economic actors continued to use godparenthood to establish connections to foster their economic interests. The Catholic reform of godparenthood, instead, brought radical change to ancient practices, succeeding where the Church had failed for many centuries: reducing the number of godparents. As a consequence of this, the Catholic reform of godparenthood was able to change societies much more than the Protestant one. Furthermore, it fostered (albeit unwittingly) the appearance of new patterns of behaviour, whilst under the Reformation traditional customs

46 Alfani and Gourdon, Entrepreneurs. 47 Guido Alfani, “Ungodly Godparenthood. Social Clientele, Mafia and Dark Networks”, paper given at World Economic History Congress, Utrecht 2009; Alfani and Gourdon, Entrepreneurs. 48 Fortunata Piselli, “Il compare ‘politico’ ”, L’Uomo, 11 (1987), 137–159. 49 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 130; Alfani and Gourdon, Entrepreneurs. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 159 continued to be practiced, even against the will of impassioned reformers such as Calvin. In this picture of Protestant-Catholic divergence, one could wonder where we should place the Orthodox. The first thing to underline is that, from the point of view of Church regulations (and seemingly, also of godparenthood models), there is perfect continuity from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern period. Differently from the Protestant (who cancelled spiritual kinship entirely) and from the Catholic (who inverted a millenary tendency to the expansion of spiritual kinship and reformed godparenthood), the Orthodox continued to accept a very extended notion of spiritual kinship, and consequently to apply a very wide array of impediments to marriage. For example in the case of the patriarchate or Russia, the Kormchaja canonical code of 1650–52 (which still referred to the Trullan Synod of 692 as a testament to the extensive impediments to marriage due to spiritual kinship) recognized seven degrees of spiritual kinship. The first degree connected godparent to godchild. The second, godparent to parents of the godchild, and godchild to godparent’s children. The third, godchild’s brothers and sisters to godparent’s children. And so on; marriage was prohibited within all seven degrees.50 Regarding the number of godparents to be admitted per baptism, the Kormchaja stated that there had to be only one godparent per baptism, ‘one trustful person’ charged with teaching ‘piety’ or religious devotion to the godchild. This prescription reiterated older rules, and in particular the decrees of the Moscow Council of 1551. However, if church rules favoured the single godparent, actual practice must have been different as the Moscow Council hinted at customs allowing multiple godparents, customs which had to be abandoned. At least one code of the late fifteenth century not only mentioned the custom of giving multiple godparents (two godfathers or two godmothers) but also stated that this was acceptable. The prevalent opinion among Russian theologians, however, was clearly in favour of a single godparent, of the same sex as the child, but significantly the occasion for them to state their opinion on the matter was the reality of different customs. The metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus’, Kiprian, who wrote in the late 14th/early 15th century and is the first to mention the issue of the multiplication of godparents, stated that there had to be just one godparent, not a godfather and a godmother ‘as they do in this land’51 (note that this custom, ‘one godfather and one godmother’, is different from the ‘two godfathers or two godmothers’ mentioned above – does this

50 Muravyeva, “Godparenthood”, 252, which is also my source for the developments in the Russian Church described below. 51 Cited from Muravyeva, “Godparenthood”, 251. 160 Alfani hint at a fragmentation of customs within the Russian area?). Interestingly, Kiprian stated that multiple godparents were a Catholic (‘Latin’) custom, and therefore the result of foreign influences that had to be eradicated. To a degree, this battle was lost, as shortly after the Kormchaja canon code was introduced, a new Moscow Council (1666) accepted the custom of having both a godfather and a godmother per baptism (the custom which is still dominant today in Russia). If we consider the wider picture, however, we can say that the Russian Church was successful in keeping the ‘western’ influences to a minimum as seemingly there is no trace, in this area, of the kind of multi-godfather models so widespread across Catholic Europe during the late Middle Ages. Unfortunately, for the other Orthodox patriarchates of Europe we lack the kind of long-term historical reconstruction of rules and practices that is now available for Russia, although in works covering different areas in specific periods, it is consistently suggested that godparents per baptism were few. For example in Romania, archival sources suggest that during the 17th and 18th centuries the prevalent custom was to have just one godparent, not necessarily of the same gender as the godchild and with a clear prevalence of godfathers.52 However, we know from contemporary anthropological research that in certain areas of the country, such as the Bukowina region, there is a tendency (seemingly corresponding to a local custom) to ask for many more godparents (up to fifty). This is contrary to Church regulations mindful of spiritual incest, but official rules notwithstanding “certain priests agree to perform marriages and baptisms with this large number of parents, in this way brokering the local customs into the Orthodox Church”.53 Furthermore, there are hints about the fact that these practices appeared only in the first half of the 20th century, to maximize baptismal gifts received from godparents, but other scholars suggest that they are much older, being connected to regulations requiring land to be sold only to kin (including spiritual).54 The case of contemporary Bukowina surely suggests that caution is needed when trying to reconstruct the whole picture on the grounds of mostly legal and theological sources. At the very least, while it seems certain that single-godfather models are vastly prevalent in the Orthodox world, both

52 Costanţa Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, “Construire autour du baptême: parrains et filleuls dans la société roumaine (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles)”, in Baptiser: pratique sacramentelle, pratique sociale, eds. Alfani, Castagnetti and Gourdon, 261–280. 53 Monica Vasile, “Godparenthood Capitalism: Strong Ties as Anchor and Shield in Illegal Economic Practices”, paper presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference “Experiencing Diversity and Mutuality”, August 2008, 11. 54 Monica Vasile, “A Typology of Godkinship Practices in Romania”, Annuaire Roumain d’Anthropologie (forthcoming). Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 161 today and in the past, we should recognize the possibility that specific areas or communities, maybe profiting from jurisdictional or regulatory loopholes, adopted multi-godfather customs similar to the European Late Medieval ones. Given the relative scarcity of studies concerned with the history of Orthodox godparenthood, similar caution is necessary when trying to compare the social significance of godparenthood in the East and West. A classic study of godparenthood in the Balkans in the 1960s and earlier by Hammel has provided evidence that godparenthood was used to establish and strengthen relations of solidarity between peers; to show respect towards a godfather of a higher rank than their own (and sometimes to become his ‘clients’); to integrate and finalize marriage alliances; to overcome disputes and bring an end to blood feuds, and so on.55 There is a clear resemblance between these uses and those described for Catholic Europe in earlier epochs, although possibly with a stronger focus on the use of godparenthood to prevent violence and maintain peace within fragmented and divided societies. However, evolution of the uses of godparenthood in the Orthodox world occurred over time and could adapt slowly to changing societies – a situation which, somewhat paradoxically, is more similar to that of the Protestant than to the Catholic.

3 Households, Godparenthood and Kinship in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: An Overview

To conclude this comparative survey of spiritual kinship and godparenthood across Europe, I will now focus on how households made use of godparenthood, and how spiritual kinship ties connected different households. Both for reasons of synthesis and because of the serious scarcity of the kind of detailed micro-studies needed to fully assess this topic, I will simply mention some key questions and will provide answers as complete as possible given the limited information available. The first, and possibly the most important, question is how spiritual kinship related to kinship. In her pioneering comparative study of European godparenthood practices in the late Middle Ages, Klapisch suggested that in such diverse areas as Italy, France, England and Germany godparents were usually selected outside of kin.56 The choice of godparents, then, was of the ‘extensive’ rather than the ‘intensive’ kind, according to a dichotomy developed by many

55 Eugene A. Hammel, Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in the Balkans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968). 56 Klapisch, “Compérage”. 162 Alfani early anthropological studies of godparenthood.57 Extensive choices relate to the selection of godparents outside of kin, while intensive ones would be aimed at strengthening and reviving – or at least, at replicating – existing ties of kinship. To reach this conclusion, Klapisch made use of mostly allusive material and relied heavily on intuition, save for Italy and particularly for Florence, for which she was able to make use of her ample database of information coming from family records. However, Klapisch’s intuition was probably correct, as a growing number of local studies are providing support for the idea that generally, in Catholic Europe during the late Middle Ages, godparents were selected from outside kinship; for example in Italy, in Ivrea (Piedmont) in the late 15th century less than 1% of godparents were selected from within patrilinear kinship while in other communities such as Mirandola (Emilia) the share was even smaller, bordering zero. About one century later (end of sixteenth), the situation was much the same, with patrilinear kinship accounting for no more than 2–4% of all godparents in Ivrea and 3–4% in Nonantola (Emilia).58 Even if we doubled the percentages to estimate the share of godparents coming from both patrilinear and matrilinear kinship, the overall picture would not change: godparents were not kin, save for exceptions. The findings for Italy are confirmed by the scattered data available for other parts of Europe. In Bordeaux (France) in 1561, just before the end of the Council of Trent, the share of godfathers chosen from within kin (both patrilinear and matrilinear) was in the 11–12% range and that of godmothers about 10%: markedly higher than that found for Northern Italy, but nevertheless a small minority.59 In England at the end of the Middle Ages, it has been estimated that about 8% of the godparents came from patrilinear kinship.60

57 The dichotomy was introduced by Benjamin. D. Paul, “Ritual Kinship, with Special Reference to Godparenthood in Middle America”, PhD thesis, University of Chicago (1942). 58 Guido Alfani, “I padrini: patroni o parenti? Tendenze di fondo nella selezione dei parenti spirituali in Europa (XV–XX secolo)”, Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Coloquios (2008), http://nuevomundo.revues.org/30172; idem, “Selection of Godparents from within Kin in Europe (1500–2000 ca.)”, paper given at European Social Science History Conference, Glasgow (2012); idem, “Parrains, partecipanti et parenté. Tendances de longue durée dans la sélection des parents spirituels au sein d’une communauté exceptionnelle: Nonantola XVIe–XVIIIe siècles”, in Baptiser: pratique sacramentelle, pratique sociale, eds. Alfani, Castagnetti and Gourdon, 293–316. 59 This data is related to the parish of Saint-André (Paroisse Saint-André, baptêmes, 1561– 1564, Archives Municipales de Bordeaux). 60 Philip Niles, “Baptism and the Naming of Children in Late Medieval England”, Medieval Prosopography, 3: 1 (1982), 95–107. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 163

This situation is in strong contrast with what we know about godparenthood today, which is characterized by the marked prevalence of choices of godparents from within kin. This also requires us to place in time the emergence of the custom of selecting godparents from within kin. To track this development, we can at present only rely on a limited number of case studies covering the very long run and on a larger number of works giving information about shorter time periods or just providing spot measures.61 Taken together, this information suggests that, while the chronology of the change varied according to country, area and social milieu, all in all from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century there was a significant increase in the number of godparents chosen from within kin. Although the tendency seems to begin during the Early Modern period, the process intensified no earlier than the 18th century, and selection of kin as godparents became the dominant choice only in the later 19th century or during the 20th, according to the area. One of the most striking features of this process is that it seemingly involved both Catholics and Protestants of various denominations, independently from the differences in their godparenthood models. Various explanations have been suggested, such as the crisis of traditional forms of community life from the 17th century, which would be associated with the progressive rise of individualism,62 or the development within the bourgeoisie of a new vision of the family, which later spread to lower social strata. However, at present none of these or the other factors mentioned in the literature seems able to fully explain what is still a mysterious process.63 In Catholic Europe, it seems assured that the emergence of intra-kin choices is somehow connected with the decline of the ‘vertical’ godparenthood which had become prevalent after the Council of Trent, but the situation is strikingly different for the Protestant (who did not have to endure any radical transformation in their godparenthood models). We know little about the Orthodox, but for example in Russia, in the St Petersburg region, the quota of godparents chosen from within kin (patrilinear or matrilinear) was around 9–10% at the beginning of the 18th century, rising to 21–22% by the beginning of the 19th:64 a rise which could suggest a general and growing process analogous to that described above for the West. Kin selected as godparents in the St Petersburg region were usually of the same generation as the godchild; older brothers and sisters were often selected. In Catholic Europe, however, when choices from within kin started to become commonplace, it seems that the older generations were preferred: particularly

61 See the synthesis in Alfani, “Selection of Godparents”. 62 Alfani, “I padrini”. 63 Alfani and Gourdon, “Spiritual Kinship and Godparenthood”, 30–32. 64 Muravyeva, “Godparenthood”, p. 266. 164 Alfani grandparents, uncles and aunts (note that, as shown by a survey on contemporary godparenthood practices in Italy and France, uncles and aunts are today the most common choice by far65). I will not develop this matter further here as, during almost all of the time period considered by this article, the vast majority of godparents was selected from outside kin. If we consider how spiritual kinship connected different households, we must conclude that during the Medieval and Early Modern period the choice of godparents was made in order to establish new formal ties between households of non-kin. A number of specific uses have been described: for example, households of migrants used spiritual kinship as a means of integrating with the host community,66 or neighbours could establish formal ties in order to ease their relationships, ending quarrels or preventing violence, small thefts, etc.67 Many of these uses, when interpreted from the household perspective, simply replicate what has already been described for individuals (see previous section). However, there are certain aspects of how godparenthood strategies are managed that only fully emerge if the focus is on the household. We know, for example, that certain households exchanged godparenthood ‘services’ (with members of one household being godparent to children born to the second household, and vice versa).68 This practice created a kind of horizontal relationship between the two households, as the ‘honour’ of being a godfather, with all that this implied, was reciprocated. In other instances, one household was placed symbolically under the protection of another, or even of one specific person. This happened when the same godparent (or different godparents from the same household, see later) was repeatedly given to the children born to a given household. In 16th-century Ivrea, these recurring godparenthoods (calculated taking into account household heads delegating their wives and daughters to the task) accounted for close to 20% of the total.69 However, we know that in other parts of Europe such behaviour was much more common, and even predominant. For example, in the German (Protestant) village of Neckarhausen in Württemberg, during the 18th–19th centuries each couple

65 Guido Alfani, Agnese Vitali and Vincent Gourdon, “Social Customs and Demographic Change: the Case of Godparenthood in Catholic Europe’ ” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 51: 3 (2012), 483–505. 66 Guido Alfani, “Immigrants and Formalisation of Social Ties in Early Modern Italy (Ivrea, Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)’, in Spiritual Kinship in Europe, eds. Alfani and Gourdon, 47–73; Couriol, “Godparenthood”. 67 Gauvard, “Violence”. 68 See for example the case of Ivrea: Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 182–183. 69 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 181–182. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 165 selected one specific person, who acted as godfather for all of their children.70 A similar custom is attested in another Protestant German city, Oettingen.71 This kind of use was possibly even more widespread in Orthodox areas, and particularly in the Balkans.72 In 18th-century Romania, the custom also required that a father give his own godfather to all of his children. If the godfather died, his firstborn inherited the task, thus perpetuating the ritual subordination of one household to the other.73 Apart from the ritual placement of different households in a position of social coordination or subordination, another aspect worthy of some consideration (and definitely of more research) is the role played by each household member in the household godparenthood strategy. The first question that arises is who took the decision about which godparents to select (if a decision was possible, since customs like that described for Romania allowed little or no space for manoeuvre – but as far as we know, customs of this kind were far from being widespread in Europe). Elsewhere, I suggested that the choice of godparents was relatively free from the control of the larger family or the kinship group; in other words, although a young man was rarely free to choose his marriage partner, he could usually select the godparents for his children.74 However, I also suggested the existence of ‘couple strategies’, with the wife acting as godmother integrating the ties established by the husband acting as godfather. Some evidence of these processes can be found by analyzing the ‘careers’ of godparents; that is, their presence at baptisms during the course of their life. For example in 16th and early 17th-century Ivrea, if we compare the careers of the husband (as godfather) and of the wife (as godmother) we get the impression of a common purpose, and also of a certain degree of integration. In fact, it is a fairly common occurrence to find the husband playing a particularly active role in the earlier years, while later in the life cycle of the couple it is the wife who participates most often at baptisms as godmother. Daughters also can be activated to further support the household godparenthood strategies.75

70 Sabean, Kinship. 71 Barbara Rajkay and Wolfgang Reinhard, “Le choix des parrains dans une ville bi- confessionnelle. Oettingen de 1580 à 1806”, in Aux sources de la puissance: sociabilité et parenté, ed. Françoise Thelamon (Rouen, 1989), 161–167. 72 Hammel, Alternative Social Structures. 73 Vintilă-Ghiţulescu, “Construire autour du baptême”, 273–274. 74 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers. 75 Alfani, Fathers and Godfathers, 175–180; idem, “Les réseaux de marrainage en Italie du Nord du XVe au XVIIe siècle: coutumes, évolution, parcours individuels”, Histoire, Economie et Société, 4 (2006), 17–44. 166 Alfani

Different household components, then, contributed to a largely common purpose. One open question is whether the existence of couple strategies implied an active role of women also in drawing an overall strategy of social relations, or whether they simply acted in vece of their husbands, who, by reducing their own presences at baptisms, might have wished to mark a process of status acquisition, while at the same time preserving useful formal social contacts through the feminine components of their household.76 On this like on many other aspects of the history of godparenthood, more research would be needed.

Conclusion

This chapter has provided a survey of long-term changes in spiritual kinship and godparenthood regulations and practices, paying particular attention to how the East and West influenced each other, and on processes of divergence between different versions of the Christian religion following two main breakpoints: the East-West Schism (11th century) and the Reformation (16th century). In the late Antiquity and early Middle Ages, it was in the Eastern Church that the notion of spiritual kinship as well as that of spiritual incest developed first, later spreading to the West. The first appearance of baptismal godparents, by contrast, is related to the introduction of infant baptism and is difficult to place geographically. However, the tendency towards an increase in the number of godparents seems to have been a characteristic of the West, while in the East, new customs prescribing the presence of more than one godparent were considered ‘Latin’ influences to be fought. This is particularly true after the Schism, which however from our specific perspective does not seem to have been the cause of East-West divergence, neither in regulations (both Catholic and Orthodox favoured expansion of the boundaries of spiritual kinship, as well as reduction in the number of godparents) nor in customs. The Reformation, by contrast, was a real turning point, causing divergence both between East (Orthodox) and West overall, and between Catholic and Protestant. While the Orthodox continued on the same path they had been following during the Middle Ages, the Protestants diverged radically concerning spiritual kinship (whose existence they negated entirely). The Catholics

76 Guido Alfani, “Padrini, madrine e figliocce dal 1400 a oggi”, in Padri nostri. Archetipi e modelli delle relazioni tra ‘padri’ e ‘figlie’, ed. Saveria. Chemotti (Padua, 2010), 119–169; idem, “Les réseaux de marrainage”. Divergence of Spiritual Kinship 167 interrupted a millennium-old process of expansion of spiritual kinship, and effectively imposed a cap on the number of godparents present at baptism (one godfather and one godmother maximum). The new rule was consistent with a (rarely applied) regulatory tradition, and consequently was similar to the regulations spread among the Orthodox, but interestingly, from the point of view of practices, after the end of the Council of Trent in 1563 it was the Catholics who seem to have diverged most from the East, as a consequence of the verticalization of godparenthood that followed a sudden and drastic reform affecting actual practices. In other respects, however, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant seem to have followed much the same path. In particular, from the 18th–19th century all of them seem to have been affected by a process leading to the increase in the number of godparents being selected from among kin, a practice which had accounted for just a small minority of choices throughout the Medieval and Early Modern period. This process, which ultimately led to godparents being selected predominantly from kin, significantly changed the ways in which spiritual kinship connected individuals and households. More generally, the chapter has provided some initial insights into how households developed strategies of coordination or subordination/patronage with other households, and how different members of the household participated in these common strategies. However, this is a field in which much more comparative research is needed, especially in the East, research which promises to shed new light on household and individual interaction as well as on general tendencies in strategies of social alliance across the European continent. CHAPTER 8 Household Structure in the Nineteenth Century in a Transylvanian Village

Judit Ambrus

The topic of family and household structure has been intensively investigated by Hungarian historians and ethnographers alike since the middle of the previous century. Ethnographers rarely use the method of quantitative analysis – if they use historical sources it is usually qualitatively, or their work is generally based on classical ethnographic methods: observation and oral questioning. One result of the growing volume of family and household analysis in the field of historic demography in the second half of the 20th century – especially that of Rudolf Andorka, Tamás Faragó and Dezső Dányi1 – was to query the prevalence of the ‘joint family’2 type in Hungary, a notion had found wide accep- tance amongst ethnographers. According to these investigations into historical demography the joint family type was neither as common nor as widespread in Hungarian peasant society at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries as had been assumed in the ethnographic literature. It was most

1 Rudolf Andorka, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele két dél-dunántúli faluban (Alsónyéken és Kölkeden). Kísérlet P. Laslett elemzési módszerének felhasználására” [Size and Structure of Families and Households in Two Transdanubian Villages (Alsónyék and Kölked)], Történeti Statisztikai Tanulmányok, 3 (1977), 215–236; Rudolf Andorka and Tamás Faragó, “Pre-industrial Household Structure in Hungary”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett(Cambridge, 1983), 281–308; Tamás Faragó, “Háztartás, család, rokonság” [Household, Family, Relations], Ethnographia, 94: 2 (1983), 216– 254; Tamás Faragó, Tér is idő – család és történelem [Time and Space – Families and History] (Miskolc, 1999); Dezső Dányi, “Háztartás és család nagysága és struktúrája az iparosodás előtt Magyarországon” [Household, Family Size and Structure in Pre-industrial Hungary], Történeti-Statisztikai Tanulmányok, 3 (1977), 5–104. 2 I use the term ‘joint family’ here as an equivalent of the Hungarian term ‘nagycsalád’, by which is meant in the terminology of ethnographers a patriarchal group involving several (either directly descended or collaterally connected) families related by economic and kinship bonds living in the same house (or on the same plot) farming and consuming together under the leadership of the head of the household (gazda), usually the eldest man. Work on the estate and the goods produced by the family members were allocated by him. A joint family like this generally contained 20–25 people (though groups of 40 were not unknown), and often split up after the death of the head of the family.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_009 Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 169 typically found in poor, barely developed uplands, and in those areas where the density of population was low, the extent of disposable lands was large, and the population practised an extensive form of farming. As far as long-term changes in household structure in Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries are concerned, Tamás Faragó asserts in the latest summary of research in that area that “the mean size of households in most of the peasant communities was between 4.5 and 5.7 persons in the 18th and 19th centuries, while in the countrywide the overwhelming majority of households contained 3–6 inhabitants”.3 At the same time it is important to note that this general picture covers variations in household structure and household type in different regions of the country. In rural communities it was not rare to find households composed of several generations of the same family living together. This situation obtained until the end of the 19th century – not only was the number of those living alone low, but also that of old people living solely with their spouse or only one child.4 Andorka drew attention to another characteristic of Hungarian peasant co-habiting strategies: until the middle of the 20th century it was quite common for married children to stay in the parental house for several years, and this found support in the norms of the communities since it meant mutual help and benefits for both the older and younger generations.5 Nevertheless, from the beginning of the 20th century the mean size of households in Hungary started to decrease and the structure of the households to become less complex. In Transylvania this tendency seems to have begun one or two generations later than in the (post World War I) territory of Hungary.6 In Transylvanian historical literature concerning the family it is often assumed that the nuclear family type predominates in the region at the end of the 19th century, though islands of the joint family type are also found –

3 Tamás Faragó, “Nemek, nemzedékek, rokonság, család” [Gender, Generations, Relations, Family], in Magyar néprajz VIII., eds. Mihály Sárkány and Miklós Szilágyi (Budapest, 2000), 457. 4 Faragó, “Nemek, nemzedékek, rokonság, család”, 458. 5 Rudolf Andorka, “Háztartási rendszerek és az idős emberek élete a 18–19. századi mag- yarországi falvakban” [Household Structure and the Lives of Older People in 18th and 19th Century Hungarian Villages], in idem, Gyermek, család, történelem [Children, Family, History] (Budapest, 2001), 257. 6 Faragó, “Nemek, nemzedékek, rokonság, család”, 470–472. In Transylvania the research into Hungarian communities’ households and families thus far conducted does not even reach the level of the research relating to the communities in present-day Hungary. 170 Ambrus

Csík and Arad counties and Kalotaszeg are considered such areas.7 This latter area, Kalotaszeg, is an ethnographic region in Transylvania (near to the city of Cluj-Napoca) which has been a part of Romania for almost a hundred years but is still inhabited by large Hungarian communities. The inhabitants of the region in the past had lived predominantly on agriculture, but owing to the low fertility of their lands they had to seek work as day-labourers, lime-burners, stone carvers and merchants.8 The village of Magyarvista (Viştea),9 in which I conducted anthropological fieldwork between 2004 and 2007, is located in this region (18 kilometres from Cluj-Napoca, Cluj county, Romania), and had the same characteristics in the 19th century and in the first half of the twentieth century. In the period this analysis refers to (the end of the 19th century)10 a predominantly Hungarian and Calvinist11 community lived in Vista, which according to the official census of Hungary in 1900 was an essentially agricultural community.12

7 Ákos Egyed, Falu, város, civilizáció. Tanulmányok a jobbágyfelszabadítás és a kapitalizmus történetéből Erdélyben 1848–1914 [Villages, Cities, Civilization. Studies in the Liberation of Serfs and the History of Capitalism in Transylvania. 1848–1914] (Bucharest, 1981), 261. 8 János Jankó, Kalotaszeg magyar népe [The Hungarians in Kalotaszeg] (Budapest, 1998), 5–6. 9 The official form of the name of the village today is Viştea in Romanian and Magyarvista in Hungarian, but it used to be Vista in the period under discussion, thus we use this form in this paper. 10 At the end of the 19th century the village was in Hungary, as Transylvania was then part of Hungary – until the Trianon treaty (1920), according to the provisions of which Transylvania was annexed by Romania. 11 In the middle and the second half of the 19th century c. 60% of the population in Transylvania belonged to the Orthodox and Uniate Church, 10–11% to the Roman Catholic and 14% to the Calvinist Church. According to the historical demographic research conducted on the region, the Orthodox and Uniate congregations consisted of Romanians, while the Roman Catholics and Calvinists were Hungarians. Nyárády R. Károly: Erdély népességének etnikai és vallási tagolódása a magyar államalapítástól a dual- izmus koráig [The Ethnic and Religious Structure of the Population of Transylvania from the Foundation of the Hungarian State to the Dualist Era], A Központi Statisztikai Hivatal Népességtudományi Kutató Intézetének történeti demográfiai füzetei, 3 (Budapest, 1987), 7–55 (35–38). 12 92% of the active population made their living from agriculture and horticulture. As my research originally was not historical (this aspect of the life of the community began to interest me only once the research started) I have not yet looked systematically at the archival sources and cannot give a more detailed description of the occupational structure of the community in the 19th century, as 19th-century censuses do not give details of this for particular communities. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 171

