Abstract
In a large village in the Perche, between Beauce and Normandie, an aristocracy of merchant-farmers benefited from the partial dismantling of lordschips estates which took place in the second part of 18th. However, by the middle of the next century, partible inheritance as prescribed by customary-law long before Napoleonic Code, was to undermine considerably the position of the privileged peasant with numerous heirs, in spite of homogamous alliance and a close network of spiritual affinity. Reported by informants or recorded in the sources, principally the notarial archives, a whole lot of "social facts" has improved genealogical research concerning the lineal descendants of one of these land-owners. Equal sharing of land between heirs determines social and domestic reproduction -intermarriage within the kinship and neighbourhead group, neolocality of the new couple- and the technical and juridical conditions of production -the varying pattern and development of agricultural units, the rapid turning of domestic groups within the family from one farm to another. This situation obtained till the beginning of this century, when the settling down of one heir on the farm prevailed.
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