Family and the Spatial Distribution of Kin in Eighteenth-Century Ascoli

At first sight, household formation in eighteenth-century Ascoli corresponds quite closely to the pattern suggested by Da Molin (1990) for north Puglia (Capitanata). Thus, applying a much simplified Laslett typology to the State of Souls listing of 1709 and the Catasto Onciario of 1754, we have the following results :

The percentage of extended and complex families is remarkably high for a town whose territory is mainly located on the Tavoliere, but is probably explained by the urban skewing of its occupational structure, its class composition and the fact that only a small proportion of its inhabitants is directly employed on large cereal estates. As in other areas of Puglia, the great majority of women are married by their early twenties and widow remarriage is the norm (with widows typically marrying outsiders). Celibacy rates are far higher for men than women. In the absence of local convents before the nineteenth century, few women are in religious orders. Similarly, the number of residential domestic servants is very low (23 in 11 households in 1709; 55 in 17 households in 1754). Both evidence from notaries' contracts, and the relatively early age at which most Ascolani husbands become household heads, suggest that marriage triggers the formation of new households.

From an initial survey of some 250 wills and marriage contracts for the period 1699-1731, two main points emerge. First, in an essentially bilateral system, daughters receive their share of family patrimony on marriage : sons must await their fathers' death or a subsequent division among brothers. Although dowry size and form vary according to social position, it ideally (and for middle ranking families typically) comprises a trousseau - including jewellery and expensive festival clothes - a town house and a vigna (orchard land with arable interspersed). In practice there is separation of property in marriage. Although women, except for widows, are treated as legal minors and cannot alienate property without the permission of both male kin and outside legal authorities, in periods of crisis such permission is readily sought and often granted. Dowry houses are invariably described as 'belonging' to women in both inventories and wills. And there can be little doubt that women have considerable room for manoeuvre in settling 'their property' (especially personal effects and houses) on daughters who, informally at least, generally have first call on the mother's estate. Secondly, in a period of growing economic and social differentiation marriage is competitive. This competition is somewhat tempered by the practice of repeat marriage but, nevertheless, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century absorbs an increasing proportion of family patrimonies. Daughters' claims take precedence. They marry earlier than brothers, and on average receive larger portions. New households are largely financed out of the property they bring into marriage; vigne are usually large enough to provide at least basic subsistence, and enterprising and hardworking husbands can add to their value. In a hazardous but commercially vibrant economy, brothers must generally find their own fortune. As in Pisticci, family patrimony must be created anew in each generation ( Davis : 1973).

Although this female centred pattern of partible inheritance and divergent devolution is undoubtedly dominant in Ascoli, it is not followed by the town's mercantile and landowning elite (some 30-40 families grouped into a score of patrilineally extended households (casate)). Here the emphasis is on maintaining town mansions and arable estates intact in the male line through the generations. Younger sons are encouraged to embark on ecclesiastical careers : daughters receive trousseau and a cash settlement. Their shares are almost always smaller than those of brothers and, in principle at least, they are denied access to arable farms. For domestic purposes upper class mansions are frequently physically divided into separate apartments, although estates and commercial enterprises are jointly run.

Multiple family households are concentrated among elite families and a small but slowly expanding group of richer massari. On the somewhat fragmentary evidence of wills and marriage contracts, they make much greater use of patrilineal ideology, especially in the articulation of the long-term ambitions and reputation of the casata, than any other section of the population. They also make more use of restrictive heirship strategies : repeat unions within a narrow circle of marriage partners both in and outside Ascoli; a rate of male celibacy which risks patriline extinction.

Although one should not over-estimate the importance of a section of the population that, at most, accounts for ten percent of Ascoli's families, in some measure at least, the impact of elite heirship strategy on household formation is reflected in Table 3, in which we focus on urban core families grouped by house (casa), and ignore both households headed by outsiders and internal subdivisions of the same house. This mode of reckoning gives a much higher rate of extended and complex families; closer to the Gargano or even the Abruzzi than other areas of Puglia. It also reduces the percentage of solitaries and households with no structure. Both this reduction and the smaller but nevertheless significant contraction in the percentage of simple families are partly explained by the elimination from the count of a mobile, semi-permanent, group of families and part-families who, in the unstable and fluctuating conditions of Tavoliere agriculture, spent a few years, at most a generation, in Ascoli before moving on. But the suspicion also remains that the ecclesiastical enumerators of the State of Souls were more concerned with conducting a moral census than in carefully evaluating the intricacies of inter-household relationships. Certainly, the compilers for 1754 and 1765 were far more willing than their predecessors to divide seemingly integrated households within case into their nuclear components.