In the course of the fieldwork the research focused on the changing role of the elderly in the village in the 20th century, recording 37 interviews there. The interviews were recorded in two sections: first a life story interview and then a semi-structured one that contained questions related to household and family forms in which the subject of the interview lived during the course of their life, and questions related to different aspects of old age. At a certain point in the research it was necessary to reveal the historical background of family and household forms in the community for the sake of a better understanding the main topic, and the investigations were extended to the documents in the archive of the congregation. Amongst these I found a so-called ‘family book’, which became the starting point of the analysis presented in this study. The reason for starting to analyse this family book was to clarify the part played by family and household structure in determining the framework of elderly people’s lives in this village – and this analysis confronted me with several methodological questions which are, in my judgement, relevant not just in this particular case and source. The aim of this article is, besides providing a description of the structure of a specific administration form, which was mainly used in the Transylvanian Calvinist Church, to attempt to find answers to these methodological problems. The most important question is that of how these categories, which were elaborated by Laslett and his research group and are widely used in studies dealing with household-structure in different parts of the world, can be applied in this particular case.13 In the case of such a source as the family book, is it possible to interpret the kindred families recorded in it as households according to the definition of Laslett? Does such a one-off registration provide enough information to apply the original definition of household without (partially) basing our interpretation on assumptions? How does the rethinking and re-examination of the analysis in the context of other sources and data colour the picture we get from the original source? I am aware of the fact that analysing household and family forms and structures requires a complex and dynamic approach using different types of sources if we want to show a picture of the real content and functions of the social phenomena we call household or family in the context of a particular community, and if not only quantitative sources are to determine what we understand by household or family.14 In the case of the investigated community it is necessary

13 For the definition of household see Peter Laslett, “Introduction: the History of the Family”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), 28–32. 14 Cf. Lutz K. Berkner, “The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example”, American Historical Review, 77 (1972), 398–418. 172 Ambrus to extend the analyses to further sources (historical qualitative sources such as wills, court proceedings) and aspects (e.g. landholding, retirement arrangements, inheritance, the number and frequency of children in the family, the role of religion). This article summarizes the first results of research which aims to reveal the household and family structure in a Transylvanian village and the questions raised by the first phase (based mainly on quantitative data) of a broader research project. The family books kept by the Hungarian Calvinist Church in Transylvania15 are a special kind of ecclesiastical source, which emerged as an additional administrative form (besides the parochial registers) in the second half of the 19th century, when the General Assembly of the Church introduced and worked out the structure and rules for keeping this type of register.16 Their importance lies in the fact that they are under-researched by Hungarian scholars dealing with family and household structure or family history, historians, demographers and ethnographers equally. In the family books two leaves served as a Family page: on the left hand side the heads of the families – that is to say, the parents – and on the right their children were to be recorded. In relation to the parents, their names, dates of birth, date of marriage and dates of death had to be entered. The same data was entered for their children, with the addition of the dates of their confirmations (see Figure 8.1). The main rules for keeping them as laid down by the Church were the following:

– the pastor had to start a new page for every family – if a child established their own family, the number of the page thus begun for the new family was then recorded in the Notes column on the original family page – the Moving away column had to be filled in only if somebody left the settlement; so it was not mandatory for the pastor to record a change of address within the settlement – if a widow remarried she had to be recorded on the page of her new husband

15 As far as I know the Churches (Calvinist and Catholic) tried to introduce this administrative form in the present territory of Hungary too, but it did not become as prevalent as in Transylvania. 16 In 1874 the Assembly of the Transylvanian Church District obliged the pastors to keep a family book for their own congregation (Reports of the Assembly 1874–75. II/3. Archive of the Calvinist Church, Cluj). Some years later the assembly realized that in many congregations the pastors had neglected the administration of the families, and thus ordained that the canonica visitatio had to check the family books of the parishes and punish the pastor if the book was incomplete (Reports of the Assembly 1878–84. II/109. Archive of the Calvinist Church, Cluj). Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 173

FIGURE 8.1 Family book of Vista

– in bigger towns it was acceptable for the pastor not to note the house number – divorces had to be written in the Notes column – the rules also governed those people who lived with the nuclear family but were not members of it: relatives had to be registered, but servants did not.

After starting a family book and registering all the Calvinist families in it, the pastor had to continue the registration of all the above-mentioned data (births, marriages etc.). Thus, if a family book was kept correctly, it included all the families in the congregation and the main demographic data concerning the family members’ lives. The particular family book I analysed17 was begun in the congregation of Vista in 1883 and it was in use until 1972. Missing data is quite rare in this family book, and in most cases can be filled in using data from the parish registries. As Vista has been inhabited by Hungarian Calvinists since the middle of the 19th

17 Family book of Vista, I/5. Archive of Magyarvista Congregation. 174 Ambrus century,18 this source involves the whole Hungarian community of this village.19 Besides the above-mentioned data, the book also contains additional notes by the various priests in connection with certain events in the families’ and individuals’ lives and their habits and characters. The arrangement of the data concerning those families that were added under a house number in the family book indicates that the local priest who started to keep the register took on the task of constructing a status animarum – he registered all the Calvinist families in the village living together at the time of starting the book and their exact birth, marriage and death dates. The pastors of the Vista Congregation recorded more than 1,300 conjugal families in the course of almost a hundred years in the book. Since there was a strong connection between the nationality and the religion of the inhabitants (the Hungarians in the village belonged to the Calvinist Church, and Romanians belonged to the Uniate20), the data in the family book cover the Hungarian Calvinist community of Vista.21 This huge amount of data and its method of arrangement raises the problem of how to differentiate between those who were registered as the part of this initial registration22 and those who were registered later on. In the case of the first registration, it also raises the question of when this registration took place. By analysing the arrangement of the data I tried to get a reassuring answer to these questions. The pastor who made this initial registration added a serial number to all nuclear families and listed them under a house number. Considering the fact that in those families which were assigned a serial number and arranged in the family book in sequence, the date of marriage was

18 The proportion of Hungarians and Calvinists has been about 90% since 1850. 19 The completeness of the family book will be discussed later. 20 Uniate (or Eastern Rite) Churches are Christian Churches in Eastern-Europe which acknowledge the authority of the Pope (as the head of the Christian Church) and the Roman curia but retain their own language, religious laws and liturgy. 21 According to the national census in 1881, the number of those whose mother tongue was Hungarian was 810 and those who spoke Romanian as a mother tongue numbered 104 – the number of Calvinists was 835 and the members of the United Church was 104. The difference may originate from the inclusion of those infants who could not speak at the time of the census but had already been christened (28) and/or those whose nationality was defined as ‘other’ in the census (7). The fact that there are no Romanian names in the family book or in the registry of births, marriages and deaths reinforces the correlation between nationality and religion as well. 87% of the population was Calvinist (and Hungarian) in 1881 according to the census. 22 This initial registration was made by Lajos Kónya who was the priest of the congregation between 1855 and 1905. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 175 practically without exception before 29th January 1884,23 and the fact that the couple married on this date is recorded in the beginning of the book,24 we can conclude that this first and original registration must have taken place at the end of 1883 or the beginning of 1884. A short period after this initial registration – involving all the Calvinist families in Vista – the pastor abandoned the recording of house numbers. Thus, unfortunately, this source does not enable us to follow the changes in household structure through time, but only in cross-section. If we follow the practice that presumes the families were linked by kinship and locality, sharing activities and consumption, we can consider the families listed under the same house number as households. In this way I conducted an analysis of the structure of the households on the basis of this original registration from 1883/84 using the categories elaborated by Laslett, except that in this particular case the subcategories of Laslett (4a) and (4b), also (5a) and (5b) could not be distinguished within the main categories (4 and 5), since it is not possible to define the heads of the households.25 In spite of that, this kind of ecclesiastical registration form is an important, multifaceted and useful but unexploited source for investigations in the field of historical demography and ethnography; in fact, there is not a single study in the Hungarian literature which uses this type of source. That is why a detailed description of the methodology of the analysis is provided before unfolding the results relating to the household structure itself. Another reason for providing such a methodological description lays in the nature of the source: it has a different structure to that of the documents generally used in the field of historical demography, as it involves a longitudinal sequence of data that raises some specific issues concerning the analysis. First of all, it was essential to clarify whether this family book was complete and sufficiently reliable to serve as the basis of the analysis. I used the

23 Though there are 3 exceptions where the serial number fits into the order of the list but the date of the marriage is earlier, the ‘common law marriage’ notes were recorded next to these families by the priest and the first children of these couples were born before the date of their marriage; thus it is quite obvious that these couples had been living together before they officially got married. 24 Altogether 230 families are provided with a serial number – this particular one is the 22nd. 25 In several cases the families recorded under the same house number by the priest were not recorded on the same sheet. The regulations of the church relating to the keeping of a family book can provide an explanation for this: the pastors had to record every conjugal family on different sheets. Because of this we cannot apply the method of considering the first person listed as the head of the household. 176 Ambrus data of the national census in 188126 to check the completeness of this register: the census recorded 835 Calvinists. The number of the population recorded in the framework of the pastor’s registration in 1883/188427 was 847 people. Since there is no significant difference between these data we can rely on this document as a registration that included approximately the whole Hungarian population of the village at the end of 1883 / the beginning of 1884.28 Following this, I identified the families in the book that were registered under the same house number, and, if necessary, completed the data concerning members of these families from the register of births, marriages and deaths. I then filtered out those who had left the household before the end of January 1884 and those who were born after this date. In this way it was possible to identify 128 households as existing at this time. Of these, 117 were households in which the kinship type could clearly be established (naturally this was a problem mainly in the case of complex households). I restricted my analysis only to these 117 cohabiting familial groups that included altogether 748 people.29 Thereafter an analysis of the structure of these households was conducted, which gave following results presented in Table 8.1. More than a half (59.5%) of the households had a complex structure and of these, 48% were of the multiple (Laslett 5) type, and 9.5% of the extended household type (Laslett 4). More than a third of the households (40%) belonged to the simple type (Laslett 3). Besides this, there was one no family-type (L2)30 and there were just two persons living alone – one widowed woman, and a bachelor.31 In the extended households, in every case a cohabiting widowed parent lived with a married son and his family. According to the analysis the mean household size was 6.3 at the beginning of 1884 in Vista. This is close to the figure which can be calculated on the basis of the national census in 1881 (5.9). 19 (34%) of the multiple families can be regarded as belonging to Laslett’s category (5e). In these households there were conjugal family units disposed both laterally and vertically as well (married parents with their married child/

26 The nominal date of the census was officially the first of January 1881. 27 I defined the number of the persons recorded in the course of this first registration – that is, those who could have lived under a particular house number before 29th January 1884 – by checking the dates of births, deaths and (in the case of children) marriages. 28 Since the registry of death is missing from the period between 1876 and 1905 it was not possible to calculate the natural increase of the population between 1880 and 1884. 29 Silvia Sovič has drawn my attention to the fact that non-related members of a household could be the poor – inmates or unrelated mothers with illegitimate children. Further research is needed to clarify this. 30 A widow and her grandchild. 31 In this case the house was listed as unnumbered. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 177

TABLE 8.1 Household types in Vista (1883/1884)

Complex Households Simple Households No Family Type Alone Multiple Type Extended Type % No. % No. % No. % No. % No.

48% 56 9.5% 11 40% 47 0.9% 1 1.7% 2

children). Almost the same proportion (32%) of households (18) belonged to the type (5a or 5b according to Laslett) in which a secondary unit (up or down) cohabited with one conjugal family unit. The rest of the households belonged to the 5c or 5d type: in 6 households (11%) married siblings cohabited with a widowed parent (5c), and 13 households (23%) of this type involved laterally conjoined conjugal families without a parent of cohabiting siblings (5d). Where a household comprised more than one conjugal family, the presence of a married woman living with her parents was very rare. This reinforces the fact that the settlement pattern was predominantly patrilocal in this village at this time (by the middle of the 20th century it had changed considerably due to the increased use of birth control). In half of the households two generations lived together (57%) and one third of them comprised three generations (36%).32 In this village at the end of the 19th century it was rare to live in a ‘one generation’ household – only the 2 solitary dwellers, 4 conjugal families without children, and a multiple household in which two married siblings lived together without children belonged to this category. According to investigations conducted into Hungarian peasant society, it was not unknown in the 18th and 19th centuries for married children (sons) to live in the household of their parents.33 Andorka revealed the existence of such cases in those Transdanubian villages (Alsónyék and Kölked) he examined on the basis of two status animarum books from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries.34 Although the proportion of cohabiting

32 There were four generations in two multiple households. 33 Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer, Proper Peasants (Chicago-Budapest, 1969), 103; Ildikó Husz, “Apáról fiúkra. Örökösödési jogszokások és gyakorlat Zsámbékon a 19. század első felében” [From Father to Son. Inheritance Practices in Zsámbék in the First Half of the 19th Century], Korall 2 (2000), 12–13. 34 Andorka, Rudolf, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele”, 156. 178 Ambrus married siblings was lower in these villages,35 in general the structure of their households was quite similar to that in Vista, which is discussed here: more than half of the households were complex (Laslett 4 and 5 type), the proportion of simple households was quite large, the number of those living alone was insignificant, and the generational depth of households was almost the same as found here. As Andorka pointed out in his study, a relatively low mortality rate (especially adult mortality) is a premise of the high frequency of three generational households in a community. Furthermore Andorka assumed that there must have been some connection between the relatively high proportion of three generational households and the low age at marriage, as also of the high proportion of remarried widows / widowers.36 In Vista, due to the lack of registration of death between 1876 and 1905 it was not possible to calculate mortality, but we can indicate the average age of marriage: between 1870 and 1890 the average age of women when they got married was 20–21 and for men it was 24–25 according to the data in the register of marriages. But in relation to this data we have to consider the emerging fact of a number of common law marriages (we will return to this later), so the actual average age of marriage could have been lower.37 In order to make clearer the picture given by the data of the family book, I re-examined the validity of my analysis in the light of the quantitative and qualitative data of the family book itself and of further sources – the national census (1881), registers of births, deaths and marriages, also a registry compiled by the local priest at the beginning of the 20th century that includes the couples living together without being married, plus additional notes by the priests in the family book, and interviews that I recorded during my fieldwork in Vista providing data concerning the forms of cohabiting in the 1920s and 1930s. On the basis of the national census that took place in 1881 in Hungary, it is possible to compare the number of the houses in Vista recorded in the registration compiled by the priest and recorded by the census. The number of the houses (if we assume that each house number belonged to a single house) in which Calvinist families were living at the time of the priest’s registration was 128. According to the 1881 census the number of houses in Vista was 161. The most obvious explanation for the difference between the two data is that the houses which were not registered in the family book were inhabited by the non-Calvinists (mostly Romanians) living in the village at that time. The number of non-Calvinists in 1881 was 121 and if we assume that they lived

35 13% in Alsónyék and 15% in Kölked. 36 Rudolf Andorka, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele”, 160. 37 The proportion of remarried widows/widowers has not been analysed yet in Vista. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 179 in small households, this former explanation seems reasonable. At the same time, given that we do not know anything about the average household size of the Romanians in the village, another possibility emerges: the Romanians did not live in small households and the explanation for the difference between the number of the houses is that the house numbers in the family book cover more than one building on the same plot of ground. Since Kalotaszeg has been comprehensively researched by ethnographers (owing to the rich folk-art of the region) since the 1870s, we have some descriptions by ethnographers relating to the cohabiting strategies of the Hungarians living in the region which reinforce this second possibility, such as the following from 1907, provided by Dezső Malonyay who spent a lot of time in the villages of Kalotaszeg at the beginning of the 20th century and visited, among others, Vista:

The house of Márton Vörös and János Vörös is a very ably enlarged dwelling. To be able to stay together with their younger sister who has got married, they make room for the young couple on the part of their plot adjacent to the street. When the third generation, the grandson, gets married, they will separate totally: the parents and the grandparents will stay in the old house, the grandson will build a new house for himself on the other side of the plot, maybe a nicer one than the old house itself. The house of old Pál Lőrinc is such a one: he lives up next to the fruit- garden – and his married sons, György and István live down close to the gate and the barn because usually they have to work there. If three or four generations stay together – fathers, sons and not rarely the great-grandfather as well – the house is enlarged. First the elder son separates when he brings a wife into the house. They make a separate ‘house’38 for the young but just adjoining the same veranda as the old folks. At such times the old give up their room to the young couple and they make alterations to the large room at the end of the veranda, which had, till then, been used for storing the grain crop, and they live in there after that.39

On the basis of this description we can safely assume that the families listed in the family book under the same house number in certain cases may indeed have lived ‘under the same roof” (as the definition of household used by Laslett

38 The word ‘house’ here stands for ‘room’ according to the Hungarian dialect in Kalotaszeg in that time. 39 Dezső Malonyay, A magyar nép művészete. I. kötet. (A kalotaszegi magyar nép művészete) [The Art of Hungarian People of Kalotaszeg] (Budapest, 1907). 180 Ambrus indicates), but in certain cases they may have lived only on the same plot, close to each other, but not in the same house. At this point in the analysis we have to face another problematic aspect of the definition of household elaborated by Laslett: what do we know about the families registered in the family book in relation to the third criteria of what constitutes a household on the basis of the family book? We know for sure that they were linked by kinship and lived either in the same house or in close proximity to each other, that is, probably on the same plot. But we do not know whether the fact that these families were listed under the same house numbers means that they constituted a unit of production and consumption or not. Researchers dealing with the analysis of household structure sometimes set a high value on the residential criterion, and sometimes on patterns of production and consumption when defining households, thereby giving the impression that they are making an effort to compensate for the insufficient information provided by their sources, in order to make them suitable for analysis and to make possible the application of Laslett’s categories. Faragó, in his summary of family and household structure in a compendium of Hungarian peasant society, summarily assumes that co-residence was an essential criterion of the household there.40 In his study of peasant society in the above-mentioned Transdanubian villages, Andorka interpreted co-residing groups as households on the basis of the residential criterion,41 while in the study of preindustrial household structure in Hungary which he wrote jointly with Faragó,42 they considered the consumption criterion as decisive, even if the members of the household lived separately. Edit Fél and Tamás Hofer assumed that the residential criterion was not a fundamental element of joint production and consumption in Átány43 in the 20th century either – this latter could have been realized even in the case of spatial separation of the members of the household.44 Péter Pozsgai asserted in his work concerning a northern region45 of Hungary that when children remained in their parents’ house after marriage, this did not automatically mean that they constituted a common

40 Faragó, “Nemek, nemzedékek, rokonság, család”, 475. 41 Andorka, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele”, 158. 42 Andorka and Faragó, “Preindustrial Household in Hungary”, 281–308; cf. Richard Wall, “Introduction”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Wall, Robin and Laslett, 9. 43 Átány is a village located in the east-northern part of Hungary where Fél and Hofer conducted their ethnographic research for more than 20 years (1954–1979). 44 Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants, 80–112.; cf. Wall, “Introduction”, cit., 10. 45 Torna county. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 181 unit of production and consumption together with the older generation – they may have separated partially in production and/or totally in consumption.46 We cannot sidestep the issue raised by these researchers when they point out that the lack of co-residence does not definitely mean the absence of a production and consumption unit, and on the contrary, as we have seen, on the basis of Pozsgai’s assertions: co-residence does not necessarily means common production and consumption.47 In connection with this, the family book of Vista does not provide any information. For this reason I tried to reconstruct the cohabiting forms of the parents and grandparents of those older people with whom I had the opportunity to record interviews during my fieldwork in the village. These examples therefore recall the first decades of the 20th century (mainly the 1920s and 1930s). Amongst those households which I managed to reconstruct on the basis of the interviews and in which several conjugal units lived in the same house, four main forms were identifiable: (1) a married son living with his parents in the same household, that is, they shared production and consumption; (2) a married son living with his parents in separate households (in these cases the reason for not living in common households was specific: the son did not work in agriculture, or the relationship between the son’s wife and his mother was troubled); (3) married brothers and their parents living in the same house but in separate households; (4) married brothers living with their parents in the same house where the parents shared the household with only one of their sons (usually with the younger one). I am aware of the fact that these households existed three or four decades later than the ones in the registry of the family book, but would argue that these later examples leave room for us to suspect that the variations of cohabiting and sharing households of the families would probably have been more miscella- neous than the arrangement of the data in the registry itself shows. In the light of the historical and ethnographic literature we can see that the joint family type was prevalent in the Kalotaszeg region at the end of the 19th century, and that co-residence and farming together by three or four families was not rare even in the first half of the 20th century. Furthermore, on the evidence of the interviews analysed above, we can assume that those households where married siblings lived together in Vista (with or without parents)

46 Péter Pozsgai, “Családok és háztartások. Torna megye társadalma a 19. század közepén” [Familes and Households. Torna County Society in the Middle of the 19th Century], PhD dissertation, Eötvös Loránd Tudomány Eegyetem, Budapest, 2006), 229, 252; cf. Rudolf Andorka, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele”, 158. 47 Cf. Jack Goody, “The Evolution of the Family”, in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Laslett and Wall, 108–110. 182 Ambrus were, according to our analysis, joint families, and the other households (which were of the complex, 4 and 5 type) belonged to some other (previous or subsequent) phase of the household cycle of the joint family system.48 But we cannot take this for granted in all cases – as is reinforced by the above mentioned examples. Co-residence strengthens the possibility of the existence of a production and consumption unit, but there may have been varying practices, depending on, for example, the size of the plot of land, the particular form of farming,49 or the relationship between the family members. In the case of Vista another important aspect of the problem of households becomes apparent, namely the stability of marriages. Conjugal families are the foundation of households, any household system’s long-term strategy in a community is strongly determined by this. I therefore sought traces of relationship instability in the documents. According to the legal custom, divorce cases were heard by the partial synods (partialis synodus) of the dioceses in Transylvania. In the proceedings of the Kolozs-Kalota Calvinist Church diocese I found 26 cases in which both the husband and wife were from Vista and 9 cases in which one of the couple was from this village. From the first group, between 1791 and 1818 there were 9 cases recorded, and 15 in the period between 1867 and 1894.50 The 138 marriages started between 1871 and 1900 recorded in the family book ended in divorce in ten of cases (7%), according to the pastor’s notes. Should we consider these numbers high or low or usual? Ethnographic research shows that divorce appears as a social phenomenon in Hungarian peasant society just after the turn of the 20th century.51 It was considered to be alien to the norms and practices of peasant communities until the beginning of the 20th century (or in some regions even to the middle of the century)52 because of the strength of the tendency to keep the family together, even if the marriage was bad and full of conflicts, in the interest of guaranteeing the stability of the community.53 Relying upon these assertions, we have to say that the early

48 Cf. Andorka, “A család és háztartás nagysága és összetétele”, 159. 49 See Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants, 80–112. 50 Between 1819 and 1866 there were no cases in the report – with the exception of the two in 1852. 51 See József Kotics, “A nő szerepének változása polgárosodó parasztközösségekben. (Válások a Tiszazugban)” [The Changing Role of Women in Peasant Societies Rising into the Middle Class. Divorces in Tiszazug], in József Kotics, Mások tekintetében (Miskolc, 2001), 65. 52 Ernő Tárkány Szücs, Magyar jogi népszokások [Hungarian Common Law] (Budapest, 1981), 275. 53 Tamás Hofer and Edit Fél conducted research in Átány (Hungary) between 1951 and 1967, and they found that divorce was alien to the villagers’ norms where family life was con- Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 183 occurrence of divorces and their spread in the last decades of the 19th century was unusual.54 The documents also illuminate another feature of the marriages in this village: the custom of establishing a family without getting officially married. There is no space here to go into the details of this, but if we confine ourselves to the most important facts, we can say the following. In the Historia Domus of the Congregation55 that was started sometime in 1929 by the local priest there is a note in connection with the presumed date of the first ‘common-law marriage’:

The first person to do this was István Barta, who had lost an arm in the battle of Könnigratz. As a cripple he served in the house of a furrier, István Nagy. His daughter and Barta fell in love with each other, but as they were not permitted to be together, they eloped. This could have happened sometime at the very end of the 1860s since their first child was born on 23rd June 1870. Their example was soon followed by many others – it swept across the area like a polluted flood.56

Amongst the 187 couples who were registered in the course of the initial registration of the families in 1883/1884, there were 9 in connection with whom the priest noted the fact that they had lived together before they got married. The duration of these common law marriages57 was mostly between 1 and 3 years (in one case 5 years). Should we consider these couples as rare exceptions or as indicators of an important change in the mentality and values related to marriage and family life in Vista? To decide this, it was necessary to examine other sources in the Congregation: the ‘List of Common Law Marriages’, which was started in 1912, and the registry of marriages. From the period we are interested in there just a few couples recorded in the List of Common Law Marriages, but in this case we have to consider the fact that it was started some decades

cerned. The first divorce in this village took place at the beginning of the 20th century, but the number of divorced people was still low in the period when they were doing their research. The people in Átány were “accustomed to resigning themselves to their fate” if their marriage was bad and divorced only rarely. Fél and Hofer, Proper Peasants, 146–147. 54 My research included not just Vista but another Hungarian village in Cluj county – Kide (Chidea) – and in that village I found just a few divorce cases in the reports. 55 “Notes on the Past of the Congregation of Vista”. Archives of the Vista Congregation. See Historia Domus. 56 Historia Domus, 56. 57 The priests of the Congregation regarded as ‘common law marriage’ those cohabiting couples who did not get married either in an ecclesiastical or in a civil ceremony. 184 Ambrus later. What is more important here is that altogether there are 979 couples who lived together without being officially married for a shorter or longer period recorded in the list in the period 1886 (the date of the first common law marriage recorded here) up to the beginning of the 21st century (2005). The number of such cases was highest in the decades between 1920 and 1960. In the register of marriages, unfortunately, the priests noted the fact of common law marriage only after 1905, but after that year this kind of note became frequent in it. On the basis of the analysis of these notes, it seems clear that after the beginning of the 20th century starting family life without officially getting married became a widespread practice amongst the Hungarians in Vista (for instance, of the couples who got married between 1910 and 1920, more than 60% (56 cases) started their common life cohabiting without being married, and in most cases its duration was over one year.58 Thus the examples we found in the family book were not unique, one-off cases, but the first signs of a process that reached its culmination in the first decades of the 20th century in this community. Regarding the potential reasons for common law marriages, several can be identified such as conflicts with parents about the future wife / husband, the high cost of weddings, or a rule that was introduced in 1853 and raised the age limit of marriage for men to 24.59 According to the priest notes in the Historia Domus the most likely reason in the case of Vista seems to be the avoidance of the high costs of a wedding at first, but by the beginning of the 20th century it had become a widespread and customary practice. However, it is still a question whether this change of the habits and mentality meant the instability of relationships and marriages here – the priests’ notes in the family book and in the Historia Domus reinforce the assumption that it did:

In a common law marriage separating is as easy as uniting. Thus a woman has lived together with four or five men for more or less time, and a man has tried several women by the time they finally settle with one.60

These features of the marriage habits of this community can be understood as an indicator of weakening of community control, of secularisation, the plurali- sation of the norms, the strengthening of individual values, and changes in the

58 In consequence the number of ‘illegitimate’ children was also high from the end of the 19th century: according to the records of the birth registry of the congregation, the proportion of them was higher than 10% between 1870 and 1910. 59 Szücs, Magyar jogi népszokások, 254. 60 Historia Domus, 91. Household Structure in a Transylvanian Village 185 status of women in the community.61 We have to reckon with this especially because, as we described above, in the 1870s symptoms began to appear of this change in mentality and values relating to marriage and the family, which indicated a more individual way of thinking, thereby making the coexistence of transitional forms of households and different kinds of household strategies more possible among the households analyzed in the period examined. For us to be able to draw a more precise picture of household structure in Vista at the end of the 19th century, further and more complex research is required which makes use of additional sources and perspectives, such as inheritance practice,62 forms of production, relations between households, the role of the household in the economic and social life of the community (for instance, in the care of old people), or birth control – and the norms behind these practices. This is indispensable if we are to be able to say with any greater degree of certainty that these households can indeed be categorized according to the scheme of Laslett as was done in the first part of this paper. If researchers in the field fail to do this, and interpret the concept of household solely on the basis of quantitative sources; if they content themselves with an analysis of the registers without regard to other kinds of sources; and if they just make general assumptions concerning the concrete forms of residence, production and consumption, interpreting the groups listed together in these registers as households, they run the risk that the household will be defined by the predefined units of particular sources. This would mean a substantial simplification of the social reality which characterized the lives of the people who are mentioned by these sources, and of the reality that is revealed, albeit in a limited way, by them.63 To avoid this risk we should evolve an approach in which there is a place for quantitative and qualitative sources alike, and which has as its goal an anthropological, microhistorical analysis and interpretation of the whole community, since “the household cannot be understood in isola- tion from the rest of the society of which it formed a part”.64

61 Cf. Kotics, “A nő szerepének változása”, 65. On the relation between divorces and the status of women in Hungary see Mónika Mátay, Törvényszéki játszmák. Válás Debrecenben 1793–1848 [Court-room Games. Divorce in Debrecen 1793–1848] (Debrecen, 2006). 62 On the relationship between inheritance practice and household structure, see Husz, “Apáról fiúkra”, 5–22. 63 Cf. Goody, “The Evolution of the Family”, 110; Silvia Sovič, “Definitions and Documents in Family History: Towards an Agenda for Comparative Research”, in Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in the Balkans (16th–20th Centuries) (Bucharest, 2006), 137; Péter Pozsgai, “Család és háztartás. Magyarországi történeti demográfiai források fogalomhasználata a 16–19. Században” [Familes and Households. Torna County Society in the Middle of the 19th Century. PhD Thesis], Demográfia, 3–4 (2001), 342. 64 Wall, “Introduction”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Wall, Robin and Laslett, 7.

