Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish

by Caroline B. Brettell

Overview

The author examines not only the imbalance in the marital fortunes of men and women but its effect on the roles of women in the community.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691610122
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #470
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

Read an Excerpt

Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait

Population and History in a Portuguese Parish

---

By Caroline B. Brettell

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-09424-3

---

CHAPTER 1

The Parish of Lanheses: Demography, Economy, Social Structure, and Religion

History and General Characteristics of Population

The village of Lanheses is situated along the Lima River in the concelho of Viana do Castelo in the northwestern province of Minho. It is approximately fourteen kilometers from the coast, and midway between the provincial towns of Viana do Castelo and Ponte de Lima. Although the Lima River is one of several rivers that cut through the north of Portugal, flowing from the mountains in the interior toward the sea, it has inspired many Portuguese poets, and is thought by some to be the mythological River Lethe referred to by the Greek geographer and historian Strabo. According to Augusto Pinho Leal, the Romans believed that the Lima River produced forgetfulness, and they feared to cross it because, in doing so, they thought that they would forget Rome and remain in the area forever. Perhaps a similar sentiment is what keeps contemporary natives of the region so attached to their homeland — to many of them, it is indeed the most beautiful part of the world, and a place to which emigrants hope and expect to return one day.

The early history of Lanheses itself is fragmented and must be viewed in the context of the history of northwestern Portugal as a whole. The entire region of Entre-Douro-e-Minho (the present provinces of Douro Litoral and Minho) was settled by primitive Lusitanians around 2000 B.C. Some writers have claimed that Lanheses was the seat of an old Lusitanian city called Lais, or city of the laisenses — hence one explanation for the origin of the name. After 900 B.C., Celtic herders and metalworkers entered the region, settled, and intermarried with the Lusitanians. The Romans appeared on the Iberian peninsula around 212 B.C., but it took them almost two hundred years to conquer the entire area, and their battles against the very independent Lusitanians were long and hard. After their conquest, the Romans set about to establish settled agricultural villages throughout the Iberian peninsula. Although remote from the rest of the Empire, Lusitania (Portugal) came to share the language, the legal structure, and later the religion of Rome.

In A.D. 409, the Swabians crossed over the Pyrenees into Spain and eventually settled in Galicia and Lusitania. Whereas the south of Portugal remained Romanized and characterized by large estates and nucleated villages, the Swabians introduced the practice of more dispersed settlements and land holdings that were divided among heirs from one generation to the next. The system of minifundia that characterizes northern Portugal, and especially the province of Minho, was born.

Moors invaded Iberia in A.D. 711, and conquered much of the territory. However, the northwestern corner never came truly under their aegis, and within fifty years of the Moorish conquest, the kings of Asturias and Leon reconquered the major cities of Entre-Douro-e-Minho: Porto, Braga, Guimaraes, and Viseu. In the late ninth century, these Christian kings reorganized the region under autonomous counts and called it the Provincia Portugalense (province of Portugal). By the eleventh century, these counts pushed their dominion southward to the city of Coimbra.

Raymond, the fourth son of Guillaume the Great of Burgandy, came to northern Spain and Portugal in 1086 or 1087. In 1090, he married Urraca, the legitimate daughter and heiress of Alfonso VI, king of Leon, Castille, Galicia, and Portugal. Raymond was granted the government of Entre-Douro-e-Minho (Portugal) and Coimbra in 1094, but in 1096 or early 1097, Alfonso gave Portugal and Coimbra to his son-in-law Henry of Burgandy as a dowry upon his marriage to Alfonso's illegitimate but favored daughter Teresa. When Henry died, Teresa was left as a regent for her son Afonso Henriques. Local Portuguese barons, fearing Teresa's alliance with her Spanish kinsmen, turned to Afonso Henriques and encouraged him to claim the Portuguese territory as his own. Afonso expelled his mother in 1128, refused to pay homage to his Spanish cousin Alfonso VII (the son of Urraca), went on to oust the Moors from large portions of the country, and finally assumed the title of King of Portugal in 1143.

After the separation of the Kingdoms of Leon and Portugal, and under the successive leaderships of Afonso III (1248–1279) and D. Diniz (1279–1325), the conditions of the rural population in the province of Entre-Douro-e-Minho improved. The lands were distributed to colonists who paid a fixed tribute or foro in money or in kind.

Each couple was given a sufficient portion of uncultivated land to plant, common land for pasturage, and furze-field for vegetable manure. All the land which was cultivated at the death of the couple (caseiros) or principle emphyteuta was divided among the heirs. All the uncultivated land was returned to the crown, the country, or the seigneury, but as self interest animated agriculture, only barren land remained undistributed. (Silva 1868:109)

Allodial holdings became increasingly smaller, to the point, in some cases, of being economically absurd. In this context, as the historian Marques (1972) has noted, local migrations from one area to the next, from countryside into towns, began. Numerous new towns (vilas novas) and villages (aldeias novas) were founded. Much in line with current theories about the relationship between partible inheritance, land fragmentation, and population growth, Marques draws a connection between the breaking up of the old Roman villas, the access of later-born sons to property revenue, and an increase in population in Portugal in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. However, like the rest of Europe, Portugal suffered a population setback with the arrival of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century.

