Social dynamics, historical change and living

standards. The district of Besalú, 1750-1850. Albert Serramontmany (Universitat de Girona)

The district of Besalú (33 km from Girona) encompassed a mountainous, albeit quite populated,

area in the north-west of Girona Region. The district of Besalú has not been so often studied by

rural historians as other parts of the province, though it has gathered some attention amongst

people interested in proto-industry, textile industry, history of the middle ages, or political

history. In addition, many local studies cover topics related to the local economy or

demographics seen from a local perspective, and we also find studies dealing with specific

farmhouses and the families living on them. Before the start of my PhD in 2011 there were some

unconfirmed suspicions about how the real estate market in Besalú was, which have resulted

accurate. Those suspicions, combined with what was already written by other historians about

the region, gave ground to the idea that a regional study centred in Besalú would shed light to

some peculiarities which would be interesting when pitted against other regional studies about

Catalonia. It is also interesting that up to now studies tended to discuss whether, after a period

of economic expansion between about 1750 and about 1800, there was a period of decline or

not during 1800-1860. Our study points out that this second period was of stagnation rather

than decline.

1. First of all, we are going to take a look at the demographic data for Besalú District and then we

will continue elaborating on this information. Unfortunately, the Spanish government collected

no reliable general demographic data until the end of the 1850s. Up to now, there is not a

consensus about how one should look at this topic, so we produced our own estimates for the

zone based on several articles1 and parish sources. The method assumes that non-reliable

census can be corrected by assuming a fixed maximum birth-rate for Early Modern societies

(Ferrer i Alòs 2007). We also attempted to produce estimates based on assuming a fixed

marriage-rate for the entire eighteenth century, which can be either 9‰ (the figure found in

Barcelona area) or 7’95‰ (the figure found in Besalú area in 1857 (Martínez Quintanilla 1865)).

1 (Gutiérrez Martínez & Abad Arbussé 2008; Tremoleda i Trilla & Aguirre i Oliveras 2000; Clara i Resplandís 1981; Terradas i Viñals 1982a; Terradas i Viñals 1982b; Simón 1993; Reixach i Planella 1993; Puig i Reixach 2012; Grabolosa Puigredon 1973; Solà i Colomer 1996; Ferrer i Alòs 2007; Martínez Quintanilla 1865)

The idea was to compare the results of the birth-rate estimate to those of the nuptial-rate

estimate.

Table 1: population estimates in Besalú Area

Birth-rate estimates 1717 1787 1857

35‰ 27800 37000 38600

40 ‰ 23500 32200 35350#

45 ‰ 20600 28600 35350#

Marriage-rate estimates

9 ‰ 20600 28550 35350#

7’95‰ 22700 33600 35350#

#=real figures (non-estimated)

Grey=preferred estimate

Both 40-7’95 and 45-9 estimates seem relatively trustworthy, yet we prefer that marked in grey

for it is more in line with other findings about the studied district.

Illustration 1 : projection of the district’s demographic evolution according to the two marriage-rate estimates

The reason for choosing the more linear estimate is that we know that the most populated

village in the district, Banyoles, clearly continued growing during the nineteenth century (3362

inhabitants in 1834 and 5436 in 1850), and articles by Simón and Clara pointing to Besalú as a

source of migrants during the nineteenth century can be countered by sources showing that it

was also a destiny for migrants from other areas (Simón 1993; Clara i Resplandís 1977). What

initially seemed as emigration caused by lack of good industrial jobs turned out to be the

continuation of the typical medieval and early modern practice of establishing marriage alliances

0

5000

10000

15000

20000

25000

30000

35000

40000

1717 1787 18579 ‰ 7,95‰

between families working in artisan or industrial occupations between different industrialized

areas of Catalonia.

