Life in the Galician country houses during the 18th and 19th centuries: midway between the civility and the roughness

Abstract

The hidalgos –or little nobility of the land- strengthened a powerful group of rentiers inGalicia during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, the second one in importance, just after the clergywith which members had family bonds. The most evident proof of this hidalgos’ success was thebuilding of country houses in hundreds that can be sawn nowadays in different conditions in theGalician territory; so, they are a fundamental part of the Galician architectural heritage, with theecclesiastic buildings too. In the last decades, the historical researches have contributed to enlargeupon the social origin of hidalgos’ houses founders, the process of consolidation of their wealth,the social reproduction of their families, and their life style too. This last question has been a themepresent in the literature when the “pazos’ civilization” was in its decline in the second middle of the19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. The main objective of this article is preciselyto investigate if that literary image agrees with the historical reality. For that, different questions areanalyzed: the economy of hidalgos’ families, the change that the building of real “recreation countryhouses” was, and the use of these edifices as “urban civility islands” into a peasant context, andbesides as “civility centres” or diffusion centres of new cultural practices in the small villages.