From the late Middle Ages (approximately 1130) until the middle of the sixteenth century, the village of Lanheses, together with the neighboring villages of Vila Mou, Meixedo, and Nogueira belonged to the couto conceded by D. Afonso to the monastery of San Salvador da Torre, a Benedictine monastery supposedly founded in A.D. 570 by St. Martin of Dume and, according to some sources, restored around 1066 by Frei Ordonho, a relative of D. Payo Vermudez (whom some called the Count of Tuy). This monastery, like the rest of the area north of the Lima River, was part of the Gallegan diocese of Tuy until 1440. It was then transferred to the bishopric of Ceuta in Africa and, finally, in 1512, to the archbishopric of Braga.

The population of Portugal began a steady increase after 1450 and throughout the sixteenth century, despite periodic plagues. In 1527, King João III ordered a census of the nation (Freire 1905). At this time, 2,104 dwellings were counted in the town and vicinity of Viana do Castelo, and 101 dwellings in the village of Lanheses itself. The entire population of Entre-Douro-e-Minho was counted at 275,330, making it, as it had been since the birth of the nation, the most densely inhabited region of Portugal — approximately 20 percent of the total population living on 13 percent of the area. The population for the country as a whole was estimated at between one and oneanda-half million at the time.

Lanheses existed at the easternmost extent of what was defined as the termo, or limits, of the town of Viana do Castelo. Viana had remained a small fishing town until the great age of discovery changed it into a major port for overseas trade. It flourished throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Attracted by its commercial prosperity, José Martins de Ricalde (or Rigua), a native of the Spanish province of Biscaya, came to Viana in the fifteenth century. The family prospered, and in 1548 a descendent, João Martins de Ricalde, acquired half of the patronage of Lanheses from the convent of San Salvador da Torre, and built a manor house in the village. One of his great-grandsons became the priest of Lanheses and erected a family tomb in the main parish church. In the early years of the nineteenth century, a descendent, D. Maria Francisca Abreu Pereira Cyrne, only child of the tenth senhor of the manor of Lanheses, married the second count of Almada, and the property thus passed into the hands of one of the important noble families of Portugal, a family about which more will be said later in this chapter. When Portugal came under Spanish rule (1580–1640), commerce in Viana do Castelo was paralyzed, and the town stagnated. Only when gold and diamonds wore discovered in Brazil did the town and its region thrive again.

In Padre António Carvalho da Costa's chorography of Portugal, originally published between 1706 and 1712 and reissued in 1868, Lanheses is listed as having 170 dwellings. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of dwellings had only grown to 173 (Cardoso 1767), and in 1793, despite the fact that it was neither urban nor politically important, the queen of Portugal, Maria I, elevated Lanheses to the status of vila, the administrative seat of a concelho. Together with other villages in the concelho that came under the jurisdiction of the new vila in 1795, Lanheses constituted a seigneury (senhorio), which was given de jure et herdade to Sebastião de Abreu Pereira Cyrne "in remuneration for the many and valiant services" of his uncle, Sr. José Ricardo Pereira de Castro, chancellor major of the kingdom, and in exchange for the seigneury of Lindoso, which Sebastião's father, Francisco de Abreu Pereira Cyrne Peixoto (brother of Jose) had had since 1750. A pillory was erected to symbolize this new status of vila, as were a town hall and a prison. In 1796, a bimonthly market (feira) was established, and by 1799 this market had usurped the cattle trading business from the smaller feira in the village of Meixedo. Except for scattered election portfolios that give us some indication of the more respected citizens of the new vila, a few tribunal records listing petty offenses, and a book of local laws, little else survives from this period of Lanheses' history.

There are, however, two sources that provide some indication of the population of the new vila at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Pina Manique's 1798 census (1970) listed 188 households, and 476 for the new concelho as a whole. The cadastre of the province of Minho prepared by the engineer José Gomes Villas Boas at roughly the same time (Cruz 1970) still listed Lanheses as a couto — one of thirteen in the territory of Viana do Castelo at that time — and counted 801 souls living in 186 households. The population was further subdivided as follows: 265 men over age 14, 304 women over age 14, 125 boys under age 14, and 107 girls under age 14. According to Villas Boas, Lanheses had, at this time, three clerics, and 960 reis were collected for the annual tithe paid to the church. The population for the entire territory of Viana do Castelo was 124,197 individuals living in 32,144 households.

With the independence of Brazil in the 1820s, the silting up of the port, and the collapse of the shipbuilding industry in the region, Viana do Castelo's period of economic prosperity waned. In 1834, in accordance with nationwide administrative changes and with the dissolution of both seigneuries and ecclesiastical patronages (padroadas), Lanheses lost its status as a vila and was, instead, incorporated into the concelho of Viana do Castelo. Although the pillory and oral historical pride are the only signs remaining to indicate the village's former political glory, the bimonthly market survives to this day and has helped to sustain Lanheses' economic centrality within its region.