Part 3 Family Strategies

∵

CHAPTER 9 Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants at the Turn of the Middle Ages

Piotr Guzowski

The issue of old age in the life cycle of peasants in old Poland has long attracted the interest of Polish economic and demographic historians, with Jan Rutkowski as a pioneer in the field. He wrote about the status of old people in social and economical structures in 18th-century Poland.1 Rutkowski’s successors have addressed the issue frequently, but studies of old age have usually been peripheral to scholars’ primary fields of interest. If they devoted any attention to this problem, it was usually when they worked with village court rolls or when they used ethnographic methodology in studying Polish society in the past.2 The only essay which comprehensively explores the issue of peasants’ old age at the beginning of the early modern period is Andrzej Wyczański’s short text on the institution of the retirement contract (Polish: wymowa).3 There has

1 Jan Rutkowski, Studia z dziejów wsi polskiej XVI–XVIII wieku [Studies in the History of Polish Villages in the 16th–18th Centuries] (Warsaw, 1956) (especially the chapter on Studia nad położeniem włościan w Polsce XVIII wieku [Studies in the Situation of Peasants in 18th-century Poland]). 2 Bohdan Baranowski, Kultura ludowa XVII i XVIII wieku na ziemiach Polski Środkowej [Folk Culture in Central Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries] (Łódź, 1971), 336n; Andrzej Woźniak, Kultura mazowieckiej wsi pańszczyźnianej XVIII i początku XIX wieku (wybrane zagadnie- nia) [Culture of Masovian Villages in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries – Selected Aspects] (Wrocław, 1987), 110–115; Anna Izydorczyk, ‘Rodzina chłopska w Małopolsce w XV i XVI wieku’ [The Peasant Family in Little Poland in the 15th and 16th Centuries], in Społeczeństwo staropolskie, ed. Andrzej Wyczański [Society in Historic Poland] vol. III (Warsaw, 1983), 7–27; Bożena Korniak, “Życie codzienne mieszkańców parafii sąpowskiej w świetle księgi sądowej klucza dóbr Pieskowej Skały”, [Everyday Life of the Inhabitants of Sąpowska Parish in the Light of the Court Rolls from the Pieskowa Skała Estate] Rocznik Biblioteki PAU i PAN 45 (2000), 75–91; Ewa Baniowska, “Chłopski świat w świetle sądowych ksiąg wiejskich” [The World of Peasants in Village Court Rolls] in Czas zmiany, czas trwania. Studia etnologiczne, eds. Jolanta Kowalska, Sławoj Szynkiewicz, Ryszard Tomicki [Change and Continuity. Ethnological Studies] (Warsaw, 2003), 117–132. 3 Andrzej Wyczański, “Opieka nad ludźmi starymi na wsi polskiej w XVI w.” [Elderly Care in Polish Villages in the 16th Century], in Biedni i bogaci. Studia z dziejów społeczeństwa i

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_010 190 Guzowski also been some demographic research into early modern Polish society, which focused on the population structure. Among other areas, the research was aimed also at showing the place of elderly members in the structure of a household, and determining the percentage of people in the oldest age groups.4 The chronological range of these studies is, in the majority of cases, limited to the 18th century because of the larger number of sources available for this than for earlier periods. It is also worth adding that Polish historical demographers have tried to present the results of their research in a wider European context,5 drawing heavily on the well-established west European historiography on the issue of old age.6 In my paper, I will try to throw some light on the situation of elderly people in peasant communities at the turn of the Middle Ages, the period which has been largely neglected by Polish historical demographers. Polish peasants, as other European peasants,

are farm households, with access to their means of livelihood in land, uti- lizing mainly family labour in farm production, always located in a larger

kultury ofiarowane B. Geremkowi w sześćdziesiątą rocznicę urodzin [The Poor and the Wealthy. Studies in the History of Society and Culture Dedicated to B. Geremek on his 60th Birthday] (Warsaw, 1992), 65–70. 4 Of special significance among a plethora of works on historical demography is Michał Kopczyński, “Starość nie radość? Ludzie starzy na wsi kujawskiej u schyłku XVIII stulecia” [Age is a Heavy Burden? The Elderly in Kuiavian Villages at the End of the 18th Century], Zapiski Historyczne, 61 (1996), 45–64. See also another book by this author: Studia nad rodziną chłopską w Koronie w XVII–XVIII wieku [Studies on the Peasant Family in the Kingdom of Poland in the 17th and 18th Centuries] (Warsaw, 1998), especially 147–166. 5 Mikołaj Szołtysek, “Rethinking Eastern Europe: Household Formation Patterns in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth and European Family Systems”, Continuity and Change, 23 (2008), 389–427; idem, “Three Household Formation Systems in Eastern Europe: Another Challenge to Spatial Patterns of the European Family”, The History of the Family 13: 3 (2008), 223–257; Iidem, “Life Cycle Service and Family Systems in the Rural Countryside: a Lesson from Historical East-central Europe”, Annales de démagraphie historique, 17: 1 (2009), 53–94. 6 An attempt to summarise previous studies, define methodology and propose the areas for further research is David Kertzer and Peter Laslett (eds.), Ageing in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age (Berkeley and London, 1995); a synthetic approach to the situation of elderly people also in central Europe over time is D. Gaunt, “The Property and Kin Relationships of Retired Farmers in Northern and Central Europe”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1983), 249–280. For a model presentation of the question of old age in England see Pat Thane, Old Age in English History. Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford, 2000). Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 191

economic system, but functionally characterized by partial engagement in markets which tend to function with a high degree of imperfection.7

In reality in the 15th and 16th century Poland peasants (Polish: kmiecie) were personally free people, whose dependence on the landlord derived from the fact of holding the lord’s land or from the lord’s public functions (legal dependence). They were free to dispose of their land and were obliged to perform standard duties for their lords: pay rents and dues in kind and provide unpaid labour.8 Michael Mitterauer noticed that one of the features unique to European household formation in some areas in Europe was retirement as a form of maintenance of the parents. It was to characterise not only the inhabitants of western Europe but also of its central part, where the so-called hide system (Hufenverfassung) was widespread and where the principal form of peasant holding was impartible Hufe (the manus or hide). The reach of the hide system was similar to the area delimited by the Hajnal line9 and the dividing line between the Western and Eastern Churches.10 The location of the line between two models of household, family and marriage has been modified over time, which in the case of Polish lands means that they have been incorporated into the area where the western model prevailed.11 The south-eastern parts of the Kingdom of Poland, i.e. Little Poland and Red Ruthenia, are now perceived

7 Frank Ellis, Peasant Economics: Farm Households and Agrarian Development (Cambridge, 1988), 12. For more about definition of peasantry see Tom Scott, “Introduction” in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London, 1998), 1–19. 8 Piotr Guzowski, “Polish and English Peasants in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods: a Comparative View”, in Britain and Poland-Lithuania. Contact and Comparison from the Middle Ages to 1795, ed. Richard Unger (Leiden, 2008), 137–145. 9 John Hajnal, “European Marriage in Perspective”, in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–143; see also the same author’s “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Wall, Robin and Laslett, 65–104. 10 Michael Mitterauer, “European Kinship Systems and Household Structures: Medieval Origins”, in Distinct Inheritances. Property, Family and Community in Changing Europe (Münster, 2003), eds. Hannes Grandits and Patrick Heady, 35–52; Michael Mitterauer, Why Europe. The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path (Chicago, 2010), 58–97. 11 Karl Kaser, Macht und Erbe: Männerherrschaft, Besitz und Familie im östlichen Europa (1500–1900), (Vienna, 2000); see also his “Power and Inheritance: Male Domination, Property and Family in Eastern Europe, 1500–1900”, History of the Family, 7 (2007), 375–395. 192 Guzowski as borderline areas, characterised by cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, where elements of the eastern model tended to dominate. The source material I want to explore is a village court roll from Trześniowa village in the south east of Poland.12 Chronologically, the document covers the period between 1419 and 1609. I have been inspired in my decision to use court rolls as sources in my research into demographic aspects of the life of medieval Polish peasants by a seminal book by Zvi Razi, who studied English peasant families in the later Middle Ages on the basis of manorial court rolls.13 The rolls contain information about peasants’ trading in land, about inheritance procedures, feudal dues, village self-government and elections, and also about marriages, deaths and migrations. It is assumed that each peasant had his or her name recorded in village court rolls at least once in his or her lifetime, which makes the rolls an invaluable primary source in social and demographic studies on peasant families in the past. Polish late medieval and early-modern sources containing information about peasants are neither as numerous nor as detailed as the English ones. Nevertheless, if a simplified questionnaire is applied to available village court rolls, they may also serve as a sufficient basis for a demographic reconstruction of peasant families. Today, only about 200 late medieval and early-modern village court rolls are available to Polish historians. Most of the rolls come from Little Poland and Red Ruthenia.14 The emergence of village court rolls was connected with the introduction of ius Teutonicum in Poland. The head of the village (Pol. sołtys) performed, together with peasant members of the jury, judicial functions in the village.15 If a peasant wanted the sentence passed in his case to be officially recorded, the peasant paid a fee and his name and details of the case were written in the rolls.16 So the vast majority of entries in

12 Helena Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej 1419–1609 [The Oldest Trześniowa Village Court Rolls, 1419–1609] (Lwów, 1923). 13 Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish. Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400 (Cambridge, 1980). 14 Tomasz Wiślicz (ed.), Katalog małopolskich ksiąg sądowych wiejskich XV–XVIII wiek [Catalogue of Court Rolls in Little Poland in the 15th–18th Centuries] (Warsaw, 2007). 15 Stanisław Grodziski, “Księgi sądowe wiejskie (Zasięg terytorialny i geneza)” [Village Court Rolls (their Geography and Origins)], Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne, 12 (1960), 85–139; Ludwik Łysiak, “W sprawie genezy ksiąg sądowych wiejskich” [On the Origins of Village Court Rolls], Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne, 14 (1962), 175–194. By the same author also: “W sprawie genezy ksiąg sądowych wiejskich (po raz drugi)” [On the Origins of Village Court Rolls (Revisited)], Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne, 15 (1963), 293–297. 16 Adam Vetulani, “Wartość badawcza ksiąg sądowych wiejskich” [The Research Value of Village Court Rolls], in Pamiętnik VIII Powszechnego Zjazdu Historyków Polskich w Krakowie Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 193 the rolls (about 70%) concerned land, its sale, purchase, exchange or inheritance, but the rolls recorded also rents, wills, inventories, loans and pledges, criminal and civil cases, and conflicts between neighbours.17 There has been much controversy in the historiography between the advo- cates of a quantitative approach to demographic and social historical studies and the supporters of applying a qualitative approach drawing on anthropological and sociological methodology.18 In the study of village court rolls, especially the oldest ones, complex statistical analysis is hardly possible, but the family reconstruction method and genealogical method help to gain some insight into the lives and life cycle of medieval peasants.19 In the oldest Trześniowa court rolls, there are 1,542 entries made between 1419 and 1609. The number of entries in individual years varied. The largest number was 37, but an average annual number of entries was eight. During the period under study, there were also 31 years when no cases were recorded. Most cases were recorded by the so-called zagajne courts which assembled usually at the turn of the year. Statistically, the majority of entries came from the period between November and February, although the legal proceedings themselves might have taken place earlier.20 The role and character of village court rolls accounts for the fact that some groups of peasants are overrepresented whereas others appear very rarely. The

14–17 września 1958r., cz. 1 [Proceedings of the 8th General Convention of Polish Historians in Cracow, 14–17 September 1985, part 1] (Warsaw, 1958), 99–114. 17 Jan Słowiński, “Kancelarie wsi małopolskich od końca XIV do schyłku XVIII wieku” [Village Offices in Little Poland between the Late 14th and the Late 18th Centuries’], Studia Źródłoznawcze, 31 (1990), 25–36. 18 The first texts indicating the usefulness of the quantitative approach in demographical analysis were articles by Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, “The Development Process of Domestic Groups: Problems of Reconstruction and Possibilities of Interpretation”, Journal of Family History, 4 (1979), 257–284; Reinhard Sieder and Michael Mitterauer, “The Reconstruction of the Family Life Course: Theoretical Problems and Empirical Results”, in Family Forms in Historic Europe, eds. Wall, Robin and Laslett, 309–345. 19 An attempt to apply this approach to the analysis of a series of registers of parishioners receiving communion and of parish registers is Mikołaj Szołtysek’s “Central European Household and Family Systems, and the ‘Hajnal-Mitterauer’ Line: the Parish of Bujakow (18th–19th Centuries)”, The History of the Family, 12 (2007), 19–42. 20 Piotr Guzowski, “Kalendarz gospodarczy i finansowy kmieci polskich na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów wczesno nowożytnych” [Economic and Financial Calendar of Polish Peasants at the Turn of the Middle Ages], in Człowiek wobec miar i czasu w przeszłości [Men, measures and time in the past], eds. Piotr Guzowski and Marzena Liedke (Cracow, 2007), 36–49. 194 Guzowski most frequently recorded were the names of peasants who were the users of hereditary farms and who at the same time served as jurymen or landlord’s officials. Much less frequently, the rolls contained the names of smallholders, cottagers and lodgers. There is also a discernible lack of balance between the number of men and women appearing in the rolls. The disproportion may be explained by the fact that courts treated men as heads of households and their names that were recorded, even if men, in fact, represented their wives, sisters or daughters in court. The number of times individual peasants featured in court cases recorded in the rolls ranged from one to over one hundred. Sometimes they were not even personally involved, but their names were recorded to help to locate a farm which was the subject of a particular case. If the farm was located between two others, the names of all three peasants were recorded to help to identify a given piece of land. Thanks to this, it is possible to study some aspects of the lives of peasants even if they never appeared as personally involved agents in recorded court cases. Identification of individual people mentioned in the rolls may often be very difficult because court writers rarely recorded information useful in reconstructing relationships between people. Besides, writers often omitted peasants’ nicknames and provided only their first names, which did not facilitate their identification. Despite these difficulties, a simple demographic analysis of the rolls is possible, allowing for some conclusions concerning an average duration of peasants’ economic activity, the size of peasant families (by applying the method of family reconstruction), replacement rate and territorial selection of spouses. In the context of the main topic of this paper, it is important what Trześniowa village court rolls tell us about the duration of economic activity of local peasants. Trześniowa was a crown village, located in the Sanok administrative area. Some time prior to 1419, the year when the first entry in the village court roll was written, Trześniowa was pledged by the king. Then, throughout the period under the study here, it changed hands several times. It was owned by gentry families of the Pstroskis, the Szafrots, the Kmitas, the Dolińskis, the Radwans, the Derszniaks.21 Trześniowa was a village of a medium size.22

21 Adam Fastnacht, Słownik historyczno-geograficzny ziemi sanockiej w średniowieczu [Historical and Geographical Dictionary of the Sanok Land in the Middle Ages], vol. 3 (Cracow, 2002), 192–196. 22 For more about the socio-economic situation of the region see Adam Fastnacht, Osadnictwo ziemi sanockiej w latach 1340–1650 [Settlement in the Sanok Land in 1340– 1650], (Wrocław, 1962); Edward Trzyna, “Ziemia sanocka i struktura jej własności feudal- nej od polowy XVI do drugiej połowy XVII wieku” [Feudal Land Property in the Sanok Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 195

In 1507, the village paid taxes from 12 mansi of land, a mill and an inn.23 By 1567, the amount of taxed land had increased to 13 mansi,24 but by the end of the century (1579 and 1589) the amount of taxed land had decreased again, to only nine mansi.25 In 1552, there were 34 peasants in Trześniowa,26 but fiscal sources from 1579 and 1589 showed also the presence of six smallholders and 10–11 lodgers.27 As there is no surviving inventory of Trześniowa, its court rolls remain the principal source of information about the inhabitants of the village. Most of them were Polish, but nicknames of some villagers, e.g. Slovak, Węgrzyn (Hungarian) or Czech, are indicative of their other than Polish ethnic origins. Trześniowa was a part of a Catholic parish in Jasionowo. When at the end of the 16th century the parish church was transformed into a Protestant church, its Catholic presbyter fled into exile to Trześniowa.28 Andrzej Wyczański, in his study on the duration of economic activity of village court jurymen, took into account the cases of people whose names were recorded in the source at least three times.29 In my research I have extended

Land and its Structure between the Mid-15th and the Late 16th Centuries], Rocznik Województwa Rzeszowskiego, 9 (1978), 145–184; Robert Lipelt (ed.), Życie gospodarcze ziemi sanockiej od XVI do XVIII wieku [Economic Life in the Sanok Land between the 16th and 18th Centuries], (Sanok, 2004); Piotr Guzowski, “Warunki gospodarowania chłopów w starostwie sanockim w XVI wieku” [Economic Conditions of Land Farming in the Sanok Land in the 16th Century], Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej, 54 (2006), 11–24. 23 Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych w Warszawie – Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw (further cited as: AGAD), Archiwum Skarbu Koronnego (further cited as: ASK) I, 20, c. 49v. 24 AGAD, ASK I, 20, c. 705. The picture of stable peasant land ownership may result from a specific system of tax register based on so-called ‘old receipts’, i.e. old tax return papers. 25 AGAD, ASK I, 17, c. 552; AGAD, ASK I, 20, c. 918v. 26 AGAD, ASK I, 21, c. 908v. 27 AGAD, ASK I, 17, c. 552; AGAD, ASK I, 20, c. 918v. 28 Filip Sulimierski, Bronisław Chlebowski and Władysław Walewski (eds.), Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego i innych krajów słowiańskich [Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries], vol. III, (Warsaw, 1882), 483. 29 Andrzej Wyczański, “Powrót do dyskusji o łanach pustych” [The Debate on Abandoned Lands rRvisited], in Celem nauki jest człowiek . . . Studia z historii społecznej ofiarowane H. Madurowicz-Urbańskiej [Man is the Ultimate Goal of Studying . . . Studies in Social History dedicated to H. Madurowicz-Urbańska], Cracow, 2000, 347–353; by the same author see also: “O dawnej rodzinie w Polsce i Europie” [On Families in Old-time Poland and Europe], in Cywilizacja europejska. Eseje i szkice z dziejów cywilizacji i dyplo- macji [European Civilization. Essays and Sketches on the History of Civilization and Diplomacy], ed. Maciej Koźmiński (Warsaw, 2010), 149–164. 196 Guzowski

TABLE 9.1 Duration of economic activity of Trześniowa villagers between 1430 and 1603

Years Number of people Mean duration of economic activity Median

1430–1500 82 25 24 1501–1550 86 23.5 21 1551–1603 51 21.5 20 1501–1603 137 22.8 21 1430–1603 219 23.6 21

Source: Piotr Guzowski, Demograficzne uwarunkowania funkcjonowania rodziny chłopskiej na przełomie średniowiecza i nowożytności, in Cezary Kuklo (ed.), Rodzina, gospodarstwo domowe i pokrewieństwo na ziemiach polskich w perspektywie historycznej – ciągłość czy zmiana (Warszawa, 2012), table 1.

the group examined beyond jurymen, so it appeared necessary to use stricter selection criteria. From among 1,500 records providing genealogical data (wife/ husband, parents, children, occupation) I have decided to select a group of 219 peasants whose names were recorded in the source at least five times. Applying this criterion allows us to observe a considerable portion of peasants’ life cycle, starting from the moment of inheriting or purchasing land (Table 9.1). Over twenty years normally passed between a peasant’s first and last appearance in the source. On average, it was almost 24 years, but the median duration was 21 years. There are also discernible differences between sub-periods throughout the period under study. Peasants whose economic activity as farm holders was the longest (almost 25 years) were the ones who began their activity in the 15th century (25 years on average, 24 years median). In the next century, the duration of economic activity shortened by a few years (21.5 on average; median 20). Economic activity varied also with regard to peasants’ social status. Of the 219 peasants studied, 130 performed judicial functions as jurymen or landlord’s officials. It appears, then, that they were members of both social and economic elites in their communities (Table 9.2). Members of Trześniowa’s social elite were economically active for an average of over 25 years (mean 26 years, median 25). At the beginning of the period studied, the elite’s economic activity was longer (mean 26.6; median 27), then, as in other groups of peasants, it gradually fell, to reach the level of 24.7 years (median 22 years) in the second half of the 16th century. It is worth noting that, although the downward trend characterized all socio-economic groups Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 197

TABLE 9.2 Duration of economic activity of Trześniowa’s social elite between 1430 and 1603

Years Number of people Mean duration of economic activity Median

1430–1500 61 26.6 27 1501–1550 48 25.9 23.5 1551–1603 21 24.7 22 1501–1603 69 25.5 22 1430–1603 130 26 25

Source of data: P. Guzowski, Demograficzne uwarunkowania, table 2.

