Throughout this period, marriage (especially for women) and the affinal relationships it generates or reinforces are crucial. Under the ancien régime, the establishment of community dowry funds (maritaggi) is the single most significant form of private charity : a near absence of divorce, legal and informal separations and cohabitation, and the steady lengthening of periods of courtship over recent years testify to the continuing important of marriage in contemporary Ascoli.
At the beginning of our period, the most striking feature of Ascoli's inheritance and marriage practices is the high priority given to women's marriages and claims to family property. Most women are married by their early twenties; widow re-marriage is the norm; and in the absence of local convents female celibacy is rare. The politics of non-marriage, expressed through the pursuit of ecclesiastical careers, is almost exclusively reserved for middle ranking and upper class males.
The rudiments of a sex-linked property system are already in place. Women ideally bring into marriage high-cost festival clothes, linens, jewels, a house, vigne (orchard land with some arable mixed in), and money. In a system that tends to favour daughters, sons must await the death of fathers, or more usually subsequent division among brothers, before succeeding to what is often little more than 'immaterial' inheritance.
Only at the extremes of the social order is this pattern varied. Thus, upper class daughters typically receive a personal trousseau and a marriage portion that, in principle if rarely in practice, amounts to a full share of family patrimony. They are then excluded from the inheritance of town mansions and arable estates. With cash dowries and a battery of restrictive heirship strategies - high rates of celibacy, entails, trusts (monti ) to meet the needs of poorer collateral kin - elite families are in a far stronger position to maintain a corporate property base through time.
This differentiated system of property transmission and divergent devolution shapes kin group formation and informal patterns of co-operation between extra-familiar kin and affines in two distinct ways - both encouraging the development of kinship-based neighbourhood associations and the generation of shallow patrilineages among local elites. Thus, Ascoli's apparently unstructured neighbourhoods contain significant clusters of maternal kin - loose associations focused on dowry-housed sisters, in- marrying husbands and spiritual kin - whose wide range of social and economic functions, especially for women, are fully documented in the notarial records. Similarly, evidence from wills, inventories, funeral records and political disputes bears witness to the importance of casate (patrilineally extended households and shallow lineages), and patrilineal ideologies amongst Ascoli's leading families.
With the development in the second half of the nineteenth century of a cereal dominated, increasingly peasantised, agro-town economy, these patrimonial dynamics change in two important ways. First, the eighteenth-century priority given to daughters' dowry claims largely disappears, and death rather than marriage becomes the single most important occasion for the inter-generational transfer of property. Secondly, the patrilineal ideologies that had shaped the heirship strategies of a restricted elite, spread to a much wider group of middling landowners and peasant farmers. These changes are reflected in an increasing patrilineal skewing in the conceptualisation of kinship relationships, reduced dowries, and the intensification of restrictive heirship strategies, especially in periods of agrarian crisis.
By the end of the century, casata organisation has all but disappeared, but is replaced by the broader but equally patrilineal razza (patriline, possibly clan). With the possible exception of large landowning families, razze lack a corporate base and rarely act as compact groups. Yet for Ascoli's urban core, especially for men, they express long-term kinship connection, delineate family interest through time and provide a vital element of continuity and stability in the allocation of status and community identity.
For most of the twentieth century, the provision of dowry houses on a daughter's marriage has been the exception rather than the rule. But this change has not fundamentally altered the structure of neighbourhoods. And while some informants in contemporary Ascoli rightly point to the association of particular razze with specific neighbourhoods, overall they are still characterised by the presence of clusters of matrifocal kin. Sisters rent, buy or try to activate potential inheritance rights in the localities in which they were born : they also seek to draw in-marrying husbands and brothers into networks of economic and political co-operation. Indeed, the resilience of neighbourhood organisation in the absence of a routinely allocated property base is one of our most striking fieldwork findings.
One of the more specific aims of the Ascoli research project was to examine Delille's hypothesis that, until comparatively recently, marriage in much of southern Italy was semi-prescriptive, with most unions falling into one of three categories : double (dubbrera) marriage, affinal re-linkages, or alliances with distant kin or affines located just beyond the range of canonical prohibitions.
Delille's hypothesis was tested in a variety of ways and against a wide range of different source materials. The included computer simulations and the reconstruction and analysis of marriage choice for the period 1730-1900, selected hand reconstructed genealogies for the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, fieldwork and archival-based courtship and marriage histories and disputes and dispensations. It is clear that, for Ascoli, this hypothesis fails, at least in its strongest, most prescriptive form. Unlike Delille's Manduria, it has neither special purpose documentation, nor panels of experts to help the church authorities pick out marriages that, anyway, fall well outside the normal range of indigenous kinship and affinal recognition (both past and present). Indeed, for most of the period under review, third cousins, third and fourth degree affines and spiritual kin are routinely married without any apparent ecclesiastical recognition or dispensation.
For the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the overall incidence of repeat marriage of all sorts (including marriage with close kin) is surprisingly constant and, compared with Delille's findings, remarkably low, accounting for between 13 and 17 percent of all marriages registered in Ascoli. Allowing for status endogamy, migration and out- marriage, these percentages are close to the 'coincidence' rate. In each generation, the take-up of partners falling into the appropriate marriage categories is generally less than one-half of those potentially available in the marriageable population.
Nevertheless, until at least the 1950s, systematic repeat marriage had a much greater impact on urban core families - middle ranking and elite families with a stable residential history in the town. For these groups between one-quarter and one-third of marriages were of this sort, and they constituted both an important mechanism of social closure and means of re-affirming local identity, and a way of restricting the size of dowry, reducing matrimonial competition and preserving family patrimony. An important consequence of this usage has been the creation of a system of informal marriage classes, with families having a fairly restricted set of marriage partners and households to whom they are habitually linked. Indeed, one of the most notable examples of associational persistence is the ongoing importance of marriage classes in shaping the structure of political competition throughout the entire period.
Nowadays, Ascolani tend to dismiss repeat marriage as 'pure coincidence', an artefact of the restricted size of the community, and both dubbrera unions and near cousin marriage are treated with some disdain. But at diminished levels, affinal re- linkage and distant cousin marriage persist. Indeed, detailed examination of selected courtship and marriage histories shows that many people who eventually married non-kin had actively considered repeat marriage, which some informants regard as the quintessential Ascoli 'love match'. It also strongly suggests that courtship procedures themselves tend to select for unions of this sort, especially with early marriage, and that the highly competitive, potlatch1 quality, of contemporary marriage can partly be explained by a decline in the incidence of repeat marriage over recent decades.