The complexity of Italian rural society was considerable.1 The common word contadino which is often used as the equivalent of the English peasant, has some of the same derogatory connotations for modern users, as it did in the past. The English term assumes a rural dweller living in a small village or an isolated farm or huts. In Italy the contado meant the whole area dependent on a main city or town; and it could mean quite considerable communities of many hundreds or even thousands of inhabitants in a kind of urban community such as Prato. Perugia (population 19,234 in 1582) had in its official contado (population 57,234 in 1582) towns or villages such as Deruta, Marsciano, Castiglionfosco, Corciano, Paciano, Passignano, Piegaro, Antria, Fratta (modern Umbertide) and Sigillo with well over 500 persons, and Panicale with over 1000, through the sixteenth century.2 Many inhabitants would not have been primarily dependent on agricultural work (peasants) – the maiolica pottery makers of Deruta for example – but still be called contadini, with or without adverse connotations.
The contado had land owned by people and institutions based in the large cities, or in lesser urban centres, and land owned by villagers. There were elite landowners who alternately lived in the contado and a city. In the actual operation of the land numerous systems of tenancies, share-cropping and direct labour schemes existed. There was much inter-connection between contado and city, though this varied through different kinds of terrain. Cities could incorporate fields and vineyards, and there was industrial production in the contado. This chapter is designed to demonstrate the variety of land-holding systems in the contado, the considerable variation in types of rural communities, and different social categories between simple peasants and great landowners inhabiting there.
Given the diversity of Italian geography, the variations of social compositions and the disparities in the prevalence of urbanisation, it was not surprising that there were considerable differences in the types of land-holding systems, and of agricultural organisation. One type, primarily in the South, was that of the large latifundia estate, where a feudal baron owned vast hectares of land, and employed landless labourers who lived in large villages or small towns and went out into the fields as required. A share-cropping system characterised central Italy. Everywhere there could be small-holdings with peasant owners, and properties leased out for varying periods from a few years to generations, by urban institutions or individuals, the church and monasteries.
A common system in much of central-northern Italy was the mezzadria (sharecropping, métayage). This involved a contract between the landowner (individual or institutional) who provided the land (podere in Tuscan), the housing, usually (in Tuscany and Umbria) oxen for ploughing, a plough and other equipment; one or more mezzadri would undertake to work the land, and the main produce (wheat, barley, beans, grapes or wine, olives, etc.) would be shared on the completion of harvest. In the classic Tuscan system the contract usually was annually renewable, but for efficiency might remain in the same family for years or generations. The peasants were required to live in the farm-house on the property to protect it. The size of property was related to the labour required to work it, and the size of the family-household contracting for it. The contract might be with a father and son(s), or a group of brothers; if the basic family was not large enough to work the property, then the contractors would be required to take on an assistant (garzone), who might be vetted by the proprietor. The family was expected to be self-sufficient on the allocated property. A change in the size of the household could lead to the non-renewal of the contract; this might involve an exchange with a better matched podere owned by the same proprietor, or severance and the family’s hunt for a new proprietor and podere, near or far.
Mezzadria contracts might stipulate that the family seek permission for any marriage in the household, that it should provide the proprietor with a certain amount of pork or poultry in the year, that certain improvements should be undertaken (new ditches, draining channels, planting more olive or mulberry trees, etc.), and how this would affect the share of the produce to be handed over to the proprietor. There were regional variations. Around Bologna the landlord retained the produce of pasturage and woods, but allowed the contadino some foraging for a limited number of animals. In parts of Lombardy and Piedmont the contadino had to rent from the proprietor pasturage for his beasts, and even his house and garden. But in the Valpolicella the proprietor might have to guarantee grazing land on his directly farmed property for his share-cropper (lavorente) to use. Some mezzadria contracts could be longer than a year at a time, as frequently in Umbria; in 1527 Bonifatio Corgna provided a piece of land in Castel Pila, (or Castel del Piano, Perugian contado), with vines, a house, an oven and a well; the labourer was to work for four years for half the produce.3 This four-year period seems common in Umbrian contracts. The Valpolicella version (lavorencia) ran for three to five years.
There has been much debate about the growth of the mezzadria system through the middle ages, and its subsequent development through to the present.4 It has been variously seen as a system of gross exploitation of the peasants, or as a relatively beneficial sharing system replacing exploitative forced labour. In Umbria and Tuscany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries urban communities and the well-to- do used this to take over control of rural areas, liberating peasants from servitude under older systems, but also depriving them of free land. Many contracts favoured the proprietors and exploited peasant labour, creating kinds of forced labour on domain properties. But in the Valpolicella and others areas of the Veronese the share-cropping system until the late eighteenth century appears a balanced system, where the peasants were far from down-trodden. The ‘memoir’ of a fifteenth-century Tuscan peasant, Benedetto del Massarizia, indicates he preferred sharecropping to leasing because it gave him some insurance in bad times; half the produce was kept, whereas a fixed rent might take away all the return.5
From the later fifteenth century in Umbria mezzadria contracts show more involvement, and more contribution from the proprietors; and go into considerable detail about how the mezzadri or coloni should work the properties. Alongside the standard mezzadria contracts were a whole variety of agreements – di lavoreccio (primarily concerning tilling), di cottimo (for mixed farming) – varying the length of time of contracts, the amount and methods of investment by proprietor and contadini and the methods of payment in kind, money and labour. Some contacts were open-ended – but with a heavy penalty payment if the colono wished a quick exit. Some contracts were for life or three generations. In 1525 Ser Pacifico di Andrea leased to Valentino di Francesco and his family some land in Panicale (near Lake Trasimeno), tilled, wooded and with olives, to be worked for three generations. Within two years Valentino had to plant 40 new olive trees, and build a house about 5 × 4 metres; he was to pay annually a third of the produce to Ser Pacifico and his successors. This seems a beneficial contract for Valentino, in a fairly prosperous area, with Panicale having an annual three-day fair where surplus produce might be sold.6 When reading the intricate Latin notarial contracts one wonders how well the illiterate peasants remembered the stipulations and orders of farming procedure. But Benedetto del Massarizia, unable to write (though possibly competent to read), had notaries and others compile a family business memoir; and he was clearly adept at dealing with notaries, complex contracts and disputes with abbeys over land.
Through the Veneto, Lombardy and the Republic of Lucca simple renting contract systems operated rather than the mezzadria, or existed alongside, with different time lengths. Renters might be obliged to work on the proprietor’s domain land, to use his mill, to bottle wine in his house. Some cultivators in return for a fixed rent had considerable freedom over how they farmed; others were hemmed in with restrictions. With freedom went some risks; the cultivator might be bound to pay the full amount however bad the harvest. Other contracts built in a sharing system based on the harvest, some helpful to the peasant, some not; in Paduan cases this meant if the harvest fell below a certain level the landowner would just take half (so reducing from the normal rent). Valpolicella tenants paying fixed rents (affitanze) might still secure from the landlord payment for abnormal damage from storms and floods.