TABLE 9.3 Duration of economic activity of peasants who did not hold any administrative position in Trześniowa between 1430 and 1603

Years Number of people Mean duration of economic activity Median

1430–1500 21 20.3 19 1501–1550 38 20.6 21 1551–1603 30 19.3 17.5 1501–1603 68 20 19 1430–1603 89 20.1 19

Source of data: P. Guzowski, Demograficzne uwarunkowania, table 3. within the village community, peasants actively participating in the work of village self-government tended to participate in the economic life of their communities longer than the ones who never held any administrative position (Table 9.3). The average duration of economic activity among 89 peasants who did not hold any position in village courts was twenty years during the whole period under study (median 19). The average number of economically active years was subject to only minor fluctuations over consecutive sub-periods, but the median had dropped by the second half of the 16th century from 21 to 17.5 years. These estimates differ markedly from the findings of Andrzej Wyczański, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.30

30 Guzowski, “Demograficzne uwarunkowania”. 198 Guzowski

For the purposes of this article, conventional demographic criteria in defining old age have been adopted. According to the Polish demographer Cezary Kuklo, “Men’s old age in crown villages began between the ages of 55 and 64”.31 Assuming that taking a farm coincided in time with getting married, it may be concluded that the first time a peasant appeared in court to register as a farm holder was more or less at the age of marriage. Unfortunately, sources do not provide sufficient information to determine the age of Polish peasants at marriage at the turn of the Middle Ages, but it may be tentatively assumed that their age would not have been notably different from that of their counterparts in the 17th and 18th centuries, who established families between the ages of 24 and 30.32 According to such criteria, an aged peasant was one who had been economically active for thirty or more years of his life. From all men who appear in our primary sources at least five times, I have decided to select 64 whose period of economic activity was exceptionally long (at least 30 years), so their names may be found in village court rolls relatively frequently. Only two of them were referred to in the source as ‘the old’. One was Jan Stąpiński, described as senex, antiquus.33 The other was Albert (Wojtek) the Old, whose nickname was used probably not necessarily to indicate his old age, but to differentiate him from a younger man of the same first name.34 Similar nicknames were used also with reference to women. A wife of the aforementioned Albert was also called ‘the Old’, probably due to her husband’s nickname.35 Actual old age and the need to distinguish between different bearers of the same first name were the reasons why widows appearing in the rolls were referred to as, for instance, Marcinkowa antiqua36 or Jadwiga Thelebuchowa stara (‘the old’).37 Michał Kopczyński in his article about elderly peasants in 18th-century Poland noticed that

there were three options available to elderly people in a medieval village: first, staying with the family as a household member for life (Polish:

31 Cezary Kuklo, Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej [Demography of Pre- partition Poland] (Warszawa, 2009), 376. According to Pat Thane, in early modern England a person over the age of 60 was treated as old – Thane, Old Age, 24–27. 32 Kuklo, Demografia Rzeczypospolitej przedrozbiorowej, 279. 33 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, no. 1100. 34 Ibidem, no. 494 and in further footnotes. 35 Ibidem, no. 890. 36 Ibidem, no. 310. 37 Ibidem, no. 1158. Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 199

dożywotnik) with or without having their status legally confirmed; second, spending the reminder of one’s life in hospital; third, joining a household of another villager as a lodger.38

Of the 64 peasants under study, as many as 26 sold their farms when they reached old age, which meant that they were giving up their status as heads of their households and were becoming dependent on their relatives or strangers if they decided to move house. Unlike in the 17th and 18th centuries, at the turn of the Middle Ages the institution of wymowa was hardly known.39 Wymowa was a legal procedure of “securing oneself some kind of life maintenance after bequeathing a farm to someone else, usually a family member”.40 Peasants secured for themselves a right to “a piece of land, to a room in the house, and to some household equipment. At that moment so-called wycug began for them”.41 In The Trześniowa village court rolls, entries containing the cases of wymowa did not appear before 1597. The first entry described the case of Adam Kawalec who sold his farm to Walenty Wiek for ten marcs paid in annual installments of one marc. At the same time, he kept three pieces of land at his disposal “for life”.42 It is worth adding that the arrangement in question was not a land transaction between family members but between non-related strangers. Among all entries studied the practice of wymowa was implied rather than stated directly. There are ten cases when peasants were selling their land to sons, sons-in-law or nephews. Each time, although wymowa was not formally made, it appears that annual payments of money for the farm paid regularly to former owners were to provide them with financial security at old age. Another option available to elderly peasants was to become a lodger in another peasant’s household, and it appears that the most likely to opt for this solution were peasants selling their farms to non-related strangers. There are 16 such cases in Trześniowa. Most of them involve people who either did not have their own children, or whose children had become independent before and had probably received their share in family inheritance already. It is difficult to assess, on the basis of the Trześniowa court rolls, whose authors rarely recorded exact details of land transactions, how common wymowa and lodging were during the period under study. However, the relative frequency

38 Kopczyński, “Starość nie radość”, 54. 39 Wyczański, “Opieka”, 66. 40 Ibidem. 41 Kuklo, Demografia, 377. 42 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, no. 1476. 200 Guzowski of hire purchase43 promoted the development of both practices. Annual instalments were also a kind of old age pension, securing financial comfort of elderly peasants. Some of the peasants who were economically active for a long period of at least thirty years did not have direct heirs, sons or sons-in-law, and they were forced to sell their farms to strangers. This fact appears to support Andrzej Wyczański’s hypothesis that the lack of direct heirs, typical of peasants with a short time-span of economic activity, was the main reason for the appearance of the so-called deserted farms (Polish: łany puste). According to Wyczański, the period of about 19 to 21 years of economic activity was often too short for peasants to be able to secure direct inheritance of their land by children or children-in-law.44 It was, most probably, one of the contributory factors in the development of a peasant land market. Almost half (12) of Trześniowa peasants who sold their farms at the end of their lives had not received them from their parents but had acquired them by purchase. Almost a third (19) of all the peasants studied here appeared for the first time in the Trześniowa court rolls at the moment of land purchase. The category of peasants who did not inherit their parents’ land may be further subdivided into three groups according to the method of acquiring their own farms. The first is a group of peasants who bought land from their fathers or fathers-in-law. Then there are peasants who bought their farms from distant relatives or non-related strangers. Others were, in turn, given land by their feudal lords. By means of land distribution, lords could potentially influence not only intergenerational transfers but also the size of peasant household. At the turn of the Middle Ages, however, this influence was definitely much smaller than it was to become in the 18th century.45 The first two means of land acquisition were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes adult sons, tired of a long wait to see their fathers retire, used the capital they had accumulated during the time of service – typical of the peasant life cycle – to buy their own,

43 Piotr Guzowski, Chłopi i pieniądze na przełomie średniowiecza i czasów nowożytnych [Peasants and Money at the Turn of the Middle Ages] (Cracow, 2008), 44–68. 44 Wyczański, “Powrót do dyskusji”, 347–353. 45 Witold Kula, Teoria ekonomiczna ustroju feudalnego [Economic theory of feudalism] (Warsaw, 1983), 233–245; Andrzej Woźniak, Kultura mazowieckiej wsi pańszczyźnianej, 71n.; Michał Kopczyński, “Dwór a rodzina chłopska – przymus i koegzystencja” [Manor House and Peasant Families – Coercion and Coexistence], in Dwór, plebania, rodzina chłopska [Manor House, Presbytery, Peasant Family], ed. M. Ślusarska (Warsaw, 1998), 12–26; Konrad Rzemieniecki, “Cykl rozwojowy gospodarstwa chłopskiego na przykładzie parafii Będków (na podstawie spisu ludności z 1791 roku) ” [The Life Cycle of Peasant Households in the Parish of Będków (according to the 1791 Census], Przeszłość Demograficzna Polski, 26 (2005), 129. Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 201 independent farms. We learn about such a case in Trześniowa, where an inn- keeper’s son, Jacob, purchased land and farmed it independently of his father who still managed his own farm and business.46 In another case, we can see a father, Andrzej Telebuch, who in 1561 supported his son financially by making a payment of a cash equivalent of the young man’s share in Andrzej’s property.47 After some time, the father decided to retire and his sons and daughters either purchased or inherited portions of his land. Of the 64 peasants with the longest economic activity, in only 35 cases did children inherit their fathers’ farms. In only 10 of these 35 cases were fathers still alive at the moment their children took over their farms. In all other cases, village court rolls mentioned children as new owners several years after their fathers’ last appearances as farm owners in court records. Twenty-nine peasants did not have any children recorded by the rolls, which does not necessarily mean that they were childless. One explanation may be that peasant daughters, like wives and widows, tended to be underrepresented in court rolls. Women appeared in our source material much less frequently than men. For about 1,500 individuals recorded in the Trzesniowa rolls, only 370 were women.48 Registered women represented all marital status groups: single, married and widows. One of the reasons why women may have been absent from the rolls is that even though cases in court regarded their rights, women’s names were not mentioned because they were formally represented by their husbands, brothers or fathers acting as women’s legal protectors. In the 16th century, more women appeared in court and they did so more frequently than in the previous century. Single women made the smallest group of women participating in court proceedings. If they did, their names were usually recorded along the names of their widowed mothers selling their deceased husbands’ farms. The girls’ presence was essential because they were obliged to officially renounce any future claims to the sold property.49 If a sold holding also included a piece of land that had been originally assigned as a girl’s dowry, the rule was that it was treated separately, and the girl had the right to the money her mother received for the dowry as well as for the part that was to be her inheritance.50

46 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, no. 976. 47 Ibidem, nos. 1131 and 1132. 48 These are only rough figures because Identification of individual people mentioned in the rolls may often be very difficult. Court scribes often omitted peasants’ surnames or nicknames and failed to indicate the men’s and women’s filiation. 49 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, 48; 165. 50 Ibidem, 310. 202 Guzowski

Daughters’ right to the share of their parents’ property was popularly recognized and village court rolls contain numerous entries in which women, accompanied usually by their husbands, acknowledged in court the fact of receiving their due shares either in cash51 or in movables.52 The other party in the transaction was either a brother who took over the farm53 or, if the land was sold, a buyer.54 If a widow remarried, it was her new husband’s duty to meet the claims of his step-daughters.55 If a woman’s right to the inheritance was not respected, her husband would stand up for it and represent his wife in court.56 When there was no male heir to the land, it could be transmitted to daughters, but in such cases heiresses usually sold their inheritance,57 or the management of the farm was entrusted to a husband of one of them.58 In case of a woman’s death, the right to her part of the property was taken over by her husband.59 Women frequently testified in court about handing over their fathers’ inheritance to their husbands.60 It is interesting that women who appeared in court to claim their rights to the land were not only those who lived in the village or its vicinity, but also the ones who had previously left their homes. Women were not in any way administratively limited in their freedom of movement, so they often sought employment outside their villages, in nearby towns or other villages. Female inhabitants of Trześniowa travelled to places within a radius of 80 km from their own village, which was much further than the boundaries of the parish. They established families there and lived independent lives, but on the death of their fathers, they often returned to their village of birth to stake a claim to their part of the inheritance. Widows appeared in court more frequently than women from other marital status groups. They came alone or with children, usually after the husband’s death, to sell the family estate. Widows were legally entitled to a third

51 Ibidem, 92, 101, 119, 192. 52 Ibidem, 374. 53 Ibidem, 92, 193. 54 Ibidem, 101. 55 Ibidem, 733. 56 Ibidem, 37. 57 Ibidem, 556, 836, 1097, 1121, 1124, 1202. 58 Ibidem, no. 526; a son-in-law inherited not only a deceased peasant’s land but also his surname See: M. Górny, “Uwagi o badaniu przezwisk i nazwisk staropolskich” [On the Study of Old Polish Cognomens and Names], Genealogia, 6 (1995), 147–154 (151). 59 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, 733. 60 Similarly in Brzezówka 176. Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 203 of the estate,61 whereas the rest was supposed to be divided equally among sons and daughters.62 Sometimes records in village court rolls relate also to customs regarding inheritance of movables by widows. For example, in 1533, in Trześniowa, a widow was endowed with a quarter of her dead husband’s personal property and a third of grain.63 If on the father’s death the children were still minors and a widow decided to keep the farm and remarry, she was obliged to pay off her children in the future, either on her own or together with her new husband.64 Trzesniowa village court roll contains information about 35 widowed women. The lives of three of them are rather obscure, but our knowledge about the remaining 32 is quite detailed. Twelve widows appeared in the rolls when they were selling their lands, alone or with their children, to unrelated strangers. Three more widows sold their farms to their own sons, and nine to relatives. Eight widows decided to keep and farm their lands together with their minor children or, if they married later, with their new husbands, and reappeared in the rolls as purchasers of land65 and animals.66 One of the widows who sold their lands made a life-rent contract where she made a gift of her part of the inheritance to a person who was obliged, in turn, to take care of the woman in her old age.67 The specific character of village court rolls, containing primarily the records of land transactions, makes it difficult to assess the situation of elderly peasants who had retired. It is popularly assumed in the literature that their social and economic status decreased after they had given up their positions as heads of their households.68 A good example is Stanisław Sbygen who, having sold

61 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, nos. 746, 790, 845, 1095; a similar situation occurred in another village, Krościenko, near Trześniowa; see: “Księgi gromadzkie wsi Krościenko z lat 1408–1535” [Court Rolls in Krościenko Village, 1408– 1535], in Starodawne Prawa Polskiego Pomniki, ed. Bolesław Ulanowski, vol. 11 (Cracow, 1921) nos. 181, 359, 490, 867, 988, 1048, 1118, 1273, 1376. 62 Piotr Guzowski, “System dziedziczenia chłopów polskich w XV i XVI wieku” [The Inheritance System in Polish Villages in the 15th and 16th Centuries], in Rodzina i gospodarstwo domowe na ziemiach polskich w XV–XX wieku [Family and Households in the Polish Lands between the 15th and 20th Centuries], ed. Cezary Kuklo (Warsaw, 2008), 29–35. 63 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, 733. 64 Ibidem, 18; 177. 65 Ibidem, 60, 146, 66 Ibidem, 404. 67 Ibidem, 56. 68 Korniak, “Życie”, 80; Kuklo, Demografia, 378. 204 Guzowski his farm to his son, ceased performing the function of a landlord’s official.69 Most Trześniowa peasants who had sold their farms also withdrew from village social life and, if they did appear in court, it was only to confirm that they received another annual payment for their lands. There were only two exceptions: Jan Ślep and Jan the son-in-law of a Piertrzyk, who continued as jurymen for some time after they had retired as householders.70 On the basis of the Trześniowa rolls it is possible to prove indirectly that there existed a certain system of social control of the situation of elderly retired villagers. Village authorities showed some consideration for people in need. In 1495, Jan Diczko was admonished by the court for mistreating his mother. In 1557, it was decided that one of the conditions upon which Walek Ślep was allowed to take over his siblings’ inheritance was that he was to take care of his mentally disabled brothers in their old age until they died.71 Trześniowa villagers’ social awareness and compassion are visible also in an entry from 1585 when one Jarosz paid two marcs from his farm, of which “one was used to God’s greater glory and to feed the poor”.72 Very little can be said about 38 peasants who formally did not sell their farms and, apparently, remained heads of their households in spite of being at an advanced age. Interestingly, as many as 22 elderly householders continued also as members of the jury or other village officials. The names of the remaining 16 peasants were mentioned in court records either in the context of land transactions, when seven elderly peasants were named as holders of farms adjacent to the pieces of land that were the subjects of transactions, or when the men appeared as sureties, parish collectors or legal guardians. These peasants seemed also to have retained their social and economic status in their old age. Some, like Grzegorz the Miller, decided to write their wills, an exceptional practice among late medieval peasantry. We learn from Grzegorz’s will that his old age was far from being characterized by destitution, loneliness and social degradation. Among the beneficiaries of his will there were not only his relatives (sister, grandson and step-son) but also his peasant servant with a wife. He also designated some money for the parish church in Jasionowa and two hospitals, in Sanok and in Krosno.73 Spending money on causes other than feudal or state taxes, as was done by the said miller, was not unusual among peasants, even the elderly ones.

69 Polaczkówna (ed.), Najstarsza księga sądowa wsi Trześniowej, nos. 1265 and 1266. 70 Ibidem, nos. 929, 1246. 71 Ibidem, no. 1086. 72 Ibidem, no. 1400. 73 Ibidem, no. 376. Old Age in the Life Cycle of Polish Peasants 205

A generous donation of six marcs to the church was made by Stanisław Alwatko, a parish collector, though it is not certain whether it was his own money or whether the amount was collected by the whole village.74 To sum up, it is worth remembering that peasants whose time of economic activity was longer than average were usually at the same time members of their community’s social and economic elite. Of the 64 householders studied, as many as 50 performed various official functions in their village or were socially higher ranking villagers, such as inn-keepers or millers. Their relatively high standards of living must have lengthened their lives, while their personal social status might have affected their decisions to stay in the role of householders in spite of their advanced age. Only six out of 38 peasants who did not sell their farms in old age kept no court or administrative positions in Trześniowa. It may be concluded, then, that the higher peasants’ socio- economic status was, the more likely they were to remain economically active as householders and heads of the family even after they had attained advanced age. It appears also that wealthy and influential peasants were not likely to abandon easily their social and economic standing once achieved. In this context, we can clearly see the discrepancy between demographic and psycho- sociological approaches to the notion of old age. The latter takes into account the intensity of people’s engagement in various social spheres, such as local community or family.75 From this point of view, the 38 Trześniowa peasants who remained economically and socially active in spite of being over 60 years of age might not have been perceived as old by their contemporaries. It is hard to determine to what extent Trześniowa peasants were representative of Polish peasantry, the largest social group at the turn of the Middle Ages, and to what extent data gained from the Trześniowa village court rolls were illustrative of the situation of peasants in other regions of Poland. Attitudes to elderly people were affected by a number of economic, social, legal and cultural factors. Although the Trześniowa court rolls do not allow us to determine the exact proportion of elderly people within the village community in the 15th and 16th centuries, they provide enough information for us to conclude that at the turn of the Middle Ages there were already many phenomena and institutions familiar to historians studying richer and more available 18th-century sources. Among the oldest Trześniowa householders we recognize almost all

74 Ibidem, no. 459. 75 Kopczyński, “Starość nie radość”, 48; Jacek Olędzki, Murzynowo. Znaki istnienia i tożsamości mieszkańców wioski nadwiślańskiej w XVIII–XX wieku [Murzynowo. Traces of Life and Identity of the Inhabitants of One Village by the Vistula River in the 18th–20th Centuries] (Warsaw, 1992), 168. 206 Guzowski patterns of conduct associated with old age which were to become typical in later periods. Nearly fifty percent of peasants in the group characterized by long economic activity sold their farms and began wycug or became lodgers. The legal practice of wymowa was not yet formally regulated, and it was based more on custom than on written contract, so it did not feature conspicuously in our primary source. It may be assumed that peasants who sold their farms might have treated annual payments of instalments as a form of financial security in their old age. All other peasants tried to keep their positions as householders for as long as possible, and they also actively participated in the social and economic lives of their village community. Higher standards of living and more prominent economic and social position explained the longer participation in economic life by the peasant elite. Just like ordinary peasants, however, the richest ones also had problems securing direct heirs, sons or sons-in-law, to their farms. In the 17th and 18th centuries formal written retirement contracts became a norm in villages in Little Poland and Red Ruthenia, both being areas east of the Hajnal-Mitterauer line. A question requiring further research is what factors contributed to the adoption of the western system of household formation in these lands. Although the village of Trześniowa was situated on the Polish-Ruthenian borderland, it was inhabited mainly by Polish and German Catholics, and since the 14th century its organization was based on the hide system (Hufenverfassung). Interesting source material that survived from the 15th century onwards which could be used for further studies are the village court rolls and inventories from villages inhabited by Orthodox Ruthenians. CHAPTER 10 Succession Choices of Small Farmers and Women Farmers’ Wills in the Area around Trieste in the Nineteenth Century

Marta Verginella

The paper discusses the succession choices of peasant men and women in Breg, an area on the south-eastern outskirts of Trieste,1 which in the 19th century was the most important port of the Habsburg monarchy.2 The area, beginning less than ten kilometres from the city centre, was part of the municipality of Dolina, which as the seat of religious and political authority played the role of local political and cultural centre. From the beginning of the 16th century to 1814 it belonged administratively to Carniola, while clerically it was subordinate to the Diocese of Trieste. The administrative separation from Trieste and the existence of the Dolina deanery, led by Slovenian priests from Carniola, ensured that the villages of Breg, which were inhabited by a Slovenian-speaking population, enjoyed a relatively independent political life, and prevented the meddling of Italian-speaking city authorities in local matters. In 1832 the municipality of Dolina, consisting of seven villages (Log, Ricmanje, Boršt, Zabrežec, Boljunec, Kroglje, Dolina),3 came under the jurisdiction of

1 In the 19th century Trieste was mainly populated by Italians, even though the size of the Slovene population grew steadily, through both immigration and activities that raised national awareness. In 1910 Slovenes represented 30% of the city’s population, while the outskirts of the city were predominantly populated by Slovenes. For a general overview, see Marina Cattaruzza, “Population Dynamics and Economic Change in Trieste and its Hinterland, 1850–1914”, in Population and Society in Western European Port Cities 1650–1939, eds. Richard Lawton and Robert Lee (Liverpool, 2002), 176–211; idem, “Slovenes and Italians in Trieste, 1850–1914”, in Ethnic Identity in Urban Europe, eds. Max Engman et al. Comparative Studies on Governments and Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Europe, 1850–1940, 8 (New York/Dartmouth, 1992), 189–219. 2 On the cosmopolitan business elite which settled in the city since the beginning of the 18th century after the Free Port of Trieste was established (1719), see Lois C. Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste (Stanford, Ca., 1999). 3 In Table 10.3, which shows population change in Breg, smaller settlements that were part of the municipality of Dolina are also included. In the article Slovenian names of the villages are used because Italian versions of the villages’ names are in use only from the second half

Trieste

Basovizza

R I

T BREG I

C Dolina

Koper (Capodistria)

figure 10.1 The area of Breg Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 209

TABLE 10.1 Number of testaments by settlement and time period

Boljunec Ricmanje Mačkovlje Dolina All together Period No. % No. % No. % No. % No. %

1819–1824 0 0 0 0 3 3.3 0 0 3 0.4 1825–1834 5 2.2 2 1.2 4 4.4 4 1.6 15 2.0 1835–1844 18 8.0 15 8.9 5 5.5 27 10.7 65 8.8 1845–1854 21 9.4 13 7.7 9 9.9 22 8.7 65 8.8 1855–1864 33 14.7 19 11.2 17 18.7 33 13.1 102 13.9 1865–1874 38 17.0 22 13.0 10 11.0 31 12.3 101 13.7 1875–1884 38 17.0 33 19.5 11 12.1 46 18.3 128 17.4 1885–1894 41 18.3 41 24.3 21 23.1 47 18.7 150 20.4 1895–1904 30 13.4 24 14.2 11 12.1 42 16.7 107 14.5 All 224 100 169 100 91 100 252 100 736 100

Koper (Capodistria in Italian).4 Koper is a small coastal town, which is today part of Slovenia, while it belonged to the Venetian Republic until the Napoleonic wars, and is located just over ten kilometres away in north-western Istria. In the town the people of Breg made sales agreements, settled legal disputes, signed various documents and also dictated their last will and testament (Table 10.1). Koper’s judicial records, held by Pokrajinski arhiv Koper (The Regional Archive of Koper), include 736 wills preserved from the period 1819–1904, of which 441 were made by men and 290 by women, while five were made jointly by husband and wife.5 Whereas in the first half of the 19th century only the owners of real estate as houses or land among farmers of both sexes in the villages of Breg chose to make a will, in the second half of the century those owning less property did so too. In 19th-century Breg more than a quarter of those who died after the age of 20 left a will (See Figure 10.2). 59.9% of the wills were made by men, 39.4% by women (Table 10.2, and see Figures 10.3 and 10.4) The percentage of women’s wills is relatively high compared to the western outskirts of Trieste and

of the 20th century after this area became part of Italy. The only exception was Mačkovlje (Caresana). 4 Now the Slovenian name of the town is widely used also in foreign maps. 5 See Table 10.3. For more on testamentary practices in Breg, see Marta Verginella, Ekonomija odrešenja in preživetja [Economy of Salvation and Survival] (Koper, 1996). 210 Verginella

TABLE 10.2 Gender of testators by time period – Breg

Man Woman Married Couple All Period No. % No. % No. % No. %

1819–1824 2 66.7 1 33.3 0 0 3 100 1825–1834 8 53.3 6 40.0 1 6.7 15 100 1835–1844 43 66.2 22 33.8 0 0 65 100 1845–1854 45 69.2 20 30.8 0 0 65 100 1855–1864 62 60.8 38 37.3 2 2.0 102 100 1865–1874 58 57.4 42 41.6 1 1.0 101 100 1875–1884 74 57.8 54 42.2 0 0 128 100 1885–1894 85 56.7 64 42.7 1 0.7 150 100 1895–1904 64 59.8 43 40.2 0 0 107 100 All 441 59.9 290 39.4 5 0.7 736 100

its wider Slovenian surroundings, where testamentary practices among the peasant population were less developed and the number of women’s wills very modest. The causes of this situation can be found in, among other things, the awareness of Breg’s communities of their administrative and political autonomy from Trieste, but also in the influence of the Venetian ‘notarial culture’,6 which spread from Koper to its agrarian surroundings. Nevertheless, from an economic perspective, Trieste was simply too close and too important not to have an impact on the economy of Breg, especially following the city’s industrial development and subsequent rapid demographic growth.7 When in the years 1823 and 1830 a land surveyor visited Breg, he noted that it was too densely inhabited, that there was a shortage of forests and pastures, and that the land did not provide enough for a living. Due to the humble size of properties, on average no larger than 3 hectares, a mixed type of agriculture prevailed. In comparison with the rest of the Slovenian territory in 1902, 35.5% of landowners had farms no larger than 2 hectares (12.5% had land no larger than

6 Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy. Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987). 7 Marco Breschi, Aleksej Kalc and Elisabetta Navarra, “La nascita di una città: storia minima della popolazione di Trieste”, secc. 18.–19. ”, in Storia economica e sociale di Trieste; La città dei gruppi, [Economic and Social History of Trieste: The City of Groups] eds. Roberto Finzi and Giovanni Panjek, vol. 1 (Trieste, 2001), 69–181. Men Women Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 211

MenMen WomenWomen

ToTo 4040 years years old old ToTo 40 40 y earsyears old old FrFrom 40 40to 59 to years 59 old years old From 40 to 59 years old Over 59 years old FrOvomer 59 40 years to old 59 years old Over 59 years old Over 59 years old

a) Men All b) Women

All All

To 40To ye ars40 old years old FromFr 40om to 59 40 years to old 59 years old Over 59 years old Over 59 years old

c) All together FIGURE 10.2 The age of testators from Dolina

0.5 hectares and 23 % no larger than 2 hectares), 21 % had farms between 2–5 hectares, mid-sized farms represented 33.3 % and they were considered to have between 5–20 hectares and large farms had from 20 to 50 hectares and represented 7.8 % of farms; only 1.1% were larger than 50 hectares.8 Each individual property included various types of land, more or less fertile: vineyards, fields, meadows, vegetable gardens and pastures. For the majority of small farmers land was the primary means of survival, a means of production, and at the same time a prerequisite for membership in the local community. Despite the fact that every village in Breg also had one or two craftsmen – a blacksmith, butcher, shoemaker or tailor – and that the mills on the Glinščica River employed millers, these craftsmen also worked on the land. Land ownership determined the form of the family nucleus and conditioned marital

8 Jasna Fischer and Franc Rozman, “Socialna demokracija in kmetstvo 1870–1914 na Slovenskem” [Social Democracy and Peasants 1870–1914 in Slovenian Territory], in Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino, 7 (1997), 5–16. In the whole district of Koper, which also included the area of Breg, the size of farm units ranged from 7.9 to 17.1 hectares (Pavle Blaznik, Units of Individual Property, and Economic and Social History of the Slovenes. History of Agrarian Industries (Ljubljana, 1970), vol. 1, 161–184). 212 Verginella

50 45 40 35 30 35 Men 20 Women 15 10 5 0 1833‒1844 1845‒1854 1855‒1864 1865‒1874 1875‒1884 1885‒1894 1895‒1904 FIGURE 10.3 Percentage of testators regarding the number of deaths and according to gender between 1833 and 1904 – Dolina

0 1833‒1844 1845‒1854 1855‒1864 1865‒1874 1875‒1884 1885‒1894 FIGURE 10.4 Percentage of testators regarding total number of deaths between 1833 and 1894 – Dolina choices and alliances. Land was the essence of economic and social relations, and as such was the centre around which family, kinship and community relations were organised.9 Especially in community relations land acted as the

9 David I. Kertzer, Family Life in Central Italy, 1880–1910: Sharecropping, Wage Labor and Coresidence (New Brunswick, 1984). Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 213 most important, fixed economic good with a significant symbolic value, as a good which both determined social relations and was determined by them. As elsewhere in the European countryside, in Breg too the economy was embed- ded in a web of social, cultural and political relations. It functioned in line with tradition and was subordinate to a cluster of various interests and needs.10 In Breg there had been a shortage of agricultural land since the Middle Ages. The basic principle of the village community as it had existed in Breg throughout the centuries was that every family had access to sufficient agricultural land and that communal land, forests, pastures and mills were managed jointly by the heads of the families. In the 19th century the process of social differen- tiation of small farmers corresponded with a new distribution of land among the village families. Because of land releasing, the land was more freely sold, especially as a result of the law of 1868, even though the state tried to limit this process. Especially in the Littoral area, the land was distributed among all the children as possibilities of earning were much more diverse there than elsewhere in the Slovenian territory.11 The poorest of them were forced to sell land while the richest bought it, the latter thus consolidating their social and economic status.

