Page 33 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Eonomy and Networks of Rural Elite Families in a Manufacturing Area

around one hundred looms (ascs, b. 24.). The owners were the same as
in the 1616 tax survey, and this means that the plague did not modify –
or, at least, not relevantly – the economic equilibria within the village. On
the contrary, the economic position of the leading families seems to be
strengthened.
Movingforwardintime,accordingtothehistoriography,astronggrowth
of the woollen industry in Schio happened at the end of the century, when
the local manufacturers started to produce high-quality clothes (at the be-
ginning illegally, then, from 1701, legally), before the real boom that took
place in the eighteenth century (Panciera 1985, 403; 1996, 25; 2004, 255–6;
2014, 148). However, looking to the archival sources this growth appears
less pronounced: if in 1665, 39 local producers were enrolled in the wool
guild of Vicenza – that is, nine more compared to the period 1648–1652
(Vianello 2004a, 235) – the investitures for fulling mills by the Venetian
Provveditori Sopra i Beni Inculti, together with the data recorder in the 1700
tax survey, indicate a moderate increase of the productive potential com-
pared to the 1640s.
Indeed, according to Panciera (1988, 18), between 1670 and 1679 the
Provveditori released eight grants (including both the new and the renewed
investitures), then two confirmations in 1687 and one in 1694. The 1700
tax survey (ascs, b. 27.), in contrast, indicates a slight decline of the mill
wheels (28, compared to 29 in 1643), 43 workshops (41 in 1579), 19 chio-
dare, and five fulling mills (Fontana 1985, 78), a figure that suggests around
eighty looms functioning, and a purgo. In summary, if we exclude the high
number of chiodare and, partially, the increase of the dyeing plants – ac-
cording to Fontana (1985, 78), five at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury – we can say that at the beginning of the century the number of man-
ufacturing structures was almost the same as that of 1541, after the down-
sizing experienced in the 1570s and the slight growth in the first half of the
seventeenth century (figure 1.5). Moreover, if in the sixteenth century and
in the first decades of the following one the selling of the clothes produced
in Schio reached markets abroad, at the beginning of the eighteenth cen-
tury ‘there are no signs of a commercialization outside the borders of the
province of Vicenza’ (Panciera 1988, 19).
The graph, however, shows that the turning point of the woollen in-
dustry in Schio was in the 1760s; until the 1750s there were no relevant
changes, with only three confirmations of investitures for fulling mills by
the Venetian Provveditori, and around a thousand low-quality garments
produced yearly between 1711 and 1716, and in 1730 (in 1528 the produc-

31