Page 24 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Giulio Ongaro and Edoardo Demo

in the land market in the first half of the fifteenth century was charac-
terized by ‘a widespread lack of aggregation of plots and [by] a relevant
fragmentation of the estates’ (Bianchi and Demo 2014, 107). This partially
changed – but without a real turn – in the second half of the century, when
a ‘clearer logic of aggregation’ occurred, a logic that continued in the first
decades of the sixteenth century (Bianchi and Demo 2014, 107).
However, this change of approach by the urban families did not lead to
a modernization of the agrarian contracts; the landowners continued to
avoid direct participation in the cultivation of the plots, and they usual-
ly rented out the properties to medium-small farmers, resorting to long-
term contracts (Bianchi and Demo 2014, 107). It seems that this pattern
endured in the following decades (Ferrarese 2008, 289; Ongaro 2020); in
the proceeding centuries the estimi of Schio still show a strong fragmenta-
tion of the plots. Indeed, even if because of the absence of specific research
on this topic using the estimi, it is difficult to characterize the distribution
of the properties, given that the tax surveys recorded only the availability
of the land (owned or rented) and not just the ownership, arapid look at
the estimi suggests that almost all the rural families had at their disposal at
least a small plot for self-sufficiency, while only the richest urban and ru-
ral families declared larger properties, sometimes with houses where ‘the
worker lives’ (as is frequently written in the tax surveys). This suggests
the existence of some plots directly cultivated by the landowners through
waged workers. Further, this kind of management of the properties was
not a trait only of the urban estates; looking to the estimi, it seems that the
wealthy rural landowners also used the same approach, renting out their
properties to medium-small farmers, who were often also employed by the
landowners themselves as workforce in the textile sector. In this sense the
land market, together with the credit market (Corazzol 1979), was a crucial
instrument for the urban families to tie themselves to the rural elites, and,
in turn, for the latter to create strong bonds – also of patronage – with the
other rural families.
Thehypothesesonwhatwasproducedonthefarmsareevenmore fragile
than the ones on the structure of the agrarian properties: on the one hand,
if we consider the morphology of the territory (as anticipated, mainly hilly
and mountainous), it is difficult to hypothesize a strong market-oriented
agricultural production. Quoting Francesco Vianello, in the area close to
the mountains of the province the terrain is ‘composed of a thin layer of
rough and melted sediments on a bottom of sterile gravel, it is very perme-
able and, therefore, quite arid’ (Vianello 2004a, 34). That is, a terrain that

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