1 Women’s Market Activity

Modest agricultural output and meagre profits from selling wine and produce in Trieste prompted Breg’s inhabitants to seek additional income from secondary activities, mainly the production of flour and bread. According to the 1830 cadastral survey12 the baking and selling of bread by women was the most important economic activity in Breg. The cadastral surveyor described the economic importance of bread making with these words:

Whereas the men work in the fields and mainly in the vineyards, this being their task, the women bake bread, buy wheat in Trieste and also sell their bread there. They embark on this trip daily and therefore work in the fields only when necessary. The activity carried out by women is the

10 Karol Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, Ma., 1957). 11 Milivoja Šircelj, Rodnost v Sloveniji od 18. stoletja do 21. stoletja [Birth rates in Slovenia from the 18th Century to the 21st Century] (Ljubljana, 2006), 73. 12 In 1823 and 1830 the cadastral map was made that shows the boundaries and ownership of land parcels. To do so, surveyers were also sent to Breg. 214 Verginella

most important economic trade, since with their industriousness women satisfy the need for bread in the family, but also the need to put bread on the family’s table, as well as other goods.13

With the profits from selling bread, women bakers bought wheat from merchants in Trieste, transported it by donkeys to the mills on the Glinščica, ground it into wheat, and then began a new cycle of independent work. The only male input into this market activity was purchasing firewood at fairs in nearby Žavlje (Zaule) and in Istrian villages. The cadastral surveyor estimated that in 1830 in Boršt, Zabrežec, and Jezero, villages with a total population of 617 (see Table 10.3), there were 213 women bakers; in Boljunec (population 613) there were 314; in Ricmanje and Log (population 679) there were 315. In Dolina, with a population of 822 and the largest settlement in Breg, there were as many as 434. Although the credibility of these cadastral statistics is undoubtedly questionable, since it is hardly imaginable that all women baked and sold bread, one cannot ignore the fact that bread making was an important economic activity in Breg and that a significant part of the female population was involved in it. This was the case until the beginning of the 20th century, when urban bakeries appeared and city authorities limited the activities of rural women bakers with ever-stricter regulations.14 The documentation studied here does not reveal how much women bakers in Breg earned or how much money a woman baking bread and then selling it in Trieste brought into her household every month, but numerous wills show that women supplemented their dowry and the inheritance from their parents with independent means. Some of Breg’s women bought land and lent out money with interest, without relying on their husband’s or his family’s money to do so. For example, Marija Černigoj from Ricmanje, like her late husband, acted as creditor for her co-villagers, as also evidenced by the wills of her debtors. In her last testament she addressed special advice to her sole heir, her sister Lucija: “And I also advise and order you, my dear sister Lucia; have patience with debtors, do not oppress them, and divide their debt into instalments. And thus you shall receive Love and blessings.” The will-makers’ advice was thus to be con-

13 Archivio di Stato di Trieste, Archivio del Catasto fondiario di Trieste, Operato d’estimo Catastale del Comune di Dolina, 30 giugno 1830. 14 Ennio Maserati states that this illegal market activity supplied Trieste daily with 12,000 kg of bread valued at 25,000 Gulden; Ennio Maserati, “Il lavoro a domicilio alla fine dell’Ottocento nelle province adriatiche dell’Austria” [Housework at the End of the 19th Century in the Adriatic Region of Austria], Quaderni giuliani di Storia, 1–2 (1990), 90–105. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 215

TABLE 10.3 Population change in Breg (1779–1910)

1779 1790 1791 1834 1840 1869 1880 1890 1900 1910

Boljunec 454 477 449 732 781 764 812 830 821 962 Ricmanje 310 362* 354* 462 437 480 514 502 Mačkovlje 49 46 40 35 41 Dolina 536 570 589 694 802 764 859 874 884 950 Jezero 53 59 60 56 52 Kroglje 107 112 107 106 148 138 130 138 138 140 Log 133 138 178 189 248 Mačkovlje 276 374 364 357 387 Prebeneg 173 170 169 271 281 289 240 263 255 244 Ricmanje 289 571 625 650 617 657 Zabrežec 105 125 130 183 197 209 248 249

* Included population of Jezero siderate when collecting debts. Marija Černigoj froze the debts of five of her debtors, even though they owed her relatively large amounts, ranging from 200 to 300 Gulden. She did not leave behind a list of debtors, but her last testament reveals that she showed more tolerance and mercy towards some than others.15 In Ricmanje in the 1870s Marija Rihter too made loans to co-villagers and relatives. Her loans were smaller than those in the previous case. She left all uncollected debts to her husband, sisters and brother.16 In Dolina at the end of the 19th century Urša Sancin, married to Jerjan, also acted as a creditor. For larger loans she employed written contracts. In her will she divided her property, including land and money, between her husband and brother. In it she also divided her debtors into small and big. Jožef Sancin, a “big debtor”, owed her 500 Gulden “under a contract” and 56 Gulden without a contract. Gašper Česnik borrowed 300 Gulden from her without a contract. Martin Samec owed her 500 Gulden under a contract. Marija Pangerc owed her 252 Gulden under a contract and 56 on an oral agreement. Urh Pangerc owed her 300 Gulden under a contract. Urša’s will reveals that she had 300 Gulden deposited at the post

15 Pokrajinski arhiv Koper (henceforth PAK), Oporoke, Marija Černigoi, 5.7.1880 (binder 1879–1883). 16 PAK, Oporoke, Marija Rihter, 18.1.1887, 14.9.1887, binder 1884–1887. 216 Verginella office in Dolina.17 The amounts she managed were unusual for most women farmers and bakers. The money Urša Sancin invested in money-lending did not come from her parents’ or her husband’s inheritance. It can only be ascribed to her market and money-lending activities, with which at least in regard to wealth she acquired a place in the upper stratum of the village community, among wealthy landowners and clerics. We have only mentioned cases of women who managed larger amounts of money, but wills reveal that a good portion of the adult female population in Breg acted as creditors as well as debtors, much like the men. One should note that married women as well as widows18 acted as creditors, which means that in the families of Breg the presence of a husband did not prevent women from managing their money independently. Contracts with debtors were signed by women themselves and not their husbands. Some women held money in their own postal accounts and only through a special clause in their will left it to their husbands. Although we do not have documentary evidence confirming that income from selling bread in Trieste was invested in money-lending in the villages, we can deduce that women’s market activity in Breg enabled some of them to lend money, at least until the establishment of farmer’s loan banks. Regardless of the amounts of money going through women’s hands, it is significant in itself that in the web of village relations women acted as an alternative to village loan sharks. If we view money as a means of emancipation, we can, if nothing more, argue that it contributed to the independence and authority of the women of Breg, that is, if we really decline to consider female authority in the family and in the community of the ancien régime in general. From this perspective, men’s wills are more revealing than women’s. As a rule, male testators referred to their wives as “housewife”, rarely as “my beloved wife”. Only in the 1880s did they begin to refer to them as “spouse”. In his will Lovrenc Gerdelič left all of his property to his wife and appointed her to be in charge of the farm until her death, but also added that she “must neither put in pledge nor sell the inherited property”. After the wife’s death the property was to be inherited by the daughter.19 Blaž Rihter named his wife to be in

17 PAK, Oporoke, Urša Sancin, 25.1.1903, binder 1900–1904. 18 Darja Mihelič writes on the loan activities of women in the Istrian town of Piran during the Middle Ages in “Žena v piranskem območju do srede 14. stoletja” [Women in the Piran Area till the Middle of the 14th Century], Zgodovinski časopis, 1–2 (1978), 23–36 (28–9). Cases of women who lent money in medieval Trieste are also mentioned by Daniela Durissini, Donne a Trieste nel Medioevo tra XIV e XV secolo [Women in Trieste in Medieval age during the fourteenth and fifteenth Century] (Trieste, 2010). 19 PAK, Oporoke, Lovrenc Gerdelič, 1.6.1868, binder 1817–1872. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 217 charge of his inheritance. He left her all his real estate and other property, but only on the condition that she remained a widow. He also allowed for the possibility that, if the need arose, especially if she was disowned by her family, she could sell as much as needed to survive. She was obliged to pay her daughter Marija 200 Gulden for her wedding, while the rest of the property was to be inherited after her death by Blaž’s brother Andrej.20

2 Inheritance Customs and Succession Choices

In the Primorska region from 1815 the Austrian Civil Code gave precise instructions on how to determine heirs. The testator was obliged to leave a share of the inheritance to all legal heirs, i.e. all children regardless of sex.21 Men and women in Breg generally did not attempt to evade this obligation. During the years 1833 to 1904 in Dolina more than a quarter of all who died after they were 20 years old left a will.22 Let us look at the following example: Jurij Parovel from Dolina stated in his will that his son-in-law Ivan was, through his marital contract, entitled to a share of the inheritance as mandated by law. He felt that Ivan was treated fairly and more than generously. To his daughter Marija, married to Ivan Sancin, he left “three weeks” in Parovel’s mill, two meadows, two gardens, half a field and a vineyard. The testator also foresaw the possibility of his son Matija returning from the military, although he had been away for 20 years. In case he returned, his sister Marija was to give him “a week in the mill”. As the primary heir the testator named his son Andrej, who was married and lived in the house of Jožef Lavriha. Andrej too was to give his brother Matija “a week in the mill” and two pieces of land if he returned. Although the will does not contain a list of testator’s property, it is evident that he acted according to inheritance law norms. Judging by the codicil he added two weeks after making his will, he was not completely satisfied. The “week in the mill”, which

20 PAK, Oporoke, Blaž Rihter, 1.8.1873, binder 1873–1878. 21 According to article 762 of the Austrian Civil Code (Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, 1911), “there is no difference between the male or female sex, between birth in or out of wedlock, when for such persons the right and order of legal inheritance occurs . . .” 22 Even though statistical comparison of testators (women and men) in regard to the whole mortality was done only for Dolina, preliminary analysis also for Boljunec, Ricmanje and Mačkovje shows that the ratio was similar in those villages. Verginella, Ekonomija odrešenja in preživetja, 89–90. On succession choices in the Žužek peasant family from Vižovlje (Visogliano), a village just ten kilometres west of Trieste where the farm was usually inherited by the eldest son, see James C. Davis, Rise From Want: A Peasant Family in the Machine Age (Philadelphia, Pa., 1986). 218 Verginella means the possibility of a weekly use of the mill, and the garden that he had previously left to his daughter Marija are in the codicil left to his granddaugh- ter, Marija’s daughter.23 In the family portrait as revealed by the Status animarum IV of Dolina for the second half of the 19th century, one notices that Matija did not return to his father’s home, which was managed by Andrej until his death, when he was succeeded by his son Jožef, while Marija moved to her husband’s home, also in Dolina.24 The wills from Breg, which often reflect attempts by testators to bend inheritance law norms to suit their needs, indicate that testamentary choices in Breg were not subordinate to individual logic or the benefit of a single family member at the expense of others. Rather, they followed the logic of family and community solidarity. Testators justified their decisions by reference to the common good of the family.25 Ivan Jerjan from Dolina named as the primary heirs of all of his property his sons Anton and Jakob, who, despite being married, lived in his house. He underscored his decision by stating that the inheritance must remain undivided and that Anton, who had been married a long time and was childless, must live in peace and understanding with his brother Jakob. If after many years his son Jožef, who served in the military, returned, he would have to share the same roof with the universal heirs, who would have to treat him as their “beloved brother”.26 Since one of the heirs was childless, the testator ordered his sons to live in a brotherly community, which had the advantage of keeping the family farm intact. Fifteen other testators in Dolina between 1833 and 1904 made choices similar to Ivan Jerjan’s. In this same period 27 testators in Boljunec, 27 in Ricmanje and 18 in Mačkovlje also decided that their inheritance was to remain undivided. Comparing this data with the total number of testators (474) reveals that joint management of family farms was most common in Mačkovlje and Ricmanje, i.e. in villages where the ratio of agricultural land to the number of people who subsisted on it was less favourable than in Boljunec and Dolina (see Table 10.1 above). Although it had been possible to break up real estate before the abolition of serfdom in 1849, there was a visible tendency throughout the 19th century towards preserving the unity of agricultural property, provided, of course, that

23 PAK, Oporoke, Giorgio Paroverl, 5.8.1851, binder 1850–1854. 24 Župnijski arhiv Dolina (hereafter ŽAD), Status animarum, III. 25 Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Past (Chicago and London, 1985). 26 PAK, Oporoke, Giovanni Jerjan, 10.6.1835, binder 1836–1849. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 219 this was not prevented by economic and demographic conditions. The farmers of Breg divided their farms only when they had no choice. In cases of smaller farms with more than one son, the breaking up of the property was inevitable. The head of the family, who chose a single primary heir from among his sons, obliged the heir to pay off his brothers in land or money. Since money was almost always in short supply, the payment was usually in the form of land. During the last three decades of the 19th century, due to demographic growth, such cases became increasingly common. The fear that their successors might fall into poverty prompted some testators to give very detailed instructions on how to manage their property after their death. In the inheritance model chosen by more than a third of testators in Breg (35.8% of cases – 268 from 749), the testator, head of the family, was succeeded on the farm by his son, while daughters were compensated in money. Due to unfavourable circumstances a large number of testators in Breg had to adapt this model to their own special needs. In the absence of sons, testators left their realty to daughters, only rarely to a son-in-law. Thus, for example, Janez Zafran named his wife the lifelong head of the farm and ordered that no one should “take the property from her hands”. After his wife’s death the inheritance was to go to Uršula and her husband Janez, on the condition that neither of them could sell the property. His still unmarried daughter Ančka was to receive a dowry of 400 Gulden, to be paid by his son-in-law during the four years after her marriage. For her marriage she was also to receive a trous- seau and everything necessary for the wedding celebration.27 Between 1870 and 1900 families in Dolina had on average 5.3 children. Approximately the same number was typical for the nearby, central Slovenian region of Carniola where, between 1887 and 1900, the number of live births to a married couple was between 4.9 and 5.6.28 About 16% of babies died after

27 PAK, Oporoke, Janez Zafran, 18.2,1878, binder 1873–1878. 28 Sabina Ž. Žnidaršič, Ora et labora – in molči, ženska!, [Ora et Labora – and be Quiet Woman] (Ljubljana, 2000), 88. In Breg it was quite common for small peasants in the second half of the 19th century that more than one generation lived under same roof or that two brothers shared the same house, yet this was not usual for ‘Gostači’ – tenants who lived as nuclear families according to the family typology advocated by Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction: the History of the Family”m in Household and Family in Past Time, eds. Peter Laslett and Richard Wall(Cambridge, 1972), 1–90. We could argue that the demographic, social and economic situation endorsed the ‘Eastern European pattern’, as defined by John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in Population in History, eds. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–43. For the questionability of the distinction between the eastern and western family model, see Silvia Sovič, “European Family History. Moving beyond Stereotypes of ‘East’ and ‘West’ ” in Cultural and Social 220 Verginella birth.29 Only 3.2 survived beyond the age of 10, which means that the average testator divided his or her property between two or three children. The data available from wills from Dolina, Boljunc, Ricmanje and Mačkovlje show that at the moment of writing their will 12.7% of testators had one child, 17.3% had two, 20.3% had three, while 32.8% had four or more (see Table 10.4). At the end of the 19th century testators divided their property among a growing number of sons and daughters. In cases of weaker properties the remuneration of brothers and sisters often led to debt or the partial selling off of the inherited land. Although the people of Breg did not base remuneration on the real value of the share to be inherited but rather on the appraisal price, which was lower, it nevertheless placed a heavy burden on most inheritors of family farms.30 Testators in Breg also made use of escamotage: in cases where the heir to be remunerated was still single, the heir to the farm would keep him or her on the farm. Delaying remuneration to heirs was a common practice in Breg. In some cases debt was an obstacle to the payment of remuneration, but at the same time encouraged joint management. Anton Hreščak, a blacksmith from Ricmanje, left his blacksmith tools, house and field to his son, who had supported and looked after him in his time of illness. He left the rest of his tools and property to his other three sons, and ordered all of them to work on the land together until they had paid off their debts and renovated the house31 The situation of some debtors was so hopeless that even shared management of the family farm did not enable them to pay off their accumulated debts. A

Historv, 5:2 (2008), 141–164., with a prevalence of complex or ‘joint’ families, which was established in the previous studies about family structures in Dolina. However, detailed analysis of the dominant family type was made in the area of the village of Dolina on the basis of three Status Animarum. The first, for the period 1830–1845, recorded 165 families, of which 48.5% were joint, 7.3% were complex, 40.6% were nuclear and 3.6% were cases of widowers and widows or individuals who lived alone. In the period 1846–1870 there were 173 families, of which 11.6% were complex, 46.2% were joint and the number of nuclear families decreased to 34.7%. In the period 1870–1900, 58.2% of the 184 families were joint, 9.2% were of the complex type, the others were mononuclear. Mononuclear families were prevalent among the tenants and sub-tenants who did not have their own house. As for the others, the joint and complex types of family were forced by social, economic and demographic circumstances. Marta Verginella, Družina v Dolini pri Trstu, v 19. stoletju, [A Family in Dolina near Trieste in the 19th Century] (Ljubljana, 1990). 29 Milivoja Šircelj, Rodnost v Sloveniji. Od 18. stoletja do 21. stoletja [Natality in Slovenia from the 18th to the 21st Century] (Ljubljana, 2006), 85. 30 Sergij Vilfan, Pravna zgodovina Slovencev [Legal History of Slovenes] (Ljubljana, 1961), 466. 31 PAK, Oporoke, Antonio Kreschiack, 22.7.1843, binder 1836–1849. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 221

TABLE 10.4 Testators as percentage of the number of people who died in Dolina a.) By 10-year age groups

Age 1833–44 1845–54 1855–64 1865–74 1875–84 1885–94 1895–1904

< 30 26.7 30.8 37.5 21.4 11.1 18.2 10.0 30–39 25.0 30.0 30.0 8.3 71.4 42.9 25.0 40–49 31.3 33.3 46.7 66.7 25.0 50.0 37.5 50–59 50.0 16.7 31.6 35.3 42.9 42.9 35.0 60–69 32.0 17.2 38.2 44.8 26.1 42.9 34.5 > 69 25.9 6.1 16.7 22.2 34.5 34.1 25.6 All 30.5 18.8 32.7 31.4 33.3 37.9 28.7

b.) By 20-year age groups

Age 1833–44 1845–54 1855–64 1865–74 1875–84 1885–94 1895–1904

< 30 26.7 30.8 37.5 21.4 11.1 18.2 10.0 30–49 56.3 63.3 76.7 75.0 96.4 92.9 62.5 50–69 82.0 33.9 69.8 80.1 68.9 85.7 69.5 > 69 25.9 6.1 16.7 22.2 34.5 34.1 25.6 All 30.5 18.8 32.7 31.4 33.3 37.9 28.7

case in point is that of Franc Čuk, who had gained entry into the upper social stratum of Dolina, but left his daughters Francka and Marija and his son Ivan Jožef a heavily indebted property. He stated: “. . . I leave to each this much, if anything remains after debt, since all of my property is under debt, two houses, a shop and a stable”.32 Through unskilful management he had run his property into the ground. In the second half of the 19th century debt became a problem for an increasing number of families in Breg. Wills reveal that farmers were burdened by the payment of compensation, church donations, bad harvests and an increasing number of children. Due to financial difficulties, borrowing money was inevitable, and this led to the selling of real estate, especially in the economically

32 PAK, Oporoke, Franc Čuk, 12.8.1893, fadc. 1893–1897 222 Verginella weakest families. If we analyse all 749 testators, we find that 150 of them were in some kind of debt.33 It should be added that not all testators mentioned their debts in their wills. The picture is therefore again imperfect, but nevertheless telling.

3 Testamentary Ordering in a Prosperous Peasant Family: The Lovriha

Since in the hands of the farmers of Breg a will was a means of stabilisation with which they regulated economic, social and affective relations within the family, as well as an important tool for preserving the traditional peasant social structure and stemming the decay of peasant property, let us examine how property was managed in a prosperous peasant family. Janez Lovriha from Dolina, house number 46, named as the primary heir to all his property his son Janez, who was married and lived at home, and whom he obliged to compensate his brothers and sisters as stipulated in his will, in which he listed and evalu- ated all of his property. His son Urh, who lived in house number 52 and was married for the second time, inherited some land and movable property. In his marital contract the testator had already given Urh two houses34 and three pieces of land with a combined value of 871 Gulden. To his son Rok the testator left “three weeks in the mill”, four pieces of land, 500 Gulden, and also a bucket for crushing grapes, two barrels and a table. The combined value of this part of the inheritance was 942 Gulden. In addition to the house number 84, his son Anton inherited “four weeks in the mill”, ten pieces of land, wine barrels, a bed, a wardrobe and three chairs. His inheritance was worth 1,037 Gulden. To his son Janez, the primary heir, the testator left the house number 46, a butcher’s shop and 12 pieces of land, together worth 2305 Gulden. The list of movables inherited by Janez shows that in dividing furniture and dishware the father privileged the primary heir, to whom he left most of the cellar dishware, an olive press, wardrobes, a bread pan, kitchen dishware, furniture, including a

33 Even though the testators that were in debt belonged to all age groups, they were most common among the oldest in the population, the ones who were exposed to payment of hereditary shares and legacies. A precise analysis according to age groups was not possible, as testaments do not include data about the age of the testator; however, the ages of testators were qualitatively analyzed as data from Status Animarum was taken into consideration (ŽAD). This can be seen in Figure 10.2. 34 The testator did not specify the house number; it was also not mentioned whether they were neighboring houses. The testator only mentioned that one was bought. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 223 wardrobe, two beds, a couch, “33 issues of the journal Novice”, paintings, a mir- ror and books. Upon marrying, Janez received from his father a house and four weeks in the mill. Including the two debts he was to collect after his father’s death, his inheritance was worth 3,375 Gulden. The testator’s son Jakob only inherited 400 Gulden. The will does not mention any reason why he was given a smaller share than his brothers. Janez Lovriha had another son, the priest Andrej, who attended school for 12 years. Upon becoming a priest he received 400 Gulden from his father. In his will his father left him an additional 200 Gulden and guaranteed him the right to live in the primary heir’s house in case of illness or if he left the priest- hood. Janez’s daughter Marija received a dowry of 500 Gulden and after her father’s death her brother Rok was to pay her another 100 Gulden. The already deceased daughter Katarina had received 700 Gulden from her father upon marrying. The testator also ordered that his son Janez must pay back 400 Gulden to his mother Marija, which she had brought into the family upon marriage. He also ordered that his wife Marija should receive 100 Gulden from his property: “Furthermore, I leave my wife Marija, who is ill in her bed, in the care of my son Janez, as it is the sacred duty to care for one’s beloved mother and her every need until her death, and after”.35 The son Janez, the primary heir, made his last will and testament three years after his father’s death. To his second-born son he left two houses,36 five pieces of land and four weeks in the mill. His two daughters were to be compensated in the sum of 300 Gulden each. As the primary heir of all of his property he named his eldest son Janez, whom he also ordered to pay back to his mother the 400 Gulden she had brought to the household as her dowry. To his wife Marija, born Metlika, the testator left 200 Gulden and appointed her the head of the farm until his eldest son reached the age of 24.37 A comparison of the wills of Janez Lovriha, Sr., and Janez Lovriha, Jr., reveals that even in one of the wealthiest families in Dolina and Breg the younger generation had less money and land. Although Janez, Jr., had half as many children as his father, he nevertheless left his two daughters a smaller dowry than that brought to the house by his wife or inherited by his two sisters. Let us also examine the last will and testament of Janez’s wife, Marija Metlika, which she made two years after her husband. To her son Janez she left 200 Gulden which she had received from her husband. She left 200 Gulden,

35 PAK, Oporoke, Janez Louriha, 17.3.1880, binder 1879–1883. 36 From the testament the data is not known; it only mentioned that one was inherited from “the second father ”, most probably the step-father. 37 PAK, Oporoke, Janez Louriha, 7.11.1883, binder 1879–1883. 224 Verginella which she brought to the household as her dowry and invested in it, to her daughter Urša. She left a further 200 Gulden to her youngest son Jakob. From her mother Urša also inherited a wardrobe, a chest, a fur, two coats, a staple, two gold rings, two pairs of earrings and all other clothes. The daughter Johana died in 1883, aged nine, four months before her father. Thus Marija divided her inheritance between three children, and not four like her husband. She anticipated the possibility that one of her children might die without a will. In that case her inheritance would go to her brother Anton Metlika in Klanec. In two clauses she also touched upon the management of the family farm and family life after her death:

By my conscience and judgement I find that it would be right and good for the children and the property if my farmhand Janez Prašel from Prebeneg upon consulting my caretaker and guarantor remained employed here, because I recognise that he is a good and loyal farmhand and because he has been employed by this house for several years, and he would care for the children and the property.