Within households, it is interesting to note skewing toward paternal kin in patterns of co-residence Thus, as Table 4 shows, the immediate kin of the (usually male) head of household are more readily included than those of his wife. Nevertheless, as we hope to show below, if the wife's collaterals are generally exclude from membership of the casa, they are conspicuously present in the neighbourhood. If Da Molin (1990) is right in suggesting that family solidarity (and not recruitment of a work force) is the most convincing single reason for Puglian extended families, that objective is equally achieved through residential propinquity.

Closer examination of the spatial context of house locations suggests two further qualifications to the standard model of the Puglian household system. The first regards the role of servants in the local economy. Although, as we have seen, residential servants are rare and early marriage precludes life-cycle service, this does not imply that Ascoli is a servantless society, but rather that its mode of accommodating servants is different from that of northern Europe. Although it is far easier to recover details of service from oral testimony relating to the second half of the nineteenth century (when its incidence was certainly greater), there is little reason to suppose that its basic structure was greatly different a century earlier. Wills provide many examples of small legacies to servants whose employment histories are unrecorded. Even more important, almost all larger houses and mansions make provision - basement or adjacent cottages - for dependants whose wives and daughters act as formal or informal servants. In circumstances in which female occupations of all sorts are officially ignored, in which service is stigmatized, and where servants only exceptionally live in the same house as their employers, under-recording is inevitable.

A second qualification concerns the suitability of the term neolocal to describe post-marital residence patterns. Among elites newly married couples are generally incorporated into pre-existing households albeit with a degree a residential autonomy; for other urban core families marriage certainly creates an independent household but, as Davis (1976) points out, the practice of endowing daughters with houses tends to encapsulate that household in a matrifocal neighbourhood.

Taking advantage of the high quality topographical information provided by State of Souls listings (and adapting and extending a method developed by Kertzer et al. (1992)) we have used the Ingres database to explore the spatial distribution of kin in Ascoli as a whole. In particular, we have sought to examine by age cohort the spread of kinship ties in residential units of increasing orders of magnitude - household, casa, immediate neighbourhood, contrada, a combination of adjacent contrade, town. Although the elaboration and analysis of this data is still far from complete, a marked degree of matrifocal inflexion is already apparent. Take, for example, the kinship experiences of the cohort of 684 children below the age of 10 in 1765. 11.8% had at least one maternal grandparent in the same casa, whereas only 6.43% had a paternal grandparent. In part, this discrepancy is explained by the higher level of non-Ascolani males marrying Ascolane females since, when the number of grandparents living in the town is taken into account, the ratio evens out (maternal grandparents 27.8%; paternal grandparents 28.95%). Nevertheless, further consideration of grandparents living as close neighbours confirms a tendency towards matrifocality - 5.7% of individuals have a maternal grandparent living within 5 houses (13.40% of those with a maternal grandparent in the town) compared to only 0.88% who have a paternal grandparent living within the same area (3.95% of those with a paternal grandparent in the town). Taking an adult cohort (20-29) for the same year, we find a similar skew in the distribution of sisters and matrilateral cousins who are mainly clustered in the immediate neighbourhood and the contrada. Indeed, the impact of a dowry system which, wherever possible, provides daughters with a house in the neighbourhood is reflected in the fact that, throughout the period under review, between two-thirds and three-quarters of all women in the age cohorts 19-29 and 30-39 (with mothers in Ascoli) have mothers living in the same combination contrade. From a different perspective (and using a different technique) the elaboration of computerized genealogies for families in each of the main contrade suggests both greater depth and complexity in the formation of 'matrilines', and a stronger (if by no means dominant) clustering of matrilateral kin within them.

These findings are broadly confirmed by archival sources. Thus, dowry houses for sisters and daughters are often located in the same neighbourhood, preferably adjacent to the mother's own dowry house, which is not uncommonly passed to the youngest daughter. Tight-knit, supportive networks of maternal kin provide early-marrying brides with an on-going apprenticeship into motherhood and into domestic skills, acquired elsewhere in Europe through the institution of life-cycle service. By contrast, sons are residentially dispersed on marriage. In-marrying husbands co-operate economically, and tend to be members of the same neighbourhood-based confraternities. Neighbours vouch for one another in court. Life-crisis ritual is focused on neighbourhood chapels.

Nevertheless, contrade are never clearly demarcated, and change in size, name and boundaries over the relatively short period covered by our State of Souls listings. In the last resort, and in the longer term, it is the mansions and palaces of the elite that provide the markers to the old town. Both elite and commoner inheritance practices are reflected in its spatial divisions.

Family and Neighbourhood in the twentieth century

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