Some contracts mixed mezzadria with rent systems for the same family, as in Como or the Veneto: a fixed rent on cereals, and a sharing of the produce of fruits, grapes, mulberry leaves, wood. In Valpolicella mulberry leaves might be under a separate contract alongside the normal lavorencia; or an equivalent of the share-cropping system for raising silkworms or pigs (soceda) alongside a cash-rent (affitanza) for cereal production (rye or wheat). In Friuli the sharing element became more common through the period, as landowners tried to gain more control over smallholdings. In parts of Lombardy there was a shift from mezzadria elements to a mixed system, with an easily collectable fixed rent on one main harvest. And here rent was increasingly paid in money rather than kind – as in Tuscany and Emilia from the sixteenth century. In the Valpolicella in the late seventeenth century there was some movement from share-cropping to direct renting, and then from the 1730s back to sharecropping, because it was more flexible and responsive to fluctuations in a volatile agricultural and general economic climate. The Tuscan Benedetto del Massarizia and his relatives around Siena worked some land as share-croppers, rented some, laboured for others – and he owned from 1476, among other properties, a vine-yard with orchard, olive-trees, woods, arable land, and a house with a vat.7
Many owners in north-central Italy from the sixteenth century had difficulty securing suitable families to work the land, so the share-croppers and tenants could secure reasonably favourable conditions; hence the longer periods for share-cropping contracts, the agreements for proprietors to cover abnormal damage, the foregoing or postponing of rents when harvests were poor. The adverse reputation of the share-cropping system derived particularly from eighteenth-century Enlightenment campaigns for agricultural reform to be led by actively involved, economically well-educated landowners; and from the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century conditions of rising population, land hunger, social and political disruption that worsened conditions for the rural populations generally.8 In reality over the period the mezzadria systems had operated very differently, affected rural families variously, and was probably most beneficial for the workers (and even the landholders), when mixed with other forms of land management.
Direct farming by large landowners in north and central Italy was limited. Much land was owned by the urban elites and by ecclesiastical institutions, who rented their land. Some large landowners did have home farms around the rural castles, villas and hamlets where they resided some of the time. Here they would use labourers (braccianti, braccenti etc.); some would be permanently employed, and provided with estate houses, others were hired as day labourers from the villages and small towns as needed, and were the most vulnerable. But given the mixed farming and mixed economy in many parts of north-central Italy they are not all to be classed as proletarian landless labourers. Many of those working on a day-rate as braccianti for the local landowner also had their own smallholdings, or were the unmarried children of a tenant household. In a mixed rural economy when agricultural tasks could be staggered through much of the year, a bracciante could be employed by various landowners, large and small, on a variety of tasks: sowing, reaping, pruning, gathering wood, building or repairing terracing, drainage channels, moving flocks.
The direct farming, and the control of the share-cropping and renting schemes, could be in the hands of powerful officials working for the landowners, as fattori or gastaldi, etc. They organised the drawing up of contracts by notaries, acted as rent collectors, checked on the fulfilment of contracts, listened to complaints, and dealt with claims for compensation for damage. A factor might serve one large landowner and be part of his estate (with free housing and food), and be somebody to be feared by tenants; or work for a group of lesser landowners. In the latter case, living in a village, he might be closer to the tenants. In the Veronese there were dynasties of estate managers; some became powerful landowners and/or commercial dealers. In Tuscany the factor was sometimes required to be celibate, so as to concentrate on his onerous duties, taking him afar through scattered properties. But a professional factor of the seventeenth century (Giacomo Agostinetti) thought a factor should be married, with a wife to take care of him, to avoid scandals. When a leading Bolognese prelate Monsignor Innocenzo Malvasia drew up instructions in 1609 for his factor, Paolo Rangone, he assumed that this already experienced factor might be succeeded by his son. Malvasia had a substantial, largely compact, estate at Panzano di Castelfranco Emilia (now in the province of Modena). His manual shows he was actively concerned with his properties (despite a busy ecclesiastical career), had read other manuals, and knew the peculiarities of Bologna farming practices. Aware of the power of the factor, and opportunities for deceit and corruption, as well as the merits if honest and faithful, he was detailed in his warnings and instructions. The complications of running a mixed farming estate (with hemp and animal farming seen as the main areas for profit and expansion) – involving mezzadria and other contracts, and day labourers – emerge from this manual, and show the social and economic importance of the professional factor in the contado.9
The powerful role of a factor is evident in a study of Altopascio, which also reveals much about the complexity of rural society. Altopascio was a village and estate complex in Tuscany (north of the Arno river, south east of Lucca) which in our period passed in effective control from the small Order of San Jacobo to the Capponi family, and then (1584) to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany.10 The ‘village’ or Estate covered about 3000 acres, centred on a castello as a small urbanised community of 40-odd houses and 600–700 persons through the 1615–1784 period. The Medici estate-manager (fattore) dominated from this castle village, with an administrative elite group separate from the rest of the village society. By the eighteenth century the factor’s household included two assistant managers, a scribe and a female housekeeper; but also the priest and his servant, the bell-ringer and his assistant, the estate guard and a dispenser. The 1767 register designated four heads of household as ‘gentleman’ leasing out land (and one such family had a surgeon). The head of the Vettori family was said to be a merchant dealing in silk, cattle and other things; and resident within his household were the baker, the manager of the grocery shop and a carter. Among heads of household there were five shoemakers, two blacksmiths, a general shopkeeper and two delicatessen sellers (pizzicagnoli), a carpenter, two weavers and a plate seller. Shopkeepers and artisans had housing above their work. Some also leased land, and there were labourers living within the castello who worked land rented outside the walls. Wives and daughters were also weavers. A hospice or hospital (the original basis of the early medieval community) remained to cope with the poor.
The fields started from the castle walls of Altopascio; to the south-east was an area of poor hard yellow earth leading to low hills and a forest area (the Cerbaia). North and east was the plain area with the river Ralla and the Sibolla canal, a low fertile alluvial area, which, however, required careful draining. Part of this land operated with long-term leases, the leaseholders building their own housing on the spot and living in isolated farms. Other parts of the plain were worked directly by the grand-ducal factor; but these were divided into plots (poderi), of which there were 38 in 1784, with isolated farms. Here the housing was often just a large primitive hut, though by the eighteenth century there were well-planned solid houses being erected to a common plan; multi-occupancy, multi-purpose, with accommodation for animals in stables, hen-houses and pigsties incorporated in the complex building.11 The forest areas provided wood for various purposes, and grazing for animals. Two sizeable water areas (lakes Bientina and Fucecchio), and a swamp were useful for fishing and processing flax. An estate oven produced bricks. There was an estate mill – which peasants often tried to avoid to circumvent taxes and monopoly prices.