Marija was also of the opinion that the girl farmhand who had looked after her and her children during her illness should remain at the house, since “she takes good care of them and the children love her, and I say that she can surely keep her job here in the role of caretaker.38 Urh, Marija’s brother-in-law and Janez Lovriha, Jr.’s brother named his only son Martin the primary heir to his property, with the exception of a quarter, which he had received from his wife who had died before him. This part, together with three fields, he left to his daughter Ana. Despite the fact that he had inherited from his father movable and immovable property worth more than 800 Gulden, at the time of making his will his property was already heavily in debt, which amounted to 490 Gulden.39 We can only guess the causes of Urh’s indebtedness. In all likelihood Urh had managed his property poorly. Documentary sources do not tell us anything about his relationship with his son Martin, who in 1894, three years before his father’s death, married Urša Jerog, but we know that they had three daughters and a son. Let us also look at the family of Rok Lovriha, son of Janez. Sr. Antonija Lovriha, at the time already Rok’s widow, took over her late husband’s property in the absence of a will. Their marriage was childless, so she named her brother-

38 PAK, Oporoke, Marija Louriha, 24.2.1885, binder 1884–1887. 39 PAK, Oporoke, Urh Louriha, 8.2.1897, binder 1893–1897. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 225 in-law Anton Lovriha the heir to the house and ten parcels of land, as well as her debts. To her niece, the daughter of Antonija Lovriha, Rok’s sister, she left two fields, a wardrobe and the clothes in it. To her nephew Janez, Anton’s son, she left a field. Antonija’s will shows that she did not divide her property among all of her husband’s brothers and sisters or all her nephews and nieces. She only privileged her brother-in-law Anton, a nephew and a niece.40 The priest Andrej’s will sheds light on his own role in the family strategies of the Lovriha dynasty. After recommending his soul to God and making arrangements for his funeral, Andrej ordered that his brothers should not receive any part of his property. As his primary heir he named his nephew Ivan Sancin, the son of his sister Marija, born Sancin. Ivan owed him 600 Gulden, which the testator had once lent his father, who by then was already deceased. In addition, Andrej also left Ivan 600 Gulden in land and 400 Gulden in money. He ordered his primary heir to pay each of his sisters 200 Gulden and an additional 100 to his mother (Andrej’s sister). To his nephew Ivan left all of his books, two bookcases, one of them glassed, four clocks, two alarm clocks, one for the wall and one for the pocket, and a silver tobacco box. He left the rest of the kitchenware, furniture and clothes to Ivan’s mother, his sister Marija.41 From his father Anton inherited less property than his brothers, but his will shows that the property he left behind was considerably larger than that he had inherited. He most probably earned the difference through his work as a priest. Significant also are his statement in his will that all of his brothers were sufficiently provided for and his choice to leave most of his property to his sister’s offspring. A summary of the main characteristics of succession choices in the Lovriha dynasty reveals that the sons of Janez, Sr., had less property than their father. Even their wives’ dowries did not significantly strengthen the family’s property. It should not be overlooked that the possibility of diminishing or expanding property transcended interfamily dynamics, since it was also dependent on broader alliances which individuals formed with members of their extended family and village community. Sensible marriages, alliances and rational farming and property management were, in addition to women’s bread making, efficient means of protection against auctions and the accompanying slide to the bottom of the social ladder. Those who did not make use of them inevitably left their descendants an indebted property. Janez Lovriha belonged to the upper stratum of the Dolina village community and was also one of the

40 PAK, Oporoke, Antonija Louriha, 12.12. 1897, binder 1898–1899. 41 PAK, Andrej Lovriha, 11.8.1888, binder 1888–1892. 226 Verginella most educated and well-read inhabitants of Breg. His sons participated in educational activities and were part of the community’s upper stratum, but circumstances were not favourable enough to enable them to preserve the property they inherited from their father. Compared to their father, their wealth was visibly diminished. We would have to follow the third generation and its life in the first half of the 20th century to establish whether the descent from the village upper crust into proletarian misery took only a couple of decades, the time of a single generation. Already in the 1870s and 1880s, testators from the poorest families began to divide up houses, stables, yards, gardens, fields and vineyards. Some testators gave precise instructions as to where heirs were to put up a wall, doors and so on. Choosing heirs in the families of Breg was thus carried out under pressure from demographic, economic and social forces. It was conditioned by the number of children, their sex, age, phase of the family cycle, the ratio between consuming and productive family members, wealth, size of the land, the current economic conjuncture and additional income brought into the household by way of market activities, especially baking and selling bread. In the poorest families at the end of the 19th century it was also increasingly influenced by employment in factories in Trieste. In quite a number of families in Breg the money flow increased in the 1890s when the youngest family members took up jobs in the city. Working in the city supplemented the means received by sons from their families, so that the wages earned by peasant sons gave a new shape to inheritance practices, especially in the poorest families.42

4 Land and Money in the Hands of Women

As we have argued, women also employed wills as a useful inheritance law institution which enabled the timely distribution of inheritance among individual family members. In Breg unmarried as well as married women and widows made use of wills (see Tables 10.7–10.10). Women’s inheritance practices pursued the same goals as those of men, regardless of the fact that, as a rule, women owned less property. Similarly to men, women hoped that by writing down their last will and testament they would prevent conflict and unfair distribution of inheritance. Women testators showed concern for protecting the welfare of the family, for rewarding diligence and care while punishing

42 For the process of urbanization of the Trieste region see Davis, Rise From Want. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 227 laziness. In women’s wills a family member who arbitrarily exploited family property before it was rightfully theirs was scolded and punished economically in a special clause. In the opinion of most women testators the duty of each family member was to show diligence in submitting to the family’s survival strategy as set out by the parents.

TABLE 10.5 Marriage status of testator by 10-year periods – Dolina

Not known Single Married Widow All Period No. % No. % No. % No. % No. %

1833–44 0 0 2 6.5 27 87.1 2 6.5 31 100 1845–54 0 0 1 4.8 16 76.2 4 19.0 21 100 1855–64 2 5.9 0 0 24 70.6 8 23.5 34 100 1865–74 0 0 8 25.8 19 61.3 4 12.9 31 100 1875–84 2 4.3 8 17.0 30 63.8 7 14.9 47 100 1885–94 3 6.5 9 19.6 24 52.2 10 21.7 46 100 1895–1904 1 2.4 9 21.4 27 64.3 5 11.9 42 100 All 8 3.2 37 14.7 167 66.3 40 15.9 252 100

TABLE 10.6 Gender of testator by 10-year periods – Ricmanje

Man Woman Married Couple All Period No. % No. % No. % No. %

1825–34 1 50.0 1 50.0 0 0 2 100 1835–44 10 66.7 5 33.3 0 0 15 100 1845–54 10 76.9 3 23.1 0 0 13 100 1855–64 10 52.6 8 42.1 1 5.3 19 100 1865–74 16 72.7 5 22.7 1 4.5 22 100 1875–84 26 78.8 7 21.2 0 0 33 100 1885–94 22 53.7 19 46.3 0 0 41 100 1895–1904 14 58.3 10 41.7 0 0 24 100 All 109 64.5 58 34.3 2 1.2 169 100 228 Verginella

TABLE 10.7 Marriage status of testators by 10-year periods – Ricmanje

Single Married Widow All Period No. % No. % No. % No. %

1825–34 0 0 2 100 0 0 2 100 1833–44 0 0 8 57.1 6 42.9 14 100 1845–54 1 11.1 6 66.7 2 22.2 9 100 1855–64 2 14.3 11 78.6 1 7.1 14 100 1865–74 2 10.0 16 80.0 2 10.0 20 100 1875–84 3 10.3 20 69.0 6 20.7 29 100 1885–94 4 12.9 19 61.3 8 25.8 21 100 1895–1904 1 5.0 17 85.0 2 10.0 20 100 All 13 9.4 99 71.2 27 19.4 139 100

Like their husbands, married women faced the question of whether to leave their property to a single heir and pay off the others in money, or to divide it equally among all of them. Compared to those of men, women’s wills exhibit a more flexible pattern, since in most cases their choice of successors was of lesser economic importance. Only a small number of women, “gospodarice” (“landladies”), who took their husbands under their roof, faced the question of whether to keep their property unified or to divide it among all the children. Until the 1860s women testators favoured sons over daughters as primary heirs. Daughters were paid off in money, land or other property. In many cases women favoured a male lineage, regardless of inheritance law norms. They did not ignore female family members, but it seems that there did not exist a privileged inheritance axis among women testators and their daughters, sisters, mothers and daughters-in-law, as was sometimes the case among upper-class women. Still, at the end of the 19th century, one notices some new tendencies in choosing the primary heir. Among universal heirs one more frequently finds daughters and granddaughters, while sons are given the status of legatees. Although the choice of primary heir is still conditioned by the family economic calculus, the wish to reward helpful behaviour and to express close emotional ties becomes increasingly noticeable. Women’s expression of affection is particularly noticeable in regard to clothing, which testators left to daughters, granddaughters, brides, mothers and sisters, sometimes also husbands. Childless women especially frequently left property to their nieces and nephews. Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 229

TABLE 10.8 Marriage status of testators by 10-year periods – Boljunec

Single Married Widow All Period No. % No. % No. % No. %

1825–1834 2 50,0 1 25,0 1 25,0 4 100 1833–44 2 11.8 14 82.4 1 5.9 17 100 1845–54 1 6.7 10 66.7 4 26.7 15 100 1855–64 1 3.6 24 85.7 3 10.7 28 100 1865–74 5 16.7 17 56.7 8 26.7 30 100 1875–84 4 11.4 24 68.6 7 20.0 35 100 1885–94 2 6.7 21 70.0 7 23.3 30 100 1895–1904 2 7.1 20 71.4 6 21.4 28 100 All 19 10.2 131 70.1 37 19.8 187 100

The dynamics of family relations began to change in Breg only after the gradual abandonment of parent-controlled marital practices and the dowry system, which took place in parallel with the decline of women’s market activity and increasing male employment in Trieste. This led to a redefinition of male and female family roles. The gradual decline of women’s participation in economic production and the increasing reliance of Breg families on factory wages weakened women’s economic power and thus laid the foundation for the disappearance of Breg’s traditional division of labour and family roles. Women’s weakening economic power also diminished their chances of actively intervening in the domestic sphere and shaping family strategies. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the first traces of these changes are noticeable in testamentary practices (see Tables 10.1 and 10.3 above). The number of testators who do not take into account their wife’s situation after their death increases. Simultaneously, the number of women who leave the management of their inheritance to their husbands and do not change their husband’s testamentary decisions also increases (see Table 10.2 above). All this took place at the same time that village authorities began to appeal to women to embrace motherhood and the moral mission that awaited them within the family. According to clerics and other influential individuals in Breg, looking after the material well-being of the family, going to town and managing land and money were not part of women’s nature. They were to be the exclusive domain of men. 230 Verginella

During this period village authorities led a campaign against undisciplined women who were a disgrace to their family and community. The ‘untamed’ women bakers and farmers had to be encouraged to embrace the model of a woman subservient to her husband and the Church, which was the mission of the Society of Mary, founded in Breg in 1904 by Breg’s clergy.43 Mary’s example defined a new family role for the women of Breg, the role of a suffer- ing and passive woman. The model was only acceptable to women who gave up bread making and all other commercial activities in the city. Although following Mary’s example, which encouraged women to be housewives and raise children,44 still allowed women to work in the fields, it also corresponded to the transfer of the economic sphere and the management of family property into the hands of men. Women without money, especially if they were also without a dowry, could only make ‘spiritual’ wills, as churchmen called this kind of unwritten, devotional last testament. In the eyes of God they were freed from the chains of worldly possessions, but only at the price of a new subservience to men. The reciprocity of economic cooperation between husband and wife, which was the engine of all family, kinship and community relations in the ancien régime in Breg, was replaced by economic dependency and a time of socially unprotected woman.

5 Conclusion

The analysis of testaments for the southeast hinterland of Trieste, the area of Breg, shows that the causes of very widespread testament practice among small farmers, men as well as women, have to be attributed, on the one hand, to the influence of Venetian notarial procedure which had spread from the cities of Istria in the agrarian hinterland. On the other hand, demographic, social and economic processes have to be taken into account in the 19th century as they had started to change the traditional structure of those communities which were also experiencing urbanization. The testament was a means of stabilization which made it possible for testators to moderate the influence of new legal norms which were introduced by the Austrian state after the release of land, or they were the tool with which they prevented excessive farm fragmentation and took care of the survival of family members. In Breg’s villages in the 19th century the symbolic and economic value of the land was

43 Marta Verginella, Ženska obrobja [Womens’ Margins] (Ljubljana, 2006), 111. 44 Luisa Accati, The Beauty and the Monster. Discursive and Figurative Representations of the Parental Couple from Giotto to Tiepolo (Fucecchio and Florence, 2006). Succession Choices of Small Farmers Around Trieste 231 still so important that the wealthiest social strata of the population were not prepared to leave the decision about who was to inherit land exclusively to Austrian legislation or their descendant’s will and therefore decided to made a testament. Even though the women in Breg’s villages usually only had disposal of more modest property, in land as in money, than men, their decisions were not substantiality different from those of men. Married women testators were, like their husbands, faced with the question whether they should leave their property only to one child and give the rest small compensation, or distribute their property equally among all of the children. CHAPTER 11 Inheritance Practice and the Elderly in Central Europe: The Example of Western Bohemia, 1700–1850

Alice Velková

1 Introduction

In contrast to other stages of life, old age is to a certain extent difficult to delim- it.1 People perceive old age individually, their own as well as that of others. Some individuals are still active at a very advanced age, others look forward to old age as a time of retirement and cannot wait to see it coming. Although the dates defining old age have been viewed as somewhat arbitrary in the past and present alike, there are important differences between old age in the past and nowadays. In pre-industrial rural society, people’s choices of how they would spend their old years were much more restricted. This final stage of their life was profoundly influenced by a whole range of circumstances, including physical condition, social status or family. Also the percentage of people who did reach advanced old age was significantly lower, for a number of reasons. In the first place, only about one half of the population was able to escape the dangers of childhood, with its high mortality rate. If people survived into adulthood, their chances of reaching a high age increased. Nevertheless, in the pre-industrial period the elderly accounted for only a small percentage of the overall population – in the 18th century, the share of people over sixty did not usually exceed 10%. In France, for instance, this share is estimated at less than 8%, in England at 9% to 10%,2 in Bohemia, estimates exist for

1 For more on this issue, see e.g. Dana Štefanová and Hermann Zeitlhofer, “Alter und Genera- tionbeziehungen in Böhmen. Zum Ausgedinge in nord- und südböhmischen Dörfern in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in Das Alter im Spiel der Generationen. Historische u. Sozialwissenschaftliche Beiträge, eds. Josef Ehmer and Peter Gutschner (Vienna, 2000), 231–58; Josef Ehmer, “Zur Stellung alter Menschen in Haushalt und Familie. Thesen auf der Grundlage von quantita- tiven Quellen aus europäischen Städten seit dem 17. Jahrhundert”, in Der alte Mensch in der Geschichte, ed. Helmut Konrad (Vienna, 1982), 62–106; Pat Thane (ed.), A History of Old Age (Oxford, 2005). 2 David G. Troyansky, “Das 18. Jahrhundert. Rückhalt in Familie und Gemeinde”, in Pat Thane (ed), Das Alter. Eine Kulturgeschichte (Darmstadt, 2005), 175–210 (175).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307865_012 Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 233 people over fifty, whose share was approximately 11%.3 Nevertheless, old age has always been an important phenomenon, associated with various historical concepts, theories and stereotypes.4 One of the typical stereotypes considers traditional society to have been ideal for the co-existence of several generations. According to such beliefs, old people were supposed to be part of an extensive network of relatives, who supported them and cared for them, not leaving them to manage alone. The modern era of industrialization and urbanization is sometimes believed to have disrupted this traditional way of life and torn older people away from this ideal community.5 However, research carried out in this field has shown that in Western Europe, the co-existence of several generations within one household has never been a prevailing model. On the contrary, in numerous societies, including Bohemia, a typical household (simple family household) consisted of the nuclear family, i.e. parents and children;6 when the children grew up, they set up their own families, while their parents usually continued to run their own separate household. People who lived by themselves in their old age were not an exception. Richard Wall states that, at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries, only about 5% of the children continued to live with their parents on a permanent basis after the wedding.7

3 Ludmila Fialová, Pavla Horská, Milan Kučera, Eduard Maur, Jiří Musil and Milan Stloukal, Dějiny obyvatelstva českých zemí [The History of the Inhabitans of Czech Lands] (Prague, 1996), 155. A more general analysis of old age seen in the context of life expectancy or the percentage of the elderly in various European and non-European societies can be found in Peter Laslett, “Necessary Knowledge: Age and Aging in the Societies of the Past”, in Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age, eds. David I. Kertzer and Peter Laslett (Berkeley, Ca., 1995), 3–77. 4 Josef Ehmer, “The ‘Life Stairs’: Aging, Generational Relations, and Small Commodity Production in Central Europe”, in Aging and Generational Relations over the Life Course. A Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Tamara K. Hareven (Berlin and New York, 1996), 53–74 (53); Hans Peter Tews, Soziologie des Alterns (Heidelberg, 1971). 5 Tamara K. Hareven, “Introduction: Aging and Generational Relations Over the Life Course”, in Aging and Generational Relations, ed. Hareven, 1–12 (2). 6 Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, 1972); Peter Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations. Essays in historical sociology (London, New York and Melbourne, 1977); Jan Horský and Markéta Seligová, Rodina našich předků [A Family of our Ancestors] (Prague, 1996). 7 Richard Wall, “Relationships Between the Generations in British Families Past and Present”, in Families and Households: Divisions and Change, eds. Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber (London, 1992), 63–85 (70–76). 234 Velková

Generational exchange was especially important when it involved the transfer of family property, mainly immovable assets.8 Correct timing of this step could favourably influence not only the lives of the family members, but also the economic condition of the transferred property. Not all property holders, however, were lucky enough to be able to freely choose the time of the property transfer, since a whole range of factors affected it, among them inheritance rights. The aim of this article is to show how, in rural society, inheritance law influenced the position of elderly people who, during their working life, owned property which they subsequently transferred to their children. Given that up until nearly the end of the 18th century, the position of regular farmers was reserved for men only, the present study will leave aside the old age of farmers’ wives. In discussing these issues, I will focus on the period 1701–1850, which is of considerable interest for the topic in question, since, in 1787, inheritance law in the Czech Lands was reformed, and the consequent changes had a substantial impact on the rural society. In the first part of this study, I will explain the nature of these reforms and their consequences. I will also use the year 1787 as an important turning point, chronologically separating two different inheritance systems, whose effects on the position of farmers in their old age I will describe. Among other aspects, I will try to find out whether and how the age at which fathers decided to transfer their property was changing. The crucial question I will try to answer is whether fathers could deliberately choose whether they would continue to manage their farm actively in their old age, or even until their death, or whether they would retire. I will also examine whether farmers could freely decide when they wished to transfer their property and to what extent the timing of the transfer was influenced by inheritance law. Last, but not least, I will look into the question of how long after the transfer of property to the following generation fathers continued to live and what was their social position in the last stages of their lives. Geographically, my research has been limited to four localities which in the period under examination were part of the Šťáhlavy estate near Pilsen

8 Alice Velková, Krutá vrchnost, ubozí poddaní? Proměny venkovské rodiny a společnosti v 18. a první polovině 19. století na příkladu západočeského panství Šťáhlavy [Cruel Landlords, Poor Serfs? Transformations of the Rural Family and Society in the 18th and the First Half of the 19th Centuries] (Prague, 2009), 149–246; Dana Štefanová, “K aspektům role příbuzenských vztahů a majetkových transakcí. Situace na frýdlantském panství v letech 1558–1750” [On Certain Aspects of the Role of Kin Relationships and Property Transactions. The Situation in the Estate of Frýdlant in 1558–1750], Historická demografie, 22 (1998), 125–30. Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 235 in Western Bohemia. The domain of Šťáhlavy was one of the smaller Czech dominions,9 including 21 villages and one little town (Starý Plzenec), with a total population of 7,500 inhabitants in the mid-19th century.10 The domain had always been in the possession of a noble house – in 1710–1816 the Cernins of Chudenice, from 1816 onwards the Wallensteins. The domain was predominantly agricultural, although there were important groups who made their living by other means than farming (craftsmen, clerks, workers in the iron mills). My study is based on the data available for Šťáhlavy, the administrative centre of the domain, Starý Plzenec, the only small town on the estate, and two villages (Lhůta and Sedlec). Around 1700, these localities contained a total of approximately 1,000 inhabitants, living in 130 houses. Over the following 150 years, the estate saw considerable population growth, so that by 1850 these four localities contained c. 2,800 people, living in 300 houses. For historical sources, my research is chiefly based on population registers,11 which were used to extract data on more than 15,000 persons and to carry out a family reconstitution. Population registers also allowed me to establish the basic characteristics of the social status of individuals; these characteristics were further refined on the basis of data obtained from registers of

9 Further characteristics of the domain in Alice Velková, “Die Herrschaft Šťáhlavy: Wirtschaft, soziale Strukturen und Demographie”, in Soziale Strukturen in Böhmen in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Markus Cerman and Hermann Zeitlhofer (Vienna and Munich, 2001), 29–41. 10 J. G. Sommer gives the figure of 7,124 inhabitans in 1838: Johann Gottfried Sommer, Das Königreich Böhmen, statistisch-topographisch dargestellt, vol. 6, Pilsner Kreis (Prague, 1838), F. Palacký speaks about 7,617 already 10 years later: František Palacký, Popis Království českého [Description of the Czech Kingdom] (Prague, 1848). Population was Czech, however, authorities were mostly German. 11 Extraction of data was always carried out from the oldest register (i.e. for the register of births from 1651, the register of marriages from 1661 and the death records from 1708) and terminated for the register of births in 1834 (for Lhůta in 1850), for the register of marriages in 1850; for the deceased the data were searched as far as the registers contained in the archives allowed – the most recent registers were available for the village of Lhůta – until 1938, which made it possible to determine with certainty the date of death of all the persons born before 1835. For the other localities, the death records terminate earlier – for Starý Plzenec in 1895, for Sedlec in 1893 and for Šťáhlavy as early as 1877. Státní oblastní archiv [State Regional archives] (hereinafter SRA) Plzeň, roman-catholic (hereinafter r. c.) vicarage at Starý Plzenec, volume number 1–9, 12, 15–18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 31, 34, 35; ibidem, r. c. vicarage at Šťáhlavy, volume number 1–6. 236 Velková real property dating back to 1694–1695,12 cadastres,13 the so-called urbaries / Urbarium (Urbar-Register),14 which prescribed the levies due to the landlord, and population lists from the 19th century.15 Given that this study focuses on the age of property holders, I believe it is useful to briefly describe the typology of this social group. In Bohemia, rural holders of immovable property can be divided into three categories: full peasant holders (sedláci, Bauern), who held the largest amount of land; smallholders (chalupníci, Chalupner or Gärtner), who usually held less than five hectares; and cottagers (domkáři, Häusler), who held cottages without land. The farms on the estate of Šťáhlavy tended to be rather small – only 30% of the holdings were over ten hectares in size. Most families were thus able to manage all the necessary work by themselves. Cottagers usually made their living by practising a craft, or they hired themselves out as day-labourers in the service of full peasant holders or landlords. Although this social group, i.e. the cottagers, came into being only at the beginning of the 18th century, thanks to a huge wave of cottage-building in the course of the 18th century the number of holdings without land eventually outnumbered the existing holdings with land.16 Although there existed three different groups of property holders, the lifecycles and strategies of the first two groups, i.e. full peasant holders and

12 Two isolated records, dating respectively to 1686 and 1691, appear in the land registers. SRA Prague, Collection of State land registers (hereinafter LR) Blovice n. 133–139, 161, 168; LR Plzeň n. 134–136; LR Rokycany, n. 233, 268, 270, 273–276. 13 Národní archiv [National Archives] (hereinafter NA) in Prague, coll. Berní rula, Plzeň district, i. n. 18, fol. 576–583, year 1654; NA, coll. Theresian cadastre (hereinafter TC), Plzeň district 61, Šťáhlavy and Nebílovy domain, rustical statement, i. n. 2252, box 684, year 1719; coll. TC, Region of Plzeň (P–S), Šťáhlavy and Nebílovy domain i. n. 27, folio 238–257, year 1748; coll. TC, Region of Plzeň (R–S), Šťáhlavy and Nebílovy domain, i. n. 90, folio 44–86, year 1757. 14 SRA Praha, coll. Est. Šťáhlavy, Urbary register of the Šťáhlavy-Nebílovy domain, i. n. 6, year 1719. 15 Ibidem, coll. Est. Šťáhlavy Conscription of population of Starý Plzenec, i. n. 169, year 1775; List of subjects, i. n. 43–49, years 1802–1817; Lists of population for the purposes of capitation tax, i. n. 201–204, years 1816–1824. Státní okresní archiv [State Disctrict Archives] Plzeň-south based in Blovice, coll. Archives of the vicarage of Starý Plzenec, i. n. 3a, Condition of souls, year 1838; NA, coll. List of subjects by religion 1651, volume number SM R 109/45, P–K 86. 16 Alice Velková, “Transformations of Rural Society between 1700–1850”, Historica, 13 (2008), 109–158 (115–123); Markus Cerman and Eduard Maur, “Proměny vesnických sociálních struktur v Čechách 1650–1750” [Transformations of the rural social structures in Bohemia 1650–1750], Český časopis historický, 98 (2000), 737–773 (753–757). Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 237 smallholders were rather similar. This similarity consisted in, among other things, a lower rate of migration, age at marriage of children, even the readi- ness with which these social groups accepted the changes of the inheritance law in 1787. In contrast to these two groups, the condition of cottagers, given their means of subsistence, was much closer to the lifecycles of other landless people (craftsmen, farm workers or hired labourers). For this reason, for the purposes of analyzing the strategies of property holders in their old age and their representation in graphs and tables, it is appropriate to separate the category of cottagers from the remaining two social groups, i.e. from those who actually held land. Such a division is also justified by the relative proportion of the three groups, given that during the 18th century the cottagers outnumbered both the full peasant holders and the smallholders, the number of smallholders being relatively small. It is not easy to define precisely what old age means since no official threshold dates exist. Usually people were considered ‘old’ when they started to lose their working capacity, their physical strength and began to develop physical signs of old age, such as grey hair.17 Nor are historians unanimous on when old age starts. For instance, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie places the lower limit of old age at 50 years,18 Karl Kaser defines as ‘old’ people over 6019 and Richard Wall classifies as old persons reaching the age of 65.20 For the purposes of this study, in line with the segmentation made by G. Sundbärg, I chose the age of 50.21 Even though it is true that only very few people ceased their economic activity immediately upon reaching this age limit, there do occur cases of fifty-year-olds who vacated their position in favour of the younger generation. Moreover, setting the threshold between the period of economic activity and retirement at a relatively low age will make it easier to follow the timing of generational exchange. Let us now explore the quantitative representation of old people in the Šťáhlavy domain. The relevant data can only be taken from sources covering

17 Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, vol. 1., Das Haus und seine Menschen 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990). 18 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou. Ein Dorf vor dem Inquisitor 1294 bis 1324 (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, 1993), 238. 19 Karl Kaser, Macht und Erbe. Männerherrschaft, Besitz und Familie im östlichen Europa (1500–1900) (Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, 2000), 222. 20 Richard Wall, “Elderly Persons and Members of Their Households in England and Wales from Preindustrial Times to the Present”, in Aging in the Past, eds. Kertzer and Laslett, 81–106 (81). 21 Gustav Sundbärg, La Suède, son peuple et son industrie. Exposé historique et statistique pub- lié par ordre du gouvernement (Stockholm, 1900). 238 Velková the entire population of the region, and there is just one such source.22 It relates to the year 1820 and shows that men and women of 50+ accounted for 19% and 17% of the population respectively. Another interesting figure shows the percentage of people who died after reaching their fiftieth year compared with the deaths overall (Table 11.1). Although the age of death recorded in the registers is not always accurate, since, especially for very old individuals, it was often overestimated, a certain trend can be recognized. It clearly appears that the proportion of people who died after reaching the age of fifty was progressively increasing, which is linked to a higher life expectancy. At the same time, the structure of the group of individuals who died after their fiftieth year was changing. While, in the first half of the 18th century, up to one third of people who reached the age of fifty died before their sixtieth year, and a maximum of 40% of the population reached the age of 70, in the first half of the 19th century, people who died in the range 50–59 accounted for only one fifth, while almost one half of old people reached the age of 70 and more. Differences between the sexes were of no major significance in the Šťáhlavy region.

