How Green Was My Valley: Feudal Landlords and Struggling Peasants

Abstract

Situated in Umbria , Italy’s most rural region, Terni was surrounded by vast estates in which ancient feudal relationships persisted—paternalistic, oppressive, or both—even after fiefdoms were formally abolished. Each successful strike by tenant farmers, sharecroppers, farmhands was succeeded by a gradual restoration of existing relationships. Authoritarian relationships also prevailed in large patriarchal rural families. Children worked hard and early, marriages were arranged, childbirth was painful and dangerous. Poverty and hunger were rampant. Rural people resisted modernization from above but cherished education as a way of resisting the masters’ abuse. Industrialization emancipated rural workers, but much of their culture—the attitudes toward work, time, discipline—fed into working-class culture , in spite of tensions between commuting rural workers (often last hired and first fired) and those who lived in town.