Family and Kinship in England, 1450-1800 [2 ed.] 1138898864, 9781138898868

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Family and Kinship in England, 1450–1800

Family and Kinship in England, 1450–1800 guides the reader through the changing relationships that made up the nature of family life from the late medieval period to the beginnings of industrialisation. It gives a clear introduction to many of the intriguing areas of interest that this field of history has opened up, including childhood, youth, marriage, sexuality and death. This book introduces the elements that made up family life at different stages of its development, from creation to dissolution, and traces the degree to which family life in England changed throughout the early modern period. It also provides a valuable synthesis of the debates and research on the history of the family, highlighting the different ways historians have investigated the topic in the past. This new edition has been fully updated to incorporate the latest research on urban communities, emotions and interactions between the family and the parish, town and state. Supported by a range of compelling primary source documents, a glossary of terms, a chronology and a who’s who of key characters, this is an essential resource for any student of the history of the family. Will Coster is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Bedfordshire. His previous publications include Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England (2002) and Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (co-edited with A. Spicer, 2005).

Introduction to the series

History is the narrative constructed by historians from traces left by the past. Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed and reshaped. The fact that different historians have different perspectives on issues means that there is often controversy and no universally agreed version of past events. Seminar Studies was designed to bridge the gap between current research and debate, and the broad, popular general surveys that often date rapidly. The volumes in the series are written by historians who are not only familiar with the latest research and current debates concerning their topic, but who have themselves contributed to our understanding of the subject. The books are intended to provide the reader with a clear introduction to a major topic in history. They provide both a narrative of events and a critical analysis of contemporary interpretations. They include the kinds of tools generally omitted from specialist monographs: a chronology of events, a glossary of terms and brief biographies of ‘who’s who’. They also include bibliographical essays in order to guide students to the literature on various aspects of the subject. Students and teachers alike will find that the selection of documents will stimulate the discussion and offer insight into the raw materials used by historians in their attempt to understand the past. Clive Emsley and Gordon Martel

Family and Kinship in England, 1450–1800 Second edition

Will Coster

Second edition published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Will Coster The right of Will Coster to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Pearson Education 2001 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coster, Will, 1963– Title: Family and kinship in England, 1450–1800 / Will Coster. Description: Second edition. | London : Routledge, 2016. | “First edition published by Pearson Education, 2001”—Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015050393 | ISBN 9781138898868 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781138898875 (paperback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781315560373 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Families—England—History. | Kinship—England— History. | Social change—England—History. | City and town life—England—History. | Community life—England—History. | England—Social conditions. Classification: LCC HQ615 .C67 2016 | DDC 306.850942—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050393 ISBN: 978-1-138-89886-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-89887-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-56037-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Chronology Who’s who

ix x xi xii

PART I

Introduction – methods and structures

1

1 Approaching the history of the family Social history and family history 3 Family or families? 5 Approaches and definitions 7

3

2 Emotional life Affection and emotion 12 Individualism 16 The rise of the nuclear family 17

12

3 Residence and reproduction Residence 21 Reproduction 24 Population 26

21

4 Life cycle and economy Life course and life cycle 29 Resources and roles 32 Inheritance 35

29

5 Kinship The kinship system 38 Relationships with distant kin 41 Diversity 43

38

vi

Contents

6 Culture and context Gender 47 Sexuality 49 Popular culture 51

47

PART II

Analysis – the pattern of family life

55

7 Independence and family formation The problem of youth 57 Service and apprenticeship 60 Courtship 62

57

8 Sex and sexualities Attitudes to sex 66 Sexual activity 69 Other sexualities and genders

66

71

9 Marriage The marriage model 75 The marriage rite 77 Married life 79

75

10 Parents and children Having children 83 Infants 87 The experience of childhood 89

83

11 Growing up Siblings 92 Children and work 94 Education, discipline and abuse

92

95

12 Death and burial Mortality 100 Burial and commemoration 103 Afterlife 106 13 Broken families Widows, widowers and orphans Disability 112 Old age 114

100

109 109

Contents

vii

PART III

Assessment – continuity and change

117

14 The impact of ideas on family life Humanism 119 The Reformation 121 The Enlightenment 124

119

15 Economic change Proletarianisation 128 Proto-industrialisation 131 Urbanisation 134

128

16 The family and kinship in perspective Ideology 137 Continuity and change 139 Structural change and adaptability 141

137

PART IV

Documents 1 Margaret Paston’s letter to her son John, 15 November 1463 2 The notebook of Nehemiah Wallington, 1625–26 3 The autobiography of Alice Thornton, 1668 4 Selections from the household census for Bilston, Staffordshire, 1695 5 Extracts from the burial register of St Michael le Belfrey, York, 1581 6 Hearth tax returns, Peter-le-Willows, the City of York, 1665–74 7 The will of Bray Rolfe, gentleman, 1607 8 Archbishop Parker’s Table of Kindred and Affinity, 1563 9 Constitutions and Canons of the Church of England, 1603 10 Deposition before the mayor and aldermen of Norwich, 1563 11 The diary of Ralph Josselin, on his youth and courtship, 1639–40 12 Deposition of Bridget Pakeman in a defamation suit before the Essex Archdeacon’s Court, 1570 13 The court rolls of Acomb, York, 1575

145 147 148 149 149 152 153 154 156 157 158 159 159 160

viii

Contents

14 Paper in the Michaelmass Sessions Roll, Essex Archdeacon’s Court, 1583 15 Thomas Becon, David’s Harp: The Seventh String, 1542 16 Richard Baxter, The Poor Man’s Family Book, 1674 17 Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, 1702 18 Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, 1651 19 A Caveat for Young Men, or The Bad Husband Turn’d Thirsty, c. 1650 20 Gervase Holles, Memorials of the Holles Family, 1656 21 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 1580 22 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693 23 Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 1799 24 A letter to the Master of the Rolls, from the Privy Council, 1590 25 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1726

Glossary Guide to further reading Index

161 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 168 169 170

171 173 193

Figures

2.1 4.1 6.1 8.1 10.1 12.1 14.1 15.1

Companionate marriage in the eighteenth century ‘The ages of man’ depicted as a series of steps Sexual impropriety linked to religious propaganda: minister and Quaker Moll Cutpurse, a cross-dressing criminal Birth, baptism and a meal for the gossips The imagery of the dance of death persisted into the early modern period A godly family, as shown in the sixteenth century The impact of enclosure on family life

14 30 50 73 86 101 123 129

Acknowledgements

I remain grateful to Bill Sheils, Peter Marshall, Claire Cross and Ralph Houlbrooke for their encouragement and support towards the first edition of this book. A debt remains to the many hundreds of students I have taught, particularly through the WEA at York, my third year unit on the History of the Family and the Social Construction of Childhood unit at Bedford, who have contributed to my thinking for this second edition. My primary debt remains to my family, particularly to Caroline for her support and for reading and commenting on the script, but also to Eleanor and Hannah for giving me a very positive experience of parenthood and family life.

Chronology

1348 1455 1485 1509 1527 1533 1538 1547 1552 1558 1563 1596 1603 1603 1624 1625 1628 1642 1649 1650 1660 1662 1685 1688 1702 1707 1714 1727 1753 1760 1767

The Black Death reaches England Beginning of the Wars of the Roses Accession of Henry VII, end of the Wars of the Roses Accession of Henry VIII Beginning of the king’s marriage case Act against Buggery Thomas Cromwell’s order to keep parish registers issued Accession of Edward VI Accession of Mary I Accession of Elizabeth I Statue of Artificers Famine begins Accession of James I Act against Bigamy Infanticide Act Accession of Charles I Beginning of the Thirty Years’ War Beginning of the Civil Wars in England Execution of Charles I, England declared a republic Adultery Act Accession of Charles II, restoration of the monarchy Poor Relief (Settlement) Act Accession of James II Glorious Revolution, accession of William and Mary Accession of Anne Acts of Union unify England and Scotland Accession of George I Accession of George II Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act Accession of George III Act for the Better Regulation of the Parish Poor Children

Who’s who

Philippe Ariès (1914–84): Pioneering French medieval historian of childhood and death, he was a botanist by training. Mary Astell (1666–1731): A writer sometimes seen as the first feminist. John Aubrey (1626–97): Antiquary, natural philosopher and writer. Walter Bagot (1644–1704): Barrister, landowner and baronet from a prominent Staffordshire family. Thomas Becon (c. 1511–67): Protestant preacher and writer from Norfolk, he was chaplain to the Lord Protector in the reign of Edward VI. Joseph Brasebridge (1743–1832): A London silversmith and autobiographer. William Brownlow (1594–1675): A baronet and parliamentarian based in Lincolnshire. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75): Swiss Protestant reformer who succeeded Huldrych Zwingli as head of the Zurich church and was one of the most influential theologians of the late sixteenth century. Richard Busby (1606–95): An Anglican priest who served as head master of Westminster School. Jean Calvin (1509–64): French theologian and pastor in Geneva; the most influential Protestant writer of the later Reformation. Lady Jane Cavendish Cheyne (1621–69): Poet and playwright, she was the daughter of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and later the wife of Charles Cheyne, Viscount Newhaven. William (Guillaume) Chamberlen (c. 1540–96): A Huguenot surgeon who fled from Paris to England in 1576. With his sons, both called Peter (Pierre), he introduced the obstetrical forceps into English childbirth. Lady Anne Clifford (1590–1676): Diarist and courtier, she married two successive earls of Pembroke and spent many years in dispute obtaining her father’s barony of Clifford in Yorkshire.

Who’s who

xiii

Richard Cox (c. 1500–81): Headmaster of Eton College from 1528–34, tutor to the young Edward VI and later Anglican Bishop of Ely under Elizabeth I. Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556): Played a major role in building the case for the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He was later Archbishop of Canterbury before his execution under Mary I. Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540): An English lawyer and statesman who acted as first minister to Henry VIII for much of his later reign. John Dee (1527–1609): Mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and occultist who acted as an advisor to Elizabeth I. Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731): Trader, writer and spy; most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Lloyd deMause (b. 1931): US psychologist, considered the founding father of the school of psychohistory and known for his pessimistic views of childhood in the past. Elizabeth Eggerton, Countess of Bridgewater (1626–63): Writer; the daughter of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536): The leading humanist writer in the Northern Renaissance. Anne Finch (1668–1743): Daughter of Christopher Hatton, 1st Viscount Hatton and later the second wife of Daniel Finch, 8th Earl of Winchelsea. Simon Forman (1552–1611): Astrologer, occultist and herbalist; born in Wiltshire and later moved to London. Mary Frith (c. 1584–1659): Better known as Moll Cutpurse; she was a London pickpocket and fence around whom a number of stories circulated in the seventeenth century. Matthew Hale (1609–76): Influential barrister, judge and lawyer most noted for his treatise The History of the Pleas of the Crown. Louis Henry (1911–91): French historian and pioneer of modern historical demography. Robert Hooke (1635–1703): Natural philosopher, architect and polymath. Richard Hooker (1554–1600): Anglican priest and theologian. John Hooper (c. 1495–1555): Protestant Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester until shortly before his execution during the reign of Mary I. Samuel Johnson (1709–84): Celebrated poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.

xiv

Who’s who

Ralph Josselin (1617–83): Diarist and vicar of Earls Colne in Essex, with Puritan leanings, from 1640 until his death. Peter Laslett (1915–2001): Political theorist and pioneering social historian; he was co-founder of the highly influential Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Frederick Le Play (1806–82): French engineer, economist and sociologist, notable for his identification of the patriarchal, stem and unstable family models. John Locke (1632–1704): Philosopher and physician; considered one of the first and most influential Enlightenment figures. Martin Luther (1483–1546): German Protestant reformer; considered to have begun the Reformation. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834): English scholar and clergyman; he is credited with originating the modern study of demography in his An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). John Manners, Lord Roos (1638–1711): Later Duke of Rutland, from Belvoir in Rutland, a noble chiefly notable for his divorce from his first wife, Lady Anne Pierrepont. Christopher Marlowe (1564–93): Playwright, poet and translator who was a near contemporary of Shakespeare. Tobias Matthew (1546–1628): Anglican Archbishop of York. Thomas More (1478–1535): Lawyer, author, statesman, humanist and eventually martyr for his opposition to the annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage and religious policies. Henry Newcome (1627–95): English nonconformist preacher and activist, born in Huntingdonshire. Isaac Newton (1642–1726): English physicist and mathematician, often considered the leading figure of the scientific revolution. Matthew Parker (1504–75): Theologian and later Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. William Parr (1513–71): English nobleman and courter, notable for the annulment of his first marriage to Anne Bourchier. Lawrence Stone (1919–99): Pioneering English historian of the English Civil Wars, the gentry and then of family life and divorce. He was author of the first comprehensive work on the family, sex and marriage in early modern England.

Part I

Introduction – methods and structures

1

Approaching the history of the family

In the mid-twentieth century, family life in the past was largely of interest only to some literary historians, antiquarians and those concerned with their own genealogies. Today the family is among the essential areas of academic historical interest. This is nowhere more true than for England in the early modern period, between the close of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of industrialisation, an era which has often been seen as a watershed in patterns of social organisation and of ideas.

Social history and family history From the 1950s, there were frequently voiced concerns about increasing rates of divorce and illegitimacy and their potential for destroying family life. These concerns can be seen to have contributed directly to the development of a sociology of the family and it was not long before historians and sociologists began to search for a longer view of this phenomenon which they hoped would supply answers to modern dilemmas. The development of sociological study provided tools and issues that historians could attempt to apply to the past. As a result of these factors, the history of the family rapidly expanded and soon began to evolve its own momentum, its own issues and methods of working. Therefore, although the search for the family in the past began with much assumption about what had happened in history, as will become clear, this was to he gradually replaced by a growing body of detailed research, from which a different (and at the time surprising) picture of family life in the past emerged. Since the mid-twentieth century the rapidly expanding investigation of the social history of early modern England has indicated most clearly that it was a highly complex and diverse society. In theory, the way in which society was organised was simple and unchanging, but there was a mixture of continuity and change and considerable local diversity and complexity. Many pioneering historians adopted a Marxist framework (even when they did not accept Marxist politics or terminology) to explain this change. This depicted the period as one of transition from the feudal, land-based society of the Middle Ages, divided between a rural aristocracy and a peasantry, to

4

Introduction

one founded on capital and industry, where the great social divisions were between an emerging middle class and an increasingly industrialised working class or proletariat. This process was seen as having particular significance, since the engine of this change, the Industrial Revolution that began in the eighteenth century, was the first of its kind, and therefore the model for future European and world history [45]. In understanding the history of the family in this period it is important to appreciate how dominant these ideas have been. It is also necessary to digest, at least to a degree, how this grand picture has fragmented in recent years, a process in which the study of the family has played a significant part. Accordingly, this book deliberately attempts to cover the two watersheds that dominate the period, between the Middle Ages and the beginnings of what is defined as the modern period in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries at one end, and between the pre-industrial and the beginnings of industrialisation in the eighteenth century at the other. Today, most historians use the terms feudal, class or industrialisation with extreme care. The society of late medieval England was certainly based to a large degree on land ownership, but it was far from classically feudal. The dramatic return to England of the bubonic plague in the Black Death of 1348–49, and its frequent re-visitations, was one major factor in the fragmentation of this system. The plague helped reduce the population and created much short-term suffering, but it also led to shortages of labour that benefited the descendants of the majority of survivors. The results were greater freedom, higher standards of living for many and, arguably, greater economic opportunities. Partly as a result of these factors, by the beginning of the period, society already looked far more complex than the simple image of the lord in his manor house and his immobile peasants tied to the land. At the top of the social order there was still a landed aristocracy but it ranged widely in wealth and status. There were the great families, many holding hereditary titles and enormous estates, but there were many smaller landholders, often styling themselves as gentlemen, who did not enjoy hereditary titles but who tended to dominate a group of communities or a single rural community. Below them most villages had a handful of significant landholders, described as yeomen. Beneath them were the small landholders, often termed husbandmen, who carried out a large portion of the labour needed on their own land, and often pursued another occupation, such as blacksmith or tanner. These two groups of smaller landholders are often placed together (along with their counterparts in the towns: the merchants, traders and independent craftsmen) as the ‘middling sort’. What made them the middle of the social order was the existence below them of the majority of the population, which may be best described as the poor. These ranged from relatively stable labourers, who might own small plots of land but were largely dependent on working for others, to a large group of landless, and often workless, vagrants. This last group horrified Tudor and Stuart commentators by roaming the

Approaching the history of the family

5

highways and trails of the country in search of employment and food. This was not a society of a few clearly defined classes, but of many interlocking social orders [28 pp. 23–35]. It was not a static social system. It was possible to move up or down this social ladder and the early modern concern with status and property in the family was haunted by the need to secure status and avoid failure. One clear pattern across the period is the virtual disappearance of small landholders and the growth of those groups that made up the landless poor. Part of the reason for this was the return to population expansion that was beginning at the opening of the period. In the mid-fifteenth century, England and Wales had approximately two million inhabitants. By the middle of the sixteenth it was around three million and by the middle of the seventeenth, it had passed five, roughly the level it had enjoyed before the Black Death. Thereafter numbers fluctuated and even fell. There was a return to expansion and by the late eighteenth century, when the take-off associated with industrialisation saw the population reach eight and a half million inhabitants in England and Wales [106]. The period was also one of great intellectual and cultural change. The Middle Ages was traditionally seen as coming to an end in the Renaissance, the rebirth of classical learning and ideas that began in Italy and became dominant in English court and elite circles towards the end of the fifteenth century. More recently, the Protestant Reformation, which began in England in the early sixteenth century and became firmly established in the late sixteenth century, has been seen as the major watershed in ideas and social attitudes, with the wholesale rethinking of man’s, and woman’s, relationships to each other and to God. The period saw the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution, which had its roots in the sixteenth-century methodology of the hypothesis, articulated by Francis Bacon, and saw its fulfilment in the seventeenth century, in the work of figures such as Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke. The eighteenth century saw the intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment, which built on many of the roots of religious protest and scientific endeavour, to re-evaluate intellectual thinking about almost every aspect of human existence. Alongside the social and economic changes that impacted on the family in this period, these intellectual strands had the potential to change the nature and understanding of the family, and a key issue in this book is the ways in which economic and intellectual change fitted together to construct and adjust family life.

