RURHE 07 Inheritance Practices, Marriage Strategies and Household Formation in European Rural Societies

Conventional wisdom holds that, over a long period of history, many women and men in the countryside were prevented from marrying because they lacked access to land. This volume offers an up-to-date discussion of the interaction between inheritance practices, marriage and household formation both for those who inherited and those who did not. It asks why and to what extent inheritance patterns and household structures differed between countries and regions in Europe right up to the present day. Dealing with bothimpartible and partible inheritance, it examines how retirement practices and choices between ante-mortem or post-mortem property transfers gave rise to a wide range ofspecific strategies. The chapters cover rural Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, ranging from semi-subsistence and seignorial societies to highly market-oriented economies. They offer case studies drawn from the Iberian Peninsula to Scandinavia and from the British Isles to Russia.