Page 118 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksander Panjek and Miha Zobec

to the ground and trampled,’ spent the night in the open air and managed
to reach his village, with difficulty, only the following morning. The latter
young man filed a complaint, and the Tomaj mayor Tomaž Černe had to
appear in court and name those responsible, but he named only one, and
it was not his nephew Ivan. A few days later, some of the ‘boys’ who were
ordinarily responsible for the ‘insolences’ committed, especially at night,
among whom was Ivan Černe, were summoned to the Devin castle. The
mayor Tomaž did not accompany them. During the journey to Devin, Ivan
Černe expressed the desire to get married to be ‘out of these intrigues of
having to appear before the justice for these things’ and confessed that he
was tempted nottoshowup atthe castle because‘we aregoing to thepin-
cers, and we won’t come out so soon.’ During the criminal investigation
Ivan Černe claimed his innocence until he was overcome by tension and
burst into tears. Only then did he confess his participation in the attack
on the two young men from Dobravlje. The process file is incomplete and
the court sentence has not been preserved (asts, atta, 202, 36).
We will next turn to Ivan. In the sixth generation, there were four Černe
fathers, meaning the number of married and procreating male family
members increased compared to the family demography in the seven-
teenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. In addition, the
time gap between the last birth of the previous generation and the first
in this one narrowed. Two fathers in this generation were sons of Andrej.
One was the above-mentioned Ivan, who finally married, as he had wished
(first child in 1731, last one in 1756), while the other was Jakob, who fol-
lowed the footsteps of his father Andrej in that his first registered child
was an illegitimate girl (1749), then later married and had children with his
wife between 1754 and 1769. The two sons of Tomaž who had children were
Jožef (children born 1733–1754) and Anton (children born 1736–1751). All
of them lived in Tomaj.
At this point, the Černes were a family of mayors and just like his grand-
father Marko, his father Andrej and his uncle Tomaž, Ivan Černe gained
this position, too, yet again despite the sins of his youth. His earliest men-
tion as a mayor in Tomaj dates to January 1748, while in January 1753 he
was a ‘former mayor.’ The manorial archive preserves conspicuous docu-
mentation on real estate transactions between peasants, although only for
the limited period 1747–1759. The vast majority are sales, while the rest are
inheritances, dowries and seizures (for debt repayment). The case of Ivan
Černedeviates from the averageof the multitudeof transactionsand their
actors in several respects: he appears in relatively numerous cases, all of

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