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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.

Water in Creuse

In the department of Creuse, a granitic land, water surges everywhere. Brooks (gânes) and rivulets stream down the «mountain», taking on the name of the particular region they water. The founts — endowed with oracular or curing powers — that served as historical landmarks since the Celtic occupation, draw but few pilgrims nowadays ; but the spring, the washing-place and the watering- place still indicate in every village the water site. And in the fields, the abandoned «fisheries», the blurred pattern of the draining- furrows, remain as traces of the age-gold irrigation network ruled by a system of alternating water-rights — l'ajournement — Since the relatively recent canalisation of spring-water for public use, the meadow lands have been turned into ponds which offer new places of sociability, palliating to some extent the feeling, among the «mountain» people, of having been dispossessed of water that belonged to them by location in their area.