Altopascio was an area of multi-crop farming, including wheat, rye, oats, beans, barley, flax and sorghum; maize successfully appeared in 1710. Grapevines bordered the fields, and there were mulberry trees to feed silkworms. The different levels of agricultural workers included: garzoni, or apprentice farm labourers (who were often bastards from the foundling home); day-labourers (pigionali) who were hired as needed and lived in rented housing; the mezzadri, share-croppers, on the grand-ducal land who paid in kind or money; and those who rented or sharecropped land from other leaseholders living outside the Altopascio estate. Families outside the castello, according to the detailed 1767 status animarum record, were supplemented by women spinning flax or weaving linen (for the linen industry based in nearby Fucecchio). One woman made shoes, and another was registered as a householder who sold fruit and vegetables, and several were servants. Wetnursing was also a source of income, whether the women were taking children into their home in the estate, were entering private houses, or going off to foundling homes in Pisa and Lucca.
Altopascio was important for the Medici income, providing about 13 per cent of total private estate income in 1650; but it was recognised to be a ‘poor’ village – especially as nobody resident there owned his property. Though poor and rural-agrarian it was not an isolated community. It lay on an ancient route from southern France to Siena and Rome: the Via Francigena or Via Romana. A hospice or hospital for pilgrims and travellers had given rise to the medieval community and its associated religious Order of San Jacobo. Other useful roads linked with towns and cities. Rivers and canals gave cheap and easy access by water to the Lucchese, the Arno and the port of Pisa. It was on the frontier zone between the Grand-Duchy of Tuscany and the Republic of Lucca, vulnerable in moments of state conflict, but having benefits as well as dangers from contraband trade. So the inhabitants had contact with a wide world, for economic, social and cultural benefit. The inter- communication is shown by the high and increasing level of marriages where a partner was chosen from outside the Altopascio parish.
The neighbouring Republic of Lucca illustrates a different mix of contadini, and some tense social relations. This Republic essentially consisted of a merchant city, a small port – Viareggio – of varying fortunes through the period, and a mixed rural area. Part of the rural area, that surrounding the city, the Sei Miglia, consisted of fertile plains and low hills; other parts in the Vicariates were more rugged, mountainous, but with some value in producing chestnuts, pasturage, and (in the Camaiore) olives and vines. The Sei Miglia was dominated by city landowners (private or religious), with some of the patricians from the sixteenth century having villas at the centre of active farms. In times of food crises the contadini here could hope for ‘some help... from the landowners (patroni), who had an interest in maintaining their peasants (salani)’, as the city’s General Council noted in the seventeenth century. The contadini in the mountains fared much worse in bad harvests; they were made to help the grain-short city and Sei Miglia with chestnut-flour, and themselves live off ‘vegetable roots and wild garlic’ (‘radiche d’erbi et agletti salvatici’). While they had more common land than in the plains, this was often pledged to citizens to cover communal debts. These distant contadini had to sent representatives to the city to seek food relief; having little credit to raise money to buy what was available, and not having self-interested or charitable landowners to help them, they returned to mountain villages empty-handed. Faced with such situations the mountain people were intent on hiding their meagre supplies from city officials from the Annona commandeering food; they thus fulfilled the urban view of them as fraudulent and criminal. Their fastnesses gave protection to ‘bandits’, adding to the hostility between contadini and urban officialdom, and to the atmosphere of violence. While rural inhabitants in the plains and lower hills close to Lucca, especially women, could supplement incomes from processing, spinning and weaving silk, the remoter mountain contadini had few such opportunities.12
The rural and agrarian scene in the South is conventionally seen as having been very different. Yet generalisations about the mainland South (the Agro Romano or Roman Campagna, and the Kingdom of Naples) and Sicily, as being dominated by great latifundia estates (called tenute in the Roman Campagna) in the hands of feudal barons, who were largely resident in Rome, Naples, Palermo and Messina – and so neglectfully absentee – have to be qualified13 (see Maps 1 and 4).
A latifundia system is generally understood to mean an extensive property owned by a major landowner, relying on semi-servile, low paid labourers. It was often single crop, under-used and under-capitalised, and provided limited profits. Neapolitan nobles had such extensive estates in parts of the Kingdom such as the Tyrrhenean plain – north of Naples (Terra di Lavoro), south to Salerno, across towards Nola and Avellino; in the Calabrian plain; in the Adriatic or Puglian plains. The Tyrrhenian plain was reasonably well irrigated, productive and fairly easily worked. Calabria and parts of the Adriatic plains were much poorer for crops, but they provided great areas for pasturing migrating sheep, as did the Roman Campagna. Elsewhere, however, the feudal landowners had scattered, more subdivided properties, as in the poorer regions of Abruzzi and Basilicata. Other parts of Puglia (Terra d’Otranto), and the Caudina valley near Benevento (from the seventeenth century) saw latifundia estates broken up into large farms involving mixed farming, and mixed ownership and tenancies; with benefits in productivity and earning power even for the labourers.
The latifundia estate, and a mentality behind it, is frequently blamed for the backwardness of the south in both economic and social-civilising terms. But many problems stemmed from the geographic deficiencies of southern Italy outlined before: extreme summer heat, landscapes denuded of trees, poor rain supplies and inadequate river systems. The South therefore by and large lacked the variety of hillside agriculture, or forest-based arboreal and animal economies, that made central and northern Italy more diverse. The southern plains could grow grains, but mainly wheat with limited returns on yields. The lack of oats meant lack of food for cattle or horses; a paucity of oxen and horses (to pull heavy machinery) meant a heavy reliance on manual labour. The plains could provide pasturage for sheep, alternating with grain growing. This encouraged a major capitalist investment in huge herds, and noble control over extensive areas of land, with legal powers to direct the movement of the flocks between valleys and hills. It was in the interests of governments to facilitate the organisation of large herds. As G. Delille argues, the basic geographical facts of most of southern Italy precluded the development of an arable–pasturage– viticulture system based on smaller herds (which elsewhere was more efficient and progressive), with the use of oxen or horses to help work the land.14 Retention of the latifundia system was thus logical and economically understandable for much of the south. The Neapolitan feudal baronage generally took little interest in land management, or in raising the profits of their agricultural possessions, at least until the enlightenment campaigns of the eighteenth century.15 The latifundia system encouraged the concentration of people in large communities, rather than in small hamlets or villages as found in north-central Italy. But in parts of the Kingdom like Terra d’Otranto, where the land was more subdivided, there were episcopal cities like Alessano, Castro and Ugento which were really villages (with 161, 51 and 151 households in 1561).16 Day-labourers would be based there, and hired to go out into the fields as required. Others moved out with the flocks for the major migrations. Many labourers were only employed for limited days in the year for seeding and harvesting. However considerable areas of common land remained for labourers as well as tenants to keep their animals, or have tiny plots for their own crops.