2. To continue with the regional study of the district of Besalú we will now focus on the primary

sector, which, as expected, was really important at the time. Studies of the so-called Girona

Region generally point out that at this period, the institution of emfiteusis (from Greek

ἐμφύτευσις, meaning instauration) allowed many people to achieve the status of owners of land

by easing the conditions of access to real estate markets. A diverging development emerged

because of the clear differences between real estate and credit markets in Besalú and other

parts of the province. This divergence is due to four main factors: in general less land was

available in the markets of Besalú through all long-term forms of alienation contract; contracts

implying formal forms of credit were also less common; emfiteutic contracts were in a much

smaller proportion of all alienations in Besalú when compared to other regions; and finally

labouring-class inhabitants mostly played a smaller role in land markets. All this happened in

spite of a bigger population. It is also worth noting that Besalú had a climate unsuitable to

grapevine, it could grow there, but it did not honestly produce wine that was any good, thus

preventing the District to fully participate in the main agrarian specialization of Catalonia.

Table 2 : long-term estate alienation contracts, and number of cases with working-class people as buyers.

1771 1806 1841

cases N % cases N % cases N %

Emfiteusis

Besalú 1 2 50% 0 2 0% 3 7 43%

Lower Empordà 17 48 35% 15 42 36% 69 140 49%

Sale

Besalú 6 66 9% 10 90 11% 2 30 7%

Lower Empordà 18 90 20% 80 268 30% 54 253 21%

This should have created a situation in which a larger proportion of Besalú inhabitants were

landless; in the sense that they held no long-term property rights (we will further clarify this

later on). This was indeed the case if we look at the following graphic representing land tax

payments in 1795:

Illustration 2: Lorentz curve of land tax (cadastre) payment in 1795 (N=3008 families)

Note that on some occasions land lease contracts asked the lessee to pay a portion (usually 50%)

of the land tax, meaning that reality should be slightly less optimistic than what we see on the

graphic.

If this picture was correct, then we would be right to assume that many people in Besalú did not

spend time working land on their own. Yet, after some time working with different articles and

documents dealing with the area, one can find many hints of another kind of market which was

partly submerged below the level of operations more normally registered by notary publics. We

have, up to now, talked about long-term property rights. But it is possible that where one market

was lacking, another supplied. If we take into account that Besalú was the eastern district of the

so-called Pirineu de Girona (the part of the Pyrenees mountain chain administratively assigned

to the Province of Girona), we can expect local versions of the institutions governing the typical

agricultural practices of such environments. In fact, along the Pyrenees (Basque Country, País

de Fois…) and in other areas such as the Scottish Highlands or certain parts of the United States,

practices of slash and burn agriculture which adapted better to the local geography were

common (Sahlins 1998; Otto & Anderson 1982). Evidence of such activities, called bohigues or

artigues in Catalan and sartages or essartages in French, are very present in the toponyms,

surnames and medieval documentation, and it becomes clear that in Besalú (as in other areas)

they continued up to the nineteenth century, perhaps also into the early twentieth century (Solà

i Colomer 2007; V.A. 2014). They are even mentioned in the works of a known novelist of the

nineteenth century who spent his life around Besalú (Vayreda 2004). It seems that whilst lands

subject to these practices went from common forests to more or less private lands, the practice

0

10

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30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 120%

cadastre besalú

cadastre bisbal

of leasing them did not change that much, it was only that it went from a community business

to the control of merchants and large landowners. Whilst not much contracts referring to it

appear in the eighteenth century, transformations experienced by property rights and other

changes make the practice of slash-and-burn agriculture more visible by the mid of the

nineteenth century, since then merchants interested in charcoal (produced by the controlled

burning of trees) manage the processes of leasing land, at the same time that workers and

smallholders use to cultivate and gather crops after the burning process, and landowners use

those lands to graze their livestock after a few years of cultivation. Forest products were also

interesting to those involved in leatherworks, which were also common in the area. This was

not the only way the region intensified marginal land explotation in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries: animal census also point out to a clear increase in all types of farm animals

in Besalú, which was another way jobs were created.

