Marriage and inheritance

In a paper written in 1972 Lutz Berkner listed the factors that might prevent inheritance customs from influencing the form of the household. Some factors made inheritance lore inoperative, for example if the family had no property or only ‘movables’, in which case there would be no link between their possession and a particular residence; or if land was held on a temporary lease. On the other hand, there were certain factors such as the development cycle of the household and the property arrangements surrounding marriage which might simply conceal the effect of inheritance. When to all this has to be added differences among inheritance law, custom, and practice, it becomes a very difficult matter to predict what forms of household might underlie a particular inheritance system. Indeed, in a more recent paper, written jointly with Franklin Mendels, Berkner has specifically identified an area where an egalitarian inheritance system had little effect on the partibility of land, and in turn on demographic and household patterns, because the nature of the local economy required large farms. This area comprised the polders of West Flanders.

So far, however, the arguments have been advanced in the absence of hard data on the structure of the household, and it seems worth while to try and establish whether there is a particular form of household that one might associate with rural West Flanders. For this purpose we will divide the households not only by the occupation of the head but according to whether they were owner-occupiers or tenants.