TABLE 11.1 Structure of the deceased broken down by age and sex in the Šťáhlavy region, 1708–1834 (in percentages)

Age of death in Period of death Total register 1708–1750 1751–1800 1801–1834 N % N % N % N %

Men 0 316 31.1 420 32.4 402 38.5 1145 34.1 1–4 216 21.2 306 23.6 174 16.7 695 20.7 5–14 74 7.3 99 7.6 61 5.8 232 6.9 15–29 65 6.4 60 4.6 57 5.5 181 5.4 30–49 100 9.8 105 8.1 54 5.2 259 7.7 50+ 208 20.5 292 22.5 267 25.6 766 22.8 No age provided 38 3.7 16 1.2 28 2.7 80 2.4 Total number 1017 100.0 1298 100.0 1043 100.0 3358 100.0

22 SRA Praha, coll. Est. Šťáhlavy, List of population for the purposes of capitation tax, i.n. 202, year 1820. Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 239

Age of death in Period of death Total register 1708–1750 1751–1800 1801–1834 N % N % N % N %

Women 0 246 26.3 363 27.1 328 31.8 932 28.2 1–4 208 22.3 288 21.5 180 17.4 677 20.5 5–14 51 5.5 72 5.4 51 4.9 175 5.3 15–29 52 5.6 57 4.3 58 5.6 169 5.1 30–49 99 10.6 137 10.2 100 9.7 337 10.2 50+ 247 26.5 410 30.6 308 29.8 965 29.2 No age provided 30 3.2 12 0.9 8 0.8 50 1.5 Total number 933 100.0 1339 100.0 1033 100.0 3305 100.0

Note: The research covers the period between the years 1708 and 1834, since in 1708 the oldest register of deaths was established; excerpts from the register of births was terminated to the year 1835, and only the deaths of people born before 1835 were looked up.

TABLE 11.2 Structure of the deceased at 50+ (in percentages) in the Šťáhlavy region broken down by age and sex in 1708–1850 (based on age of death as reported in death registers)

Age of death Period of death 1708–1750 1751–1800 1801–1850 men women men women men women N % N % N % N % N % N %

50–59 70 33.4 69 27.9 92 31.6 115 28.0 81 18.9 105 21.0 60–69 62 29.7 77 31.2 80 27.5 143 34.9 129 30.4 156 31.3 70–79 34 16.3 53 21.5 74 25.4 90 22.0 115 27.1 137 27.5 80+ 43 20.6 48 19.4 45 15.5 62 15.1 101 23.6 101 20.2 Total number 209 100.0 247 100.0 291 100.0 410 100.0 426 100.0 499 100.0 Mean age 66.0 67.0 65.7 64.9 69.6 68.2 of death 50+ Median 62.0 65.0 65.0 64.0 70.0 68.0 240 Velková

It may be expected that these changes life expectancy also became manifest in the way of life of the elderly in the last stages of their lives. Did a longer life expectancy automatically mean that people were economically active for longer? Or, on the contrary, did the number of the elderly who spent their last years enjoying their retirement rights (výměnek, Ausgedinge) increase? And to what extent was the way of life they chose conditioned by the inheritance law in force?

2 Influence of Inheritance Law on Property Transfer

On the estate of Šťáhlavy, as in the rest of Bohemia, the typical features of inheritance law included impartibility of farmland, one main heir and a prevalence of single-family households. No unified inheritance system existed in Bohemia until as late as the end of the 18th century. It was the overlords of different estates who formulated and decided the rules governing inheritance, which, as a consequence, may have differed from region to region.23 Most often the existing holder’s youngest son inherited the holding in the 18th century,24 which was also the case on the estate of Šťáhlavy. The origins of this customary law are not entirely clear. Most probably, the right of the youngest son took hold because it granted a sufficiently long period of tenure to the farm manager, not disrupted by pressure to take over the holding on the part of the heir. However, in practice, throughout the 18th century, this law appeared to be more of a disadvantage. The farmer was often obliged to manage his holding until a relatively late age, in order to be able to hand over the property to an adult heir. If, for a serious reason (e.g. due to very old age or poor health) he was unable to run the household any longer, he could, with his landlord’s assent, transfer it to another of his children. Usually, however, he did not make use of such an option, thus selecting his heir indirectly by not carrying out the property transfer in his lifetime. By continuing to keep his holding until he died, he ensured the inheritance claim for his youngest son, since, according to the inheritance law, the youngest son succeeded to him automatically. It was not rare, however, that the original holder died before his heir reached

23 Eduard Maur, “Das bäuerliche Erbrecht und die Erbschaftspraxis in Böhmen im 16.–18. Jahrhundert”, Historická demografie, 20 (1996), 93–118 (101–15); Velková, “Transformations of Rural Society”, 144–6; eadem, Krutá vrchnost, 150–174. 24 Vladimír Procházka, Česká poddanská nemovitost v pozemkových knihách 16. a 17. století [Czech Serf Holding in Land Transfer Registers in the 16th and the 17th Centuries] (Prague, 1963), 504–5; Maur, “Das bäuerliche Erbrecht”, p. 106. Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 241 majority and could become a regular holder. In such cases, it was necessary to entrust the holding to an interim holder, usually the new husband of the heir’s widowed mother, or possibly the widow herself or the heir’s brother- in-law or older brother. Unfortunately, such a provisional solution tended to reduce the prosperity of the holding and threatened the economic interests of both the landlord and the State,25 since, while being entitled to make use of the proceeds of his agricultural activity, the interim holder was not obliged to pay back debts incurred by his or her predecessors. Often, the result was that the property in question became more and more indebted.26 That is why in 1787 Emperor Joseph II issued a Patent stipulating that if the holder died without leaving a will naming his heir, his eldest son was to be appointed as his successor.27 Already one year before, in 1786, subject holders were granted the right to leave a testament;28 until that time they were not allowed to choose their heirs freely without permission of the landlord.29 On the face of it, this modification of inheritance legislation might not seem very significant – it took place only after farmers had already been allowed to choose their successor freely. The provisions of the Patent were in fact applied only if the father had died without a testament. That however was not a rare event at the turn of the 18th and the 19th centuries, since it took a certain time for the practice of making a testament to take root. This rural society seems to have been rather conservative in this respect, because as late as the early 19th century, making a written testament was not very widespread. If a farmer expressed his will, he usually did so orally, and his oral statement was

25 Alice Velková, “Staatliches Eingreifen in die Beziehung zwischen Gutsherrschaft und Untertanen. Zu Erbrecht und ländlicher Familienstruktur in Westböhmen an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert”, in Untertanen, Herrschaft und Staat in Böhmen und im ‘Alten Reich’. Sozialgeschichtliche Studien zur Frühen Neuzeit, eds. Markus Cerman and Robert Luft (Munich, 2005), 153–75 (155). 26 Procházka, Česká poddanská nemovitost, 421. 27 Joseph Kropatschek (ed.), Handbuch aller unter der Regierung des Kaisers Joseph II. für die k. k. Erbländer eingegangenen Verordnungen und Gesetze vom Jahre 1780 bis 1789, vol. 13 (Vienna, 1789), 98. 28 Kropatschek (ed.), Handbuch, vol. 10 (Vienna, 1788), 89–92. 29 Some of the Josephine reforms mentioned here are analyzed by Karl Gutkas, “Probleme der Landwirtschaft zur Zeit Maria Theresias”, in Die Auswirkungen der Theresianisch- josephinischen Reformen auf die Landwirtschaft und die ländliche Sozialstruktur Niederösterreichs, ed. Helmut Feigl. Vorträge und Diskussionen des ersten Symposiums des Niederösterreichischen institutes für Landeskunde Geras 9.–11. Oktober 1980 (Vienna, 1982), 1–35; Roman Rosdolsky, Untertan und Staat in Galizien: die Reformen unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II., (Mainz, 1992) (ed. Ralph Melville). 242 Velková afterwards registered in special books which recorded contracts and arrangements concluded by the subjects. A certain reluctance to ponder over the end of one’s life may have played a role here, as well as the fact that the farmer’s death was not usually preceded by a long illness which would turn his thoughts in that direction. Also the cost of paying for drafting a written testament was probably not negligible. The importance of the Patent consisted primarily in the fact that it helped push through a new model which proved to be more beneficial to all the stake- holders. Since its provisions were applied when no testament was left, other farmers could see the practical advantages of the new model, which they would perhaps have been reluctant to adopt. One reason for this reluctance was that farmers tended to be rather conservative in their thinking – this also applied to the Šťáhlavy region where, in the beginning, most farmers continued to follow the original inheritance practice, although they were not obliged to do so. It is also true, however, that the new inheritance order profoundly changed the position of the individual family members and it is therefore understandable that farmers could not change their original strategy overnight. Since for many decades (even centuries) it had been firmly established that the youngest son became the heir, farmers were used to taking steps to secure the future of those children who did not inherit. Considering these circumstances, it was simply not possible to take away the right to inherit from the youngest son, who had often been preparing for his role for many years, and give it to the eldest – who had often settled down elsewhere. Only those families which were set up after the Patent had been issued could adapt their strategies to the new situation, therefore it was only the following generation, born after the law had changed, who accepted the new rules with more openness and willingness. Let us now consider how inheritance law was implemented on the Šťáhlavy estate (see Table 11.3). Here, for most of the 18th century, the prevailing pattern was that the farmer passed the property over to his youngest son (until 1787, such transfers accounted for 72% of all the cases when the farmer had at least two children). Other children were selected only if the rightful heir was unable to take over the property (e.g. he was still minor or disabled) and the farmer refused to carry on. As a consequence, the father was usually constrained to run his farm for a very long time before he was at all able to pass his farmstead over to his youngest son. In most cases, however, the father did not live long enough for his youngest son to reach majority: 78% of the land holders (i.e. full peasant holders and smallholders) and 93% of the cottagers (i.e. landless people) held their property until their death. However, even not managing one’s farm for Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 243

TABLE 11.3 Structure of heirs of fathers handing over only one holding to their children in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850

Heir Time of retirement 1701–1787 1788–1820 1821–1850 N % N % N %

An only son 69 27.8 34 21.1 38 24.4 Youngest son 93 37.5 48 29.8 26 16.7 Eldest son 14 5.6 29 18.0 43 27.6 Other sons 9 3.6 14 8.7 15 9.6 Daughter (father also had a son) 13 5.2 10 6.2 16 10.3 Daughter (father had no son) 38 15.3 21 13.0 10 6.4 Not determined 12 4.8 5 3.1 8 5.1 Total 248 100.0 166 100.0 177 100.0

so long could guarantee economic continuity. What happened was rather the contrary, since most heirs were still minors, i.e. younger than 24. Almost one half of all heirs were under 20 when their fathers died and 29% of the heirs had not even reached the age of 10 (Figure 11.1). It is therefore not surprising that, quite often, after the farmer had died, a provisional administrator had to be appointed. This was the case for 47% of the land holders and for 42% of the cottagers (Table 11.4). Most frequently it was the deceased farmer’s widow or her new husband who were appointed as provisional managers of the holding. Such was the case for 90% of the land-holders and 80% of the cottagers. If the future heir was already approaching adulthood, a provisional administrator may not always have s been formally appointed. However, that did not mean that such a young heir would have been immediately able to run the farm by himself. Even there, his mother or an elder brother or another relative usually assisted him in gradually taking over his responsibilities. The need to appoint a provisional administrator after the farmer’s death also had a bearing on the age at which the heir of the holding (both in case of full peasant holders and smallholders) assumed his full responsibilities as the manager of the farm. Paradoxically, in a situation when an administrator had to be appointed, the moment of the takeover by the heir was usually delayed, despite the fact that, formally, the heir became the holder right after his father’s death. If the person appointed as provisional administrator was the 244 Velková

TABLE 11.4 Property transfers broken down by economic continuity in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850

Circumstances of property transfers 1701–1787 1788–1820 1821–1850 N % N % N %

Full peasants holders and smallholders During the father’s lifetime 35 21.5 35 54.7 37 58.7 After father’s death to heir 52 31.9 16 25.0 18 28.6 After father’s death to provisional administrator 76 46.6 13 20.3 8 12.7 Total 163 100.0 64 100.0 63 100.0

Cottagers During the father’s lifetime 6 7.1 32 33.0 39 41.9 After father’s death to heir 43 50.6 38 39.2 43 46.2 After father’s death to provisional administrator 36 42.4 27 27.8 11 11.8 Total 85 100.0 97 100.0 93 100.0

widowed housewife’s new husband, he usually tried to maintain his position for as long as possible, even when the rightful heir had long reached majority.30 Thus, before 1787, heirs on average took charge of the holding no sooner than at age 28. After the change in the inheritance law, which led to a radical drop in the need for provisional administrators (in 1788–1820 they were appointed only in 20% of cases and in 1821–1850 in only 13% of the property transfers), the average age at which the heir actually took charge of the holding decreased by more than three years. As for the fathers, they considered it best to transfer the holding to their heir before he reached 25 (see Table 11.5). To summarize, after 1787 the age at marriage tends to coincide with the age at which full peasant holders and smallholders take charge of the farm (Table 11.6). This is confirmed by my research which shows that, after 1787, fathers in the Šťáhlavy region indeed preferred transferring the holding to their son on the occasion of his marriage.31 Linking the heir’s marriage with

30 For more on this topic see Alice Velková, “Marriage and Property Transfer in Rural Western Bohemia 1700–1850”, in Inheritance Practices, Marriage Strategies and Household Formation in European Rural Societies, ed. Anne-Lise Head-König. Rural History in Europe, 7 (Turnhout, 2012), 101–125 (115). 31 Idem, 117. Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 245

TABLE 11.5 Age at which heirs took charge of the holding inherited from their fathers in the Šťáhlavy region, 1701–1850

Age Full peasant holders and smallholders Cottagers 1701–1787 1788–1850 1701–1787 1788–1850 N % N % N % N %

15–19 6 5.6 16 13.1 9 17.0 15 11.1 20–24 31 28.7 55 45.1 6 11.3 32 23.7 25–29 31 28.7 32 26.2 16 30.2 37 27.4 30–34 20 18.5 11 9.0 10 18.9 28 20.7 35–39 13 12.0 4 3.3 8 15.1 16 11.9 40+ 7 6.5 4 3.3 4 7.5 7 5.2 Total 108 100.0 122 100.0 53 100.0 135 100.0 Not known 37 25.5 24 16.4 26 32.9 46 24.4 Mean age 108 28.0 122 24.8 53 28.7 135 28.0 Median 108 27.0 122 24.0 53 28.0 135 27.0

the transfer of property allowed the fathers to carry out a transparent division of inheritance shares among those of their children who had no inheritance entitlement to the holding, since it was usually the dowry brought by the heir’s bride which was used to pay out the individual shares. In conclusion, what we observe after 1787 is not only the decrease in the mean age of the takeover of the holding, but also the mean marriage age, which applies to virtually all the social categories involved. One of the underlying reasons for this change consists in the father’s own initiative, since after 1787 the father much more often lived long enough to see his heir come of age. The inter vivos transfers between smallholders and full peasant holders accounted for 57% of the cases (compared to 21.5% prior to 1788), and for 39.5% in the cottagers’ category (compared to only 7.3% prior to 1788). This phenomenon is all the more interesting if we bear in mind that the mere change of inheritance rules, i.e. giving preference to the oldest instead of the youngest son, resulted in a situation where, at the moment of the heir’s maturity, the father was on average younger than in the previous period. If, despite that, the age at which the heir married and took over the holding further decreased, what it actually means is that, as I will show in more detail further in the text, the father, of his own accord, decided to give up his own economic activity at a younger age than was customary in the previous period. 246 Velková

TABLE 11.6 Age at marriage of heirs of paternal holdings, 1701–1850

Age Full peasant holders and smallholders Cottagers 1701–1787 1788–1850 1701–1787 1788–1850 N % N % N % N %

15–19 4 3.3 15 12.5 0 – 3 2.2 20–24 55 45.1 61 50.8 21 31.9 56 41.2 25–29 45 36.9 33 27.5 27 40.9 48 35.3 30–34 13 10.6 9 7.5 12 18.2 20 14.7 35–39 4 3.3 2 1.7 3 4.5 8 5.9 40+ 1 0.8 0 – 3 4.5 1 0.7 Total 122 100.0 120 100.0 66 100.0 135 100.0 Not known 23 15.9 26 17.8 13 16.5 46 24.4 Mean age 122 25.3 120 23.7 66 27.5 135 26.2 Median 122 25.0 120 23.0 66 25.5 135 25.0

This model clearly shows that in the 18th century farmers did not have much choice in determining how they would spend their old age. Inheritance law de facto predetermined their way of life. If a father did not wish to run his farm until his death, he usually had to give up the idea of handing it over to the youngest son and had to choose another heir. Indeed, before 1787, half of those fathers who did not keep their holding until their death eventually transferred the property to one of their older sons or to a daughter’s husband. Let us now explore at what age fathers usually gave up farming and consequently for how long they could enjoy their retirement. Here again the answer depended on whether the farmer wished to preserve the inheritance claim for his youngest son. There were also differences between landholders and cottagers, who usually earned their living as craftsmen, day- labourers or worked in iron mills. For the cottagers, passing on their cottage meant running the risk of becoming totally dependent on their heir when they grew old. Not all the cottagers were able to secure themselves, along with the transfer of their property, and their retirement rights, which in Czech rural society was an important institution for the security of old people.32 However

32 On the issue of retirement rights see Hermann Zeitlhofer, “Arbeit und Alter in ländli- chen Gesellschaften der Frühen Neuzeit. Die Erwerbstätigkeit im Alter zwischen eigenem Besitz und den Zwängen einer ‘Ökonomie des Auskommens’ ”, Jahrbuch für Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 247

TABLE 11.7 Mean age of fathers at time of property transfer in 1701–1787 and their age at death

Age of fathers Full peasants holders and Cottagers smallholders All property Only inter All property Only inter transfers vivos transfers vivos

Father’s age by property transfer 57.8 66.0 56.6 62.5 Father’s age by death 59.4 73.3 57.1 71.3 Number 140 30 83 6 All fathers 163 35 85 6 % 100.0 21.5 100.0 7.1

the retirement rights of the cottagers (i.e. at maximum the right to be provided accommodation and certain contributions for life by the heir of the property) were not a form of social security, since they mostly included only the entitlement to live in an outhouse. In certain cases, the heir pledged to maintain his parents after they were no longer capable of work, which only strengthened the system of dependence. This is probably one of the reasons why not only before 1788, but also after that year a significantly lower number of cottagers, compared to full peasant holders and smallholders, carried out the property transfer during their lifetime. Holding a cottage until their death, represented

Wirtschafts-geschichte, 1 (2008), 31–54; Josef Grulich, “Zu ausgewählten Aspekten des Familien- und Lebenszyklus”, Historická demografie, 20 (1996), 9–56; Dana Štefanová, “Soziale Schichtung in der Herrschaft Frýdlant”, Historická demografie, 20 (1996), 177–228; Dana Štefanová and Markus Cerman, “Lebensunterhalt und Erwerb im Alter in ländli- chen Gesellschaften der frühen Neuzeit”, in Historik nechtěných dějin. Sborník příspěvků věnovaných prof. dr. Eduardu Maurovi [Historian of Unwanted History. Anthology in Honour of Professor Eduard Maur], eds. Marie Koldinská and Alice Velková (Prague, 2003), 83–107; Alice Klášterská, “Forma sociálního zabezpečení na vesnici v 18. a první polovině 19. století. (Výměnek v pozemkových knihách vesnice Lhůty u Šťáhlav) [A Form of Social Security in the Country in the 18th and in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Peasant Retirement Arrangements in Land Transfer Registers of the Village of Lhůty u Šťáhlav)]”, Historická demografie, 21 (1997), 95–132; Josef Grulich, “Das länd- liche Ausgedinge in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der Wahrnehmung sozialer Kategorien im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert”, in Menschen – Handlungen – Strukturen. Historisch-anthropologische Zugangsweisen in den Geschichtswissenschaften, eds. Václav Bůžek and Dana Štefanová (České Budějovice, 2001), 343–69. 248 Velková at least a certain security if one day they became unable to maintain themselves by work. They would always be able to sell the cottage, even at the cost of not transferring it to their children. On the other hand, even cottagers had to put up with the pressure exercised by the heir, who was not willing to wait for the transfer until his father’s death. As I will demonstrate later, such a situation arises in particular after 1787, when, due to the reform of the inheritance law, fathers are usually much younger when their heirs come of age, compared to the previous period, If a cottager did decide to transfer his cottage during his lifetime before 1788, the mean age of the transaction was 62.5 years, meaning that he spent on average eight to nine years in retirement. These data, however, must be taken only as indicative, since only six out of eighty-five cottagers decided to carry out such a transfer during their lifetime, while all the others held the cottage until their deaths. Compared with that, landholders who transferred their holdings to their sons did so on average 3.5 years later than the cottagers, and went on to enjoy their retirement rights for no longer than seven years. In contrast to cottagers, the retirement rights of former landholders were much more extensive, providing sound security for their old age. Apart from the right to accommodation they could also comprise contributions in cash and, especially, in kind, which could, if necessary, be sold by the retired person. In case of a poor harvest, the retired could even be better off than the active farmer, since the latter was always obliged to provide the same amount of contributions, regardless of whether the harvest was good or bad, even if his own living standard declined. The relatively advantageous position of former landholders as regards security in their old age may have been one of the reasons why they did not insist on running the farm until their death. To this end, as has already been said, half of the fathers who transferred their property inter vivos, preferred an heir other than their youngest son, precisely to avoid the necessity to keep farming longer The fact that full peasant holders and smallholders, compared to cottagers, transferred their holdings more frequently inter vivos, but were on average older than cottagers at the moment of the transfer, may have had several causes. In the first place, the data may be slightly biased due to the low number of such cases. Another reason may be the lower age of the cottagers at death. In general, in the period before 1788, they died earlier, maybe even prematurely, in comparison with full peasant holders, and who consequently did not have time to carry out the transfer or had performed it at an earlier age. Let us now see how this pattern changed after the inheritance law was reformed in 1787. As we have already pointed out, the reform did not find Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 249 expression in the family strategy of farmers immediately after it had been introduced. It became more widespread only in the following generation of farmers, as is clearly shown also from the research on the Šťáhlavy estate. Although it is true that here, after the Patent was issued, the number of eldest sons appointed as heirs increased, in 1788–1820, the prevailing pattern still consisted in appointing the youngest (in 48% of the cases). In contrast, after 1820 it became evident that fathers had already fully realized the advantages of the new inheritance system and started to apply it in practice. If a father decided between at least two children, he preferred the elder one in 43% of the cases, and the younger only in 26%. But the chief contribution of the reforms carried out in 1786–1787 consisted in giving the father more freedom to choose the child to whom to give the property. The fact that fathers really did try to choose the best possible solution is demonstrated by the increasing percentage of other than youngest children who were appointed as heirs: 31% after 1820 compared to 17% before 1788, or 24% in 1788–1820. The changes in the strategy adopted by farmers became apparent on several different levels. First and foremost, after 1820 cases of heirs who were still children at the time of the transfer virtually disappeared. While in 1701–1787 as many as 31% of the heirs were under 15, after 1820 they accounted for 6%. In parallel with this trend, the necessity to entrust the management of the farm into the hands of a provisional administrator after the farmer’s death became much less frequent. Both among full peasant holders and smallholders, as well

30,0 28,0 26,0 24,0 22,0 20,0 18,0 16,0 1701‒1787 1788‒1820 % 14,0 1821‒1850 12,0 10,0 8,0 6,0 4,0 2,0 0,0 0‒4 5‒9 10‒14 15‒19 20‒24 25‒29 30‒34 35‒39 40+ age FIGURE 11.1 Age of heirs at the time of their fathers’ retirement 250 Velková

TABLE 11.8 Age of fathers at the time of property transfer carried out in 1788–1850 and their age of death

Age of fathers 1788–1820 1821–1850 All property Only inter All property Only inter transfers vivos transfers vivos

Full peasants holders and smallholders Father’s age by property transfer 59.4 60.8 58.6 59.2 Father’s age by death 66.1 73.5 66.2 72.7 Number 59 32 57 33 All fathers 64 35 62 37 % 100.0 54.7 100.0 59.7

Cottagers Father’s age by property transfer 59.8 65.5 60.8 61.9 Father’s age by death 62.5 73.2 64.6 70.7 Number 93 31 88 39 All fathers 97 32 93 43 % 100.0 33.0 100.0 46.2

as among cottagers, this transitional measure had to be adopted in only 12% of the cases. Also, the provisional periods became shorter, since most minor heirs were over 15, and were approaching adulthood. It is quite evident, therefore, that farmers were no longer so often constrained to farm until their deaths – this occurred in 41% of property transfers among the landholders and in 58% among the cottagers. The decreasing number of appointed provisional administrators, however, suggests that fathers, especially cottagers, kept the tenure of their property until their deaths for strategic reasons rather than because they had no adult son. The changed inheritance practice thus allowed fathers to decide how they would spend their old age – whether they would continue to actively manage their holding or whether they would delegate this role to their successor. At the same time, they were able to choose the most suitable time for their retirement. What, in conclusion, was the mean age at which fathers decided to transfer their property to their successors after 1820? Since the holding after that year was most often transferred to the eldest son, full peasant holders and smallholders usually gave their farms over to their sons much earlier in their life Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 251 than in the 18th century. On average, fathers gave up work at approximately fifty-nine, i.e. seven years earlier than in the period before 1788. They could therefore expect to spend up to fourteen years in retirement – which is twice as long as in the 18th century. There is of course one other possible factor behind the earlier retirement of the farmers which needs to be considered, namely the pressure exercised by the adult heir, who wished to become independent. It is true that when his eldest son reached his majority, the father may have been considerably younger than when his youngest son came of age. In this respect, the course of events would strongly depend on the father’s power and authority, since nothing could make him transfer the holding contrary to his own will. As for the cottagers, no substantial change occurred comparable with the landholders – after 1820 the average age of fathers who handed over the cottage to their heirs decreased by less than one year, to sixty-two years. Cottagers died at earlier ages than full peasant holders and smallholders, and consequently they spent on average only nine years living on retirement benefits.