In spite of all these facts, and even if slash-and-burn agricultural activities were clearly capable

of producing permanent jobs for hundreds of people in the district, and even if more and more

people could work at the farmhouses because they hosted bigger herds, it is a fact that short-

term property rights were less effective than long-term ones in sustaining Besalú’s population,

which was somewhat poorer than that of the Empordà. Yet, a look at other economic sectors in

the following section will show us other ways which explain why the region could resist much

longer without a crisis. It was only possible through the integration of different activities.

3.

Besalú had an important industrial tradition. We can find many examples of it during the middle

ages, but it would be wrong to assume nothing changed during the early modern era: Catalonia

suffered a textile crisis in the first half of the seventeenth century from which it recovered the

following half (Duran 2003; Garcia Espuche 1998). At that time, rural towns and cities outside

Girona substituted the province’s capital as the main industrial centres (Torres 2001). The trade

opportunities (including international markets) and general agrarian and demographic

expansion of the eighteenth century were very helpful in understanding proto-industrial growth

(Vilar 1973). In this general context, cottage industry in the districts of Besalú and Camprodon

greatly expanded (Serramontmany 2015). Whilst it is clear that Catalonia was an industrial

region in the late nineteenth century, some authors claim that it is still helpful to talk about

proto-industrialization (Marfany 2010). In this sense, the general evolution of the district of

Besalú and the city of Olot should be seen as an expansion taking place simultaneously in several

mountainous areas around Catalonia (Vilar 1973), an same expansion which was overtaken by

cities during the nineteenth century, only to take back the competitive advantage during the last

two decades of the nineteenth century, at the time of company towns and large mills (Enrech i

Molina 2003). Two key questions could be pointed: what was the chronology of industry in the

District of Besalú (for it is debated); and how did this industry affect people’s everyday life and

income?

During the eighteenth century towns and cities in Besalú specialized either in wool or linen-

hemp fabrics. By the 1770s, both Banyoles and Olot introduced cotton too. Important industries

included the production of ropes, men and women’s stockings, berets, and military uniforms.

The production could expand thanks both to external demand and to technical improvements

(both through discovery and through the hiring of foreign technicians) which allowed Catalonia

to compete effectively again with other countries for the first time in a couple of centuries. Yet,

rural areas relying on cottage industry were not the most effective forms of organization when

one reached the modern era. In spite of that, maintaining a relatively large number of

inhabitants in certain regions was only possible if there were jobs elsewhere than in agriculture

to combine with everything related to the primary sector. We know that Besalú was one such

region since we saw that land did not offer the same opportunities for people of that District

than for people in other parts of the Province. With this background, there are historians which

claim that the local industry was in decline during the first half of the nineteenth century, whilst

others claim that it simply did not grow much more. To elucidate this we collected data on

people’s occupations in the largest town of the district, Banyoles. Banyoles (population estimate

in 1787 about 5000 people) had about 159 hemp & linen looms in 1790, as well as 80 for cotton.

Nearby town of Tortellà, second in importance for the textile industry in Besalú District had 100

looms all in all. Just a few kilometres to the west of the district, the large city of Olot had about

600. A factory working in linen and hemp could easily hire between 18 and 42 women per loom.

Those women worked part-time in spinning, with seasonal and social variations in time spent on

cottage jobs, and it is safe to assume ¾ of the female population participated in protoindustrial

activities. Workers for the putting-out system were recruited systematically 22 km around any

factory (Serramontmany 2015). The fact that many women in a Southern-European region

would work would perhaps surprise certain historians, but none who is familiar with how the

social system and marriage market really worked here at the time. Families could also benefit

from the presence of industrialists through the demand for many products, from hemp and wool

to plants needed in dying or preparing fibres. Of course this also stimulated the need for auxiliary

artisans, such as carpenters, locksmiths and calico-designers. What is more, women who spun

often combined this task with other occupations, such as shepherding.

