Household and Estate Management in the Seventeenth Century: Problems and Perspectives (original) (raw)
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Paper delivered at The Social History Society Annual Conference, June 13 2018. Joint runner-up for the SHS Postgraduate Paper Prize. The paper studies how ideological changes and innovations were part of the making of the social and economic changes described as the development of agrarian capitalism. Specifically, I look at how agricultural writers in the sixteenth century intervened in particular struggles and conflicts pertaining to these changes. I claim that by creating new social and cultural ideals, norms and values in relation to these conflicts and changes, agricultural writers actively took part in the making of agrarian change. The paper contributes to recent research in early modern English social and cultural history, and to recent debates within the historiography of capitalism by studying how specific kinds of market imperatives, social property relations and particular ways of organising labour-processes were created not only by economic, political and judicial contestation, but ideological and cultural conflicts and struggles as well.
This article offers an alternative perspective on peasant culture and settlements of the High Middle Ages. Most studies of rural settlements from the High Middle Ages are dealing with ecological and technological aspects of peasant life and political-economic relations with aristocrats. This article looks at cultural relations between peasants and between peasants and another cultural group, the aristocracy. Relations among the peasantry determine the internal cultural definition of the group, the cultural relations with other groups form the external cultural definition. The external cultural definition is based on mutual constitution of cultural groups. In this article the lay-out and composition of the farmyard is used to study the internal cultural definition. Thirty-four farmyards from the period 1125-1250 in the Meuse-Demer-Scheldt region are analysed for this purpose. The members of domestic groups (men, women and children) create perception scheme's related to among others human-environment relations, gender and age during practices related to living and working in the house and on the farmyard. These are expressed in the lay-out of the yard and articulate with the life cycle of the yard which is made visible with the help of archaeological phases. The lay out of farmyards is compared to those in other regions of the north-western European plain. At the end a reflection is offered on the significance of the study of farmyards to the internal definition of peasants as a cultural group and the external definition of peasant culture vis à vis the aristocracy. What goes for the farmyards goes for castle sites, they too were related to perception schemes which are expressed in their lay-out.
Farms and families in ninth-century Provence
Early Medieval Europe, 2010
Information about the people recorded in 813-14 on the estate of St Victor de Marseilles shows that although considered to belong to the monastery they were an independent peasant class. Family size and structure varied: some farms were run by the labour of the family which included unmarried sons and 'married-in' sons-in-law; other farmers employed living-in servants in husbandry. The mountain sheep farms had large groups of unmarried young people. Inheritance systems ensured that the peasant family property remained intact over the generations and provided support for unmarried sons who remained to work there. * I am grateful to Chris Wickham and members of seminars in Oxford, London and Cambridge for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Mark Whittow for his company and insights during an exploration of some of the St Victor properties. David Austin, Andrew Fleming and David Siddle, colleagues on the 'Cipières Project', have given me an unforgettable introduction to an upland Provençal landscape, its history, its demography and its archaeology.
Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2012
This article studies the much neglected moral landscape of a popular early modern agronomical treatise, the Theatre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600) by Olivier de Serres. It shows how Serres provided a practical and moral response to the decimation of the French countryside in the Wars of Religion (1562–98). The Theatre d'agriculture was written to offer comprehensive guidance on how to make husbandry of the soil a virtuous form of wealth creation, untainted by the vice of avarice. The article examines Serres's description of just profiteering, excessive getting and deficient giving on an early modern country estate. Serres denounced avaricious overlords, but his greater concern was to advise landowners on managing their allegedly greedy, fraudulent workforce. This resulted in strategies that favour the landlord's enrichment over that of his workers, but not, as is usually argued, in an enthusiastic promotion of sharecropping. I find little evidence that Serres strongly supported any model of land management other than ones involving direct cultivation and fixed rent contracts, where the landowner personally oversaw and monitored the productivity of his servants and tenants. For Serres, a meticulously calculating attitude to finances was warranted by a volatile, avaricious workforce. Historical contextualization suggests that these suspicions, whilst not wholly unsubstantiated, must be viewed critically. Serres's advocacy of pragmatic economic calculus (bon mesnage) as a just philosophy of enrichment was by no means universally shared by his peers. Indeed, for some, bon mesnage of this sort could be, morally speaking, akin to avarice.
