Abstract
In this chapter the notion of the extensive kin group is used to measure the distribution of land and resources and to reconstruct the logic of residential organization in villages and scattered hamlets. By using cadastral and notarial records, the investigation swiftly becomes micrometric and structural. The chapter offers a quantitative and morphological analysis of land ownership distribution, settlements, and exchanges. Social cohesion and integration were grounded on these, but so were competition and feuds.
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Notes
- 1.
ASG, Magistrato delle Comunità, reg. 768–69. The title of this section was suggested to me by Diego Moreno’s article, “Querce come olivi. Sulla rovericoltura in Liguria tra XVIII e XIX secolo,” Quaderni storici 49 (1982): 109–36.
- 2.
One example: on 12 August 1628 Stefano Barbazelata, from the village of Favale, “promised to give and deliver to Jacobino Cavagnario son of Stephano … nineteen staria of chestnuts” by Christmas, in exchange for forty-four lire. If the consignment were not made “the agreement would constitute a loan by said Jacobus of said chestnuts, with interest and damages paid by said Stefano” (ANC, Notary Lorenzo Leverone, filza 1783).
- 3.
There are numerous examples in ASCR, Diversorum, reg. 1 ff.
- 4.
On the chestnut tree in Liguria in the early modern period see M. Quaini, Per la storia del paesaggio agrario in Liguria (Savona, 1973); D. Moreno , “La colonizzazione dei ‘Boschi d’Ovada’ nei secoli XVI–XVII,” Quaderni storici 24 (1973): 977–1016; G. Doria and G. Sivori, “Nell’area del castagno sulla montagna ligure: un’azienda tra la metà del Seicento e la fine del Settecento,” Quaderni storici 39 (1978): 937–54; P. Di Stefano, “‘Castagneti aggregati a massarie’: trasformazioni nella castagnicoltura a Voltaggio nella seconda metà del ‘700,” in Studi in memoria di Teofilo Ossian De Negri, vol. 3 (Genoa, 1986), 124–37.
- 5.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 5
- 6.
ASCR, Diversorum, reg. 12 (1638–39).
- 7.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 4.
- 8.
In four coastal districts of the captainate of Rapallo, during the same period, parcels in which chestnut trees were the dominant crop accounted for 17 percent of all parcels. The most important crop by far were olive trees, which were dominant in 56 percent of the parcels; see Raggio, “Produzione olivicola.”
- 9.
In 1582 Rapallo issued a prohibition against “extracting” chestnuts; see ASCR, Inutilium, filza 5.
- 10.
See O. Raggio , “Mutamenti di proprietà e contratti agrari nel Chiavarese, 1544–1714: l’espansione dei domini in due famiglie,” Miscellanean Storica Ligure (Studi di micro-analisi storica) 9 (1977): 51–81.
- 11.
On this practice of temporary cultivation, which involved cutting down parts of wooded lands and burning bushes and undergrowth, see D. Moreno , “Geografia storica dei sistemi agro-silvo-pastorali mediterranei: un invito all’indagine sul terreno,” Libera Università di Trapani 4, 10 (1985): 125–58 and id., “The Agricultural Uses of Tree-Land in the North-Western Apennines since the Middle Ages,” Beiheft zur Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Forestwesen 74 (Zürich, 1985): 77–89. In general, see E. Sereni, Terra nuova e buoi rossi (Turin, 1981): 3–100.
- 12.
ASCR, Ripartizione tassa dell’olio, filza 1.
- 13.
On oak cultivation in Liguria, see Moreno, “Querce come olivi.”
- 14.
This was the calculation of G. Felloni, Distribuzione territoriale della ricchezza e carichi fiscali nella Repubblica di Genova (secc. XVI–XVIII), Ottava Settimana di Studio ‘Francesco Datini’ (Prato, 1976), typescript.
- 15.
ASG, Magistrato delle Comunità, reg. 835.
- 16.
The two terms were probably used to distinguish coppices and forests; see Moreno, “Geografia storica.”
- 17.
ANC, Notary Lorenzo Leverone, filza 1790. Reconstructing the internal economic dynamics of domestic units would require demographic sources (birth registers) and family records. For a model of how a Ligurian family farm operated, specifically with respect to demographic structure and labor investments, see G. Levi, “Famiglie contadine nella Liguria del Settecento,” in Miscellanea Storica Ligure 5, 2 (1975): 207–90. See also D. Moreno , “Per una storia delle risorse ambientali. Pratiche agro-silvo-pastorali e copertura vegetale in alta val di Vara,” Quaderni storici 69 (1988): 941–79, esp. 952, table two, “Schema di accesso alle risorse in regime forestale e in regime consuetudinario per una azienda familiare della alta val di Vara.”
- 18.
ASCR, Diversorum, various registers. See E. Canale, “Territorio e criminalità rurale nel capitanato di Rapallo tra ‘600 e ‘700 (MA thesis, University of Genoa, 1985–86).
- 19.
ASG, Magistrato delle Comunità, reg. 775 (year 1584).
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 4–5; ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1720; ibid., Magistrato delle Comunità, reg. 717 (year 1611–13).
- 22.
ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1802 (year 1620).