The population of the urban area of Banyoles showed the following occupations in different

years of the nineteenth century:

Table 3: male occupations recorded in Banyoles’ census during the 1st half of the nineteenth century

1830 1834 1850

artisans (textile industry) 34% 35% 34%

artisans (other) 14% 17% 18%

farmers & landowners 4% 4% 2%

liberal professionals 2% 2% 2%

other 8% 7% 11%

primary sector & workers 27% 21% 23%

trade & factory management 9% 10% 7%

transportation 2% 4% 3%

N 822 887 1777

As we can see, in spite of population growth in Banyoles, to be an artisan in the textile industry

was the most common town occupation, whilst the overall number of artisans grew. Only the

primary sector seemed to lose some of its importance (if we assume so-called workers were

mostly related to the primary sector, as it is done by historians of Catalonia). It seems clear, in

light of the available evidence on occupations during the nineteenth century, that the

chronology of the industrial decline in rural Besalú should be placed around 1860, as De Bolós

defended, and not immediately after the Napoleonic Wars (Bolós Capdevila 1977). It is at the

time that rural industry could not continue to compete effectively with more advanced factories

in Barcelona and Central Catalonia, for up to then, the combination of a specific agrarian system

with the availability of domestic work and the concentration in certain products, including non-

cotton ones, in face of an expanding demand, allowed manufacturers to continue their de-

centralized activities. They had recovered from an economic crisis during the Napoleonic Wars,

but they would eventually not recover from the competition of more modern technology, for

there was a limit to where low paid and low opportunity cost female domestic work could bring

them. Yet, we shall not forget that even if cotton was introduced in the eighteenth century, it

was only more than 100 years later when it did become really dominant in the market.

But even if the district of Besalú continued growing in population, industrial activity, livestock

farming, and agriculture during the first half of the nineteenth century, as Schlumbohm once

said for a German proto-industrial region, such forms of economic organization do not really

offer opportunities of socioeconomic advancement to those living in them: "The specific

agrarian social system of the region [...], was not dissolved by proto-industrialization but only

reshaped. The seasonal character of the linen industry, with its lack of a social division of labour,

was so closely interwoven into the agrarian system that the holders of real property remained

unchallenged in their predominance. What is more, they came to prevail even in the field of

rural industry. Thus, unlike many other proto-industrial regions [...], the landless class

[leaseholders] did not become more or less emancipated from the hegemony of propertied

peasants (Schlumbohm 1992). This situation is very different from what one can find in many

other parts of Girona province, where industry was less important but many became propertied

and enjoyed better income thanks to agricultural expansion and specialization. Ironically, the

districts which we would perhaps think of as more advanced (those with proto-industry) ended

up having a poorer population than those that had a more agrarian specialization at the time,

such as the Upper and Lower Empordà Districts. Relevant to those who followed the

protoindustrialization debate, it is also the case that there are observable differences in the

demographic regime. Besalú was on one hand slower to experience a demographic transition to

a more modern regime (with lower birth-rate and lower mortality), but on the other hand

seemed to be able to break much faster socially sanctioned practices reinforcing status

homogamy (see annex). In this sense, it resembles more other Catalan areas with industry than

other nearby Districts with more agrarian specializations where a “change in society without a

change in marriage” has been claimed (Marfany 2006; Congost & Ros 2013).

4.

We have access to two other sources which tell something helpful to support the claim that

Besalú was more unequal, and likely poorer too. Those are marriage chapters and inventories.

We will start with commenting the former, and then move to the latter.

Table 4 : comparison of non-deflected dowries received by bridegrooms from the bride’s family in the districts of Besalú and La Bisbal (median)

N artisan farmer worker smallholder merchant landowner

Besalú 1771

118 112’5 125 60’5 402

Bisbal 1770 85 125 150 80

Besalú 1806

180 137’5 256,5 100 100 300 2500

Bisbal 1806-1807

136 225 300 100 100 500 1350

Besalú 1841

141 111’41 148’54 57’19 111’41 148’54 1949’64

Bisbal 1850-1855

92 250 425 135 167,5 300 8700

Source: Besalú data collected by me. Empordà data from the Girona Rural Societies History Group. Bisbal district 1850-55: gathered from information found in annex 10 of Esteve’s thesis (Esteve Torras 2011).