How can we talk of family strategies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when even prosperous parents could not be sure of how many children they could bring up to adulthood? How can we talk of a heightened sense of family identity, of the past and present of individual families, when remarriage was constantly creating half-brothers and half-sisters, step-children and step-parents, crisscrossing in-laws?so that it was not always clear where the nuclear family began or ended? How can we insist on the strengthening of parental power when, as in sixteenth-century Lyon, one-third of the teen-agers becoming apprentices and one-half of the young women marrying for the first time were fatherless; when, as in seventeenth-century Bordeaux, more than one-third of the apprentices had neither parent alive?1 Yet I propose to characterize early modern family life in terms of strategy, identity, and order, as a trend, if not a fact, about every family and as an increasingly persuasive cultural ideal for families above the level of the very poor. As Machiavelli could forge his political rules in the face of fortune's whims, so could families forge their rules as well. In some ways, as we will see, these features of family life were much aided by contemporary political, social, and religious developments; in other ways, they were in tension with them, with interesting long-range consequences for attitudes toward social and corporate solidarity. I Let us begin by noting a central concern of many families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: they want to plan for a family future during and beyond the lifetimes of the current parents. Some want merely to pass on the family's patrimony as intact as possible to those of the next generation who will stand for the house or its name in the father's line. Others want to enhance that patrimony; still others want to create a patrimony if it does not already exist. And what is being planned for here is not merely lands, cattle, houses, barns, pensions, rents, offices, workshops, looms, masterships, partnerships, and shares, but also the occupations or careers and the marriages of children. These, too, must be designed so as to maintain, and perhaps increase, the family's store and reputation. 87 88 NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS This is not, it should be remembered, a "natural" or inevitable way for families to act. It implies a situation unlike that in the early Middle Ages, when wives in some landholding families might have closer ties to their family of birth than to their husbands; when family identity might well extend horizontally out to third and fourth cousins with whom one consulted about immediate issues of vengeance and alliance rather than about distant prospects.2 It implies a situation in which the family unit, whatever its spread, conceived of its future as requiring invention and effort, rather than simple reliance on traditional custom and providence. Then the family unit must have some power to put its plans into effect, for there were other groups and persons?villagers, lords, guildsmen, city governments, clerics, and monarchs?who had an interest in what parents did with their children and property. Such long-term planning was, of course, well beyond the possibilities of those who could not bequeath anything because they were serfs (and we must remember that if serfdom had almost disappeared in sixteenth-century England, it could still be the lot of 20 to 30 per cent of the peasants in parts of Burgundy and the Bourbonnais). The best they could hope for was that their children might crowd with them under the same roof and thereby be permitted by custom to succeed to their land when the time came. So a mainmortahle in the Sologne, trying to buy his freedom, explained that as a serf he could not marry his daughter well, and that his other children had left him and would neither pray for his soul nor pay his debts after he died. Such long-term planning was also beyond the possibilities of landless free peasants and unskilled or ill-paid urban workers. For those without even seed or livestock to pass on, without a trade or art, with little more than a wooden coffer of belongings, their future was made if they could bring even one child to adulthood, rather than seeing offspring all die or abandoning them to a foundling hospital.3 But beyond this threshold of thralldom or poverty, already among better-off peasant and artisanal families a habit of mind can be found which, once arrangements for immediate economic and psychological stability have been made, turns toward the future. Listen, for instance, to a sixteenth-century request by eleven families of sharecroppers in the Burgundy, all descended from a household which had opened a farm for an Augustinian abbey some sixty years earlier. They reminded the brothers how they had conserved, increased, and improved the land; how they had multiplied in number of households, children, and separate families; and how they feared that the abbey might decide to contract with some other parties, thus "cutting . . . them off from the fruits for which they hoped from their long and assiduous labor." With such a lack of assurance, their children might have to abandon them and move elsewhere when they were old and feeble. And so they sought?and won? village status and some legal title to the land: "perpetual and permanent habitation ... for themselves and their posterity . . . born and to be born."4 Or see how the process takes place in the family of the printer Jean Barbou. He came to Lyon from a village in Normandy, worked his way up from journeyman to master, married a widow with useful printing connections, if little money, and prudently enlisted a wealthy merchant-publisher as godfather to his son. Then he died at 53, leaving his wife, three unmarried daughters whom he dowered decently, a printing establishment upon which 900 livres was FAMILY LIFE IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE 89 still owed, and one son?alas, aged 4?whom he made his heir. Widow Guillemette rallied, married her oldest daughter to a printer richer and more learned than her husband, and saw to it that she and her son were partners in the