Most inhabitants of the Kingdom of Naples lived in substantial population centres, whether cities (città), large villages (called terre) or hamlets (casali). The last were usually dependencies of the other two; città and terre were in administrative terms università. The università were predominantly feudal, under baronial control. In 1531 out of 1563 such communities only 55 were royal cities under direct royal jurisdiction. The Spanish rulers increased the number of università to about 2000, but only 50–60 of the most important in size and strategic location were royal. By the 1780s there may have been 3000 università, of which 2300 were feudal (after some campaigning to shift some back into royal control). Then about one million out of the 4.8 million population lived in royal communities. The feudal communities were most predominant in Basilicata, Terra di Lavoro and Calabria, and least in Terra di Bari and Principato Citra.17 The feudal università were local municipal authorities with their own officials and councils; sometimes with wide citizen voting population, sometimes with narrow oligarchies, with tax-raising powers, some control over common lands and some legal jurisdictions.
The feudal barons who had these università in their fiefs had more jurisdictional power than feudal nobles in other Italian states; and they had feudal levies and contributions that could be significant sources of revenue (and more profitable than farming). They often had considerable monopoly rights; vassals might have to use the lord’s mills, ovens and inns, to process cloth in special places. The baron could impose taxes on goods and people passing through his territory, or on goods sold on his property, as in a market. Hunting and fishing rights were under baronial control. Forced labour had ceased by the sixteenth century, though in some fiefs the vassals were required to present ‘gifts’, as at Christmas, instead. The baron could require vassals to defend his castle (or pay in lieu), or fill certain offices, such as revenue collectors, though salaries were paid. Barons controlled various legal and administrative offices in the università, and received proceeds. Appeals could be made from feudal courts to royal appeal courts, but in practice the feudal system was a major buttress to the local power of barons over the vassals (vassali, as all the inhabitants in their territories were officially called).
The Neapolitan and Sicilian barons, as also the Roman nobles in the Campagna, generally only kept a small proportion of their land under direct farming. The Borghese, the dominant feudal family in the Campagna, by 1763 had 93 per cent of their lands in tenancies. The large estates had considerable areas of common land for the vassals to graze animals, and other unenclosed land where peasants could rent tiny plots. Then other areas were rented out under various kinds of contract, for payment in fixed amounts of rent in money or kind, or in shares of harvest. In Calabria many such contracts were for eight years, closer to Naples four, in Sicily three to five. In the Roman Campagna leases by the eighteenth century were for 9 to 12 years on baronial property (but less on ecclesiatical possessions). Middle-rank tenants might sub-let. In some areas simple mezzadria-type contracts existed but, as in Sicily, the division was much more favourable to the proprietor (two-thirds), than in north-central Italy. Much of the ecclesiastical land on the mainland, as in Puglia, was rented out at very favourable levels of payment from the peasants’ point of view, sometimes in the eighteenth century to minimise anti-clerical attacks. The extent to which inhabitants of the large rural terre had access to tiny pieces of land on the hillsides, under what conditions, for growing vines, olives, fruits or keeping animals, remains unclear.
A consideration of some southern fiefs can counter-balance simplistic views of the Mezzogiorno of latifundia estates and sheep migration. The Caracciolo Brienza branch of the greater Caracciolo clan ranked among the top 50 Neapolitan families, having 15,000 vassals by the end of the eighteenth century.18 Their power was centred on four main fiefs: Atena and Brienza (Principato Citra), and Sasso and Pietrafesa (Basilicata), in neighbouring università, but across two provincial boundaries and three dioceses. Within the provinces they were distant from the capitals, Salerno and Matera (Map 4). Atena was far from its episcopal centre, Capaccio; and the other dioceses were poor (Campagna-Satriano and Marsico Nuovo). So the Caracciolo Brienza had limited rivalry from lay or ecclesiastical powers. Like many Neapolitan barons – and unlike Tuscan, Roman or Lombard equivalents – the Caracciolo Brienza barons spent considerable periods in their fiefs, in the castles at Brienza, Pietrafesa and Sasso, and (from 1612) a palace built at Atena. The castles were prominent on hills dominating the village; besides being the domestic residence they contained offices, law courts, jails and storage space. The Caracciolo discouraged visits by equals, and there were no fiefs of equals close by. They returned to Naples, where they had palaces, for major social and business negotiations such as marriages.
The fiefs were not particularly large or wealthy. Brienza (at 713 metres) and Pietrafesa (630 metres) were on high hills between the Vallo di Diano plain and the Lucan Apennines. The properties produced grain, oil and wine; there was pasturage and many wooded areas. Atena (the smallest in size) was mainly in the plain of the Vallo di Diano; it produced grain and wine, but had little pasturing; it suffered from being marshy and swampy, from frequent flooding of the river Tanagro. Atena was close to the royal road to Calabria, and the baron’s privileged inn was economically significant. It was the centre of the Caracciolo commercial activity. Sasso (higher in the mountains, at 940 metres) was the poorest università, with the smallest population, which eighteenth century officials judged to be savage and very poor. It relied mainly on pasturage, but produced some silk. Like Atena it also had buffalo for producing cheese. At Atena the Caraccciolo created some sub-fiefs, leading to the formation of a small elite society; but otherwise there were few above a low level of peasant farmers. Though resident in the fiefs, the Caracciolo Brienza showed little direct interest in the land, were unadventurous, and accepted declining returns from the land in the seventeenth century. Little of the land – of the barons or the commune – was enclosed or rented out as autonomous farms. Much land was open to grazing by all vassals, and other areas were open to whoever wished to grow crops in return for a proportion of the harvest (terraggio), which was usually only a tenth. The family also had allodial land and houses, rented out for money or kind, except where they directly farmed vines. Giovan Battista (d.1620) was the exceptional active landowner, buying up land within the fief, trying to create more coherent properties, especially at Atena (where he built a palace). He increased wheat production for commercial sale to Naples. He also made some nine-year contracts with groups of residents in Pietrafesa and Brienza, supplying oxen and some initial seed for wheat and barley growing, designed to boost overall production. But his successors did not follow his enterprising approach. The Caracciolo were no more adventurous in livestock, unlike the Doria, Princes of Melfi, with fiefs in Basilicata and Puglia.