Family or families? As this area of study has developed as a major force in the discipline of history, those involved in this process have been careful to draw a distinction between the genealogical study of the histories of particular families and the historical study of the family. One problem it has created is the assumption in academic circles that there is such a thing as the family: a social organisation

6

Introduction

that was universal, definable and therefore, measurable. Brief consideration of this issue should make it clear that such an entity is unlikely ever to have existed. Given the social inequalities, regional and local diversity, and demographic conditions in the past, it is improbable that there was a single family experience. With this diversity, in many ways, the genealogist’s concentration on individual chains of descent, a reminder of the constant flux in which family life is lived, has much to offer academic study. The definitions of the family used in the early modern period underline this point. Until the eighteenth century, the term was used to describe a lineage (or line) of descent, wider groups of kin and the household, including any resident servants [36 pp. 4–5]. Thus family, kin and household were not separate entities, but overlapping sets. The points at which these definitions met are crucial in understanding the nature of family life in the past, as are the processes by which these definitions became distinct and the term ‘family’ began to be applied almost exclusively to a married couple and their children. Because of these problems, many historians have simply failed to define what they mean by the term ‘family’; others who have been aware of this difficulty have often fallen back on the illumination of norms and rules of family life that can be argued to have given it its structure. Importantly, most individuals are members of more than one family. The first, into which individuals are born, known as the family of orientation, not only nurtures them in their infancy, but also determines their place within the social order. A second family is created if an individual establishes his (and rarely in this period her) own household. This is the family of procreation, which joins an individual to a new set of relatives and, in the past, was theoretically necessary before children could be brought into the world. This became their family of orientation, which they would leave to continue the process. In the early modern period, the picture was often more complicated than this. With relatively high rates of mortality, it was unusual for these family structures to survive intact. Family units that were broken by the death of a parent might be reconstructed by remarriage, sometimes leading to the combination of step-siblings and half-siblings in one household. Moreover, as will be seen later, individuals of almost all social ranks rarely moved straight from the family of orientation to that of procreation. Between these states they often lived and worked within the context of other family groups as lodgers, apprentices and servants, and some historians have argued that they became, in effect, additional members of these units [23 p. 3]. Despite these complications, most historians working on these problems since the middle of the twentieth century have assumed the existence of a family in the past. There has been little consensus on how this entity should be defined. It could be argued that each definition of what the family is has led to a different methodological approach to investigating family life in the past. Each approach in turn has asked different sets of questions and used different sources in attempting to resolve them. In order to understand what

Approaching the history of the family

7

early modern family life was like, it is necessary to appreciate these differing approaches, their strengths, weaknesses and conclusions. Part I of this book concentrates on these approaches and their findings in an attempt to highlight the ways in which historians have investigated family life in the past and the images it has provided. It also attempts to examine the basic enduring structures of family life with which these approaches have been concerned. The second part attempts to analyse the elements that made up family life at different stages of its developmental cycle, from creation to dissolution, while the final part aims to assess the degree to which family life changed in this period.

Approaches and definitions In the early years of the modern historical study of the family, with historians breaking new ground, often completely independently, diversity of methods became the rule. In 1980, Michael Anderson achieved something remarkable by organising these different and diverse efforts into a system of classification, in a work of less than 100 pages [30]. His four approaches were those of psychohistory, demographic studies, those based on the sentiments and, finally, the household economics approach. Although Anderson’s system has been highly influential, many historians have objected to his idea of distinct approaches. Peter Laslett preferred to think in terms of emphasis, rather than approach [23]. Ralph Houlbrooke has focused on a variety of influences, including psychology, demography, ideas and sociology, but also law, economics and anthropology [40 p. 4]. These are valid points, and there are clearly problems in attempting to classify historians in a simplistic way. However, a more important issue than the methods chosen by historians is what their work tells us about their underlying definition of the family. Anderson dismissed the approach of psychohistory in less than a page. The manifesto of this school of thought is a volume edited by Lloyd deMause in 1974 [65], and its continued influence is evident in the Journal of Psychohistory. This is an attempt to understand individuals in the past by applying the tenants of psychology and psychoanalysis to historical evidence. It is not popular among mainstream social historians because it appears antihistorical. First, the imposition of a system for understanding the mind that originated in the late nineteenth century, and developed in the twentieth, onto people of the pre-industrial past, carries obvious dangers. Second, historical sources do not lend themselves to this form of analysis; historians cannot put their long-dead subjects on the couch and interrogate them in the way contemporary psychiatrists can their patients. Finally, psychology and psychoanalysis are themselves controversial, with many disputing the models they present of the mind or dismissing them as irrelevant. Nevertheless, some historians, such as Lyndal Roper, have continued to use psychology in the context of gender relationships and the ideas of Freud, his successors and critics still have an impact on how historians see areas such

8

Introduction

as relationships and sexuality [406]. It is, in essence, the study of the family as a state of mind. The second approach outlined by Anderson was the demographic. In the UK, and particularly for the early modern period, this is most closely associated with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. The interests of members of this group, and those influenced by and associated with them, break down into two major areas: historians such as Peter Laslett and Richard Wall focused on household structure, while Anthony Wrigley and Roger Schofield were among the most eminent of those that provided a demographic context, using measures of population, fertility and mortality. Both strands have come together in areas such as the study of illegitimacy, age at marriage and family size. This approach tends to rely on quantitative or statistical data, derived from census-type and registration documents, materials including taxation records and parish registers [Docs 4 and 5]. It is an empirical approach, beginning from the premise that certain sources have survived and then attempting to find out what can be determined from them. This approach has not been without its critics. The quality of the data investigated, the typicality of England and the significance of statistical evidence in evaluating family life, have all been called into question. It might be added that this occasionally presents a less than accessible and even tedious solution to the problems of investigating social life in the past. The fundamental concept behind this view can be seen as a definition of the family as a unit of residence and of reproduction. Anderson’s third approach, that of the sentiments, focuses on the emotional content of family. Members of this group include pioneers in the history of the family such as the cultural and social historians Philippe Ariès and Lawrence Stone, the sociologist Edmund Shorter, and to a lesser extent J. L. Flandrin, R. Trumbach, M. Mitteraur and R. Sieder [282, 77, 75, 36, 79, 44]. Unlike the demographic approach, which is source based, this method originated from issues raised concerning the modern family, or a desire to see the details of how the family fitted into theories of social change in the past. Its proponents then attempted to find sources that permitted those questions and issues to be addressed. Particular areas of interest are the relationships between men and women; parents and children. The means of investigating these relationships have been varied, but include a heavy reliance on qualitative data, particularly biographical and literary materials, such as diaries, letters, autobiographies and conduct books [Docs 1, 2, 3, 11, 14, 15]. There are obvious problems with this approach. These sources were only generated by a small, and largely male, social elite, who are often biased to particular forms of religion. Moreover, such materials lend themselves to an anecdotal style of historical writing, which, although often fascinating in the detail it supplies, reveals little about the frequency of circumstances or the nature of social change. Historians working within this approach are most

Approaching the history of the family

9

commonly associated with the idea that people in the past did not have the same emotional relationships with members of their families as are assumed today. As will be seen, this conclusion has been firmly quashed; the historians who have revised this pattern, most obviously Linda Pollock, Ralph Houlbrooke and Rosemary O’Day, have used much the same approach and similar sources [310, 40, 69]. Where they differ is in the comprehensiveness of their studies, in some cases their willingness to incorporate evidence from other approaches, and the conclusions they have drawn. More recently a new ‘history of the emotions’ has emerged, which has renewed interest in the importance of sentiments within and without the family. Advocates of this methodology, whether pessimistic or optimistic about the nature of family relationships in the past, and whether arguing for continuity or change, can all be seen as exploring the family as a set of shared values or emotions. Anderson’s final methodology was what he termed the ‘household economics’ approach. He stressed this road to the past as an attempt to deal with some of the problems of the other two major methodologies. He also indicated that, whereas demographics are source based and the sentiments grew out of observations of the contemporary world, this approach arose from a desire to test the theories of social sciences about the family of the past. Among these concepts are those of the life cycle and life course. The argument is that, just as individuals undergo a series of stages throughout their life, families also have a developmental pattern. Thus, the household is seen not seen as a social norm, but as a constantly changing and developing unit. Emphasis is on the economic functions of the family, and inheritance as the means by which resources arc redistributed. One of the limitations of a household economics approach is that it necessitates a form and quality of evidence that is rare before the modern period. It can also be accused of ‘economic determinism’, an assumption that economic self-interest was the prime motive for social action, which disregards many of the motivations and concerns that helped dictate the actions and choices of family members. This is the family as a process and as an economic unit. Moving beyond Anderson’s typology of approaches, another important emphasis is that of anthropological or kinship-based studies. Pioneers of this approach include Alan Macfarlane, Jack Goody, Miranda Chaytor and David Cressy [58, 37, 38, 110, 133]. Because anthropologists deal with societies where the family, in the sense of parents and children, is relatively less important than in the West, they tend to focus on the kinship system as a whole. This separates the fact of biological reproduction from the ideas that structure these relationships, of which the ‘family’ is one. This is, then, an attempt to adopt an approach to the study of family life in the past that incorporates a broader view of the total system. It is not a method without significant problems. The first is whether it is possible to find materials that allow the ways in which individuals and groups in the past related to their more distant kin to be seen. The second is the danger that, by concentrating on such relationships, historians give the

10

Introduction

impression they were significant, even when the evidence does not support this view. Moreover, this approach cannot be used in isolation, as by its nature it cannot deal with some of the most important issues that surround the more limited family. The study of kinship does, however, present the opportunity to move studies on from a focus on the physical and emotional environments of family life. This approach can be seen as defining the family as part of a wider social system. Finally, there has been the growth of a ‘new cultural history’ that has transformed the understating of the boundaries and nature of family life. It is rooted in social anthropology, Marxism and the work of French poststructuralists, particularly Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who drew heavily on linguistics [3 p. 1]. This strand often examines areas related to the family such as sexuality, gender and the impact of popular culture, rather than the family itself. It is much more theoretical than the previous approaches and much less dependent on empirical evidence. It has opened up an array of areas associated with family life for study, including sexuality, gender and popular culture and can be seen as the study of the family as a cultural construct. Cultural history still comes from two traditions. The literary strand tends to be based on written and artistic works, which have been given a new lease of life and legitimacy by the new cultural history. The empiricist social history that came to dominate from the 1960s tended to disregard them as viable sources for understanding society. They were seen as elitist and the product of partial views that did not necessarily apply to society. Peter Laslett, exemplified this view when he pointed to the role of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in perpetuating the myth that people in pre-industrial England married early, given that it was a work of fiction, describing a different period and concerned social patterns among the social elite of another culture [23 p. 84]. Many works based on elite cultural productions argue explicitly that they are a valid means of understanding attitudes and beliefs, because they can be treated as part of a cultural process of negotiation and production and that they are being placed within a much wider and better understood cultural context provided by theory. Historians who have explored cultural history tend to approach the process from a perspective that places these works in a social and political context, often supplementing their findings with other cultural products, such as medical handbooks and court records, and are often more reluctant to draw generalisations from the evidence. Undoubtedly there is much greater common ground between the two strands within cultural history and this can be seen in the many collections of essays that combine works from both traditions. However, as yet, few individuals have been able to combine the two traditions within a single work and, as will be discussed later in this book, such a synthesis of sources and traditions is problematic. Although the cohesiveness of these differing approaches can be disputed, it is clear that historians of the family have worked within different

Approaching the history of the family

11

methodologies and made use of different types of sources. Each can be seen as having their origins in a distinct definition of the family. All of these definitions may be entirely valid. Each focuses on one vital part of the structure of family life in the past. Only by appreciating the nature of emotional relationships, residence and reproduction, the family life cycle, economics, the kinship system and culture, can it be hoped to understand the nature of that family life. The remaining chapters in this section will examine each of these differing structures in an attempt to illuminate a framework within which family life can he investigated and evaluated.

2

Emotional life

The question that dominated the historical study of English family life until the 1980s was whether the quality of emotional relationships was the same as it is today. The answer supplied by most pioneers in the field was that relationships within the family were colder and dependence on those outside it much greater. This was, in part, simply because historians expected fundamental social change to have occurred in the early modern period, whether they accepted a Marxist model of development or were among the so-called Whig or liberal historians that saw early modern England as the period in which a more individualistic and ‘democratic’ society was created. Both sets of changes necessitated a move from an inflexible system based on wider kinship and extensive ties to the rural community, to one founded on the more easily manipulated nuclear family, which, as a result, would have become an isolated, cohesive and affectionate institution. Thus, pioneers in this area of investigation have been associated with two major concepts: first, the growth of affection, and second, the development of individualism. Both of these factors play into a third major concept without which they cannot be understood – the rise of the nuclear family.

Affection and emotion The nature of affection has been one of the great areas of debate in the study of the early modern family. This controversy can be divided into an examination of relationships between men and women on the one hand, and between adults and children on the other. Changes in these joined areas of interest have been detected in factors such as artistic representations, the nature of courtship, terms of address, advice, the use of corporal punishment, expressions of grief and the commemoration of the dead. Some historians built these factors into a general picture that demonstrated dramatic change, from relatively cold and formal relationships, to those based on genuine affection. However, it is important to note the great differences between these historians in their understanding of the timing and stages of these changes.