Although the population of Portugal had grown steadily during most of the sixteenth century, a plague in 1581, sixty years of Spanish rule, and the war of restoration in 1640 initiated a period of lethargic population growth through most of the seventeenth century. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the population of the country as a whole was estimated at two million. According to Balbi (1822), in one of the first "statistical essays" on Portugal, certain regulations supported by João IV (1640–1656) and his successors, as well as religious intolerance that discouraged foreigners from settling, impeded Portugal from regaining its former growth pattern as quickly as it might have.

Population grew slowly during the first half of the eighteenth century under the reigns of Pedro II (1668–1706) and João V (1706–1750) despite a plague in Lisbon in 1723, certain political intrigues with which these sovereigns involved themselves, and sometimes contradictory legislation with regard to agriculture, commerce, and industry. By 1758, the population was estimated to be at two-and-a-half million. By 1800 it had reached approximately three million, and by 1820, 3.1 million. Yet, according to Marques (1972), Lisbon was not growing as fast as other major capital cities in western Europe, and the growth of the city of Porto, by contrast, was symptomatic of the economic development and prosperity of northern Portugal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. If we accept early population counts for Lanheses itself, growth was indeed slow. Between 1527 and 1712, an average of one new household was formed every two-and-a-half years; only three new households were established in the fifty-five years between 1712 and 1767, whereas one new household was established every other year in the thirty-three years between 1767 and the dawn of the nineteenth century.

The real takeoff in Portugal's population growth occurred after the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially between 1860 and 1911. As in other parts of western Europe, this takeoff was largely coincident with an abrupt fall in mortality. Morgado has pointedly observed, "if three hundred and thirty years had been needed for the population (of Portugal) to reach a figure of three and a half million, only a further century was needed before it passed eight million" (1979:319).

The first national census of Portugal was taken in 1864, and from that time on we have a more or less accurate monitoring of population trends, nationally, regionally, and, to a lesser extent, locally. The census figures for the concelho of Viana do Castelo and for the village of Lanheses appear to indicate that population growth in this area did not really take off until the 1920s and 1930s. However, a closer examination of the rates of actual and natural increase (based, of course, on aggregate calculations from parish registers in combination with census figures) demonstrate that indeed there was population growth, but that it was offset to a great extent by emigration (Table 1.1). In the fourteen years between 1864 and 1878, fifty new households were established, while the population itself declined by almost two hundred individuals — hence a dramatic drop in mean household size, as well. A more thorough discussion of the nature of household formation during the late nineteenth century is included in Chapter Three.

Figure 1.1 shows trends in the gross numbers of baptisms, deaths, and marriages in the parish for the little more than two-and-a-half centuries between 1700 and 1960. Baptisms show a general decline throughout the later eighteenth century, followed by an increase during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century.

Between 1830 and 1890 there were short-term fluctuations in natality and, subsequently, a second period of rapid increase at the dawn of the twentieth century and especially after 1920. The momentary drop between 1910 and 1919 seems to be directly associated with a momentary drop in marriages, as well — both most likely a result of the impact of World War I. Although not shown on the graph, the number of baptisms in the parish declined quite dramatically during the 1960s, a direct result of emigration to France, which coincides with a negative rate of actual population increase after forty years of population growth. Couples in the 1960s were often marrying in Lanheses and subsequently departing together for France, although many have had children born in France baptized in the village.

Marriages show more short-term fluctuations after 1810, but generally, the average number of marriages per year remained fairly constant until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Deaths appear to have varied as much as births over the short term. In general, the low figures probably reflect an underreporting of childhood mortality before first-communion prior to the mid-nineteenth century. The dramatic rise in deaths between 1800 and 1810 is most likely the result of the Napoleonic invasions in the later years of that decade. The rise between 1830 and 1840 reflects the impact of the worldwide cholera epidemic (Morris 1970) — thirty-two individuals died in August and September of 1832 alone. A similar epidemic, the Spanish flu, hit the parish in 1918, killing twenty-seven people during the month of October. This latter epidemic is not forgotten by Lanhesans, especially those who lost a relative, and an annual pilgrimage in early June is made by inhabitants of all the villages in the region to commemorate this tragic and mortal event.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait by Caroline B. Brettell. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• List of Tables, pg. ix
• List of Figures and Map, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter One. The Parish of Lanheses: Demography, Economy, Social Structure and Religion, pg. 14
• Chapter Two. Emigration and Return Migration in Portuguese History, pg. 70
• Chapter Three. Family and Household: Nuptiality in Lanheses, pg. 98
• Chapter Four. Having Children: Fertility in Lanheses, pg. 166
• Chapter Five. Children Out of Wedlock: Illegitimacy in Lanheses, pg. 210
• Conclusion, pg. 263
• Appendix One. Sources: The Parish Registers and Other Documents, pg. 269
• Appendix Two. Recognition Which the Inhabitants of This Parish Made of Their Practices and Customs, pg. 277
• Notes, pg. 279
• Bibliography, pg. 299
• Index, pg. 321