The herding of great flocks of sheep dominated some key southern areas. Animal husbandry (sheep, goats, oxen, cows, buffaloes, mules, horses, pigs, etc.) all over Italy served various purposes and played varyingly significant roles, providing food variety (meat and dairy), clothing (wool and leather), fertilisation for crops, work and transport animals. As part of mixed farming, animals were the salvation for many small tenants, share-croppers and labourers. Where sheep became a significant feature the size of the flocks caused different effects. Small flocks of sheep were primarily useful for fertilisation and local food supply; but not leading to great profits. However, large flocks of sheep and cattle could serve major industrial enterprises and create considerable wealth. By the sixteenth century in Calabria, the Salerno-Eboli plains of the Neapolitan Campagna, and Puglia, and the Papal Campagna, considerable capital was put into the building up and organisation of flocks of thousands of sheep, which had to be moved from plains and valleys to hills and back. The plains in summer were too hot and arid to support sheep and cattle, which were taken to the hills and mountains, which in turn were too cold in winter. In Calabria Citra flocks that spent the summer in the Morano mountains and Sila area, came down to the plains and coastal areas around Crotone. Sheep were moved from the heat of Roman Campagna in June up to the central Abruzzi and Umbrian hills till late September. The most capitalised and organised transhumance was that from the Abruzzi mountains to the plains of Puglia, organised by the Dogana of Foggia.19
The effects of the large-scale transhumance systems were considerable and various. In the Papal State the leading landowners from the fifteenth century, under government incentives (until there were some second thoughts in the 1580s), shifted considerable areas from arable to pasturage, to the detriment of the cereal food supply, and leading many dispossessed and underemployed peasants to migrate to Rome and other cities. In Calabria and Puglia arable and pasturage combined better, and the sheep used fallow land in the plains, without major depletions of the farmed land. The movement of the large flocks required many males to leave home for months, affecting family and household. The large-size ventures encouraged some entrepreneurial and capitalist ventures in areas not otherwise noted for this, and set up wide networks for the commercial distribution of wool.
The large-scale sheep movements were organised through various government-created institutions – the customs house (Dogana) – for its own tax-raising purposes. There were the Dogana dei pascoli for the Patrimony of San Pietro in Tuscia (in existence from at least 1289, and significantly developed from the fifteenth century), a Dogana in Salerno (for the western part of the Kingdom of Naples) and most prominently the Dogana delle pecore for the eastern side, which moved its headquarters from Lucera to Foggia in 1468.
The Dogana at Foggia was intended to regulate the transference of large flocks from the Abruzzi mountains to set pasture lands on the Adriatic plains for the winter months (with staging areas of pasturage in transit); to control the sheep owners, shepherds and farmers providing pasturage on fallow land; to prevent opposition from fief holders, communes and arable farmers who resented the dominance of sheep and other animals; and to collect taxes. Though the size and prosperity of the operation fluctuated considerably through our period (the growth periods being 1447–94, 1550–1612, 1686–1806), the enterprise was always extensive. There were 1,700,000 sheep involved in 1496, and as many as 4.25 million reported in 1580/81. In 1783 there were 2315 families with locati, places allocated for pasturing their sheep. Some 6000 other families were involved in shepherding, or 4 per cent of the Provinces involved with the Foggia Dogana (Abruzzi Citra, Abruzzi Ultra, Capitanata and Molise).20
Flocks were brought down from the Abruzzi at the end of September, along different regulated sheepwalks starting at places like Aquila, Celano and Pescasseroli; negotiating six passes (Ascoli and Candela, Biccari and San Vito, Guglionesi, La Motta, Melfi and Spinazzola, Ponterotto) and rivers (especially the Biferno and Fortore) and resting at various holding pasture stations, the sheep (and some mules and horses) were dispersed from late November to one of twenty-three main pasture locations in the Tavoliere di Puglia (from Lesina and Castelnuovo in the north to Andria and Minervino in the south). The return journey started at the end of March and was completed in early May. The specialist livestock farms were complex to house the humans, the sheep, dogs and horses, to provide facilities for milking and cheese-making and to provide market gardens. The nearby cereal farms were simpler, though some also had pasturage. The animals provided manure for the cereals, and improved the arable production rate. One full-time shepherd per 500 sheep was seen as the best working arrangement. Smaller sheep-owning families might amalgamate to send off such a flock, or a small owner just accompany his own flock. Other individuals or companies created very large flocks, developed a hierarchy of full-time and part-time shepherds (sometimes specialising in lambs, pregnant ewes or rams); wood-gatherers, cooks, dog-watchers were also required. A full-time shepherd was assumed to work 360 days a year; any other worker would have a working-year of much less, given obligatory feast-days when they should not work on the land or in the workshop.
Shepherds might start before they were ten, and have a career on the sheepwalks until their 60s; many were literate (to cope with complex negotiations, taxation, record keeping imposed by the Dogana system), and they could end as substantial sheepowners themselves. Virgilio de Colangelo of Pacentro started in the Dogana in 1524, and 59 years later aged 75 was a rich possessor of 6000 sheep when he was awarded his locato. Substantial sheepowners may have started as a paid shepherd, or owner of a small flock, or were nobles and notaries organising major companies and enterprises, and acting as syndic officials on the governing body. The Doria family, Princes of Melfi, provided the leaders in the seventeenth century; from 1672–1763 they averaged 9844 sheep (with a maximum of 15,533), 904 goats with eighty-seven shepherds, of whom twenty-seven were full-time.21
The range of those involved in the Foggia Dogana operation, and superintended by the representative body, the generalità, that governed and negotiated for those owning sheep and rented pasturage, was wide; the generalità superintended the pastoralists and agriculturists, and also their families, servants, guards on horseback, shearers, surveyors, bakers, cheesemakers, shoemakers, accountants and more. For the Puglia-Abruzzi regions the Dogana produced a fairly harmonious balance between agriculturalists and pastoralists, and fended off the opposition of nobles and communes who were not part of this corporate system, and resented its power. By the eighteenth century (and especially after the famine of 1764), leading enlightened reformers such as Ferdinando Galiani and Melchiorre Delfico attacked the Dogana monopoly control, as detrimental to the agricultural reforms needed to ensure a steady food supply for a rising population.