Whilst median dowries do not seem to offer many differences during the 1800s, we have to bear

in mind that the number of smallholders was much lower in Besalú due to the differences in the

land and credit markets we explained above. It is important to take into account that, even if

the results are similar, the percentage of working-class people signing marriage contracts at

Public Notary offices in Besalú was clearly lower. And, by the end of our study period, it seems

that the dowries paid in Besalú were clearly lower than those paid in the Bisbal District, one

which at the time could be defined as specialized in agriculture, and which opened many more

opportunities to gain long-term property rights to land.

Now moving to inventories; available data allows putting the results for presence or absence of

9 key goods side by side, and those seem to suggest no difference amongst merchants, but

significant difference amongst liberal professionals, workers and smallholders. There are also

clear differences between farmers in both areas, but those may not be meaningful, because they

are strongly influenced by the difference in the composition of each sample, that is, we do not

know the number of tenants and landowners comprising the Bisbal District sample because the

historian who studied it did not separate them. Therefore, we are forced to consider the

comparison of farmers’ inventories in Besalú and the Lower Empordà (Bisbal District) not

possible. Another problem is that no findings related to artisans have been published, also

preventing us from making comparisons in this significant group, which we believe may be

better off in Besalú. The most interesting difference is nonetheless amongst workers: in the

Empordà we find many times a greater number of inventories referring to them, when

compared to Besalú, and they also appear as clearly richer, since they consumed a greater

variety of the nine available key goods. Liberal professionals and clergymen also seem to have

more items in inventories from the Empordà, but they were a much smaller part of the

population than workers. Esteve also published data for smallholders, but only for 1850-55, and

surprisingly, those that were considered smallholders in Besalú were slightly richer than those

considered to be so in the Lower Empordà. A final consideration is that, at a more general

societal level, chocolate consumption seems to have spread earlier in time in the Empordà area

than in the Garrotxa area, maybe due to wealth differences or perhaps to the proximity of sea

harbours.

In conclusion, common people in the Lower Empordà area (around La Bisbal) seemed to have

been able to acquire significantly more consumer products than their equivalents in Besalú

District.

Table 5: comparison of diferent social groups through goods appearing or not in inventories

Left number represents % of inventories who show that good in the Lower Empordà. Right

number represents % of inventories who show that good in Besalú.