Emotional life

13

For Philippe Ariès, focusing on children, the period of transformation was the sixteenth century, when, he argued, artists began to reflect a new concept of childhood as a distinct state, instead of showing children as merely small adults [282 pp. 327–52]. From this, he concluded that childhood, as a concept, was a relatively recent invention. DeMause’s work intensified this picture, arguing for a continual evolution, concluding more extremely that ‘the further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorised, and sexually abused’ [65 p. 21]. Edward Shorter’s analysis of change in the nature of the family was, he admitted, undermined by his heavy reliance on evidence from France in the period 1750 to 1850. From this he suggested, but could hardly prove, a widespread and rapid transformation in attitudes to children (particularly between mothers and infants), in sex and in patterns of romantic affection between men and women [75 pp. 54–78]. In contrast, Lawrence Stone painted a picture of a staged transformation from the ‘open lineage family’, dominant in the late medieval era, to the ‘restricted patriarchal nuclear family’ in the middle of the period, culminating in the ‘closed domesticated nuclear family’, which was common by the end of the eighteenth century [77]. This he saw as evidenced in increasing expressions of affection for offspring and spouses in conduct books and biographical materials such as diaries and letters. There was also a decline of corporal punishment for children, and growing grief at their deaths. These developments were paralleled by a renewed emphasis on the morality of marriage, and the development of a literature that created the idea of romantic love and fostered ‘companionate marriage’ [Figure 2.1]. All these figures, but especially Stone, relied not only on literary sources, but also on emerging demographic evidence of high mortality, which was particularly concentrated among children. From this, they concluded that individuals would have reacted by withdrawing emotionally from their partners and offspring. In Stone’s view there was only a limited amount of ‘emotional capital’ available for investment and it would not be wasted, particularly on children who might die at any moment [77 p. 70]. These arguments, with the implication that people in the past were heartless machines, have provided one of the greatest possible spurs to investigations of family life. Partly as a result of this process, this pioneering work has been condemned in every possible way. There are always problems in interpreting art as evidence of social norms, because it may instead reflect skill and convention. Ariès in particular has been criticised for having ‘ripped evidence from its proper context’ [40 p. 6]. Shorter was aware of how limited was his evidence for the lack of affection in ‘traditional’ society [75 p. 55]. The greatest difficulty has been that Stone, in particular, argued that there was silence on most matters of affection before the seventeenth century and that this implied a lack of involvement. Given the massive changes that were occurring in the historical record in

14

Introduction

Figure 2.1 Companionate marriage in the eighteenth century Source: ‘The Happy Marriage’ (after Hogarth). © Chronicle/Alamy. Stock Photo.

early modern England, as it moved from an oral to a written and print culture, such an argument is obviously flawed. In these circumstances, the more frequent expressions of affection evident in the modern period may simply reflect new forms, and greater quantities, of records. Such an argument has been rendered irrelevant by the mass of contradictory evidence historians produced in the 1980s: evidence that is remarkably easy to find, even in sources that were well known when these pioneering works were written [Docs 2 and 3]. Linda Pollock, focusing on children, pointed to the genuine affection shown towards them by parents. She indicated that brutality was exceptional rather than commonplace and that real grief was shown at their deaths, even at the beginning of the period [310]. Similarly, Ralph Houlbrooke, who also examined relations between husbands and wives, concluded that, ‘much evidence of love, affection and the bitterness of loss dating from the first half of Stone’s period has simply been ignored’ [40 p. 15]. To give just two examples concerning married love, in 1441 Margaret Paston finished a letter to her husband John by requesting him to wear a ring with the image of St Margaret, ‘that I sent you for a remembrance till

Emotional life

15

ye come home’ and observing ‘ye have left me such a remembrance that maketh me to think upon you both day and night when I would sleep’ [3 p. 5]. In 1502, Sir Robert Plumpton wrote to his wife Agnes, calling her ‘my deare hart’, signing his letter, ‘your owne lover’ and sending it to, ‘my entyrely and most hartily beloved wife’ [9 p. 152]. Finding examples of parental affection is more difficult, largely because people did not write letters to their young children and the diary did not emerge as a literary form until the late sixteenth century. When this occurred there are examples like that of Lady Anne Clifford, who, when her twoyear-old daughter was ill, noted, ‘I was fearful of her that I could hardly sleep all night’, or more painfully that of William Brownlow (1594–1675) who wrote in his diary after the death of his second son, ‘I was at ease, but Thou O God has broken mee a sunder and shaken mee to peeces’ [310 pp. 125, 134–5]. While such examples can easily be found, what is more difficult is to understand what exactly this love and affection meant in the context of the time. Since the 1980s the understanding of relationships in the past has been transformed by an attempt to treat emotions themselves as a legitimate object of study, rather than their impact on the nature and structure of family life, in an attempt to discern how people in the period constructed, understood, and articulated their feelings [70]. It has developed as a multidisciplinary intellectual approach that encompasses all the emotions, including anger, fear, love and hate, in what Rob Boddice has characterised as the ‘affective turn’ [64 p. 148]. The study of the history of the emotions was first seriously proposed by Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns. Focusing on modern America, they distinguished between ‘emotionology’, which they defined as the study of attitudes towards emotions, a subject which they argued can be investigated by the historian, and which should be distinguished from the experience of emotion, which they argued cannot be effectively researched. They proposed that a major subject of study should be the ways in which a dominant emotional framework constrains and defines feelings and emotions [76 pp. 813–36]. In contrast, focusing on the Middle Ages, Barbra Rosenwein coined the term ‘emotional communities’, which includes the family, neighbourhoods, the church and guilds, as a mechanism for understanding the overlapping influences on the emotions [73]. William Reddy outlined the concept of ‘emotives’, which are the articulation of feelings through the use of language. Reddy argues that through emotives ‘emotional regimes’, which he understands to be the emotional ‘normative order’ of a society, can be explored [72 pp. 256–88; 71 pp. 327–51]. All this suggests that the expression of affection has to be seen in the context of a cultural framework. As will be addressed in the final part of this book, the key intellectual and religious changes of this period may have played a major role in defining this framework. Members of the higher social orders were expected to express love and grief in defined forms and

16

Introduction

with limitations. This is not to say that the affection they expressed was not genuinely felt, but the way it was constructed and recorded have to be considered as part of a wider context that may have necessitated such expressions and constrained them.

Individualism A major theme in the work of Lawrence Stone was the idea of growing individualism throughout the period. This process has been seen in such diverse elements as patterns of inheritance, choice of marriage partners, developments in the architecture of houses, memorials, family prayers, the pursuit of pleasure, rising illegitimacy and the growth of a pornographic industry in the eighteenth century [77 pp. 223–69]. Clearly, if changes in all these areas of society did occur, they would have had profound effects on the nature of family life, amounting to a watershed in attitudes. The attractiveness of this idea has given it a profound effect on some investigations of the history of the family, and has even left its mark on revisionist work in this area [40, 331]. Stone defined individualism as ‘a selfish desire to put one’s personal convenience above the needs of society as a whole, or those sub-units of the kin or the family’ [77 p. 224]. This new ideology was seen as particularly marked in practices connected with the commemoration of the dead, with a shift from the featureless, stark effigies of the medieval period, surrounded by heraldry, which put them in the context of family and kin, to realistic individual busts and images from the seventeenth century, as indicative of these changes. Similar transformations were occurring in individual portraiture among the social elite. There were also new forms of writing, including the self-revelatory diary and the autobiography, which date from this period. These were part of a literature of self-exploration, which grew to include the novel and the love letter [77 pp. 224–6]. Stone argued that these were part of a wider social and political process that was marked in England by growing religious toleration, recognition of the religious beliefs of the individual and the beginnings of ideas about the ability of men and women to control and manipulate their environment. He saw the intellectual agents of these ideas to be in the Renaissance idea of humanism, with its concentration on the individual and her achievements, and in the followers of the Swiss religious reformer Jean Calvin. Calvinists, often linked to a variety of religious strands in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as Puritans, pioneered a religion of introspection with emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God, expressed through prayer and Bible reading. This has been contrasted with late medieval Catholicism, which relied heavily on collective and communal rites, such as the Mass [77 pp. 225, 245, 259]. In Stone’s view, these were the engines of change, but the origin of this argument lies in thinking about the nature of property ownership between the late medieval and early industrial periods.

Emotional life

17

It has long been argued that in the Middle Ages property was collective, rather than individual, and that the head of a family was no more than the custodian of an estate, which, in effect, belonged to a line or ‘lineage’. Thus, the major principle of inheritance was primogeniture, that is to say an estate and headship would normally pass to the eldest male child [77 p. 87]. Because the remainder of the family, for example younger brothers and sisters, would be dependent on the head, it was assumed that they would tend to form a large and relatively cohesive family group. It has been argued that this system was beginning to fragment at the highest levels of society by the seventeenth century, as the influence of family groups gave way to individual preferences. One often-cited example is the choosing of sides in the Civil Wars, which saw families like the Verneys of Buckinghamshire divided between Parliament and king [35, 61]. However, even Stone had to accept that primogeniture not only persisted, but was intensified in law in the eighteenth century with the rise of strict settlement. This was a system that helped to keep the estate of a man without sons intact, by entailing it away from daughters towards a single male relative [77 p. 244]. The ‘rise of individualism’ is seen as necessary so that a capitalist economy could flourish from the eighteenth century. In such an economy, property and effort had to be individual, rather than collective, to supply the means and motivation for capitalisation. Thus, even members of conjugal family groups have been seen as more individual, separated from the world by distinct rooms and increasingly linked to each other by reciprocal roles and responsibilities, rather than each occupying a God-given position in the social order. The most direct assault on this picture came from Alan Macfarlane, who argued forcibly that England, at least from the fourteenth century, was already an individualistic society, because property was always held by individuals [125]. Macfarlane painted an image of a highly flexible social system already based around personal effort and of which the nuclear family was the primary unit. If this argument is correct, it means that the search for massive, but predictable, shifts in attitudes and actions throughout the early modern period is no longer necessary. As will be seen below, this emphasis on continuity interlocks with the evidence brought to light by other historians and it has had a profound impact on our understanding of almost every area of family life in the past.

The rise of the nuclear family The rise of the nuclear or conjugal family, of a couple and their children, and the corresponding fall in the significance of wider kinship and communal bonds, has long been a cherished image among sociologists and social theorists. Again, this development has been seen as necessary so that industrialisation could take place. It is the crossroads of ideas about growing affection and individualism in the same period, of which the nuclear family

18

Introduction

is the agent and ideal. This pattern has been perceived in many areas, including the decreasing interference of legal and traditional sanctions, the increasing privacy of the conjugal unit and the rise of domesticity as an ideology [75, 77]. In late medieval England there was a wide variety of communal and legal sanctions that could be brought to bear on the conduct of sexual and familial behaviour. Manorial courts, often seen as representing the will of the community, were particularly adept at punishing some forms of behaviour, such as scolding and wife-beating. Similarly, church courts, often acting at the relatively local level of an archdeaconry, were able to punish sexual incontinence and had some control over marriage litigation [218, 219, 220]. Their tendency to be filled with such cases earned them the popular title ‘bawdy courts’. It has been noted that in England these institutions began to decline from the sixteenth century. This was in part because the Reformation eroded the powers of the church courts, restricting their sanctions and scope, while there was increasing emphasis on the parish as the smallest unit of local government, rather than the manor. It is therefore argued that the ‘community’ represented by these institutions was less and less able to interfere in family life and that this resulted in growing autonomy for the conjugal family. Such an argument is not completely convincing. First, this social control was never applied universally. Historians distinguish between those ‘close’ nucleated lowland parishes, where social control lay in the hands of one major landholder, or a few landholders, and ‘open’ parishes, which predominated in dispersed upland or forest areas, where control of land and society was less concentrated [28 pp. 171–2]. Furthermore, although manorial and church courts did decline, they did not do so universally or quickly in the early modern period. For example, the citizens of Acomb, near York, were still appearing before their manorial court to answer to local justice in the nineteenth century [Doc. 13]. Church courts were still active, if on a more limited basis, until the same period. It is also true that these institutions could decline, because many of their functions had been taken on by the state. The slow trickle of statutes affecting family life that were passed in this period, such as those against bigamy in 1603, or concerning clandestine marriages in 1753, meant that the state courts took on an increasing role in the regulation of familial and sexual behaviour. By the same process the parish gained considerable powers over the lives of the poor, seen most clearly in the Laws of Settlement which, from the late seventeenth century, were used to regulate whether the poor could marry [247]. If the case of increasing autonomy for the conjugal unit cannot be proved, then what about the possibility of increasing privacy? This has been seen in a number of areas, most obviously in architectural changes, patterns of servant residence, and in activities that promoted the privacy of the body [77 pp. 256–7]. There were changes in the organisation of the houses of the rich that suggest increasing emphasis on privacy. The open medieval hall,

Emotional life

19

the dominant feature of elite vernacular architecture of the period, where the noble family was ‘on display’ to their servants and retainers, certainly contrasts with the corridors and privy chambers for dining and sleeping, which became standard in the English country house. It has been noted that, from the eighteenth century, a number of commentators pointed to a tendency for servants to live ‘out’, instead of on their master’s property. One example is Joseph Brasebridge, who, in the 1770s, bemoaned his lack of control over his apprentice, because he slept at his father’s house [77 p. 255]. Moreover, there is some statistical evidence that supports this case, with the beginnings of a process that considerably reduced the numbers of servants sharing the households of their masters evident from the mid-eighteenth century [83 p. 221]. However, what remains difficult is the relationship of these factors to changing attitudes. As will be seen, these developments may have had more to do with alterations in the nature of labour, rather than evolving attitudes to privacy. Stone’s ‘architectural determinism’ has been challenged by Tim Meldrum, who has pointed out that even in these new households, the ubiquitous nature of servants meant that the private matters of masters were hardly likely to stay so for long [152 pp. 78–83]. Architectural changes can be read as indicating either contrasting sets of social attitudes towards privacy, or as a radical transformation in the ability of the rich to carry out what they may always have desired, to segregate themselves from the rest of the world. It is problematic that these patterns (while reflected in an abbreviated form in the houses of yeomen and merchants), like so much of the evidence on which these arguments are based, only extended to a small and wealthy elite. For the majority of the population, as they were forced to lodge in towns or densely packed proto-industrial villages, conjugal privacy did not increase, but decrease. There is better evidence for the rise of bodily privacy. As Lawrence Stone noted, it may be more than coincidence that the fork, the handkerchief and the nightdress all came into common usage from the seventeenth century [77 p. 256]. There is evidence of an increasing desire for privacy in the carrying out of basic bodily functions. Moreover, Puritanism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has long been associated with a degree of prudery towards the dressing of bodies, even though this view was never dominant. Again, that the inhabitants of early modern England, particularly the rich, had increasing numbers of personal possessions, may tell us less about their ideas and priorities and rather more about their developing economy. Certainly, these things changed the quality of many lives, but whether they amounted to a fundamental transformation in the nature of family life is open to debate. Finally, what of the emergence of domesticity as an ideology in family life towards the end of our period? Eighteenth-century continental commentators noted the peculiarly large amount of time English husbands and wives spent together, suggesting that domesticity had become a dominant theme. A similar picture can be derived from the internal evidence of diaries, letters

20

Introduction

and advice to married partners that flourished in this era [250]. However, as with arguments over emotion, the problem here is that, given the change in the volume and nature of source material, there is no means of judging whether this ideology had in fact been predominant in an earlier period. As will be demonstrated in a later chapter, comparisons of advice to married couples from the early sixteenth century onwards show that there was remarkable consistency in the nature and emphasis on partnership in marriage. As will be seen in the next chapter, one further and fundamental argument against the idea of the rise of the nuclear family is that there is little evidence that larger extended families ever existed as units of residence. To be fair to the pioneers in this field, they rarely argued that residence was part of this pattern, rather, as Edmund Shorter put it, ‘the nuclear family is a state of mind rather than a particular kind of structure or set of household arrangements’ [75 p. 205]. Nevertheless, this raises the question of whether these perceived changes in behaviour could occur without any apparent effects on household structure. One problem is that the family seen as a state of mind, or set of shared emotional values, is impossible to measure statistically and these factors can only be debated on a purely anecdotal level. The investigation of the sentiments has been an important contribution to the field, and continues to be so. However, there is a need to separate the study of the emotional aspects of family life from the widely discredited conclusions and assumptions of some of the first historians to examine these issues. The new history of the emotions opens up the possibility of examining family relationships in the context of their time. An investigation of the emotional life of the family in the past still has a significant role in understanding the social world of early modern England, but it is only one possible means of investigating that pattern.

3

Residence and reproduction

One obvious means of avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the pursuit of the family through literary sources is to press into service the mass of information generated by the early modern English state. This material naturally lends itself to statistical analysis and this inevitably gives such investigations an air of reliability that is lacking in enquiries into the history of the family as a web of intangible emotions. The rise of this form of history owes much to the development of new methods of analysis, originally pioneered in France and highly influential in North America, but which were adapted, refined and pushed forward from the 1950s in Britain. This branch of the history of the family can legitimately claim to be the most successful methodology employed for the early modern period. It placed the study of the family on a scientific basis, carried out the most radical transformation of the understanding of family life in the past and it has remained essential to any investigation of the texture of society in any period. However, these findings have had their critics. The pioneering work in this arena can be divided into two main areas of interest. First, there is the investigation of the nature of the household, and second, the pattern of demographics in the past. Together these factors have produced a picture of the family as a residential and reproductive unit at the centre of social and economic patterns.