Not all southern communities in the feudal system were predominantly agricultural, and some focused on small industrial complexes, or artisan specialities. For example Solofra, on the route between Salerno and Avellino (an Orsini feudo from 1558), benefited from the Salerno sheep system. Noted for producing parchment in the sixteenth century, it became both a tanning centre, and a producer of beaten gold. It conducted much trade through the fairs at Bitonto, Foggia and Salerno. In 1658 (after the cruel plague), it had about 500 households; 101 were headed by tanners, 58 by shoemakers, 19 by gold and silver beaters, 23 by tailors. There were four doctors and notaries, but now only one parchment maker. Its variegated employment profile would do credit to a Tuscan or Veneto città, but for having only one lawyer.22
The social and economic complexities of a southern feudal territory can be exemplified by neighbouring Eboli, which was judged a potentially prosperous and happy fief in a report about it in 1640, when the Doria d’Angri succeeded the Grimaldi.23 It was well located geographically, extending from the gulf of Salerno in the south 40 miles to the Picentini mountains in the north, with the river Tusciano to the west, the river Sele to the east. There were easy communications with Salerno (17 miles) and Naples. At the mouth of the Sele, eight miles from Eboli, was a landing-stage, facilitating transport of produce to and from the annual Fair at Salerno, and the local San Bernardino fair. Eboli, with about 600 households in 1648 was on top of a hill, easy to reach; a baronial castle was across the Telegro valley, and well protected. Around the town were various sizes of cultivated property, with vines, olives and gardens. Below the hills and down to the sea was a large plain, partly wooded and partly swampy, for pasturage and common usage. Few true ebolitani worked the land, but lived civilly (‘si vive civilmente, senza servizio manuale’); they brought in seasonal labourers (braccianti), from Campagna, Montecorvino, etc.
But all was not so happy in Eboli. The swampy plain, plus a warm climate meant serious malarial problems. This discouraged the feudal lord from living there; and when his Vicar General came to administer the fief he tended to reside in the neighbouring Doria feudo of Capaccio. In the later sixteenth century a bandit leader, Benedetto Mangone, from a lair near Eboli, was the scourge of the province until captured and executed in Naples in April 1587. There were many conflicts between landholders and pastoral farmers, between large sheepowners and local contadini, over disputed boundaries and common lands. The 1640 reporter also stressed that Eboli was full of social-political tension, with the vassals constantly litigating against the lord. The Eboli feudo had had a number of changes of lordship over the previous century and more, facilitating the development of a noble elite, which had secured some subinfeudated property from the Grimaldi, in conflict with lesser citizens The latter petitioned Nicolò Doria not to draw distinctions, and he declared ‘all my sons are of a kind, and so I will know how to castigate Nobles like the commoners (plebei), if they should commit crimes’; but he soon established new rules for local elections that ratified the distinction between privileged families (delle prerogative) and the body of the community (università), which also accorded the former some tax exemptions. The tension between the local nobility and the populace grew during the 1640s, and exploded during the general revolution in Naples and the Kingdom in 1647–8. Eboli was badly affected by the 1656 plague (recovering to only 355 households in 1669). The Doria gradually took a greater interest in this feudo, supervising direct farming and improvements, but so inducing conflicts with the well-off proprietors who had tried to enclose large areas for their exclusive pasturing.
Eboli has been noted as an open society, not only in terms of importing seasonal workers, but with marriage systems also open to outsiders (geographically exogamous, unlike Solofra to the north). Women played significant roles in family strategies and economically in the control and transference of property, especially among less well-off families; this helped tie incomers to the land and property. Conjugal solidarity, assistance for widows to remarry and the use of godparent relationships, gave social protection. Different strategies were used so that sons could marry and set up small conjugal families with some substance, and that premature deaths should not leave partners or children unprotected. So in Eboli political conflict and violence characterised the public life, but the domestic scene had more social cohesion.
This section should have shown that landholding systems were complex throughout the peninsula, the types of agricultural production diverse and consequential employment opportunities varied, even in a supposedly unsophisticated southern society. Some implications for types of households and families will emerge later.
From the owning family’s and institution’s perspective ownership was of great significance, as the source of prosperity (or debt), of prestige and status, the occasion for disputes with governments over taxation, and as the basis for social bargaining, especially through marriage alliances and dowries. From the governmental viewpoint the main concern was whether the land was owned by ecclesiastical institutions or the laity, since the former might be exempt from taxation. A significant shift from lay to ecclesiastical ownership, as happened in the Veneto in the sixteenth century, could alarm governments worried about their tax base. Governments also were interested whether the land was owned by a citizen or recognised urban resident, or by a country or contado dweller, since the former might be more lightly taxed than the latter. The distinction of recognised nobility as such mattered less in Italy than in some other countries (as in many parts of France), since it did not necessarily or usually mean any automatic exemption from land tax. In that sense Italian states suffered less from the social tensions between privileged, tax-exempt, nobility and tax-paying middling classes.
Most large-scale landowners, whether lay or ecclesiastical, were not directly and actively involved in land management; most land was contracted out in various ways to small tenants or share-croppers, or was controlled by factors. When and where landowners did take a personal interest – as with some patricians in Venice, Padua and Vicenza from the sixteenth century, the Doria family as Dukes of Melfi in the seventeenth, or the Tuscan nobility of Chianti in the eighteenth century developing terracing and quality wine-growing – it might lead to more adventurous farming, with benefits for many including those peasants who remained on the land. In the last case at least, and elsewhere under enlightenment agricultural reform, many contadini suffered by being driven off the land or into serious underemployment through agricultural efficiency requiring fewer workers. The lack of direct interest by many aristocratic landowners could on the one hand contribute to economic stagnation, on the other to less onerous exploitation of peasants in times of crisis.
The concentration of land in the hands of leading noble families and the church generally increased through to the eighteenth century. According to Stuart Woolf’s summary the nobility owned about 20 per cent of the landed income of Naples, 70 per cent of the Bolognese plains; in Lombardy 42 per cent of the plateau, 46 per cent of the plains and 49 per cent of the hills; in Venetia the Venice patricians and the local nobilities owned (in 1740) 55 per cent of the plains, 38 per cent of the hills. In the Agro Romano 61 per cent of the land was held by 113 families, and 37 per cent by 64 ecclesiastical institutions (in 1783). In Lombardy 20–23 per cent of the land was in the hands of the church, hospitals and confraternities, and these groupings controlled 20–30 per cent of the lands of the Kingdom of Naples. But within the nobility through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries more control was concentrated in fewer families; three-quarters of the Neapolitan feudal lands were held by only 15 families, from nearly 1500 titled noble families.24 This imbalance became the target of enlightened reformers.