- 23.
ASG, Diversorum, reg. 5.
- 24.
ANC, Notary Gio Angelo della Cella, filza 3426.
- 25.
ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 1.
- 26.
ANC, Notary Gio Batta Arata senior, filza 6351.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
ASCR, Extraordinariorum, reg. 9.
- 29.
See Grendi, “La pratica dei confini.”
- 30.
See the visits of the borders of Chiavari and Rapallo in ASG, Archivio Segreto-Confinium, filze 22, 26, 58, 109; see also ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 579 on the construction of outbuildings in the high Sturla Valley in 1600. These structures, built in stone with roofs of wooden beams covered by straw, were used to shelter livestock, for cheese-making, and as residences during the months of summer pasture (May–September). On these aspects, see ASG, Archivio Segreto-Paesi, busta 301.
- 31.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 571. Witnesses even remembered exact locations of places whose names were “now erased by time.”
- 32.
ASG, Archivio Segreto-Confinium, filza 26; ibid., Senato-Litterarum, filza 582.
- 33.
The value of these properties was equal to 3.5 percent of the total estimated worth, which was a fairly low percentage compared to the 11 percent for the coastal area. Ecclesiastical lands, all of which were constituted by “chestnut groves,” accounted for almost half of the exempted properties , and numbered twenty-five parcels belonging to fourteen head priests in parishes (ASG, Magistrato delle Comunità, reg. 768–69).
- 34.
M. Bloch , “Les paysages agraires: essai de mise au point,” in Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale 8 (1936): 256–77.
- 35.
ANC, Notary Lorenzo Leverone , filza 1809.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
New family nuclei would continue to live in the same structure, either expanding or dividing the paternal residence . In the parishes of Cicagna and Orero, for example, of the 279 houses listed in Fig. 4.4, forty-six were really “portions of houses,” and combined with the houses were forty-two “small houses” that were certainly inhabited, at least in part. The lofts were shared or divided into “portions.” Groups of houses and “portions of houses” shared one or more ovens located on a “piazza.”
- 38.
Exchanges and bequests between different family units and branches of wider kin groups, between siblings, cousins, uncles/aunts, and nephews/nieces, together with residences under separate but contiguous roofs, point to the need for a deeper investigation of family structures that takes into account the shared demography and life cycles of all of the co-resident or “kinship” groups. Using the typology of Peter Laslett—even in its second version—would arbitrarily simplify the problem; see R. Wall, J. Robin and P. Laslett , Family Forms in Historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983) (Italian partial trans. Forme di famiglia nella storia europea [Bologna, 1984]). For an important critical overview of studies on family and kin groups, see S. Yanagisako, “Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups,” Annual Review of Anthropology 8 (1979): 161–205.
- 39.
The mobility and migration of young people who were not yet legally independent, especially of younger brothers, was a phenomenon which I am not able to quantify, but which was surely important. It is certain that there was an emigration toward the Po Valley , part of which was directly tied to commercial exchange circuits (see Chap. 6), and there was also an emigration of young apprentice weavers and porters (camalli) toward Genoa . As we will see, bans and temporary expulsion orders affected almost every family group; expelled persons often decided to relocate definitively to one of the Po Valley cities, to Livorno, to Corsica , or to Provence. There was also a local mobility of young famegli (domestic servants and shepherds) who served the principali.
- 40.
A key aspect of village identity was its territorial extension, to which a dominant kin group was linked; this idea was sometimes supported by a founding myth. The concepts of village and kin group were not completely separable, such that relations between villages—whether on the scale of the parish or that of the community —generally paralleled relations between the kin groups that resided in them. The grain consignments of 1629–30 (when there were shortages) to the Republic’s Grain Office (Ufficio dell’Abbondanza) clearly indicate the association between the village (villa) as an administrative and fiscal unit and the kin group ( parentella ) as an ensemble of hearths belong to those sharing a surname: village of Molinazzo / Leverone kin group; village of Trino / Malatesta kin group; village of Cò de Verzi / Porcella kin group; village of L’Acqua / Cavagnaro kin group; village of Cornia / Dondero kin group; village of Pian di Mercato / Fopiano kin group; village of Isolalonga / Mangino , Gnecco and Crovo kin groups; village of Gattorna / Rossasco and Gattorna kin groups (ASG, Senato-Atti, filza 1885; ASCR, Criminalium, filza 22; ANC, Notary Lorenzo Leverone , filza 1784).
- 41.
The map of alignments, understood as a network of friendships and enmities, remained generally stable during the period 1550–1650; see Chap. 10.
- 42.
ASG, Senato-Litterarum, filza 610. Similarly, in 1623 Angelo Maria Arata, son of notary Gio Batta, observed that the Porcella “are like the Leveroni” (ASG, Archivio Segreto-Secretorum, busta 1566).
- 43.
ASCR, Criminalium, reg. 4–5. For examples of surnames changing in the sixteenth-century kingdom of Naples, see Delille , Famiglia e proprietà, 205–06.
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Raggio, O. (2018). The Land and Residential Patterns. In: Feuds and State Formation, 1550–1700. Early Modern History: Society and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94643-6_4
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