Page 254 - Panjek, Aleksander, Jesper Larsson and Luca Mocarelli, eds. 2017. Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective: Alps, Scandinavia and Beyond. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 254
integr ated peasant economy in a compar ative perspective
lighten a last aspect. The purchased and sold land in each transaction was
indeed tiny, but if confronted with the amount of land that composed the
25 farm units we’ve just been analysing, such transactions, again, do not
appear so irrelevant anymore in the local economy. In fact, in an average
transaction about 13% of an average farm’s land was sold and purchased
(Table 10.5).
Table 10.5: Average land per holding and average land per transaction compared
Average land per holding (ha) Arable land Meadow Total land
Average land per purchase & sell transaction (ha) 0.838 3.024 3.862
Average percentage of holding per transaction (%) 0.114 0.387 0.501
13.6 12.8 13.0
3.3 Family transactions
Based on the local customary regulations attested to at the beginning of
the 17th century, in the first part of this contribution we were able to dedu-
ce that the family played an important role in the peasant real estate mar-
ket. The far more material evidence provided by the transaction registrati-
ons from the mid-18th century clearly confirm this interpretation and even
allow us to depict such a role through the figures. Nonetheless what we are
going to present here are underestimations of the family’s share in the real
estate transactions.
The family relations between the acting parties in the transactions are
not explicitly mentioned in most of our registrations, with the exception
of inheritances and endowments, in which the kinship is whether stated
or obvious. In order to overcome this obstacle and define if a purchase and
sale of real estate took place among relatives, we adopted a simple criterion
that should leave little room for possible scepticism and virtually no possi-
bility of overestimation. We assumed that the transactions between people
sharing the same family name and living in the same village where the pur-
chase and sale took place were relatives. Given the rather low probability
that persons with the same family name in the same village in the 18th cen-
tury would not be more or less closely related, and considering that with-
in one village there was a fair chance of kinship even between people with
a different family name, the chosen criterion should represent an accept-
able means to our purpose. For the same reasons the approximation we get
252
lighten a last aspect. The purchased and sold land in each transaction was
indeed tiny, but if confronted with the amount of land that composed the
25 farm units we’ve just been analysing, such transactions, again, do not
appear so irrelevant anymore in the local economy. In fact, in an average
transaction about 13% of an average farm’s land was sold and purchased
(Table 10.5).
Table 10.5: Average land per holding and average land per transaction compared
Average land per holding (ha) Arable land Meadow Total land
Average land per purchase & sell transaction (ha) 0.838 3.024 3.862
Average percentage of holding per transaction (%) 0.114 0.387 0.501
13.6 12.8 13.0
3.3 Family transactions
Based on the local customary regulations attested to at the beginning of
the 17th century, in the first part of this contribution we were able to dedu-
ce that the family played an important role in the peasant real estate mar-
ket. The far more material evidence provided by the transaction registrati-
ons from the mid-18th century clearly confirm this interpretation and even
allow us to depict such a role through the figures. Nonetheless what we are
going to present here are underestimations of the family’s share in the real
estate transactions.
The family relations between the acting parties in the transactions are
not explicitly mentioned in most of our registrations, with the exception
of inheritances and endowments, in which the kinship is whether stated
or obvious. In order to overcome this obstacle and define if a purchase and
sale of real estate took place among relatives, we adopted a simple criterion
that should leave little room for possible scepticism and virtually no possi-
bility of overestimation. We assumed that the transactions between people
sharing the same family name and living in the same village where the pur-
chase and sale took place were relatives. Given the rather low probability
that persons with the same family name in the same village in the 18th cen-
tury would not be more or less closely related, and considering that with-
in one village there was a fair chance of kinship even between people with
a different family name, the chosen criterion should represent an accept-
able means to our purpose. For the same reasons the approximation we get
252