Eighteenth-century reformers attacked ecclesiastical landowners for neglecting the productivity of what they leased out, for exploitation of peasants in some cases, and for lax ‘generosity’ to lazy and threatening peasants. Concern for having prayers and masses said for departed souls, led individuals to leave property (or money that would be invested in property) to churches, monasteries, hospitals and (to a lesser extent) confraternities to help finance the priests, and to be registered as a ‘good work’ that might help secure remission from the stay in Purgatory. Land held by the church was likely to be held in mortmain, inalienable and unchangeable in its usage. So church land might pass on from generation to generation in the same family, or with similar kinds of tenants and mezzadri, without much concern for improvement, productive shifts in usage or changing farming methods. A polemical study of Puglia – where about a third of cereal production was under ecclesiastical ownership – suggests that ecclesiastical properties there suffered from all faults; the need to finance the counter-reformation revival led ecclesiastical managers to seek short-term increases in returns, impoverishing many coloni, and turning many from small lease-holders to day-labourers. But the ecclesiastical managers were often too inept and/or fraudulent to ensure long-term productivity or true profit for worthwhile ecclesiastical enterprises. The Jesuit Order from the mid seventeenth century may have been agriculturally the most efficient of the ecclesiastical institutions. Strident claims for ecclesiastical immunity over taxation led to debilitating clashes with both communal (università) governments and rival lay noble landowners.25
While general accusations about conservative church ownership might be valid, the picture can be misleading. Some institutions could be considerable landowners demonstrably active in improvements, productivity and enterprise. The great Roman hospital of San Spirito in Sassia, the wealthiest ecclesiastical institution in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries after St Peter’s, had large land possessions in the Papal State, especially north of Rome. An on-going study is revealing that from the late sixteenth century the hospital brothers had some very active administrators, who well supervised the properties and their returns, creating large farm-houses, granaries and mills; they employed significant architects like Ottaviano Mascarino and Gasparo Guerra to build churches, or fortresses (as at Risparmini), to protect the properties and peasants from pirates raiding the coastline. The fraternity was also concerned that their extra-Roman properties should enhance the image and 26 reputation of the Hospital.
The Neapolitan monastery of the Certosa di San Martino (with beautiful Baroque buildings and paintings implying rich incomes) was a landowner in Puglia, and a significant player in the shepherding system of the Foggia Dogana (as were Jesuits). The Cassinese Congregation of the Benedictines were notable for land reclamation schemes, irrigation and variable land usage. The Perugian monastery of this Congregation, San Pietro, was a major landowner in Umbria; its surviving archival records show major work in re-routing and controlling the flow of the Tiber river, the creation of new farm colonies, especially at Casalina, and the introduction of cattle farming. Leading monks who served as officials there (and in other Houses, especially that at Padua, since they had to move regularly), are revealed as active entrepreneurs in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries. But the War of Castro (1641–4) sent them and many others in the Papal State into economic crisis, and they gave up direct control of their key properties. However in the later seventeenth century the monks were experimenting with cheese production and tobacco growing.27
Church landownership could be significant. From the sixteenth century most of the Perugian contado was owned by the nobles, but a quarter was owned by monasteries, churches, hospitals and confraternities.28 The proportions of ownership between nobles, other city dwellers, ecclesiastical institutions and local contado dwellers varied considerably through the length of Italy, and even within narrow territorial bands. Much depended on the quality of the land, on the relative resources of leading urban families (or existing fief and castle-based nobles), on the adventurousness or otherwise of leading ecclesiastical institutions. From the early sixteenth century nobles and patricians tended to accumulate more land, especially where commercial-based elites shifted resources into land. From the mid sixteenth century the proportion of land in ecclesiastical hands increased significantly in some areas. The Venetian authorities from the 1560s were particularly worried by the way testamentary dispositions put more property – urban and rural – into church ownership (if not direct control), to the detriment of the tax base.
What tended to diminish was the proportion of land owned by rural small- holders, as secular urban investors, and ecclesiastical institutions took control. A local Pisan case study can illustrate the decline of ownership by contadini. The podesteria of Palaia (with 12 communities) was the most fertile of these areas and had already been targeted by leading Pisan and Florentine families in the later fifteenth century. The powerful Riccardi nobles of Florence account in part for the further shift – especially around the commune of Villa Saletta, where the Riccardi possessed 36 per cent of the property (by value) in 1563, and 90 per cent in 1620. (That of religious institutions fell from 28 per cent to 4 per cent, of other proprietors from 36 per cent to 6 per cent.) The Pisans in 1585 complained formerly at the inroads into their territory made by leading Florentine families. The Florentines owned (by value) 29 per cent of Peccioli, 10 per cent of Lari and 32 per cent of Palaia in 1560; by 1637 they had 41 per cent, 17 per cent and 45 per cent. The urban Pisans had to be content with buying up from local peasants in the less economically attractive hill area of the vicariate of Lari. The contadini ownership between 1560 and 1637 fell from 38 per cent to 27 per cent in Peccioli, from 61 per cent to 30 per cent in Lari, and from 34 per cent to 17 per cent in Palaia.29 The loss of ownership was of course significant for the contadini, but the detriment to their welfare varied according to what kind of tenancy or contract followed with absentee owners or factors.
Ecclesiastical and noble landowners could be both adventurous and debilitating in their effects on economic production, and the social well-being of their tenants, share-croppers and labourers. No easy pattern can be discerned over time or geography, contrary to past polemical assumptions. What has to be noted is that even when a peasant was tied to a fief holder and his land, seemingly vulnerable to exploitation, he (and sometimes she) often had the opportunity to own a little land and to own animals that could be nurtured on feudal and common lands. This applied, as recently stressed, to the remote village of Pentidattilo, on a rugged hillside on the southern tip of Calabria. Thereby some feudal peasants under the Alberti in the early eighteenth century could enjoy some material benefits.30
The Italian contado was thus very diverse, and had a great variety of inhabitants. Some communities (like Altopascio) have the social-economic appearance of a small town. Villages, Neapolitan terre, hamlets (casali), Tuscan farm complexes show considerable ranges and types of peasants: very poor day-labourers unemployed much of the year, poor and rich smallholders and herdsmen; some of these and their families were involved in textile processing and manufacturing. There were the professionals involved in the farming, the factors, managers, grain dealers; there were smiths, cobblers, tailors full-time or part-time, depending on the size of a village community and its wealth; there were notaries, doctors, apothecaries and teachers in the larger villages or terre; all sorts of levels of clergy; there were nobles, their families, retinues and soldiers.
Whatever the ownership of the land, the extent to which owners had significant contact with the land and the world of the contadini was very variable. Many Italian elites – the patricians of Milan, Genoa, Turin, Palermo, Messina – were based in the cities, owning rural property but rarely visiting the countryside. A shift from commerce to land-holding and entitled fiefs as the basis of wealth and status for urban elite families seldom led to a contado-based existence. Some were urban-based, but had villas, castles or palaces away from the large cities – for brief visits to escape summer heat, to hunt, to indulge in fashionable bucolic entertainments – as from Florence, Rome, Naples or Venice; though some such patricians, especially from Venice or Vicenza were active gentlemen farmers fully involved in rural activity.
