Page 111 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

A Dynasty of Mayors and a Member of Parliament

action.’ Such relations could be upward oriented, seeking a prestigious god-
parent, or downward oriented, when an elite person wanted to show chari-
ty towards the poor, albeit socially horizontal ties were not excluded, while
the choice of godparents chosen ‘among relatives was somewhat marginal.’
Towards the end of the eighteenth, but mostly so during the nineteenth
century, processes of ‘familialization,’ indicating the preference for god-
parents from among relatives, and of social ‘horizontalization’ have been
recorded. Godparenthood increasingly became a means of strengthening
‘internal solidarities at each level of the social structure’ instead of vertical
cohesion(Alfaniand Gourdon2012a,1,14, 20–4,29–33).Our attemptatus-
ing godparenthood as an indicator of the prestige and consensus enjoyed
by an elite family in the native village community will therefore allow us, at
the same time, to verify whether the change in meaning of godparenthood
may be detected also in Slovenian rural society between the seventeenth
and early twentieth century, albeit based on only one family.
Since the late seventeenth century, members of the Černe family were
repeatedly mayors in the village of Tomaj in the Karst (southwest Slove-
nia). In the Devin manor, where our case study takes place, mayors were
representatives of a group of several villages, while each village had its
own vice-mayor. In the eighteenth century, and seemingly in the earlier
and later centuries as well, mayors were individual members of the (peas-
ant) elites. Over the generations, individuals from a narrow circle of one
and the same families and their relatives tended to hold the position of
mayor. They based their leading role on extensive assets, which they also
maintained with significant income from the performance of the mayoral
function and with the possibility of encroaching on profitable real estate
and other deals based on their above-average material situation (Panjek
2023). To the economic one, social power must be added. Mayors acted
as a link between the peasant society and the manorial administration,
since besides representing their communities, as part of their office they
had to perform duties and implement directives by the landlord and his
officers.
The research is based on parish registers of births, court files and a fam-
ily archive. The study is divided into two parts. In the first, which compris-
es three chapters, we reconstruct the history of the Černe family in the
village of Tomaj over three centuries, with an emphasis on the economic,
moral/ethical, as well as local and wider political actions of its representa-
tives. On the one hand, this is a consequence of the information contained
in the sources we use (court records), and on the other, it is functional to

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