business. Sister Denise took over; she never faltered, even when her husband was temporarily imprisoned for printing the anti-Trinitarian Servetus (anathema to Catholics and Calvinists alike), and carried on the printing house in her own name after her husband's death. The son, Hugues Barbou, grew up also to become a printer, first in Lyon and then within the safer walls of Limoges, where he purchased an atelier for 1,200 livres and founded a publish ing dynasty that was to last some two hundred years. From Limoges, in his early thirties, Hugues reflected on the family's rise from that Norman village and on the arrangements made to get him where he was.5 To be sure, family strategies for the future were not brand new in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Careful studies of the nobility of the Ma ?onnais in twelfth-century France, of patrician families in twelfth-century Genoa, and of burgher families in thirteenth-century Bordeaux (with its newly developed wine trade) have all shown fathers changing the inheritance rights variously of wives, daughters, and younger sons in order to consolidate or enhance their position. In London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, there were merchant families who carefully set down a country branch, then waited two or even three generations before moving all the males out of city trade.6
Social history and agricultural productivity: the Paris Basin, 1450-1800
1990
Historians should remain eternally grateful to Claude Sarasin. 1 Like all the canons at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in early eighteenth-century Paris, he could have led a life of uncontaminated leisure, with few obligations besides perfunctory attendance at daily offices. Although he did hold the post of archivist at the cathedral, the position was largely ceremonial, and no one actually expected him to sift through Notre Dame's voluminous papers. That messy task could be left to paid assistants, while Sarasin simply collected his pay. Yet Sarasin did not do what was expected of him. Obsessed with cracking vellum and bound leather registers, he began to compile a detailed index of Notre Dame's capitular acts, where, among other decisions, the leases of Notre Dame's extensive property holdings were recorded. He spent years on the project, and when he ceased work in 1743, his index comprised more than one hundred manuscript volumes in a squat Latin hand. Thirty-three alone were devoted to Notre Dame's properties-most of them farms in the Paris Basin-and in them one finds details of leases from the late Middle Ages up to the middle of the eighteenth century. Today his index, along with the rest of Notre Dame's papers, is stored in Paris at the Archives Nationales. The virtue of Sarasin's index is that it can be combined with other, equally valuable documents in Notre Dame's archives, such as records of land surveys and farm management, accounts of property seized at the beginning of the French Revolution, and, most important of all, a voluminous and well-organized collection of original leases. When linked together, the various records permit one to follow individual farms and pieces of agricultural land, with matching series of leases and property descriptions, from the fifteenth century to 1789. The records thus allow us to track a large number of identical properties through time, an advantage that has eluded most other historians working on leases. Indeed, most other researchers have worked with random samples of different properties, and the heterogeneity of the properties has clouded their conclusions. 2 What follows is an analysis of 808 leases gathered from Sarasin's index and from the archives of Notre Dame. 3 The leases form 39 series, each one concerning a separate property in one of 25 different villages scattered throughout the Paris basin (Figure 1). The properties in question lay on 1 The author wishes to express his gratitude to participants at seminars at UC Davis, the Univers!ly of lllmo1s, and Washmgton Un1vers1ty; and to members of the audience at the Second World Congress of Cliometrics and at the 1989 meetings of the Society for French Historical Studies and the All-UC Economic History Group.
Rural Sociology, 2021
Venus Bivar ' s book cleverly encompasses two seemingly opposing trends in French agriculture-France is the world ' s second agricultural superpower, yet the country boasts a small-scale producer image. The two models result from competing conceptions of agricultural "quality." The former was associated with food safety and productivism in the immediate postwar period. The latter increasingly focused on superior properties, terroir and small production. According to Bivar's thesis, this evolution falls under a "creative destruction" process in the wake of "agricultural modernization": rationalizing methods boosted productivity, yet their human and environmental costs (e.g., the disappearance of millions of farms, indebtedness, depleted rural communities, and the side effects of hazardous chemicals) paved the way for alternative, superior "qualities". Bivar ' s analysis centers on the State ' s deep modification of land ownership, which fed heterogeneous anti-state and anti-modernization currents at the origin of organic farming (OF). These movements were attentive to soil and nutrition, ranging from anti-Semitic, eugenistic, fascist proponents of "national regeneration" in the late 40s, to libertarian "back to the landers" in the late 60s. In the 1980s, the Ministry valued institutionalizing OF in response to criticism toward (and the effects of) agricultural modernization. As of 1944, French agriculture was central in a broad modernization movement led by the State (chap. 1) that directed workforce to the cities and fueled a service, industrial economy. Agricultural planning, influenced by the US Marshall Plan and the Common Market, aimed toward expansion. The scattered structure of agricultural property, inherited from Napoleon ' s Civil Code and, which prevented mechanization and economies of scale, was combated through land consolidation, (dis) advantaging farms deemed (un)viable. Disparities and rural exodus increased greatly, unlike incomes. In the wake of indebtedness and