Residence In contrast to pioneering historians investigating the sentiments, those concerned with residence and reproduction tended to focus on averages and norms; some would even say its proponents have been obsessed with finding a mythical historical ‘everyman’. In these works, where they have been confrontational, and on occasion they have been furiously so, they tended to attack assumptions that predated the works of Ariès, Stone and Shorter, and to which these historians of the sentiments were indebted (although they may not have known it). In this sense, demographic historians were attempting to pull up the tree by its roots, rather than simply attacking the branches. The focus of this work was on the household, the primary unit of residence, which was a major unit of measurement, of social organisation and which

22

Introduction

began to gain a legal status in this period, when the concept of ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ came into use [366 pp. 352–84]. For Peter Laslett, the primary targets were ideas about residence formulated by Frederick Le Play, a nineteenth-century French engineer turned social commentator. Le Play highlighted three different models of family organisation: the patriarchal family, where large kin groups shared joint ownership of property and land; the stem family, based on co-residence of parents and children and where inheritance was passed down through one child who would remain in the parental home; and finally, the unstable family founded on the conjugal bond, and where parents dispatched children to form new and independent households when they matured. Most importantly, Le Play fashioned these familial forms into an evolutionary model, where primitive societies began with the patriarchal family and moved through the stem family to the unstable family, the characteristic institution of the modern and industrial world [34 pp. 11–14]. What is most significant for this debate is that each form of family should have had an effect on residential patterns. Therefore, in the pre-industrial period, a change should be evident from large stem families to the smaller, unstable, conjugal or nuclear household. This model was taken up by Marxist historians and widely accepted in liberal circles, because it fitted into a more generally accepted pattern of social change. What enabled historians to take issue with this scheme is the survival of census-type materials from the early modern period. The first census proper was taken in 1801, but before that point the early modern state produced a number of surveys, made for the purposes of taxation, that are similar in nature. Those that take the form of house listings, giving the names of members of each household in a parish, and often their relationship to the head of that household, provide a fascinating insight into patterns of residence in the early modern period [Doc. 4]. The earliest examined so far is from Coventry in 1523, but there are several from the second half of the sixteenth century and increasing numbers as the period progressed. There are biases in the distribution of parishes by location and type [51, 83]. Nevertheless, they provide a means of investigating just how English households in this period were structured, and therefore of testing assumptions about the nature and evolution of family life. The increasingly sophisticated investigation of these sources, associated with the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and in particular with the work of Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, is highly complex, but demonstrates some important characteristics. First, it is clear that the Mean household size in early modern England was much smaller than was expected by many, at around 4.75 persons overall. The second observation is that kin from beyond the conjugal family (of parents and children) rarely shared residence in these sources, being evident in only around one in ten households. Most damaging for the stem family thesis was the rare existence of two cohabiting conjugal groups, for example parents and one of their married children. This type of family would have been

Residence and reproduction

23

necessary for the direct transmission of a household between generations. What was evident in 29 per cent of households in 100 pre-1821 communities was one or more servants, making up some 13 per cent of the general population [83 pp. 147–9]. The role of servants had a profound effect on the nature of family life in the early modern period. In addition, towards the end of the era there were increasing proportions of households with lodgers and boarders, as high as 20 per cent in some areas. The work of Tim Meldrum on domestic service has indicated the complexities below this overall figure, using court records to show how service was affected by social status and the ways in which servants moved between locations and households [152 pp. 15–24]. These findings have been controversial. Laslett’s expansion of his thesis to suggest that the stem family had never been the predominant form in Europe, brought down the wrath of a number of continental historians. Most acrimoniously, a debate developed between Laslett and Lutz Berkner, who used evidence from Austria in an attempt to prove the existence of the stem family. Berkner argued that the overall percentage of houses with kin from outside the conjugal family was relatively small; it was most common (60 per cent of cases in his data) where the heads of households were young men, aged 18 to 27. He used this to argue that household listings present only a ‘snapshot’ of residential patterns and that it is necessary to examine the family as a process undergoing a life cycle. Thus, relatively few families would exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of the stem family household at any given time, when a youngest or eldest son, his wife and children would share a property with his parents, as this stage took up a short proportion of the life cycle [107, 108]. It has been argued that high rates of pre-industrial mortality made households constructed of ‘multiple’ conjugal couples unlikely and short lived. However, for England, and possibly even for the rest of Europe, there were insufficient proportions of multiple households to support even this thesis [86]. Nevertheless, Berkner raised an important point about the nature of the family as a process, rather than a fixed entity. This not only pointed to an alternative way of interpreting the family, but amounted to a fundamental attack on the definition of the family as a unit of residence, merely a ‘household’, that lies at the centre of Laslett’s work. The problem is that households are measurable; that is why they tend to be used for the purposes of taxation, but families and familial ties are not necessarily identical with the household. These are not the only criticisms. The comprehensive nature of censustype materials is less than clear. If there were serious omissions from the evidence, they would tend to be among the poorest social groups, who would have been exempted from taxation. There are also the possibilities of local, regional and social differences. Although England before the nineteenth century was a predominately rural society, it was not exclusively so. Major towns, of which London was by far the most significant, expanded rapidly across the period, from around 80,000 to over 700,000 inhabitants between

24

Introduction

1550 and 1801, holding roughly a tenth of the national population. Minor provincial towns were also important, with 19 per cent of the population in towns with a population of under 2,500 in the early part of the period and 31 per cent by 1801 [88 p. 55 ]. Moreover, there was not one sort of rural parish, with massive variations between pastoral and arable, coastal and fenland areas. While no clear pattern in the geographical distribution of household types has yet emerged, there were evident differences between communities in Laslett’s studies. Clearer still are the social distinctions, with gentry households having a mean household size of 6.63, yeoman farmers of 5.91 and labourers of only 4.51. It remains an open question whether these differences indicate contrasting systems of household composition for different social orders, or whether they were all aspiring to the same system, with some, for reasons of poverty, unable to fulfil their aim. The most telling criticism of this method of study is that it confuses two separate entities: the family and the household, a distinction made most clearly by Rosemary O’Day [69 pp. 6–10]. New households were usually formed at marriage, but ties continued to exist to families of orientation. The process of separation was gradual, marked by the death of members of the previous generation and the birth of children to the new couple. Ties of kinship and property continued to exist across the barriers of households. In addition, the household was not simply a sub-set of these ties, as it often included persons who were not related by any form of kinship, as in the cases of servants and lodgers. It was, in the formulation of Naomi Tadmor, a ‘household-family’ [85]. Similarly, many servants must have continued to have ties of family to their parents and siblings in other communities and households. The household was not simply the tangible manifestation of the family in early modern England, but a unit of residence that acted as the focal point for different family loyalties.

Reproduction In exploring the immense potential of evidence for demographic patterns in early modern England, pioneering demographers experienced a steep learning curve, uncovering much that turned upside down assumptions about family life in the past. Many of these assumptions were general, rather than academic, in nature, but the importance of their destruction can hardly be exaggerated. These findings therefore provide a crucial baseline for any serious study of family life. Such investigations rely heavily on one source, with which England is particularly blessed. The order sent out by Thomas Cromwell in 1538 for the keeping of a register of baptisms, marriages and burials in every parish, meant that England was the first country to provide a nationwide and continuous record of demographic occurrences, as these rituals approximate to the crucial events of birth, marriage and death. In practice, the record was far less national and continuous than it should have been [20]. Nevertheless,

Residence and reproduction

25

it provides sufficient information for detailed demographic studies to be undertaken for England from at least the middle of the sixteenth century. Parish registers have been employed to understand demography in two major ways. The first, aggregative analysis, derives general statistics through calculations based on one or more parish registers. This dates from the early nineteenth century, when John Rickman began to calculate the pattern of population expansion. This process is now carried out with far greater sophistication, and parish registers have been supplemented by the use of other sources, such as marriage licences and census-type materials. However, this method remains limited in the degree to which it allows the reasons for demographic change and its relationship to family life to be understood. The second method, family reconstitution, invented by a French historian, Louis Henry, links the separate facts about individual families to produce a profile of their demographic history. These profiles can then be utilised to provide more detailed data based on the actions and fortunes of these families and their members, including factors such as the size of family groups, the intervals between births and expectations of age at death. However, it is not a method without problems and limitations. For example, only a minority of families, about one third, can be examined in this way, and these naturally tend to be the least mobile and easiest to trace, often excluding the poorest families [99]. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, these methods illuminate an interesting picture of early modern society. They demonstrate that, contrary to many assumptions, in this period marriage was not early, but relatively late, at a mean of around 25 or 26 years for women and 26 to 28 years for men (which compares with ages of 22 and 24, respectively, in the 1970s) [106 p. 255]. Child marriages may have endured among some members of the nobility and in some areas, such as Lancashire and Cheshire, but they appear to have been exceptional [145]. Contrary to expectations, women did not have large numbers of children in quick succession, with gaps of two to three years being common. Late marriage, and long intervals between births, meant that completed families did not tend to be large, with a mean of six to seven children born to each family. Moreover, illegitimacy was relatively infrequent in the early modern period; extra-marital births remained below 3 per cent of the total for every decade between the 1540s and 1750 (except in the crisis years of the 1590s, which saw widespread poverty and starvation). In the nineteenth century it would reach twice that proportion [23 p. 159]. Thus before the mid-eighteenth century, late marriage and the fact that relatively high proportions of women remained unmarried had profound effects on rates of reproduction [100 pp. 2–20]. In other respects, what was assumed about family life has been confirmed. Mean life expectation was relatively low in the pre-industrial period, being in the early forties at birth [106 p. 252]. As will be examined in Chapter 12, rates of mortality were particularly high among children, with around a quarter dying before the age of ten and more than half of these in the first year

26

Introduction

of life. By the same token, once maturity had been reached adults could anticipate a relatively long life, a mean of another thirty years [106 p. 250]. These circumstances inevitably had profound effects on the nature of family life and, as will be seen, they fundamentally affected the shape of the family life cycle and behaviour of individuals. The data derived from both parish registers and household listings has been attacked for its potential inaccuracy and its lack of typicality, as well as some of the conclusions drawn from the data [98]. Anglican parish registers are inherently problematic as sources. It cannot be emphasised enough that they do not record births, marriages and deaths, but baptisms, marriages and burials. They often contain gaps before 1601 and are, unusually, increasingly inaccurate as the period progresses. This is because greater numbers of Protestant non-conformists, Catholics and those who simply avoided religion altogether, chose to disregard these Anglican rites, or postponed them, sometimes indefinitely. Despite the best attempts to estimate this shortfall, all statistics derived from them can only be an indication of events. Moreover, the 404 parishes used by Wrigley and Schofield in their study of the population history of England, often determined by the presence within them of a willing volunteer, have been criticised for their lack of representativeness of the county as a whole [106]. More fundamentally, the tendency to reduce complex statistical evidence to an average prompted Jean Flandrin to describe it as the production of a ‘meaningless mean’, a figure that tells little about the actual experience of family life [36 pp. 53–6]. Such criticism tends to disregard the careful nature of this work and the open admission that it represents a best estimate, rather than a set of definite facts. While Wrigley and Schofield’s magnum opus may discourage valid criticism because of its pure weight of scholarship, its careful explanation of methodology makes all too apparent the authors’ awareness of the problems they faced [106]. Despite these limitations, although the meaning of, and conclusions drawn from, this form of study will remain open to debate, it cannot be denied that it has provided a framework for understanding family life that is unlikely to be seriously challenged in the near future.

Population Stress on the continuity of household forms and indications of demographic circumstances in the early modern period, can give the impression of a society deep frozen for over three centuries. The most obvious antidote to this danger is that, as already seen, across the period the population of England increased by approximately a factor of three. Additionally, there were fluctuations in most of the statistics cited above during the period, some of considerable magnitude and importance. For example, the illegitimacy ratio fell from around 3 to 4 per cent in the 1540s to its ‘nadir’, in the 1650s, of around 1 per cent, before it began its steady rise and passed 4 per cent by the end of the period [94 pp. 176–91]. It has been suggested that this was due to

Residence and reproduction

27

variations in the emphasis on social control exercised by Puritan elites, who dominated towards the middle of the seventeenth century, but whose influence declined after the Restoration in 1660 [116]. Confusingly, it has been argued that the relative size of age groups present in the population changed significantly over time, and may, in part, explain changes in these rates, as the young are more likely to engage in illicit sexual activity [101 p. 42]. However, Peter Laslett pointed to the relationship between this figure and the mean age at marriage, for men and women, which rose and fell in inverse proportion [23 p. 161]. It might be expected that where marriage became more difficult (and therefore occurred later) the result would be more illegitimate births among frustrated potential brides and bridegrooms. However, in early modern England the same factors that repressed marriage acted successfully to repress illicit sexual activity. As this example indicates, while one important role of demographic historians has been to illuminate the basic circumstances of life in the past, a more significant and difficult undertaking is to explain these circumstances and the relationships between them. When Thomas Malthus founded the modern science of demography in late eighteenth century, he placed the emphasis on the effects of mortality. Put simply, his argument was that population growth was checked by impact of famine or disease, which would keep it within its natural resource base. Modern demographers, while acknowledging their debt to Malthus, have increasingly come to see fertility as a more significant factor [35 pp. 4–8]. Although a crisis, like the famines of the late 1590s, or the outbreak of plague in the 1660s, might appear to have a profound effect on the size of a population, these losses tended to be rapidly made up. This was partly because the death of adults led to earlier inheritance and the availability of more resources, such as farms or businesses, which allowed a younger generation to marry earlier and reproduce. For instance, in the epidemic of 1725–29 in Worcestershire, there was a surge of marriages followed by a mini-‘baby boom’ of baptisms over the next five years. In another 25 to 30 years there was an echo of more marriages and baptisms as the next generation reached maturity [91 pp. 403–9]. As already seen, the overwhelming majority of births in early modern England occurred within the context of marriage, meaning that the relationship was the major factor in determining fertility. This was the institution around which new households were created, and so limitations on household creation, and on conception within them, were vital in this process. Put in another way, the household was at the centre of the demographic system in early modern England and changes in its construction and nature would have had profound effects on the general pattern of life. In this process, changes in other factors become highly significant. First, the proportion of the population never marrying fell in the eighteenth century. As will be seen in Chapter 9, in the decades around 1700, roughly a quarter of people aged 40 to 44 had not married, but a century later it was only between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 of the population [106 p. 260]. Similarly,

28

Introduction

age at marriage was tending to fall. Brides at their first marriage, who were a mean age of 26.5 in twelve parishes in the period 1650–99, were followed by a cohort aged a mean of only 24.9 in the period 1750–99 [104; 106 pp. 257–65]. The result of these two factors was that a larger proportion of the population were able to have children at an earlier age, and this goes some considerable distance towards explaining the rapid population growth that was beginning at the end of the eighteenth century. Malthus was the first to link this situation to movements in prices and wages. He argued that population expansion would tend to create food shortages, which would in turn increase prices, depress the value of real wages and mean that marriage would tend to be late. In turn, when the population eventually began to fall as a result of these circumstances, the reverse would occur, with less demand for resources raising the real value of wages and leading to earlier marriage and increased population. This model fits well until the late eighteenth century, ironically the time when Malthus made this observation, but from this point, the connection appears to have been broken, with prices continuing to fall and wages increasing in value despite population growth. Wrigley and Schofield argue that this was because there was a generation time lag between the effects of economic change and family behaviour [106 pp. 306–8]. Another explanation, which will be addressed in the final section of this book, is that the link between resources and marriage was broken by changes in the economic and social structure. It is obvious that the role of the household and the pattern of demographic change in early modern England are connected in extremely complex ways. It is difficult to understand these interactions by investigating the general patterns and trends in demography in isolation. Recent research has used family reconstitution and records of residence, such as taxation returns, to link issues of residence and the life cycle with mortality among the young, patterns of marriage and family formation, together with residential persistence [102, 92, 95, 96]. In part, the work of other historians, particularly those of what Anderson termed the household economics approach, has been an attempt to understand these connections through a focus on the household as an economic unit, to investigate how it was constructed, how it functioned, reproduced and was dissolved. The examination of the family as a unit of residence and reproduction has made extremely good use of the wealth of information available to produce an important (if not incontrovertible) framework, within which family life in the past can be understood. While these findings have stressed the continuity of fundamental familial forms, this should not be confused with the changes that could and did occur within the context of this framework. However, a number of limitations in this definition of the family have been highlighted and it is clear that, in itself, demographic history is insufficient as a means of investigating and understanding the totality of family life in the past.