3 Activities of Property Holders in Old Age

The mean age of farmers at the time of the property transfer provides us with only indicative information on when fathers actually decided to give up their active involvement in running their property. The picture of how many farmers were still working at a given age before 1788, and how many were already enjoying retirement, becomes more focused when taking into account how fathers themselves perceived their age, i.e. when they felt too old to manage their holding. Let us now look at the individual age categories and how the change of inheritance practice was reflected in this area As regards men in their fifties, hardly any were retired – only 1–2% among both cottagers and landholders. This finding is by no means surprising since most people were still physically fit at that age. They neither considered themselves old nor were they perceived as such by the society. Moreover, given that the mean age of marriage was between 25 and 30 years among men, it was only in their fifties that they had adult and teenage children. More remarkable, however, is the pattern in the other age groups. Among the cottagers, the proportion of active men remained roughly the same among the 60-year-olds and 65-year-olds. Only among cottagers in their seventies can we register a slight increase in the number of men who had already handed over the property to their successor (in total 6% of the cottagers). The proportion of cottagers who were still active continued to be quite substantial (83%) even among 75-year-olds. 252 Velková

100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 1791‒1787 % 50 45 1821‒1850 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 50 55 60 65 70 75 age FIGURE 11.2 Still active full peasants holders and smallholders by their age

As concerns full peasant holders and smallholders, the proportion who were still actively working in each of these age groups was relatively lower, compared to cottagers, but the percentages were still significant. Up to 93% of 60-year- olds and 89% of 65-year-olds who chose their child as a successor continued to manage their holdings by themselves. Even among the 70-year-olds, no substantial decline can be observed (with 82% of the farmers still active). It is only in the age group of 75+ that the percentage of men who decided to retire increased (37.5%). These data confirm the pattern outlined above, that most fathers kept the holding until their death. As concerns men in their fifties or sixties, the decision not to transfer the property might seem natural. Concerning the higher age categories it seems likely that farmers, for one reason or another, made this decision out of necessity rather than choosing to spend their last years in that way of their own accord. The changed behaviour of farmers after they started to fully exploit the reform of inheritance practice supports this hypothesis. More conspicuous changes occurred among full peasant holders and smallholders. After 1820, even in the category of the 50-year-olds, the number of fathers who handed over their holding to an heir increased, accounting for 8–13%. A truly distinctive change took place in the behaviour of fathers aged 60–65. This was the age most fathers started to consider most suitable for a property transfer – among the 60 year-olds, as many as 75% were still active, Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 253

100 95 90 85 80 75 70 65 60 55 1791‒1787 % 50 45 1821‒1850 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 50 55 60 65 70 75 age FIGURE 11.3 Still active cottagers by their age while among men five years older, the share of non-active men prevailed at almost 60%. Farming after the age of 70 was altogether exceptional, involving a mere 10% of the fathers. A similar change in behaviour can be noticed among the cottagers, although, for the reasons given above, some fathers preferred to keep the holding until their death. Among the fifty-year-olds, only 7% of the cottagers decided to carry out the transfer. Even in this category, most men considered an age between 60 and 65 to be the most suitable for retirement. Nevertheless, at the age of 65, 65% of the men still kept their holding. Even among the 70+ category, the cottagers who kept the property prevailed (52%). Only in the category of 75+ did the share of active men drop considerably, to one third. Not all the fathers who handed the property over to their heirs, however, gave up their active work. Even here, the behaviour of farmers in the 18th and 19th centuries varied, since, especially for full peasant holders and smallholders, other ways of spending their old age were available. One option was formally to transfer the holding to an heir while insisting on retaining the entitlement to run the farm for an unspecified period of time. Altogether, 9% of the fathers opted for this strategy, since it allowed them to divide inheritance shares among their offspring more easily, the impulse being in most cases the heir’s marriage. The property was thus formally entrusted to the heir, while the father reserved to himself the right to run the farm for as long as he wished. 254 Velková

Still other fathers transferred their farm to their son and retired, but later found that they did not yet wish to give up a working life, so they bought another property on which they could continue farming. Among the 65-year- olds, this was the case in 6% of the fathers, who were all rather well off and after retirement had sufficient means to take such a step. Sharing one place to live between the older and the younger generations was not always smooth, especially if there were changes in the new farmer’s family or if the new manager decided to sell the farm. For this reason, a father may sometimes have decided to move away from the original farm even if he did not intend to continue farming elsewhere. Instead of living on his retirement pension, he bought a small cottage where he could spend his final days in peace and quiet. In the Šťáhlavy region, this strategy was also sometimes adopted mostly by very old men. Among the men in their seventies, 8% made this choice. In this age group, 70% of farmers were already retired, and, of the remaining 22%, one half were still running their farms while the other half had transferred the farm to a son but reserved to themselves the right to farm the land without any time-limit. The older the farmer, the more frequently he chose formally to transfer the farm while keeping the theoretical possibility of managing the property himself. In this way fathers tried to safeguard a peace- ful life for themselves and their wives together with the younger generation. Among the fathers aged 75, none held a farm himself, but 21% were still able to claim their entitlement to the farm.

4 Conclusion

Owing to the inheritance system applied until the end of the 18th century, it was unusual for older men who owned a property to enjoy life in retirement. As they were obliged to wait for their heir to reach majority, they often had to work on the farm until a very old age, often until they died. Later, the reform of inheritance law enabled the fathers to choose a solution which they considered best. The most common model was where a father, in his sixties, transferred the property to his heir, while retaining a certain amount of control over the farm as a retired member of the family. Thanks to higher life expectancy, fathers could enjoy life in retirement for an increasingly long time. It is likely that the idea of living in retirement was not perceived as something dreadful since fathers did not insist on managing their farm at any cost. Continuing to run a farm until death typically occurred among men who did not reach very old age – those who died on average at age 56 before 1787, and at age 59 after 1820. To summarize, the ideal age for retirement was around Inheritance Practice and the Elderly 255

60, when farmers were still in good shape and could hope to live for a long time. What does this imply? I believe that this confirms that fathers generally enjoyed a great degree of authority which did not disappear even after they had transferred the farm to a son. Fathers did not seem to be afraid that by retir- ing they would become useless or that their status would decline significantly. Very likely, fathers continued to participate in the administration of the farm by giving advice or giving a hand. Thanks to the model whereby a father retired relatively early and gave the farm over to his heir, cases of three generations living together, rather limited in the 18th century, became more frequent. The forms of this co-existence varied considerably and would make an interesting subject for a future study.

Index

Administration Collective 4, 8, 17, 79 Austrian 217 Community 18, 148, 163, 182 British 52, 54, 59 Agrarian activity 30, 35, 52, 77, 98, 169, Carniolan 207 170, 235 Ottoman 13, 51, 72n5, 73–80, 88, 98, 105 Conflicts 121 Serbian 107 Fama 117–122, 132 Trieste, Diocese of 207 Justice 121 Venetian 51, 209–210, 230 Mixed agricultural-pastoral 98 Authorities 14–15, 144 Neighbourhood 121, 124, 132 Calvinists 124, 126, 138, 171 Relations and judiciary procedure 121 Catholic 121–122, 124–128, 131 Religious 154 Eastern Church 145, 149, 166, 191 Peasants 182, 189–206, 207–213, 232–255 Lutherans 124–126, 129, 138 Culture 3–4, 7–8, 47–48, 63, 67–68 Ottoman 54n32, 105 Protestant 121–122, 128 Defter (Ottoman tax poll) see Serbia Reformers 127, 151 Demographic regions 2 Village 229–230 Domkáři, Häusler (cottagers) 236. See also Western Church 145, 150, 191 Socio-economic groups See also Religion Eastern Europe 2–6, 10, 96, 100, 103–105 Berkner, Lutz 48 Elderly Bohemia 232–255 In Bohemia 232–255 Inheritance Law of 1787 234, 241–242 In England 17, 23 Marriage 244–245, 251, 253 In Greece 56–57, 61–62 Old age 232–233, 237, 251–254 In Mediterranean Europe 7, 57, 62 Provisional administration 243–244, In Northern Europe 18, 23–46 249–250 In Poland 189–206 Typology of rural holders 236 Authority 66 Western Bohemia 16, 232–255 Cared for 7–8, 18, 23, 32, 38, 204 See also Inheritance, Elderly, Social groups Changing role of the elderly 171, 204, and Headship 240–242, 249–251, 254–255 Children 24 Cambridge Group for the History of Definition of old age 198, 232–233, 237 Population and Social Structure 2, 81, Domestic violence 18 90 Economic activity 15 Census-type documents and manu- Heads of household 204, 240–249, scripts 12–13, 17, 19, 26, 42, 44, 49–50, 254–255 58–59, 76, 78, 82, 93, 107, 124, 143, 147, Independence 17 171–177, 179, 182–183, 218, 235, 236 Life expectancy for older generation 64, Chalupníci, Chalupner or Gärtner 254 (smallholders) 236. See also Living arrangements 4, 12, 24–25, 28, 57, Socio-economic groups 62–63, 240, 242–246 Co-habitation/co-residence 8, 11–12, 24–26, Men 16, 62, 246, 251–255 29–30, 32, 35, 38, 41, 43–44, 57, 59–63, Old people 5, 12, 16–17, 189–206, 232–255 66, 86, 91, 169, 180–181 Poverty 17, 36 258 Index

Elderly (cont.) Migration 53–56, 64–65, 67–68 Security 246–248 Revolution 54, 59 Stereotypes 233 See also Administration, Households, Women 17, 57, 62, 198 Inheritance and Migration Wymowa 199. See also Poland See also Family Households, Inheritance Hajnal, John 2–3, 6, 8, 10, 47, 100 and Widows Headship see Households England/Britain 4–5, 8, 18–19, 33, 45–46, 48 Herlihy, David 3 European families 1–20 Hide system (Hufenverfassung) 191, 206 Historical demographers 2 Fama 14, 117–122, 132–133 Hospitals 4, 136, 204 Family Households Adultery 127 In Bohemia 233 Calvinist families 172–175, 178. See also In England/Britain 26–29, 48 Religion In Finland 26–29, 33 Care 23 In Germany 26–29 Debt 220–222 In Greece 56–68 European families 1–20 In Hungary 168–185 Famelia (family) 50 In Northern Europe 26–29, 35 Illicit sex 127, 133, 135 In Norway 26–29 Mothers 23, 37–38 In Romania 170, 179 Neglect 18 In Russia 26–29, 33 Networks 23, 37 In Serbia 83–92, 108–109 North European families 21–46 In Sweden 26–29 Peasant 69–92, 93–115, 168–185, 189–206, In Transylvania 169–170 207–231, 232–255 Change over time 59–62 Poor 36, 226 Christian 78 Reconstitution 13, 16, 28, 69–92 Definition 24–25, 82, 86, 94–97, 180, 185 Relationships 18 Divorce 182. See also Religion and Romanian 179 Hungary Rural 26, 30–35, 69–92, 93–115, 168–185, Family members 34, 66, 89 189–206, 207–231, 232–255 Headship 15, 19, 33, 37, 56, 58, 60–61, Secrets 18–19 64–66, 86, 89, 104, 205, 228, 242–247, Sexuality 127–131 249–251 Sociologists 2 Households, godparenthood and Structures 16 kinship 161–166 Urban 26, 36–42 Identifying a household 50, 80–83 Ties (strong, weak) 8–9, 12, 23, 86 Illicit sex 127, 133, 135 See also Elderly, Household, Widows and Joint /stem 3, 5, 7n28, 48, 94–100, Women 168–169, 181–182 Finland 21–46. See also Widows Lodgers 25, 42, 44. See also Socio-economic groups Greece 47–68 Multiple and extended (complex or Households and Inheritance 56–58, strong) 1–2, 5, 7–8, 13, 48, 57, 59–60, 59–67 62–64, 67–68, 81, 99, 176, 254–255 Island of Kythera 12, 51–52 Nuclear/weak/simple 1–4, 7–8, 12, 48, 59, Marriage 58–59 66, 68, 169, 176, 233 Index 259

Patterns 49, 63–68, 69–92, 93–116 Joint household system see Households Rural 93–115, 107, 169, 170 Jurisdiction 14 Separate (independent) household 25, 66 Kaser, Karl 99, 100 Single person households (solitary) 25, Kertzer, David 5 39, 57–58, 60–62 Kinship 1–2, 4, 10 Structure 26, 57–59, 66–67, 81, 85, 89, biological 16 93–116, 168–185 support 17, 38 System of Kythera (Greece) 56–68 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane 3, 149, 161–162 Taxation system based on households 102, 105. See also Laslett, Peter 2–4, 6, 8, 10–11, 23, 47–48 Administration, Serbia and Taxation Classification scheme 13. See also Urban 25 Models Working class households 40 Le Play 48 Zadruga 94–107 Life expectancy 64 Hungary 168–185. See also Households, Loan sharks 15, 213–217 Marriage and Religion Macfarlane, Alan 3 Illegitimate children 18 Macro-regional approaches 5–6, 9–10 Industrialisation and urbanisation 47–68. Macro-regional family 4 See also Greece Marriage and family patterns 2–3, 14, 47, Inheritance 15–16, 57, 63, 65–66, 80, 96, 100, 58–59, 113, 123, 128–129, 142, 155, 103–105, 121, 199–200, 240, 254–255 244–245 In Bohemia 232–255 Anglican church 126–127 Law in 1787 234, 241–243, 245–246 Age at marriage 24, 39, 56, 58, 63–64, In Greece 56–68 178, 198, 244, 251, 253 In Serbia 103–105 Catholic 125–127, 131, 133, 136, 139, 141 In Slovenia 207–231 Calvinists 126, 139 Age categories and inheritance Children 219–220 practice 151, 252–254 Clandestine marriage 123–124, 127, 129 Deserted farms 200 Common law marriages 178, 183–184 Land transmission 32, 35, 44, 66, 200–201, Practice among Hungarians 184 203–204, 226–231, 234, 240–254 Consent 122–123 Marriage 244–245, 254 Council of Trent 122, 125–126, 129, 147, Ownership of land 64, 66, 236–237, 241, 149n21, 150, 152, 156, 162 243, 245–248 Courts 127, 130–131, 133, 139–141 Partible 63 Disputes 117–141 Provisional administration 243–244 Divorce 126, 182 Retirement and retirement’s contracts Eastern European marriage pattern 100 25, 32, 199, 203, 206, 245, 248 Ecclesiastical jurisdiction 122–123 System Ausgedinge, Altenteil, kar, European marriage pattern 100–103 syting 32 Formation of the couple 122–124 Wills 209–231, 241 Fornication 129 Women’s inheritance practices 226–229 Germanic law 128 See also Widows and Women Hardwicke Marriage Act 127 Ireland 37 Headship 33, 60–61, 242–245, 253. See Italy 7n28, 35, 139–166 also Households 260 Index

Marriage and family patterns (cont.) Nuclear hardship hypothesis 23 Illicit sex 127–131, 141 Todorova, Maria 99 Incest 144–145 Tridentine 156 Medieval canon law 122–123, 126, 128, 131, Modernization 1, 9, 48, 67 136, 137–141 Neo-locality 31, 56, 91 National and regional differences 1 Never married/permanent celibacy 58 Neo-revisionist approach 6, 11 Paternity 136 North America 47 Premarital relationships 128 North-western Europe 2–6, 8, 24, 47 Premature carnal knowledge (frϋher Northern Europe 12, 23, 28–29, 36, 43–44 Beischlaf) 138 Nuclear-hardship hypothesis 4 Protestants 126, 136, 141 Rape trials 131 Occupation 34, 42, 77, 170, 195–196 Reformation 42–167 Old age see Elderly Lutheran Reformation 122, 124–129 Outdoor relief, parish-based 4 See also Authorities and Religion Ottomans 13, 69–80, 98, 105 Remarriage 32, 126 Reputation of betrothed women Poland 15, 189–206 131–137 Peasants 190–192, 194, 200, 205–206. See Seduction trials 136, 138, 140 also Socio-economic groups Status 122–124 Village court rolls 192–195, 198–203, Virginity 133 205–206 Wedding ring 124 Wymowa, institution 189–190, 199, 206 Wedding rituals 124–127, 129 Parents 18 Medieval canon law 14, 123 Pioneers of historical demography 2. See Mediterranean family model 5, 7, 47. See also Models also Models Poor relief 4, 6, 23 Mediterranean marriage 3. See also Population 50–51, 232, 238 Marriage and Models Fertility 63 Methodologies 24–26, 44, 79–83, 105–108, Mortality 63–64, 232, 238–239 110–114, 148, 168–185, 234–240 Trieste (19th century) 207n1 Micro-regional approaches 5 Post-revisionism 9 Migration 13, 40, 44, 53–56, 64–65, 68 Age group 54–55 Reher, David 7, 8, 11–12, 23, 29, 43 Movements 55 Religion Piracy and enslavement 53–54 Calvinism 14, 151, 170–176 Refugees 53n27 Divorce 182. See also Hungary Seasonal migrants 54–55, 64 Catholic 14, 119–141, 142–167, 230 Urban migrants 54 Christian education 151, 154 Models Church of England 152 Co-habitation patterns 26 Council of Mainz of 813 144, 154 Godparenthood 148–157 Council of Trent 122, 125–126, 129, 147, Hajnal, John 2–3, 6, 8, 10, 47, 100 150, 152, 156, 162 Kaser, Karl 99, 100 East-West schism 142, 146, 150, 166 Laslett-Hammel household classification Godparenthood 142–167. See also scheme 24–25, 79, 85, 97, 191 Spiritual Kinship Life cycle poverty 23 Muslims 69–92. See also Serbia and Marriage 124–127, 191 Ottomans Index 261

Orthodox 14, 69–92, 77, 91, 142, 150, 153, Serbian feudal class 105 159–161, 163, 166–167, 191 Srez 107 Protestant 14, 142, 153, 157–158, 163, Taxpayers 86, 88, 103–105 166–167 Timar 71, 73, 75, 79, 91 Reformation 142–143, 146, 150–153, 166 Vassal 71n3, 73 St Augustine 144 Vajat 83 Uniate 174 Vilayet 75 Western (Christian) 143, 146, 191 Vlachs 77n18, 85 See also Authorities, Marriage and Voynuks 77 Spiritual kinship Zadruga 94, 102, 107. See also joint Retirement 15–16, 25, 199, 203–206 family household Wills 15, 33, 209–231. See also Zeamets 73, 75 Inheritance, Widows and Women Head tax 105. See also Taxation See also Poland, Wymowa See also Administration, Inheritance and Revisionist approach 5–6, 9 Religion Russia 33. See also Spiritual Kinship and Simple household system see Households Religion Slovenia 207–231 Ruggles, Steven 10–11, 24, 44, 47 Austrian Civil Code of 1815 217 Bakers 213–214, 216, 225, 230 Scandinavia 34–35 Dowry 214, 229–230 Sedláci, Bauern (peasants) 236. See also Inheritance 214, 216–217, 228–229 Socio-economic groups Men’s will 216 Serbia Money-lending activities 214–216 Branković family 70, 71 Peasant family 222–226 Branković region 13, 69–92 Remuneration 220 Cvijić Jovan 83, 97 Society of Mary 15, 230 Defter (Ottoman tax poll) 13, 71, 73, Village loan sharks 216 75–76, 83, 90–92 Wife’s subservience to husband 230 Despotovina 71 Women’s wills 209, 215, 226–230 Domazet 80 See also Inheritance, Village authority and Fiefs 75–76, 91 Women Filipović, Milenko S. 97 Socio-economic groups 30, 34, 77, 78n22 Hasses 73, 75n14 Cottagers 34, 194, 236–237, 242–243, House (Kuća) 79, 82–84, 86, 90, 107 246–248, 250–253 Inokosne (small or nuclear) 88. See also Dwellers 36 Households Farmers and landowners 31–32, 35, 64, Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović 94 77, 104–105, 181, 194, 210–211, 219, Kmet 88 222, 236–237, 242–246, 248–255 Methodology 79, 110–115 Female industrial workers 38 Medieval law 82 Feudal lords 98, 104, 200 Myths 94–95 Kin collaboration 34 Nahiyes 75–77 Landless 31, 33, 237 Okrug 107 Lodgers 17, 25, 34, 194–195, 199, 206 Ottoman hierarchy 73, 75 Peasants 58, 63, 104, 180–182, 189–206, Rural 13, 94–97, 107, 110 207–231, 236. See also Community Soldiers 76–77 Proletarians 31, 35 Serbian Civil Code of 1844 95 Servants 34, 63 Serbian family of the mid-19 century 102 Textile workers 38 262 Index

Socio-economic groups (cont.) Incest 144–145, 152, 160 Smallholders 194–195, 219, 236–237, 242, Justinian Code 145 244–245, 247–248, 251–253 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane 161–162 Social and economic elites 196, 205 Kormchaja canonical code, 1650–52 Urban elites 58 159–160 Urban settings 36 Legislation 150 South-east European family 12, 14, 47–68, Libri di famiglia (family books) 147. See 69–92, 93–116, 168–185, 207–231 also Census-type documents and Southern Europe 2–4, 6, 8, 23, 28–29, 44, manuscripts 47–68 Luther 151 Spiritual kinship 14, 17, 19, 142–167 Marriage 145, 155 In the Balkans 161 Mediterranean Europe 157 In Central and Southern Europe 149–150 Patronage 157 In England 149, 161–162 Reformation see Religion In France 147, 149, 157, 161–162, 164 Ritual 153–155 In Germany 157, 161, 164–165 Social alliance 155 In Italy 147, 149, 155–156, 161–162, 164 Social institution 155 In Northern Europe 149–150 Survey 14, 148–167 In Romania 160, 165 Northern Italy 148n16. See also Italy In Russia 149, 159–160, 163 Ties Church 160 between individuals and households Moscow Council 159–160 or families 154 In Southern Europe 153 economic 157 In Sweden 157 Tridentine model of godparenthood Alliances 155–156 156 Baptism 14, 19, 142–144, 146, 148, 151, Wills 230. See also Inheritance and 154, 157 Women Calvin 151 Sweden 29, 38, 40 Compaternitas 145, 154–155 Council of Metz, 893 147 Taxation 25, 77n18, 78, 83–88, 102, 105. See Council of Rome, 721 AD 145 also Serbia and Ottomans Customs 147, 149, 151, 155, 157, 163 Todorova, Maria 80, 90, 98, 102 Eastern (Orthodox) 142–143, 145–147, 149–150, 153, 159–161. See also Unmarried motherhood 18–19 Religion Godparenthood in Europe after the Venetian rule 53, 209. See also Authority East-West Schism and the Reformation 153–161 Welfare provision 4, 6, 8–9, 17 Godparents 142, 144–148, 150–152, Western Europe 2, 233 154–155, 157, 159 Widows 5, 12, 25–27, 34, 76, 78, 81, 84 Horizontal relationships 155–157, 164 In Austria 32 Kinship ties and households 161, 163 In Central Europe 36 Strategies 154–156, 161–167 In England/Britain 30, 33 Ties between households of In Finland 27, 30, 33, 38–40 non-kin 164 In Germany 30, 32 Vertical relationships 156–158 In Greece 56–57, 61 Households, Godparenthood and In Hungary 178 Kinship 161–166 In Italy 35 Index 263

In Northern Europe 29–30, 32, 36, Concept of virginity 133, 137 40–41 Crime of ‘premature carnal knowledge’ In Poland 198, 201–203 (frϋher Beischlaf) 138 In Serbia 81, 84 Dowry 201, 214 In Slovenia 216 Economic activity 213–214, 229 In Sweden 29, 38 Female honour 136–137 Age of the widow 29 (in England and Foundling hospitals 136 Wales), 30, 40, 42, 44 Illicit sex 127, 133, 135, 141 Family reconstitution 28 Inheritance 121, 123, 201–202, 228–229. Head of household 56. See also See also Inheritance Households Land and Money 226–230 Inheritance 32, 201–203. See also Legal protection 130, 137–141, 201 Inheritance Lending money 214–216 Living alone 39 Medieval canon law 122–123 Living with kin 28, 39, 61 Moral mission 229–230 Local economy 30–44 Mothers of illegitimate children 136 Migrant widows 40 Pregnancy 134 Occupation/work activities 42 Rape 130–131 Remarriage 202 Reputation 121–122, 131–137 Retirement 33. See also Retirement and Submission of wives to husbands 126 Inheritance Seduced women 138, 140 Rural widows 30–36, 44 Women’s market activity 213–217 Social position of widows 41 Women’s reputation in Protestant and Urban places 35–36, 40–41 Catholic Europe 117–141 Urban widows 36–44 Women’s subservience to husband 230 and widowers 5, 12, 23, 37, 56, 61, 106, 113, Wills 33, 209–210, 214, 218–222, 226–230 141, 178, 243 Young single women 38 Widows and children 38–40, 43–44 See also Family, Household, Inheritance Wymowa 199. See also Poland and Elderly Women 14–15, 17, 25, 60, 96, 201–202 Bakers 213–214, 216