lan

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& t

en

ants

- p

ages

os

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chan

ts

arti

san

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wo

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s

smal

lho

lder

s -

men

estr

als

liber

al p

rofe

ssio

nal

s &

pri

ests

1750-55 - N 46 / 43 9 / 6 55 / 7 18 / 3

sheets 98% / 95% 100% / 100% 91% / 100% 94% / 100%

napkins 78% / 84% 89% / 89% 78% / 43% 89% / 67%

table clothes 83% / 88% 100% / 100% 83% / 89% 89% / 67%

books 4% / 14% 11% / 0% 4% / 0% 73% / 100%

silver objects 33% / 47% 56% / 33% 33% / 14% 28% / 3%

gold objects 13% 14% 33% / 1% 13% / 0% 6% / 0%

chocolate pots 13% / 9% 44% / 17% 13% / 0% 39% / 0%

forks 44% / 46% 56% / 6% 44% / 29% 61% / 33%

chests 94% / 95% 100% / 100% 94% / 100% 83% / 100%

1800-05 - N 29 / 28 9 / 11 49 / 13 13 / 10

sheets 93% / 100% 100% / 100% 94% / 100% 100% / 90%

napkins 79% / 90% 89% / 91% 79% / 69% 92% / 80%

table clothes 79% / 97% 78% / 91% 79% / 77% 92% / 80%

books 4% / 14% 0% / 36% 4% / 0% 85% / 50%

silver objects 29% / 45% 56% / 56% 29% / 0% 54% / 40%

gold objects 11% / 14% 22% / 18% 11% / 0% 15% / 0%

chocolate pots 43% / 54% 56% / 63% 43% / 8% 85% / 80%

forks 79% / 97% 89% / 82% 79% / 62% 69% / 60%

chests 93% / 100% 89% / 100% 93% / 100% 92% / 90%

1835-40 - N 20 / 43 11 / 12 16 / 6 12 / 11 6 / 9

sheets 100% / 95% 100% / 92% 100% / 67% 83% / 100% 100% / 89%

napkins 75% / 90% 91% / 42% 75% / 50% 33% / 55% 100% / 78%

table clothes 100% / 85% 81% / 83% 100% / 83% 50% / 64% 100% / 89%

books 10% / 39% 27% / 25% 10% / 17% 0% / 0% 83% / 44%

silver objects 10% / 22% 34% / 8% 10% / 0% 0% / 0% 67% / 67%

gold objects 5% / 5% 18% / 8% 5% / 0% 0% / 0% 0% / 0%

chocolate pots 55% / 57% 55% / 42% 55% / 0% 0% / 9% 83% / 89%

forks 45% / 71% 46% / 50% 45% / 50% 33% / 55% ? / 89%

chests 95% / 88% 73% / 92% 95% / 100% 92% / 91% 67% / 67%

Source: made with our own data from Besalú, combined with data from the Lower Empordà

from (Esteve Torras 2011)

5.

We have seen that the population of Besalú faced some additional difficulties due to the

district’s uplands location and to a land and credit market that did not offer a great deal of

opportunities. Yet, during the eighteenth century, upland districts of the Province of Girona such

as Besalú grew demographically and avoided any serious economic-related crisis implying clear

population loss. We have to understand that this was only possible by looking at it as an

economy in which families were deeply involved in pluriactivity combining several sectors,

including a strong demand for cottage industry for the entire studied period. This integration is

what made maintaining a growing population in a relatively unlikely geographic place possible,

albeit it had three clear consequences: bigger polarization between rich and poor, the

maintaining of old demographic patterns (high death and birth rate), and the loosening of social

sanctions related to the marriage market. These three aspects tell it clearly apart from the areas

of the Province of Girona closer to the Mediterranean, which had a different climate and

geography.

ANNEX

Table 5 : baptisms and deaths in Besalú

1717 1787 1857

bapt. death bapt. death bapt. death

TOTALS 346 174,9 646,1 434,55 639,54 530,6

ÍNDEX 100 (n.d.) 186,73 100 184,84 122,10

RÀTIO BIRTH/DEATH ? 1,49 1,21

NOTE: 1717 death index not calculated because of unreliable data.

Table 6 : status homogamy in Besalú considering observed marriages vs. Expected marriages considering the size of each group in the population.

bridegrooms Bride fathers

1755 artisans farmers merchants lib prof. workers

artisans (N23) 1,0 1,6 1,6 1,0 0,2

farmers (N12) 0,0 3,1 0,0 0,9 1,3

merchants (N2) 1,1 0,0 9,3 0,0 0,0

lib professionals (N6) 1,1 0,8 0,0 3,7 0,0

workers (N13) 0,5 1,1 0,0 0,0 2,7

1769

artisans (N24) 2,0 0,5 1,9 0,0 0,9

farmers (N20) 0,4 2,0 0,0 0,7 0,6

merchants (N1) 0,0 0,0 0,0 13,4 0,0

lib professionals (N6) 0,0 1,5 0,0 6,7 0,0

workers (N16) 0,6 0,4 1,4 0,0 2,1

1805

artisans (N39) 1,6 0,9 0,7 1,2 0,9

farmers (N49) 0,7 1,3 1,4 1,9 0,7

merchants (N7) 1,6 0,4 6,1 0,0 0,4

lib professionals (N4) 1,4 0,7 0,0 11,5 0,7

workers (N85) 0,9 1,0 0,5 0,0 1,3 Source: dispensation banns

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