4

Life cycle and economy

One of the most significant contributions to the understanding of family life is the awareness that families are not fi xed entities, but the dynamic results of systems of social organisation. These ideas originated in sociology and social theory, but have an obvious applicability to the work of historians, who have the potential to investigate these processes in the context of change across time. The emphasis on economics has been part of an attempt to shift investigations away from the broad, ‘macro’ picture of agricultural methods, manufacture and trade, to an attempt to understand how the family functioned as an economic unit at the ‘micro’ level. These areas can only be understood in relation to each other; accordingly, this chapter will first outline the pattern of the family life cycle, before turning to the ways in which resources were redistributed between families and how they were utilised to maintain the family unit.

Life course and life cycle Although historians often use the term ‘life cycle’ to describe the changing roles of an individual, that there is nothing circular about the pattern of human life as it runs its course from birth to death [Figure 4.1]. Rather, this term is most appropriate for families, which do undergo a process of development and renewal. The distinction between the life course of the person and the life cycle of the family is an important one, as it shifts the focus from the changing roles of individuals to their part within a more complex and enduring structure. The nature of this process is vital in understanding how family life functioned in the past, the impact of demographic circumstances, and the role of social expectations [109, 113, 114, 115]. The types of sources that have been particularly useful for the study of the life cycle in early modern England are similar to those used in the pursuit of demographic evidence. Most important have been records of residence, such as house listings, but also other taxation documents, such as those for subsidies and the hearth taxes of the mid-to-late seventeenth century, particularly where there are several listings that allow change over time to be understood [Doc. 6(a)–(c)]. Also significant are records that deal with points

30

Introduction

Figure 4.1 ‘The ages of man’ depicted as a series of steps Source: Reproduction of an engraving by C. Bertelli. © Wellcome Library, London.

of transition between different stages in the life cycle, most obviously parish registers, but also court records that provide details about these events. Finally, probate documents, such as wills and inventories of goods, present an opportunity to see the nature of relationships and the transmission of property when death threatened to change the shape of family life [Doc. 7]. The pattern these sources illuminate can be divided into two parts: the rules and norms that gave the family system its shape, and the effects of these rules. Of these, the rules behind the system are simple and straightforward. First, most individuals left home when relatively young, to act as servants or apprentices and only formed independent households later, often at marriage. Second, it was accepted that two conjugal couples should not normally share a household. These rules can be inferred from literary sources. For instance, the account of one Italian visitor of the fifteenth century noted of English parents’ actions towards their children that ‘having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the upmost, they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people’ [282 p. 353].

Life cycle and economy

31

Similarly, in the early seventeenth century William Whately advised prospective husbands when they married, ‘if it may be, live of thyself with thy wife, in a family of thine own’ [28 p. 69]. To these examples can be added the weight of evidence from household studies that indicate the impact of these rules on residential patterns. The concept of service for the young meant that many parents shared their houses with their own children for only a few years. It explains why there were large numbers of households with resident servants. It has been noted that, in a statistical sense, servants acted as a substitute for children [83 p. 58]. The impact on the construction of the family was sufficient to create a debate on whether children or servants were more important to the family [371 pp. 292–342]. This, in turn, broke the links between the child and the family of orientation at a relatively early point. At least in the eighteenth century, the tendency of servants to send earnings back to their parents was much less marked among labourers in England than it was in France and the Netherlands, perhaps because there was less possibility of land being passed on by inheritance, acting as a check on intergenerational solidarity [151]. It often severed the connection with the community of origin and may in part explain the much-noted high geographical mobility of early modern English society, where it was rare for individuals to be born and die in the same parish. That couples desired to establish a new and separate household from their parents had a limiting effect on prospects for marriage. Partners could only marry after a period of hard work and hard saving, often while in service. The result was the relatively late marriage already seen, shared with other nations and known as the Northwest European marriage pattern. Above the poorest classes, children were often dependent on their parents reallocating some of their resources so that they might marry. Often this was through ‘portions’, a share of the parents’ wealth given over at marriage or maturity. It is no coincidence that the mean age of marriage, in the mid-tolate twenties, was close to the mean point at which parents would have been dying, in their late fifties and early sixties. This was when their resources would be passed down to their heirs. However, this does not mean that there were frustrated betrothed couples waiting for long periods, vulture like, for their parents to die before they could marry. Instead there was a gradual process, by which parents redistributed their resources among their children as they began to mature, culminating, on occasion, in a form of retirement or in death. The resources of one set of parents would normally be insufficient for all their children. This was part of the reason that service and training were so important; they were processes by which parents attempted to secure the future of the next generation. The members of this generation were expected to produce a return, either in skills, employment or capital, so that they could be self-supporting. Although these social rules were commonly followed, there were many exceptions. These were most common at the top and bottom of the social order. The rich naturally tended to have larger households and more capital.

32

Introduction

Therefore, it was easier for them to share houses between conjugal couples and to establish children with an income at an earlier point in their lives. As a result, earlier marriage and complex households were more common among the gentry and nobility [83 p. 154]. Similarly, at the bottom of society, the poor would probably never own land and tended to rely on pay in exchange for their labour. As a result, they would have been at the peak of their earning power while young and fit and had an incentive to marry and have children earlier. This, then, was a pattern that frayed at the edges of the social tapestry. Furthermore, the life cycle of early modern English families was frequently incomplete. With high mortality and low fertility, it was not uncommon for this process to be curtailed or terminated, due to the death of a partner or a lack of children. If these circumstances did not arise, the pattern is fairly clear. Individuals tended to leave home early and enter another household or series of households. New families were then formed when they reached maturity and set up their own households. This might be shared with servants, and their children were likely to leave when relatively young. The couple then began to undergo a process by which they dismantled their resources and redistributed them to their children. This might be gradual; it could also be sudden if they died or retired. This pattern raises a number of interesting questions concerning the nature and effect of these stages upon family life in early modern England, and it is these issues that will be the subject of the second part of this book. A further set of questions, highlighted by the exceptions to these rules, concerns the degree to which different social groups and individuals were operating within one family system, and these will form the emphasis of the next chapter. Finally, there is the question of how these units of resource, the families created by this system, functioned and redistributed their assets.

Resources and roles The resources available to a family included not only the obvious elements, such as money, livestock and goods, but they can also be seen in terms of customary rights and the skills or abilities of members of the family group. Money, in the form of coins, was increasingly significant throughout the period, but large quantities were rarely amassed. Instead, wealth tended to be tied up in investments, loans, items of value like silver plate, and the resource on which there has been the greatest emphasis, land [58]. Land, in a largely agricultural economy, was the largest area of production. It was the most obvious area for investment and carried implications of status. For this reason, it was common for successful urban businessmen to crown their careers by buying a country estate and attempting to acquire the title of gentleman. However, land ownership came in many forms, from copyhold, in effect a form of rent, to freehold, where the land was virtually owned outright. Moving down the social scale, the limited ownership of even small

Life cycle and economy

33

quantities of land could be vital for the economics of the family. Thus the redistribution of resources, and especially land, was crucial to the continued viability of the family unit. The concentration on landholding is often deceptive, as land did not necessarily have to be owned to be used. This is particularly true in parts of the North and West, where there were large areas of fell, moor, woodland and heath on which local inhabitants could graze their animals [410 p. 9]. As a result, the ownership of cattle and sheep assumed a much greater significance in the economic world of individual families. A similar effect was created by large areas of fen and marsh, which were most common in the east of the country and which could be farmed for resources such as rushes and wildfowl. Finally, in coastal areas, ownership of fishing vessels permitted harvesting of the resources offered by the sea. These were not the only rights that helped ensure survival. Customs that allowed the picking of wood or gleaning of fallen corn in harvest all helped to supplement the resources of the poor and to ensure their survival. However, there is evidence that a growing population tended to reduce the viability of these resources as they were shared among increasing numbers, and this may in part explain the development of formal systems of charity from the sixteenth century. There were attempts to limit these rights by local elites, most obviously where they concerned hunting and through enclosure. This probably reflects a better documented stage in a process that dates back into the medieval period; however, such attempts may have been enjoying increased success, limiting the options of the poor and bringing them in contact with the system of criminal law [25 pp. 123–31]. Finally, although agriculture predominated, it was not the only form of economic activity. Thus skills, such as metalworking or the ability to write, could be put to advantage. As already seen, many of these skills took a considerable period to acquire. Moreover, they were often of little use without certain equipment, such as a forge and tools, which were often specifically mentioned in wills and inventories. In summary, the members of a household could rely on a complex set of resources, many of which are hard to perceive in the surviving records, but which were vital to the economic viability of every family. While land was the most important, other assets could be highly significant, particularly on the lower rungs of the social ladder. Patterns of inheritance reflected these concerns and suggest common assumptions about family life and similar aims in different circumstances. Most importantly, they point to the possible impact of social and economic factors on family life in general, circumstances that can be seen in the economic roles of individuals within the household. The most obvious place to begin is with the position of the legal head of the household, the husband and father. Although the earning ability of men differed considerably across society, there can be little doubt that the primary economic responsibility, and (it must be said) power, was theirs. As already seen, this could be expressed in a number of ways. Among the

34

Introduction

social elite, income could be generated by investment and from estates. Lower down it was earned from skills: some professional, as among lawyers; others that were crafts, such as carpentry and metalworking. They might also work alone or with others on their own agricultural land, or utilise local rights such as overgrazing. Finally, those without access to these resources, or where they proved insufficient, might sell their labour, either in a manufacturing process or, more commonly, as an unskilled agricultural worker. The contrasts between these different resources and the social groups that were associated with them would have had a considerable impact on the productivity of a household across the life cycle. The evidence suggests that, even in times of relative economic prosperity, the wages earned by labourers were not sufficient to sustain a household for long. The most obvious means of supplementing this income was through the work of other members of the household, and therefore marriage opened up greater possibilities for generating income. This theme has been a subject of interest since 1919 when Alice Clark published her pioneering study of the working life of women in the seventeenth century [390]. She identified many of the trades undertaken by women; a number were common among housewives, including spinning, tailoring, inn-keeping and brewing. Women, although excluded from many crafts and guilds, were able to keep the rights earned by their husbands if they were widowed and thus could often run an existing business, as they might a farm or even a large estate. Unmarried women might undertake many similar tasks and they held a virtual monopoly at the beginning of the period over medicine, nursing and midwifery. However, these were often not jobs of high status, as they often are now, but one of the few options left to women who found themselves on the economic margins. The wives of those who held land also often undertook agricultural tasks, particularly in periods when the demand for labour was heavy, most obviously in ploughing or at harvest, when the men would reap corn and the women stack and glean. Women had to intersperse these income-generating activities with a considerable number of household chores. Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, published in 1580, gives an indication of the ‘ideal’ [Doc. 21]. Housewives should rise at four or five o’clock, depending on the time of year. They should prepare breakfast and dinner, clean floors, do laundry, bake, but also feed cattle and milk cows, brew, card and spin wool. In the afternoon, they should sew, fill pillows, and make candles. In the evening they would bring in the washing, feed hens and pigs, then lock up the animals and the house, serve supper, wash up and amuse their husbands before retiring at nine or ten o’clock [2 pp. 198–203]. The evidence suggests that this is not an unrealistic pattern. However, it varied a great deal depending on circumstances. Wealth diminished the hard labour and the wives of a substantial proportion of the population would have spent much of their time directing servants in these tasks. Wealth also reduced the need for self-sufficiency, as items such as candles and clothes could be

Life cycle and economy

35

bought, particularly in towns. It has also been pointed out that the poor were saved from cleaning and laundry because they had less to maintain [187 pp. 109–10]. Nevertheless, women’s work patterns show an important mixture of duties crucial to the maintenance of a household, contributing to the agricultural output of the farm or smallholding and utilising skills and labour that would bring in important income. Men and women were not the only members of a household that could be economically productive. Although children were clearly a burden when very young, they could take part in economic active from a relatively early age. As will be examined in more detail in Chapter 11, children as young as six or seven were set to simple tasks. However, what is uncertain is the degree to which these economic contributions to the household began to outweigh the costs that extra mouths created. It is clear that productivity increased with age, but the existence of life-cycle service suggests that great productivity was likely outside, rather than inside, most households. In the majority of cases, men undertook the most important role in the production of resources. However, women and children could be significant in this process. These trends were likely to be more marked where high mortality or a lack of marriage prospects created households led by or consisting only of women. In times of economic distress, the numbers of perpetually celibate women and widows who would not remarry rose. The women involved had to fend for themselves, and since most forms of traditional female employment were poorly paid they had to find ways of cutting costs by clustering together in female-dominated households, by living with relatives, or by seeking work that provided accommodation [182]. These circumstances were more common lower down the social scale, where economic necessity meant that the gap between production and consumption of resources was likely to be much narrower and the need to increase production that much greater [406]. As will be seen in the final part of this book, these were circumstances that were proving increasingly common through the early modern period. It is worth considering the impact these different economic circumstances and the roles of members of the household would have had on their social roles and their relationship to each other.

Inheritance Inheritance has assumed a central role in understanding the household economy because it presents a mechanism for the redistribution of resources between one generation and the next. In some ways, this impression is unfortunate, because the main source for the study of inheritance, wills, did not deal with all of an individual’s property, but only what they decided, or remembered, to allocate. This problem can be compensated for, to a degree, by the use of inventories (made of the deceased’s goods and assets by his or her neighbours after his or her death), by the use of probate accounts (that detail the process of distribution) and through the examination of legal

36

Introduction

records of disputed inheritance [117, 118, 129]. However, two major problems remain. First, most wills were made only when inheritance was not straightforward, most commonly when an adult was leaving children who were minors or where there was no clear heir; therefore they represent not a normal, but an unusual pattern of resource distribution [126]. Second, probate dealt only with the distribution of resources after death, and it is unlikely that this was the sole point at which this process occurred. Where full records survive they indicate that land, and other items, were passed on, sold and resold with bewildering frequency. Again this can be compensated for by the use of other documents, such as household accounts, manorial rolls and surveys, but these tend to be confined to the relatively wealthy or deal only with the transfer of land. At the base of society, where crucial resources might be relatively small sums of money, or even items such as cutlery and crockery, the picture of how this process was carried out remains unclear. Nevertheless, within these considerable limitations, the study of inheritance does demonstrate some interesting aspects of the processes by which families were maintained when early death threatened to destroy them, and by which resources were redistributed when they were dissolved. Inheritance did not operate within a single legal system. While most aspects of probate were the concern of the Church through its courts, throughout the period inheritance was governed by the common law of the kingdom. Neither of these systems was uniform. The law of probate varied between the two historic archdioceses of Canterbury (in the South and most of the Midlands) and York (in Nottinghamshire and the North). There were also areas of local custom, with the City of London functioning on its own principles, while in Kent the custom of ‘gavelkind’ determined how estates should be partitioned [46]. It has generally been assumed that these jurisdictions had profound effects on the nature of inheritance and thus of landholding and family life. A particular distinction has been drawn between areas where the ‘rival’ customs of primogeniture and unigeniture were dominant [410 pp. 9–12]. Under primogeniture, which applied in most areas, an estate would normally pass to an eldest son and his descendants, after him to his brothers and their descendants, and only then to any daughters and their offspring. In contrast, systems of unigeniture, or partible inheritance, like gavelkind, would divide an estate between sons and/or daughters. In theory, primogeniture should result in larger estates and impoverished junior branches of families. Unigeniture should have resulted in a more fragmented pattern of uniform, but smaller, holdings. Oddly enough, despite the many assumptions that have been built upon these contrasts, few historians have managed to prove that such variations manifested themselves in practical terms. One reason for this is undoubtedly the phenomenon already noted, by which parents of the landholding orders were careful to plan for their children’s futures, by ensuring that they received training, and by investing

Life cycle and economy

37

their estates in them. It was when this process was not well advanced, often because high mortality took fathers away when families were relatively young, that probate could be used to set up a pattern that would ensure a similar distribution of resources. Sons, and particularly eldest sons, were favoured in this process, but a desire to secure the future of all children, male and female, older and younger, is frequently evident [54]. Disputed wills indicate that people with relatively modest possessions were concerned to pass them on and women were often major players in such court cases [118]. Probate as a process was often about circumventing some of the problems of both types of custom: securing the futures of younger children and daughters where primogeniture predominated and attempting to preserve the viability of family holdings for main beneficiaries where unigeniture affected the landed social orders. Therefore, rather than stressing the significance of different inheritance patterns, what was more important was the universality of assumptions about family life that helped maintain similar results despite legal variations. The concept of the life cycle not only provides a vital contribution to the understanding of the connections of households and families to economic and social circumstances in the past, but it also furnishes a useful tool for examining the nature of family life, from formation to dissolution. It provides a mechanism for understanding many of the complexities of family life across its existence and the ways in which economics, law and custom could be mediated to fit with economic and social expectations. This pattern will form the basis of the second part of this book, but before that, it is necessary to investigate how these factors were connected through the wider system of relationships known as kinship and the cultural context within which they operated.

