The Family by Mary Jo Maynes;Ann Waltner;

Author:Mary Jo Maynes;Ann Waltner; [Waltner;, Mary Jo Maynes;Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195338140
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

This post–Civil War certificate from Johnston County, North Carolina, officially registered a relationship of cohabitation between two emancipated slaves that had begun nine years earlier, under slavery. Former slaves had the right to marry only after emancipation. The Heritage Center, Johnston County, North Carolina

Slave labor was preferred by owners of the commercial plantations on the rims of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, but landowners, small farmers, and merchants also reorganized rural labor forces in Europe in response to the growth of a market for agricultural commodities. Around 1500, most farming in Central and Western Europe was relatively small in scale and based on family farms. Farm families produced grains and other crops for their own subsistence (that is, to feed themselves) as well as some for limited local markets. Many European farmers were peasants who did not own land outright. Peasant households often owed rents in labor, in kind, or in cash to an aristocratic landlord. But heads of peasant families often did have the right to keep the land within the family and to determine who would inherit the right to farm their plots. So access to farms (like access to political power and mercantile wealth) was transmitted mainly through family inheritance.

Marrying and starting a family were, in turn, tied to inheriting land and other forms of farm goods and equipment like tools or animals. Such property was closely guarded, and its transmission was often spelled out in great detail in written contracts that were part of a marriage negotiation. In European peasant families, both sons and daughters could expect to inherit from their parents, but not necessarily the same forms of property. Typically, in many parts of Europe, unless there were no male heirs, land passed primarily through sons. Movable farm capital—household equipment as well as cows and other livestock—more often went to the daughters. A couple who wanted to marry would do so only when they were set up through inheritance or dowry with a farm, very often in a home of their own.

The necessity of demonstrating to the community that a young couple had what was necessary to set up a new household is reflected in customs like the bridal procession. In areas of Germany the Brautwagen—bridal wagon—carried the bride and her dowry goods from her village to her new home. Notarial documents and family records list the wagon’s contents, often in great detail. For example, one early-eighteenth-century listing of the contents of a Brautwagen in Diepholz, Germany, begins with “a bedcover with 10 pounds of feathers” and ends with “six pigs,” whose individual values were specified.17 The dowry—which, with the land that so often came from the groom’s side, formed the economic basis of the new household—was on display for everyone to see.

Village customs of many sorts figured into keeping farmlands and families in balance and keeping population growth slow. Since marriage in much of Central, Western, and Northern Europe was late by world-historical standards—men married in their late twenties or early thirties and women

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