There is much to say for presenting history as seen from the ground up, especially since many times we get history as told by the victor, top downwards. History, we are often told, is told by the winner but to get the real picture, one must also see it from the side of the loser, or at least the people at ground level.
This book owes much to the theories of Peter Laslett, one of the founders of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure as well as WG Hoskins.
It focuses on the small village of Qrendi, small today and even smaller in the 18th century when it had only some 800 inhabitants. It derives its information from the sources which chronicle the many small events in the lives of people - notarial archives, baptismal records, status animarum, as well as some extant sets of accounts mainly to do with church fabric, confraternities and the like.
The 18th century was the time when the Maltese did away with their fear of Turkish invasions and thus villages became more populated. The Church followed suit and a number of parishes were set up. Qrendi itself was set up as an autonomous parish in 1618, carved from the larger parish of Zurrieq.
Traditional histories of parishes focus mostly on the parish church, its construction and embellishment and then on the religious groups in the parish, such as the confraternities.
This book, looking at history "from the ground up" focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, such as the houses they lived in, and what one would find in them, as well as what trades were practised, etc.
Nevertheless, the Church and its vicissitudes occupied much of the villagers' attention. Sometimes, these were quite dramatic. In Zebbug, in 1767 the people exhumed the corpse of a hated parish priest, Don Giuseppe Marco Azzopardi, from the privileged tomb he had chosen in front of the main altar and buried him in the choir where the other priests were buried. In Zejtun, in 1787, the people defied the inquisitor, the bishop and the grand master and kicked out Don Francesco Maria Xuereb.
Qrendi was fortunate in that the parish priest in the period under study, Don Antonio Mizzi, came to the parish at a young age and stayed there for the next 50 years until he died in 1804.
There were other priests living in Qrendi at the time - in 1758 they numbered eight priests and four clerics - and collectively they formed part of the village's rather small elite. Not all priests were paragons of virtue. This regards especially Don Salvatore Hellul who was reported as keeping Maria Grazia Baldacchino, a woman of easy virtue, in his house. Three marshals and an alario from the bishop's Curia waited outside his house from 10pm till the next morning. But the priest, coming out of his house at 7.30am, menacingly asked them what were they doing and they ran away.
This ferocious priest had such a bad reputation that almost all the people of the parish refused to hear his mass. According to his own testimony, he frequented taverns and played card games. He was also accused of having procured several offspring to Grazia Baldacchino. He was apprehended in 1758 when he was in a brothel in Valletta.
Otherwise, the people of Qrendi seem to have been a rather quiet, law-abiding, lot. Their main occupation was agriculture, understood mostly as a family business. There is an enormous amount of records in notaries' archives dealing with leasing of fields, purchasing equipment, animals, etc. Apart from crops, a favourite cash crop was cotton, introduced to Malta by the Muslims.
Not all Qrendin were farmers or gabillotti. Some were traders, like Michele Xiriha, the richest man in the village. He and other traders like him would go to Genoa with huge quantities of money on them. There, they would be handed even larger sums of money with which they then purchased merchandise in Italy which they would then go and sell in Spain and elsewhere making very good profits on the sums invested.
During this period, the people of Qrendi, with rare exceptions, did not follow the example of others elsewhere in Malta and travel abroad, it would seem, but they did move around Malta when it came to marrying.
Others - 15 - served on the galleys, not necessarily belonging to the Order.
It is a myth that in those days people died mainly at home. On the contrary, between 1757 and 1797, 142 Qrendi parishioners (15.1%) died at hospital, the same proportion as in Ghaxaq.
This does not mean that crime was inexistent in Qrendi. On the contrary, during this period, there were two cases of homicide and one case of rape. The village had its bully, Francesco Muscat nicknamed Ir-Ruman, a quarrelsome man who terrified the villagers who were thus afraid to report him.
Nevertheless, even in those times, the community rallied around and multiplied its initiatives in favour of the poor, especially through the socially inclusive confraternities.
In Qrendi, as elsewhere in Malta, people were more known by their family nicknames than their proper surnames. Such nicknames include, for instance, ta' buras (big-headed), bin il-far (the rat's son), tal-ganc (the hook's son), tal-masri (the Egyptian's son), etc.
Nicknames or rather family nicknames identify a person as forming part of a wider family network, rather than a nuclear family. But this does not mean that families then were mostly formed of extended families - on the contrary, modern scholarship has proved that nuclear families were the rule even then.
The author provides a wealth of information about childbirth, which was more of a collective female affair than it is in today's world. When the day of delivery approached, the woman was afraid lest confinement resulted in death. She desired familiar faces around her especially women because the presence of any man was deemed indecent and immodest. The most a man could do was go for the midwife (maestro).
While it would seem that men generally were older than women at the time of marriage, one trait that sets Malta apart from other countries was the quite high proportion of people who did not get married. There was also a high percentage of widows and people who had remarried, given the incidence of mortality in those days.
How did widows cope with this enforced continence? The Qrendi parish records tell of two babies born to widows (one subsequently married the father).
But records are scarce as regards illegitimacy. One can understand this: the practicalities of a small village militate against full disclosure. The whole area is riddled with episodes: such was the case of Giovanni de Brincat who did what Manzoni (later on) wrote about - an irregular if valid wedding.
Careful study has shown that 7.4% of the 230 births between 1750 and 1798 had been conceived before marriage. In other words, men ascertained their fiancée's fertility before entering into a marriage. The question of birth control is more difficult to ascertain - were contraceptives used or was coitus interruptus the more common? A factor could have been the weaning of a child, which could take up to one year, expressed in the disdainful expression hobbla u tredda, referring to a woman who was pregnant and weaning at the same time.
From 1750 to 1785 nine children from Qrendi were left at the foundlings' hospital in Valletta. In 1758 there were in Qrendi four couples separated by the Church court while three men and one woman separated de facto from their partners.
The second part of the book deals with what we may call the superstructure of society - organised religion. Religion, especially the Catholic religion and especially the post-Tridentine variation that accompanied the birth and childhood of the Qrendi parish.
Societal control was exercised negatively by combating all traces of magic and positively by insisting on Easter practice and combating blasphemy. Nevertheless, some sought magical solutions to life's problems. Maria Borg was hauled in front of the Inquisitor for allowing two slaves to look for treasures in her house and Salvatore Mifsud had recourse to a converted Jew in a desperate attempt to save his daughter's life.
Organised religion transmutes into religious observance - attending the catechism lessons, listening to sermons and taking part in confraternities (a post-Tridentine innovation) believing in Christ, the Eucharist, the Virgin Mary (not just the titular feast of the Assumption but also the very popular church of Tal-Hniena on the outskirts of the parish) and the saints.
Finally, the Church itself, built to the design of Lorenzo Gafa from 1685 through 1712, its furnishings and vestments.
The last item to be discussed in the book regards death, its incidence and associated rituals.
For the next very important event that marks the history of the parish one has to wait till 21 January 1878 when on the initiative of parish priest Don Paolo Xuereb the confraternity of Our Lady of Lourdes was set up and a secondary feast started to be celebrated. This event lies outside the scope of the book although reference can be made here to Charles Farrugia's book on the nearby parish of Mqabba and its history of secondary feast.
One important additional factor in this book is the presence of many detailed footnotes and bibliography that in themselves constitute a treasure trove of vital information for anyone interested in further reading about this period and subject.