But some elite landowners lived more in the contado than in the large cities. These fall into various categories. Many were poorer nobles – with titles and fiefs, but limited rich land – who could not afford to maintain a civilised urban lifestyle; they lived in the more mountainous areas of Piedmont, Liguria, Friuli, Tuscany, Umbria, the Romagna and the Kingdom of Naples, or the coastal Roman Campagna. But as was noted with the Caracciolo Brienza, richer Neapolitan families were ready to spend long periods in their remoter fiefs; they did not treat their Naples palaces as the prize civilised residences in the way their Roman, Genoese or Florentine equals did. Poorer nobles resident in their castle fiefs could there organise money-making banditry, with a degree of immunity. Neapolitan, Umbrian, Romagnol and Venetian nobles were also noted for involvement either in outright banditry, or strong-arm extortionate practices using tough retainers (bravi) against local peasants, as Venetian officials supervising the Terraferma reported back about local nobles from Brescia, Bergamo, Padua, Treviso or the Friuli. The contadini could be caught up in the factional fights of elites, such as the Brescian Martinengo, Colleone and Avogadro families, or the Friulian Savorgnan clans.31
Where the nobles were resident in rural areas, and interested in the land, as with the Venetian Barbaro at their Villa Maser (designed by Palladio, frescoed by Paolo Veronese), there were beneficial effects on a wide-ranging economy, with adventurous agricultural development. Economic and social diversification inevitably followed if powerful, comparatively rich families, conditioned to conspicuous consumption and elaborate living, rebuilt castles, or created elaborate villas and palaces on the contado properties, and lived there at least part of the time. Building operations, staffing the properties, providing greater varieties of food, clothing and furnishings would all affect the local economy, even if much was also brought in from further afield.
The development of Medici villas in Tuscany from the fifteenth century (at Careggi, Poggio a Caiano, Poggio Imperiale, Pratolino or Caffaggiolo where maiolica decorated pottery was developed), had major consequences for the local economies, and for the whole image of rural living, market-gardening and formal garden development. Other patrician families like the Ginori were to follow a similar path from the early sixteenth to the eighteenth century whether as art patrons, market gardeners, active villa inhabitants, through to creating a porcelain factory near their favourite villa di Doccia in 1737. Cardinals and their families from Rome redeveloped villa life on Roman precedents at Frascati and Tivoli. In the Veneto villa life became the vogue for many patrician families from Venice and Vicenza especially; but Palladio, Scamozzi and successors built most of them to be the centre of working farms and adventurous agriculture. On a lesser scale one has to consider the probable beneficial effects of the Caracciolo Brienza deciding to reside in Brienza or Atena; the Farnese establishing a palatial residence at Caprarola; of members of leading Perugian families like the Baglioni or Della Corgna retreating to (respectively) Spello and Castiglione del Lago; or the Vitelli building a palace at Città di 32 Castello.
The living conditions of the peasants and rural artisans clearly defy easy categorisations. Some peasants were packed into multi-occupancy buildings in compact large communities on the hillside; others lived in caves, in flimsy wooden huts; others in fairly substantial farmhouses scattered across the landscape of Tuscany or parts of Umbria. Up until the 1960s touring through central or southern Italy – hill-top towns or farmland – could still give some idea of what physical conditions might have been like for centuries. The background scenes of Tuscan and Umbrian paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth century can give some idea of the hamlets and isolated farms of the period; fairly simple stone structures; living areas, animal housing and storage co-mingled; wells and ovens outside. Mills appear as more substantial structures, as befitting somebody of above average prestige and wealth, but in need of protecting produce, and himself and family from irate customers resenting his role as tax collector for commune and landowner. Sketches and detailed drawings survive from the period, as in the Siena archives, of what farms and buildings on the estates looked like. Some leading architects and theorists became interested in rural architecture for individual peasant families, or composite farm communities, such as Bernardo Buontalenti in the sixteenth century for the Arno valley, or F. Morozzi of Siena in the eighteenth, leading to probably better housing conditions, but maybe less autonomy. Benedetto del Massarizia and his clan had living spaces and ‘luxury’ possessions (beds, clothing, fancy shoes, silver buckles, mirrors, painted boxes), enough for Balestracci to see him as of a peasant middle class.33
From the later sixteenth century in the Lombard plain farm settlements were increasingly developed based on courtyard principles (rectangular complexes up to 120 × 150 metres or so), which enclosed the peasants and their animals at night, and imposed a degree of social control by the landowner and his agents. Areas around Rome had known similar complexes in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, and returned to them in the eighteenth where arable farming was reintroduced. Flatter areas of the South (the Capitanata, Sele) show similar complexes, to contrast with the hilltop fortress communities. These large farm communities testified to the efforts of landowners and institutions developing capitalist farming.
Many southern communities were ‘dormitory towns for agricultural workers’, with very simple basic housing.34 Montefusco, on the old Appian way from Avellino to Naples, seems typical of one category in physical structure, though it had artisans (e.g. potters and shoemakers) and upper class residents. Perched around a castle up in the mountains, little streets radiated down from the central public buildings. An early eighteenth-century description indicates that most housing along these lanes were single storey stone, with storage basements, with some two or three storey structures up the hillside behind. Most would have been single-room for a nuclear family. In 1631 the community had 1125 people, in 275 households. Marriage meant moving out, finding a vacated, or building a new, primitive, abode. There were fourteen nobles and twenty-five borghesi or doctors, who would have had more substantial housing; but geography and poverty dictated simple housing and simple household structures for most here, whether artisans or farm workers.
In the worst conditions contadini lived in primitive wooden shacks, tumble-down stone hovels and caves. For shepherds and forestry workers these dwellings were for part of the year while away from a family base. We have no real idea of the numbers who lived their lives in remote and very primitive dwellings outside communities; just as we find it hard to tell the dire rootless poor in city basements and alleys.
Italian rural society was very complex throughout most of Italy. Land-holding systems, and the organisation of agricultural production varied considerably, creating a multi-layered peasant society. The terrain often encouraged, or necessitated the diversity. There was much flux between systems of agricultural organisation. As far as limited detailed knowledge indicates trends over the period, it seems that the proportions of land owned by urban-based elites and institutions increased from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century; the mezzadria systems marginally declined, tenancies and labour contracts become more monetary, and the level of material well-being increased, (partly through proto-industrialisation and more interconnections with cities), if not at the rate enjoyed by the leading cities.