Land will tear us apart: family-farm division and real estate market in Slovenia (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article addresses the question of family and farm in the eastern Alpine area in the pre-statistical period in the case of Slovenia. In particular, it questions the prevalence of the ‘Bauer-type’ family, in which the farm is indivisible, the male farm head has a pronounced autocratic power, while his siblings and other family members are relegated to a subordinate role. Since family and kinship history research in early modern rural Slovenia doesn’t offer sufficiently solid foundations, the division of farms is investigated as a signal of the absence of the ‘Bauer’ model and instead of the presence of a partible succession system. The figures on farm division in different areas in the long run are integrated by information on inheritance and dowry practices, taken from the literature and archival sources. Furthermore, by identifying the actors on the peasant land market, who were entitled to sell and purchase farms and plots, family and gender-related aspects of land-ownership rights are disclosed. The research combines scholarly literature with archive sources to present regional overviews and case studies, on which it reconstructs a wholly original and comprehensive insight into family, farm and land market in Slovenia. The resulting picture is more complex than the simple extension of the ‘Bauer’ family-type would suggest, somehow resembling the composite situation of Tyrol, and it reverses the existing interpretation in Slovenian literature. In fact, farm divisibility seems to prevail, although indivisibility was present. Partible succession was the rule, both in the case of divisible and indivisible farms. The prevailing customary law among peasants was partible inheritance, preferably to males, combined with a dowry system and the separation of property between spouses.