5

Kinship

While historians of the household economics approach have been most influenced by sociology and social theory, those investigating kinship tend to look to ideas originating in social anthropology. Anthropologists, researching other contemporary societies with different systems for organising family life, are unable to make the same assumptions about the existence of ‘the family’ that sociologists and many historians have done. Therefore, they have tended to be less interested in the emotional quality of relationships between men and women, or parents and children. Nor have they been as concerned with residence like demographic historians. There is most common ground between this area of study and that of household economics, because of a similar emphasis on process and change over the life cycle, but this methodology has a wider brief, tending to look not at the family, but at the kinship system as a whole. Additionally, the major debate in this area has been over the nature and significance of relationships with wider kin. What this debate helps to illuminate is the way in which different circumstances affected the use of kin and the kinship system.

The kinship system There is widespread agreement that the form of the kinship system in preindustrial England was (as it is today), in anthropological terminology, ‘ego-centred’; that is to say, it was focused on individuals, not groups. Each individual had a unique set of kin and described them by a distinct set of terms, such as father, brother, uncle and cousin. This contrasts with many systems used in other societies, where kin and terminology are defined by groups and generations of descent. The English kinship system was also bilateral, with descent counted from both parents, as opposed to patrilineal and matrilineal systems where it is only inherited from a father or a mother. Descent through the male line was easier to trace because surnames (from the fourteenth century) were passed down patrilineally, but heraldry and genealogy indicate that, at least among the social elite, track was kept of both lines. As a result of this system, it is necessary to see every individual in early modern England as being at the centre of a large network of kinship.

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This stretched back through the generations of their ancestors, the roots of the family tree, and down through their descendants, who spread out like the branches, an image often used in early modern artistic representations of the family [140]. As in most societies, kin in early modern England existed in three broad categories. The most important were those related, in the language of the day, ‘by blood’ (referred to by anthropologists as consanguineal kin), that is, those to whom individuals had a biological relationship: for example, fathers, mothers, siblings and children, and all ancestors and descendants. The next most important group were kin related through law or custom (known as affinal kin): this included spouses, parents-in-law, children-inlaw and step-relatives. Finally, anthropologists distinguish a third form of kinship that existed in pre-industrial England, that of fictive, ritual or spiritual kin. These were created through a ceremony and mirrored other forms of kinship, rather like the example of blood-brotherhood. In pre-industrial England, this included two major relationships: those created at baptism between godparents, godchildren and co-parents, and those created at confirmation between the person being confirmed and his or her sponsor [132]. Anthropologists often place considerable stress on the terms used to describe kin and something of the nature of the English system can be seen reflected in the language used. The unique nature of each individual’s kinship network can be perceived in these terms, which were all descriptions of the relationship seen from their perspective. The bilateral nature of descent can be seen in the unusual habit of using the same terms to describe kin on the father’s and mother’s sides of the family, most obviously for uncles and aunts. The distinction between consanguineal and affinal kin was drawn by adding suffixes, such as ‘in-law’. Today prefixes are used to distinguish different forms of affinal kinship, such as step-brother or half-sister, but in early modern England, these terms were rarely used and such relationships were described as ‘in-law’, if they were distinguished at all. That there was less precision in the use of language to describe kin than is common today suggests that the particular nature of relationships was relatively unimportant. Similarly, unlike many societies, once beyond a small group for whom there were specific terms, there is a circle of kin referred to as ‘cousins’ or simply as ‘kinsfolk’. Although early modern writers sometimes distinguished their first cousins as ‘germain’, they rarely used the numbering system, common now, of ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third cousins’, or identified the line of descent by stating that they were ‘once’, ‘twice’ or ‘three times removed’. This has often been taken to indicate that individuals in early modern England were rather vague about their relationships and that kinship was therefore relatively unimportant. However, it is worth pointing out that one of the problems with the English kinship system is its extreme complexity. For a relationship to be understood, every link in the kinship chain has to be known. This also meant that individuals had, potentially, a large number of kin, which made them difficult to describe.

40

Introduction

Although the potential network of kin was enormous, sociologists distinguish different levels of kinship. There tends to be a group that are ‘recognised’, which is to say those with whom the links of kinship are acknowledged and known by an individual. Within this is a smaller circle who are ‘affective’, that is to say with whom the individual has some sort of practical relationship. Finally, within this is the inner circle of ‘intimate’ kin, with whom they identify their interests and share their resources and daily life. The debate then, is over where the inhabitants of early modern England placed these concentric circles within the wider kinship network. In many societies, one of the major functions of a kinship system is to create a circle within which marriage is not possible, because it is considered to be incest. In late medieval canon (church) law this circle was wide. Prohibited kin included consanguineal or affinal relatives to the fourth degree (that is the descendent of an individual’s, or his or her spouse’s, greatgreat-grandparents). What is more, illicit affi nity (created by sex outside of marriage) and spiritual kinship, through sponsorship at baptism and confi rmation, both created prohibitions to the second degree [36 p. 19]. These prohibitions were not merely formalities and were backed up by the church courts. For example, in 1463 John Hawthorne of Tunbridge in Kent was sentenced to be whipped three times round the church and market for the crime of marrying his deceased wife’s goddaughter. It has been calculated, on the conservative assumption that each of an individual’s relatives had one descendent of each sex, that a person would be unable to marry a staggering 188 kinsfolk [36 p. 27 ]. However, only 88 of these would have been of the same generation and only half of these the opposite sex, leaving 44 individuals, still a considerable number, who could not have been legal marriage partners and excluding those created by illicit sex and spiritual kinship. Henry VIII’s marital difficulties, and the break with Rome in the 1530s, led to changes in this system. The law was modified to justify the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and later to allow him to marry his first cousin through marriage, Catherine Howard. As a result, the ultimate authority became the vague prohibitions contained in Leviticus chapter 18. These were not clarified until Archbishop Matthew Parker put forward his ‘Tables of Kindred Affinity’ in 1563, and these were not formally made binding until 1603 [Doc. 8]. They were publicised by being placed in parish churches and in the back of the Book of Common Prayer from 1681, but it is clear that there was considerable confusion over, or wilful ignorance of, their contents [37 pp. 178–81]. They limited the barriers of marriage to an individual and his or her children, siblings, nephews, nieces, stepchildren, uncles, aunts and grandparents. However, they were not clear on whether an individual could marry his or her siblings-in-law and did include first cousins. Illicit affinity was treated like marriage and the restrictions on marrying relations through spiritual kinship were removed [140 pp. 23–7]. Despite the legal acceptance, and its support by theologians, particularly

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those influenced by Reformed religion, popular opinion remained against first cousin marriage [139]. This probably made a practical difference to most people’s lives only on rare occasions. Even in the medieval period, the seemingly cumbersome restrictions on marriage could be disregarded for a fee, by purchasing a dispensation from the Church. Dispensations to marry closer kin were rarely granted and probably rarely requested; implying that in practice, the changes in the law merely shrank the marriage prohibitions to approximately where society felt they should be. Most people thought that relatives who shared a grandparent should be included, but beyond that they were relatively unconcerned. The circle of recognition of kin in early modern England was then relatively small compared with many non-European societies.

Relationships with distant kin It is the nature these connections with these kin that has emerged as the central debate in this field. Part of the criticism of the work of Stone and Shorter was their assumption that, at the beginning of the period, kin were highly significant in family life. Stone saw the rise of the nuclear family at the expense of kinship and political clientage among the aristocracy, while Shorter described the nuclear family coming to ‘prefer friendship with close kin to interaction with the concentric rings of uncles and aunts . . .’ [77 pp. 123–9; 75 p. 4]. The starting points for objections to this pattern of change are the detailed investigations of household structure from the demographic school, which indicate that they rarely included other kin outside the conjugal family. In the forty-six listings that recorded kin between 1574 and 1821, from Peter Laslett’s sample of 100 English communities, only around one in ten households contained additional resident kin [83 p. 149]. What is more, since these amounted to only 946 persons in 626 households, in most cases there were only one or two additional kin present. This evidence largely destroys any residual image of the pre-industrial family as a large collection of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all living under one roof. The specific relationship between these persons is only known in roughly two-thirds of these cases. Of these, most were relatively close kin of the head of the household. The largest group, over one-third, were single (and therefore presumably widowed) parents or parents-in-law. A slightly lower number were grandchildren, who in the majority of cases did not have their parents resident with them. The remaining significant group was made up of brothers and sisters, who were just under one-sixth of residents. There were only around twenty more distant kin, such as aunts, uncles and ‘cousins’. These results strongly suggest that where kin outside the conjugal family were resident in a household, it was usually the result of taking in those who could not care for themselves, including aged parents, orphaned grandchildren, younger brothers and sisters. This, in itself, is instructive about the nature of social

42

Introduction

obligations towards kin, but it cannot be argued that in early modern England, kin outside the conjugal family were normally resident in households: rather it suggests that they were only resident in exceptional circumstances. In the light of this evidence, the debate over kinship naturally shifted to investigate the nature of relationships with kin from outside the household. By the 1980s a consensus had emerged that contrasted wider kin unfavourably with the family or with the community at large. In his study of the family life of the seventeenth-century Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin, Macfarlane stressed the relative insignificance of more distant kin. Although a fairly large group of kin was recognised (that is to say mentioned) in Josselin’s extensive and comprehensive diary, only one distant consanguineal relationship (to his father’s brother) was found to be of importance. Macfarlane pointed to the greater significance to Josselin of his friends and neighbours [58]. Keith Wrightson and David Levine took up this theme in their study of the village of Terling in Essex. By analysing the proportion of households within the parish that were linked by kinship, they were able to conclude that kinship density within the parish was relatively low, with only 40–50 per cent of householders being linked in this way. Furthermore, most of the linked households were related to only one other household, so the network of kinship was also relatively loose [56 p. 85]. They argued that interaction based on kinship was unlikely. In contrast, interaction with the wider community of neighbours appears to have been vital in everyday life. It is worth bearing in mind that kinship density is a product of two factors: mobility and the size of the area under examination. One of the most interesting and important facts to emerge about early modern society is the relatively high geographical mobility of individuals. This may have been partly the product of the system of service already encountered, which tended to break the links between place or origin and residence at a relatively early age. This meant that employment, and marriage partners, were more likely to be located in another community. This made it difficult for parishes to become agglomerations of descendants of a few families, all inter-related by marriage. It is, however, important to note that English parishes were relatively small, particularly in lowland and urban areas. As a result, even small-scale migrations, to the next village or town, appear to reduce kinship density, but this did not mean that relationships with kin necessarily ended. In an important methodological article, Barry Reay utilised ‘total reconstruction’ to examine kinship in three adjoining Kent parishes in the nineteenth century, outlining the ways in which households went through phases of extension and how there was a heavy kinship density across parish boundaries that challenges the distinction between kinship and community [137]. The net result of this work is that the idea of nuclear families as isolated entities, rarely interacting with their networks of kin, which were always narrow and thin throughout the period and in all circumstances, has begun to break down.

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While acknowledging the relative unimportance of more distant kin in most cases, in a seminal article David Cressy, examining the evidence from early modern wills, pointed to the flexibility with which kinship could respond when aid was needed [133]. More forcibly, Miranda Chaytor, working on Ryton in County Durham, stressed the role of households as focal points for the redistribution of resources among kinship groups [110]. Similarly, Diana O’Hara has emphasised the role of kin in marriage negotiations, even at a relatively humble social level, indicating that kin as a group could have a stake in the crucial business of forming households [254]. Elizabeth Foyster has pointed to the ways in which kin provided advice when marriages broke down [249 pp. 168–83]. Amy Froide has argued that, contrary to the accepted orthodoxy, single women had significant continuing interaction with relatives, particularly if they were female, including aunts, nieces and cousins, which did not appear to have been affected by geographical distance [174]. It is also clear that wider kin had responsibilities for orphaned children [312 pp. 165–7]. This cumulative evidence indicates that kinship played an important part at key points in the life cycle of the family, at birth, in courtship and marriage, at death and for those who stood outside the process of marriage and household creation. Kinship was one among a number of means by which close and significant relationships could be formed. This raises the issue of which circumstances made kin significant or insignificant. One possibility is that kinship functioned differently for contrasting social groups. It is also possible that historians have failed to put sufficient stress on geographical diversity, which may have had a profound effect on relations with kin where different social and economic systems predominated.

Diversity In a highly stratified society, with huge contrasts in culture and wealth, it is unsurprising if different social orders are found to exhibit contrasting social attitudes and behaviour. It is clear from their attention to heraldry and genealogy that the nobility and gentry possessed a considerable interest in matters of descent and kinship. However, kinship not only provided a proof of status; it also offered a useful resource that could be called upon to further economic or political ambitions. Members of the literate, horse-owning and leisured county elites were the people most able to maintain and pursue their kinship networks to their best advantage. This was carried out to such a degree that this elite county society has often been seen as an aggregate of kinship networks [47 pp. 44–8]. Similarly, while villagers tended to prefer the local gentleman or gentlewoman as godparents to their children, the gentry themselves tended to utilise spiritual kinship as a means of creating and strengthening links within this wider society [132]. It is notable that the gentry were far more likely to live in households that included kin from outside the conjugal family. This was partly a product of their larger houses,

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Introduction

but it fits in with a pattern of behaviour where wider kinship was of greater significance among this social group. One good example, highlighted by Rosemary O’Day, is that of the Bagots, a minor gentry family from Blithfield in Staffordshire. Surviving letters from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries show the head of the family, Walter Bagot, intervening in disputes and problems involving his married siblings; taking his nephew into his house to care for him; negotiating over the marriage of another nephew and godson; and supporting his godsons through their education at Oxford. In O’Day’s words, ‘the Bagot example shows another dimension of patriarchy in operation, in which the patriarch acted tactfully but decisively to protect the interests of close and distant natural and spiritual kin who were not part of his household’ [69 pp. 68–73]. Lower down the social scale, among the relatively prosperous yeomen farmers, merchants and professionals of the middling sort, similar, if less pronounced, patterns of behaviour can be seen. Although most houses within an early modern community may not have been connected by kinship, for a significant group of the most stable small farmers, kinship was vitally important [136]. Families from the middling sort, because they had some land to pass on, were more likely to remain in a given area and, since people tended to marry those of similar status, they were also likely to become closely linked to those around them through affinity. In seventeenth-century Myddle, a woodland-pastoral community in Shropshire, there were considerable inter-relationships by kinship among the long-established small farming families [48 pp. 203–4]. Among increasingly professionalised clergy and lawyers, there emerged clerical and legal dynasties, which gave each other mutual support and patronage. Similar networks of support were evident among business families in towns, who were often able to monopolise political power in major regional centres. In these cases kinship could be extremely useful, and although there was not the same obsession with descent found among the gentry and nobility, where kinship served a purpose, it was often a more significant factor in social relations. While relatively stable small landholders might have built up local kinship networks and employed them in a similar way to their social superiors, this was a shrinking social category. The evidence indicates that the more mobile, and largely illiterate, rural labouring poor, were less likely to use this resource. However, it has been noted that although this appears to apply to kinship in a rural context, within towns these changes may have intensified these forms of relationship. Here populations were more densely packed and mortality generally higher. In these circumstances individuals stood a greater chance of being in close proximity to their relatives and may have been forced to rely on them if the vagaries of urban mortality took away members of their closer families. This book will return to the effects of these increasingly common circumstances on family life in the final section, but this observation of differences

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between town and country also points to the impact of geography and topography on the employment of kinship. It has long been argued that distant kin were more important in some regions of the country than in others. These areas have generally been seen as in the highlands, which predominate in the West and North, where there existed a society largely based on pastoral agriculture [49 p. 4; 398 p. 9]. Here, as already seen, ownership of land was often less important to survival than common rights, such as the ability to graze sheep or cattle on large areas of heath and moor. As a result, the problem of supporting children through inheritance would have been less acute and the imperative to migrate less powerful, resulting in larger collections of kin. This argument is given force by the existence of a different pattern of kinship in the most obvious highland region, on the border with Scotland in the counties of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland. Here existed powerful ‘clans’ where kinship and obligation were assumed on the basis of a surname, such as the Charltons, Robinsons, Dodds and Milburns; the Grahams, Armstrongs and Elliots. These ‘wild and misdemeaned people’ pursued raids, blackmail and the feud across the border, and among each other, until the seventeenth century [55 p. 25; 43 pp. 60–1]. However, these ‘names’ began to lose their collective identity as Tudor and Stuart monarchs stripped their leaders of political influence. In the seventeenth century, individual families began to emerge as the most important units, strongly indicating that this was not a different kinship system, but merely a variation of the same one. It was once argued that the acute importance of kinship in the borders was reflected in the rest of the highland regions of England. More recently, where upland and forest communities have been examined in detail, kinship has generally been seen as a relatively unimportant factor. Alan Macfarlane’s assessment of kinship in the parish of Kirby Lonsdale in Westmorland, which he describes as an upland parish, led him to conclude that there was no evidence of extensive kinship networks [125 pp. 75–6]. However, surname evidence strongly suggests that mobility was much lower in these areas than in lowland England, resulting in a greater density of kin present within highland and pastoral communities. In the extensive parish of Almondbury, near Huddersfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, this reached as high as 75 per cent of households linked by kinship [130 p. 4]. What remains debatable is whether these kin played a greater part in the lives of early modern highland and pastoral families. Evidence from wills suggests they did not. Surprisingly, the proportion of wills including bequests to wider kin was significantly lower in some highland communities, and tended to be much higher in towns [129, 130]. A variety of explanations can be presented for this evidence, most significantly that such parishes, which were less susceptible to the impact of disease, tended to have lower rates of mortality. As a result, close kin were more likely to survive and there was less often a need to call on the wider kinship network.

