Introduction

Within the framework of questions raised by our collective research on the family and work in pre-industrial societies, the aspect chosen for particular investigation here is one particular activity, peddling, which it is difficult to describe as a trade in the strict sense of the word. Peddling provided country dwellers with contact with towns, but only temporarily, during the actual journey, differentiated their practices from those belonging to the community as a whole. We need to ask whether peddling marked off those engaged in it with regard to allocation of social roles or domestic tasks and ways of envisaging marriage and the transmission of patrimonies; and whether, given the fact that it brought some country dwellers into contact with urban markets, it modified the whole set of social relationships within village communities.

A working hypothesis involving a special consideration of family histories aims both to fill in certain gaps in the kind of statistical and macroscopic social history that ignores the variations connected with family cycles, and to stress the processes of change and social dynamics not usually covered by ethnographical studies of older peasant societies. The object of the approach adopted here is to discover the ways in which family groups created links and networks to ensure continuity and to show how the history of groups was shaped by the confluence of the histories of individuals.