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Rural historians can learn much from a corpus in the process of being compiled, that of the communal statutes of present-day Vaucluse district. The case of Gigondas, a small community in the lower Rhône Valley, provides an opportunity to study at grassroots level the process whereby local legal custom was elaborated along with the respective shares falling to lord and community in this elaboration. Once written down and agreed upon by all concerned, these statutes covered the area with such a dense network of normative rules that they put into question (among other things) the common conception of agrarian individualism said to be an inherent feature of the Southern peasantry.