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Introduction

Although this is an area where much research remains to be done, one clear characteristic of the English kinship system was its flexibility. It could be adapted to produce something approximating to a clan system, as it continued to do on the Scottish borders into the seventeenth century. It could be pressed into service where personal or professional necessity dictated, as was so often the case among the nobility, gentry and most of the middling sort. Finally, in an urban context, even the poor appear to have relied upon it as a mechanism for aid and survival. Just because kin were close by did not mean that they were important, but, although kin might not be present in a household, or lived across administrative boundaries, they could play a vital part in family life.

6

Culture and context

From the 1980s cultural studies began to seriously influence investigations of history, and during the 1990s they threatened to eclipse traditional social history. This trend was first evident in France and then the USA, with British historiography lagging behind, perhaps because this approach conflicted with the dominant empirical tradition. In the field of the history of the English family this shift has had a major impact in three areas: the study of gender, sexuality and popular culture. The development of these areas of study has both deepened the understanding of the family in the past and provided a wider cultural context within which it can be better understood, but raises important methodological issues for the study of the family.

Gender As interest in the history of women widened into an interest in gender in general, historians began to see gender as a category that could be used to evaluate the roles of both men and women and the interactions between them [192]. In this model, whereas ‘sex’ refers to the biological differences between men and women, gender is generally taken to refer to the socially constructed differences between them, based around contrasting poles of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ [191 p. 8]. Seen in these terms, the early modern family was a mechanism for defining male and female roles and then for the socialisation of those roles within the next generation. Investigations of the roles of men and women have often focused on transgressions of accepted roles, partly because surviving sources, particularly from ecclesiastical and minor civil courts, contain extensive evidence of such events. This led some historians to speculate that the early modern era was a major watershed in the construction of gender, even that there was a ‘crisis in gender relations’ that could be seen in attempts to control and constrain women, reflected in prosecutions for characteristically female offences of scolding and sexual immorality. These invited dramatic legal sanctions such as ‘cucking’ or ‘washing’, by which women were immersed in water, and informal sanctions such as the ‘charivari’, ‘ridings’, ‘rough music’, or ‘skimmingtons’ [183]. These were events by which

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members of a community highlighted (and therefore punished) perceived unacceptable behaviour, often sexual, through a public ritual. The victim, or a substitute, was led around the village, either on a horse, or pole, and pelted with stones or mud, often with the supposed offence acted out in the process [184]. Gender differences can also be seen in the use of space. Sometimes the domestic sphere could be seen as feminine, while men occupied the wider masculine, occupational and public sphere. This ‘separate spheres’ model has been extended back from the nineteenth century by historians such as Amanda Vickery [197], but it has been challenged by others, particularly Amanda Flather and Robert Shoemaker, who point to mounting evidence that this model was much more complex in practice and that the gendering of space was the subject of negotiation and contestation [171]. The subject of manhood in this period has also begun to receive serious attention from historians. Conventionally, feminist historians tended to see manhood as inextricably tied to patriarchy, and part of a system for the suppression of women. However, more recent work has emphasised the complexity of ideas of masculinity [163, 172, 179]. It was mainly expressed through the family, in relationships between husbands and wives, and parents and children, but it was modified and limited by factors such as age and hierarchy. Manhood was seen as an age-specific life stage. It was different in its expression for the rich and the poor. For the elite manhood included elements of authority, but required a changing palate of attributes that might include the martial arts, literacy, numeracy and courtly skills. For the poor the idea of manhood might involve elements of physical ability and learned skills, but would always be limited by the need to be subservient to social superiors [193]. A model of reputation that sees women as primarily concerned with sexual reputation and men as more complex and focused on credit and honour has been challenged by scholars such as Garthine Walker, who has argued that other factors such hard work, authority within the household and honesty should also be considered [198]. At all levels, masculinity was tied to ideas of honour and credit. As will be explored in Chapter 8, even with the sexual ‘double standard’, which meant that women’s sexual activity was much less socially acceptable than that of men, men did have to fear for their sexual reputations [173]. A further issue that has much occupied scholars of the early modern period is the degree to which women within early modern society had agency, that is to say the ability to act independently of the systems of patriarchy and the constraints of their gender-defined roles [195 pp. 1–14]. The pages of early modern records are filled with examples of women who achieved some status that countered the limitations placed on them by their society. These run from those who (in court records) disregarded the rules of chastity and silence, to the large number of women who ran businesses and estates, to the many women writers, once largely neglected by the canon of literature.

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Rosemary O’Day goes as far as to argue that powerful and independent women were the norm rather than the exception [189].

Sexuality Until the 1970s issues of sexuality in history were rarely confronted directly as major scholarly issues worthy of study. Important early work included that by Norbert Elias on The Civilising Process (1939), which pointed to the ways in which issues like bodily functions and sexual behaviour were gradually constrained as elite culture acquired, and then passed on, stronger and higher boundaries and reduced tolerance for sexual activity. A major watershed in how the subject was viewed was the publication of the first of Michel Foucault’s three-volume work on the history of sexuality [209]. Foucault established a model of sexuality that has, positively or negatively, dominated scholarly investigations to the present day. Foucault argued against the ‘repressive hypothesis’ adopted by Elias and his followers, which suggested that talk about sex has been inhibited since roughly the seventeenth century as a by-product of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeois society, only beginning to be a subject of open discussion again in the late twentieth century. Turning this idea on its head, Foucault argued that there was a ‘veritable discursive explosion’ of sex, although it had a limited vocabulary and was surrounded by rules about who could discuss it and in what circumstances. Foucault’s cause of change was the sacrament of confession, which, as a result of the Counter-Reformation, became a mechanism for the sharing of sexual offences and desires. A fairly obvious problem for this argument is that, except for a minority of Catholic dissenters, English people did not have confession. It could be argued that the corresponding movement in seventeenth-century Protestantism, grouped under the name of Puritanism, had a similar impact, but Puritanism was often an internal world of self-evaluation and consideration. If sexuality in the past was not a simple system of repression, then the issue arises of what exactly it was composed of. Foucault answered this by pointing to the distinction between the ‘ars erotica’ and the ‘scientia sexualis’, essentially the art and science of sex. In his formulation, the ars erotica sees sex as part of a system of aesthetics and pleasure and was dominant in ancient Greece and later Eastern civilisations, while the scientia sexualis views sex as a serious subject of study and a treats it as part of a quest for truth, in a perspective that was characteristic of Western views of sexuality from the medieval era. Foucault also argued that before the eighteenth century, discourse on sexuality focused on the reproductive role of the married couple, and was constrained by church and civil law. However, this changed as society became increasingly interested in other sexualities, what he calls the ‘world of perversion’. This included the sexuality of children, the mentally ill, criminals and homosexuals. This meant that activity that had been viewed as sinful was now seen as ‘perverted’. This led to a prurient interest

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Introduction

in such activity and, although carefully regulated, perversity, and interest in perversity, became a major part of bourgeois society. Foucault’s ideas have proved highly controversial and this aspect of his work has been criticised for its lack of evidence and for a failure to identify important chronological and national differences. However, the debate over the ‘repressive hypothesis’ has been an important one, challenging assumptions about sexuality in the past. The debate has often not been about whether new sexualities developed as much as when they came into being. Early responses to Foucault tended to focus on moving back the point of origin of modern ideas of sexuality to earlier periods, such as the early modern and medieval eras [234 p. 497]. This is what Eve Sedgewick characterised as the search for the ‘Great Paradigm Shift’ [230 pp. 44–8]. In the area of eroticism, Foucault’s distinction between the ars erotica and the scientia sexualis has also proved influential in setting the agenda. Katherine McClusky argues that Foucault’s idea of the scientia sexualis acting as if it was an ars erotica in the nineteenth century, where scientific and rational enquiry acted as a conduit for sexual prurience and voyeurism, can be pushed back into the early modern era [224 p. 81]. Printed broadsheets, conduct books, specialised medical text books and court cases all acted as theatres in which sexual activity could be investigated, even if it was condemned [Figure 6.1].

Figure 6.1 Sexual impropriety linked to religious propaganda: minister and Quaker Source: © Chronicle/Alamy. Stock Photo.

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Foucault’s formulation of a growth of an idea of perversion has also been controversial and significant. His distinction between the ‘sodomite’ and the ‘homosexual’ has led scholars to distinguish sexual acts from identities [214 pp. 93–120]. The argument runs that there were no ‘homosexuals’ before the eighteenth century, although there were people who engaged in acts now associated with homosexuality. However, once again the debate here is less about whether homosexuality existed in the past and more about exactly when it came into being. The interest in sexuality has extended into many areas, including attitudes to the body. Examining medical texts, Thomas Laqueur has argued that there is a division between the idea of a ‘two sex’ model of the body, which came to dominate after the Enlightenment and a ‘one sex’ model that was common before. In early modern medical texts, a woman was depicted as a man with inverted and internal sex organs. From this he argues that the one sex model saw women as a biological variation rather than as a distinct sex [222 pp. 124–5]. However, it is not clear to what degree people outside of a small group of medical experts thought in these terms and the predominant medical theory of the humours emphasised male/female differences, while evidence from other sources, particularly advice in conduct books, emphasises the contrasts between men and women [24 p. 34; 177 pp. 6–7]. Helen King has marshalled evidence to indicate that, rather than replacement of a one sex model with a two sex model, they existed side by side throughout most of the period [186]. Given these clear constructions of sexuality, Laura Gowing has argued that the distinction between socially constructed gender and biological sex breaks down in an examination of the early modern period [178 p. 2]. It is clear that sexuality is an important factor in understanding family life. It is necessary to note the processes of contestation and negotiation that existed between different views of sexuality throughout the period and that, rather than obvious major paradigm shifts, the period can be characterised as one of complication and gradual, inconsistent emphasis on different views of sexuality in differing circumstances. This is not to say that ideas about sexuality did not change, but that they did not do so suddenly, unexpectedly and irrevocably.

Popular culture Popular culture, in this case meaning the culture of the people, rather than of the social elite, began to interest historians seriously in the 1960s and 1970s, and was partly influenced by major sociological studies. The watershed work was Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978), which proposed a model by which the medieval aristocracy had been ‘culturally amphibious’, having their own culture, but being able to enjoy and participate in popular culture, which they shared through the early modern Church and community. As a result of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and later the Enlightenment, they became increasingly separated from the

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common people. This resulted in attempts to constrain and control popular culture, which was increasingly seen as a threat to social order. This can be seen in England in Puritan reactions to popular activities, such as May Day celebrations, morris dancing and plays, and is often seen as reaching its peak under the Protectorate regime that followed the Civil Wars from about 1649 to the Restoration in 1660, when most of these events were banned [22]. The separation of cultures identified by Burke meant that some of the elite began to ‘discover’ popular culture and record it, at least from the seventeenth century and with increasing intensity in the eighteenth century, producing records of declining rituals, folk songs and beliefs. The relationship between elite and popular culture was probably a lot more complex than this, with Puritanism producing its own culture and the people constantly readapting and reinventing theirs in changing circumstances, while the elite often drew on the culture of the people for their own entertainment and amusement [337]. This complex relationship between different forms of culture has been characterised by Roger Chartier as one of ‘appropriation’ [368]. The bipolar model of culture began to be seriously challenged from the mid-1980s and to be replaced by a multi-faceted view that saw many popular cultures, which were linked in complex and intricate ways. This attempt to depict a more complex model of culture suffers from the danger that it can become so diffuse that it is impossible to define what popular culture is, or how it is distinct from other cultural forms. Such a diffusion of the concept led to challenges over whether there can be a history of popular culture at all [385]. Accessing this culture is extremely diffi cult. Adam Fox’s painstaking reconstruction of oral and literary culture in the early modern period has indicated the complexity and richness of the lives of ordinary people, but also some of the difficulties of understanding popular culture through the records left by the elite and oral culture through written sources [373]. Interpreting all evidence as ‘texts’ has become an accepted practice in cultural history. This has helped to revalidate elite cultural products, such as pictorial art and plays, as a means of understanding cultural attitudes to issues like sex and the family, and has opened up other evidence, such as court records and conduct books to be treated within a wider cultural context. However, this also raises some serious methodological issues. Most obvious among these is that not all texts are of the same social value. They are created for different purposes and for audiences who interpret them in different ways. Popular culture can be seen as affecting family life in a number of ways. Rituals are the best evidence that the common people had their own codes of sexual behaviour and often their own means of dealing with breaches of them. For example, cuckolds (men whose wives had had illicit sex) might wake to fi nd horns placed outside their houses (because it was believed cuckolds grew invisible horns). Verses and songs were also circulated, sometimes in written form, as a means of condemning and accusing members of the community of unpopular practices and, as demonstrated above, there

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was the popular ‘justice’ of the charivari [210] [Doc. 14]. The most common perceived offenders punished in this way were henpecked husbands, but the wife- or husband-beaters were also disliked [218, 219, 220]. A key theme is the way in which popular perceptions negotiated with elite perceptions. Family life acted in the context of these perceptions and the interaction between families and the community, be it the parish, town or the country. In place of the old certainties of elite and popular, religious and irreligious, law and disorder, historians, taking their cue from poststructuralist thinking, particularly that of Foucault, tend to think in pluralities and processes of negotiation, rather than conflict or imposition. In this sense, ideas of gender, sexuality and culture were all negotiated fields, where the results were always tentative and constantly changing as part of a process of interaction and adjustment. The rise of the new cultural history has had a profound impact on the nature and extent of the study of the history of the family. Broadening the debate to consider issues such as gender, sexuality and the nature of popular culture has meant the incorporation of major theories into the field and has helped place the history of the family in the context of wider society and linked the field to major developments in scholarship. This has helped to put the family at the forefront of historical study as a nexus of investigations of attitudes and important areas of change. It can also be argued that it has led to a diffusion of the study of the family, which has moved beyond the confines of households and wider kinship relations to include general attitudes and intellectual changes that make it more difficult to identify the family as a single area of study. The techniques of cultural history can be criticised as being more theory- and less evidentially based than other approaches, leading to potential accusations that the historian is ‘reading in’ meaning, or over-interpreting evidence. While these criticisms have some validity, now that the door is open to the cultural history of the family, it cannot be closed and this approach has successfully widened the study of the family and greatly developed the understanding of its context and nature.

Part II

Analysis – the pattern of family life

7

Independence and family formation

The object of this part of this book is to illuminate the ways in which relationships within families and between kin functioned. As already seen, these relations were not fixed, but constantly changing and developing for individuals as they moved through their life course. Accordingly, this section has been divided into seven chapters, each focusing not, as is usual, on this individual pattern of change, but on that of the family as a unit, between the beginnings of independence, through its formation in marriage, expansion through the birth of children, to its dissolution by the death of its primary members, the parents, and the aftermath of that dissolution. This was not a clearly defined process, but it is logical to begin with a consideration of the creation of new households through the investigation of the point at which existing households began to fragment. This occurred as the children of a couple began to mature, moving, in the view of many historians, into a new state of youth. As already demonstrated, this often involved a long period of service or apprenticeship, and the nature of this institution is crucial in understanding the ways in which early modern families functioned. Finally, most of those who were to continue family life emerged from this state to form their own households through the institution of marriage, making courtship and the process of household formation critical to family life.

