ABSTRACT
Work on the land was more arduous than in the workshop. Peasants who lived to be old could not go on working as before, even if they were not sick or disabled. Arrangements for their retirement, full or partial, varied from region to region in western Europe, depending on the local inheritance laws and customs, the family structure and the nature of the peasant economy. While primogeniture was the dominant principle of inheritance in the fiefs, and partible inheritance predominated in the cities, in peasant society several principles obtained. We know of primogeniture, ultimogeniture, partible inheritance, and impartible inheritance descending jointly to all the offspring, or only the sons. In some regions customs allowed the father to choose which of his sons would be his heir. As a rule, where there was neither a demesne estate cultivated by the tenants’ labour, nor a strong peasant community, arrangements for retirement were based on the local custom, but concerned only the family in question. It was not so in regions of demesne estates. There the lord of the manor, to protect his own interests, could intervene in the peasants’ retirement and even determine when an aged peasant might retire. Where the rural community was strong, as in the regions of the common field villages, its representatives were sometimes involved in the arrangements for retirement; above all, they supervised the execution of the maintenance agreements between fathers and sons. But underlying the different laws, customs and local conditions, there were two fundamental models of retirement. In one, when the father grew old and was unable to work as much as before, he did not transfer the holding to his son (or sons), but remained the head of the household and controlled the funds, even though he was no longer the main workforce on the land. In the second model, the aged peasant retired and transferred the holding to one of his sons, who then became the head of the household (in spite of the warnings of the popular proverbs and the didactic literature). So much for the social custom. Needless to say, its practice was affected by the particular demographic conditions of the time and the place, as well as by the specific family circumstances. The sharp demographic decline caused by the epidemics which erupted in the
mid-fourteenth century led to changes in patterns which had seemed normative before the plague. In this chapter we shall see some examples of arrangements based on the two said models, and consider their effects on the lives of the older and younger generations which had to share the resources.