The problem of youth Youth in pre-industrial England has become a popular subject of study, in part because of the influence of sociological studies of contemporary youth and culture. There is also recognition that early modern England, with an expanding population and relatively high mortality, was a society with an unusually high proportion of young people. Whether these individuals constituted a category that can be defined as youth has been much debated. The disagreement originated in the work of the sociologist Karl Mannheim, who differentiated between the existence of ‘generations’ and ‘youth’. The argument follows that, although there were groups of people in the past that can be defined as biological adolescents, they lacked a distinct cultural identity

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[143 p. 3]. More recently, historians have tended to argue that this distinction is false and that there was such a state, but its expression was different from the modern perception of youth. This distinctiveness can be examined in two ways, through the external definitions of youth as a separate stage in the life course and through an investigation of its internal culture and cohesiveness. As demonstrated in an earlier chapter, children could leave home for a period of service when seven or eight, but most did not leave until they were in their mid-teens and most apprentices were in the age range of 15 to 25 [143 pp. 39–47]. It was from this point that they began to acquire some of the legal status that marked them off from children. Most significantly, females reached the legal age of puberty at 12 and males at 14. These were the ages from which individuals could marry, recognising the approximate points from which the different sexes were able to be active in sexual reproduction. At this stage, marriage could only take place with parental permission and, as already seen, such ‘child marriages’ were rare, particularly outside the gentry and nobility. In the medieval era individuals gained full legal rights over property between the ages of 15 and 21, depending on their gender and the type of land tenure [142 pp. 42–3]. In the early modern era, for men the age of 21 assumed an importance and this was clearly intended to mark a significant point of transition into adulthood. However, there is evidence that full maturity was not believed to begin until later. Occasionally wills mention 25, or even 29, as the ages of inheritance. As already seen, this was close to the average age of first marriage for men, suggesting this marked the point where they could become full members of society. Thus, law and custom point to gradual and diverse processes by which individuals acquired legal and social status through age. These began, for some, long before modern adolescence, with a move to service or education. They were punctuated by puberty and legal majority, but not complete until marriage, or the death of an individual’s parents. In the context of early modern demography, where the average life expectancy at birth was in the early forties, this was likely to be a significant section of an average life course, roughly a third. However, much of this high mortality was concentrated in the first few years of life, and it is important to bear in mind that for those who survived childhood, this stage formed only a small part of their life experience. It would have been less than one-sixth of the mean life span of those who reached the age of 30. In the late seventeenth century, those between the ages of 15 and 24 made up less than 17 per cent of the population as a whole [143 p. 218]. Nevertheless, it could be argued that this stage saw the formative experiences of individuals’ lives, when their ideas, beliefs and economic fortunes were determined. Even if youth is accepted as a social category, what is more difficult to understand is to what degree the individuals within it achieved the hallmark of modern youth, a distinctive youth culture. There are elements that suggest such a pattern. In London, male apprentices shared a common identity

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within their crafts and guilds, and came together on occasion as a political and military force, most obviously in the Civil Wars, to lobby for Parliament and to fight the king as the major component of the formidable London trained bands [149 pp. 155–6]. There were also specific occasions in the ritual calendar during which youth predominated. The most obvious was May Day, at the beginning of the agricultural year, when potential servants swarmed to market towns to negotiate for employment, but also to dance, play games and drink. Sometimes these revels went further, with the young electing their own ‘lords of misrule’, and, as one eyewitness from late sixteenth-century Lincolnshire noted, engaging in ‘heathenry, devilry, whoredom, drunkenness, pride and what not’ [143 p. 27]. But the significance of these circumstances is open to debate. The London trained bands, highly influenced by Puritanism, marked one end of a religious spectrum that would have harshly disapproved of these ‘pagan’ revels at the other. Moreover, although London was important, with perhaps 20,000 apprentices in the mid-seventeenth century, it was in many ways exceptional, particularly in terms of service, which across the county as a whole remained predominantly dispersed and agricultural in nature. It has also been suggested that the revels of youth merely emphasised the subjection to authority and labour that the young normally experienced. An additional problem is that, unlike modern youth, which, since the midtwentieth century has experienced high levels of disposable income, early modern adolescents were relatively poorly paid and desperately needed their income to secure their future prospects. One area where they were able to build their own culture through moderate expenditure was in the buying of cheap print, especially ballads and chapbooks, which were sold for a few pennies. They often specifically addressed themselves to the young [Doc. 19]. Many were highly religious in nature and designed, fairly obviously, to constrain youthful behaviour. This may have been an attempt to justify their existence and does not necessarily mean that they were welcomed by this age group. But they did have a particular emphasis on issues that might appeal to the young, such as courtship [26]. Popular literature also demonstrates how the culture of the young fitted into a wider adult world and reflected many of its ideals and concerns. In a groundbreaking essay, Keith Thomas argued that early modern society was a gerontocracy, a society run by the old [320 pp. 45–77]. The evidence suggests that there was considerable concern over the problems posed by youth, with renewed emphasis in the seventeenth century, when they were largest in numbers and most vocal. There was a constant stress on the need for the young to respect their elders, by an extension of the fifth commandment to include not only parents, but also virtually all adults. There was an emphasis, particularly in more radical religious circles, on catechising; that is the testing of children and servants on a religious catechism of essential beliefs, which was designed to be learnt by rote [148, 160] [Doc. 9]. These concerns should not be allowed to overshadow other social principles

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(like those of hierarchy and gender), which were also seen by many as under threat, but it is clear that youth was perceived as posing significant difficulties for the social order and constituted a distinct life-course strategy for the majority.

Service and apprenticeship One set of solutions to the problem of controlling the young was the system of service and apprenticeship. As already seen, the English habit of sending the young away from their homes to live and work in other households was frequently noted by visitors to the country. For outsiders, it was often perceived as a sign of indifference to children, but it is likely that the claims that adolescents brought up in another household would be better disciplined were widely believed in England. It was not a universal practice, being dependent on social standing and economic opportunity. For those lower down in society it was a necessity to find employment for offspring as early as possible, but even parents of the middling sort used it to ensure the training of their children (particularly boys) in a trade, craft or profession. For many, service was a long period and coincided roughly with the stage between the end of childhood and the beginning of full adulthood. For this reason, it is referred to as life-cycle service, to separate it from those for whom service was a lifelong occupation. As already seen, in this period almost one-third of households contained some servants, either domestic or agricultural, and the majority of those in service were adolescents. In some areas these proportions could be high, with London in the early eighteenth century having as much as 60 per cent of households including servants [159]. Such arrangements often provided relatively short-term employment, for perhaps only a year or two, and could be interspersed with periods of return to the parental home. Since the probability of householders having servants increased higher up the social scale, and the likelihood of being a servant increased lower down the same scale, it can also be seen as a means of maintaining the social inequalities between rich and poor. The early modern period was, however, an era of considerable change in the nature of service. In the late Middle Ages, most servants, whether on the farm, or in the house, were male. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, the majority of domestic servants were ‘maids’: a term that highlights their unmarried status as well as their gender. Unsurprisingly, the majority of servants in husbandry, who contributed a significant section of agricultural labour, remained male. Therefore, as time went on a distinction developed between the two forms of service emphasised by the gender of those that undertook them [150]. In an age virtually without machines, lacking commercial chemicals, and with relatively limited tools, all work was labour intensive. Both domestic and farming servants rose early, particularly in the summer, and spent most of their days, except for a reducing

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number of holidays and to a lesser extent Sundays, engaged in hard or tedious work, be it scrubbing floors, carrying water, digging ditches or cutting hedges. Apprenticeship represented a much longer-term, more formal relationship, which implied training in a craft or trade. Throughout the period the overwhelming majority of apprentices were male. There were, however, some skills that were increasingly significant in certain regions of the country, for example lace-making in the East Midlands, which necessitated apprenticeships for women. At the beginning of the period apprenticeship was often required in order to join a trade organisation or a guild in order to pursue a career and this was only possible after a set period of training. The normal term was seven years, but it was sometimes longer in well-established crafts and shorter in newer ones. However, the position of the medieval guilds was challenged by the Reformation (which removed their role as lay religious fraternities) and by socio-economic change (which undermined many traditional groups). In addition, the increasing use of compulsory apprenticeship as a solution to the problem of what to do with the children of the poor eroded the social standing of the institution. Finally, the growth of a pool of cheap, unskilled labour and the beginnings of industrialisation began, as will be discussed in the final part of this book, to make the scheme virtually obsolete in the eighteenth century. In both service and apprenticeship, the master had the theoretically absolute powers of a father. The thousands of indentures, the legal agreement that initiated apprenticeship, that survive from this period, themselves a fraction of those created, take the same form. The master undertakes to supply ‘meat, drink, apparel, washing, lodging and all other things’, while the servant agrees to ‘avoid taverns and alehouses, dice, cards and any other unlawful games . . . fornication [and] matrimony’ [23 p. 8]. Discipline could be severe and there were a number of instances where masters were prosecuted for killing servants, usually as the result of extreme beatings, but few ended in convictions. Of the 431 homicides before the Essex Assize Courts in the period 1560 to 1709, forty-five, almost one in ten, involved servants. One involved the murder of a master by a servant or apprentice, one a mistress and one a child of the house, while five were murders of other servants, but in the vast majority of cases, the servants were the victims [156 pp. 29–34]. This happened in the case of the nine-year-old servant Thomas Lincolne in 1595, who was whipped so harshly by his mistress for laziness while ill that he died from his wounds [346 p. 267]. In 1681 Elizabeth Wigenton, a coatmaker of Ratcliff, was found guilty of the murder of a thirteen-year-old girl who was her apprentice; after being unhappy with the girl’s work she took a bundle of rods and ‘whiped her so unmercifully, that the blood ran down like rain’, after which she fainted and then died [16 p. 30]. These circumstances suggest that there was considerable violence, and little check upon it. Although, in theory, servants were members of a family, they were rarely treated as such. Revealingly, there was no rite of passage to mark

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the entry of an individual into the master’s family, as is normally the case where adoption or fictive kinship is created. This idea of family membership was a justification of patriarchal, or occasionally matriarchal, authority, rather than a form of adoption. There was more chance for a relationship to build up with apprentices who were closer in social standing to their masters. A few apprentices became affinal kin by marrying their master’s daughters and some inherited the estate of a master, but only if he lacked another heir. More commonly, the relationship was limited to the provision of food, lodging and some payment. Many masters spent considerable effort on moral and spiritual education, but this again speaks more about concerns over control of the young than incorporation into the family. As a group, male apprentices were famous for their sexual activity. Sometimes this was with women of their own age and status, but as will later be discussed, sometimes with prostitutes [149]. Yet, there was little organised prostitution outside of London and a few other major urban centres. As already seen, there was a relatively low illegitimacy ratio, suggesting that sex between men and women was usually postponed and confined to marriage. It seems that contemporary propaganda exaggerated their role in this regard. However, female servants were one of the most common groups bearing illegitimate children, which were frequently, and probably justifiably, attributed to the acts of their masters. In this regard, changes in the nature of domestic service created a large group of potentially exploitable women, many of whom suffered, as a result, both ignominy and poverty. Service and the more formal relationship of apprenticeship often acted as a mechanism for the control, socialisation and education of the young. It was not simply an isolated social institution, but was linked to those prevailing issues and concerns over gender and hierarchy as well as age. The subordination and oppression of servants and apprentices could be extreme, but in some cases close relationships could develop between masters and servants. Service thus reflected accurately the mixture of subordination, abuse, co-operation and paternalism that characterised early modern society and family life in general.

Courtship Although a significant minority of the population was excluded, youth often ended, and families began, with the formation of a new household through marriage, and examining the critical process of courtship by which this was achieved is vital to understanding how families came into being. The possibility of marriage was, almost throughout society, dependent on the making of a ‘good match’. This meant that the potential marriage should be valid, by being outside the prohibited degrees of the Church and by both partners being free from other vows and marriages. It implied, as the commentator

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William Perkins put it, ‘parity or equality’ in age, status and wealth [29 p. 87]. However, a good match might necessitate finding a partner who was of slightly greater status or wealth, allowing a degree of social advancement. Obviously, not everyone could achieve this aim and, as a result, the search for partners could resemble a complex economic game. The significance of wealth should not be overstated; other qualities were often highlighted by commentators, including the piety, morality, skills and often the compatibility of potential partners. Among the nobility and upper gentry the process was often initiated, or even ‘arranged’, by parents or guardians. Conduct books suggested that the role of parents was to advise and direct, not to dictate. It is clear from numerous examples that children could get their own way if they were prepared to override their parents’ objections. The consent of those entering into a marriage was a crucial principle in law and in popular perceptions. It has been argued that this negotiation and calculation indicates a society where sexual and romantic attraction were relatively insignificant. Yet even among the middling sort, at least as early as the sixteenth century, romantic love could be a major factor. The seventeenth-century diarist and clergyman Ralph Josselin recalled his first encounter with his future wife, when ‘my eye fixed with love upon a Mayde; and hers upon mee’ [Doc. 11]. Lower down the social scale, economics and issues of social standing played a lesser part and mutual attraction may have been more significant. Despite the high level of social and family pressure, there were a few cases of people ‘marrying out’ of their social orders. Most of these were for reasons of romantic love, but for noble women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were cases where women in difficult circumstances turned to available and loyal men in times of personal crisis, and they serve as a reminder of how the limits on women’s independent action could lead to such solutions [260]. Sons had more independence in the choice of partners than daughters, but foreign visitors often noted the considerable freedom given to young English women to travel and visit, which suggests they had greater opportunities for meeting potential marriage partners than their continental counterparts. In these circumstances, it would be logical to expect high levels of sexual promiscuity, but as already seen this was not true before industrialisation. One reason was that much social interaction between men and women occurred in carefully constructed group activities. For the young the social system was, as John Gillis has observed, ‘a homosocial world’, where same-sex peer groups dominated [250 p. 22]. Even the festivals, rituals and games of St Valentine’s Day, May Day and midsummer, that raised terrible spectres of moral decay in the mind of many a Puritan preacher, were a highly structured and limited form of social interaction between the sexes. For example, one of the most popular by the seventeenth century, ‘kissin-the-ring’, allowed limited, public and light-hearted contact between the

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sexes as they chased and saluted each other. It was thus rare for men and women to experience each other’s company in privacy, before they were formally engaged. Women appear to have been particularly dependent on advice and the approval of others, probably because their status depended heavily on marrying the right man and in maintaining their reputation for sexual propriety [254]. This may explain why the initiative to begin courtship was usually taken by men. Courtship could take several years, although periods of around one year appear to have been the most common. Diaries suggest that in practical terms it revolved around visits to the woman’s parental home, attending rites of passage, trips to nearby towns, visits to alehouses and walks in nearby fields [250]. Most of this activity was conducted in the presence of others, but it is not surprising to find that there is some evidence of this relative freedom leading to pre-marital sexual activity. There was room for considerable confusion, as under English common law a proposal of marriage, once accepted, was binding. These ‘spousals’ were often accompanied by the giving of tokens, which were occasionally, but not always, rings. That spousals did allow some young men to obtain sexual favours without an intention to marry is evident because they appeared in court for breach of promise. This system allowed a number of women to acquire the man of their choice as marriage partners, by later claiming such a promise; a vital matter if they had become pregnant. Not all courtship was a careful and well-ordered matter. In a sample of twelve parishes, roughly a quarter of all brides had children within the first eight months of marriage [212, 213]. In some cases, the danger of illegitimate offspring forced a match, but in others it indicates that once promises were exchanged, individuals considered themselves married. Despite these problems, the promises were probably genuinely given in most cases, and all the evidence suggests that marriage was considered a serious and important institution. The suitability of the person with whom that household would be created and shared was a crucial consideration for most people. Before and after formal betrothal, among the propertied classes a lengthy process of careful negotiation was needed that would determine or clarify what each partner would bring into the new household. These discussions often revolved around the potential wife’s ‘dowry’, a sum of money from her father’s estate. However, it is clear from the evidence of wills that women brought other items to a new household, like vital domestic implements such as pots and pans, which would be necessary in its running. In the later part of the period a conspicuous consumption of household and particularly kitchen items has been detected, where, for at least the well-to-do, these items would become part of a system for displaying wealth [256, 257]. The cohesiveness of youth as a social category in early modern England is open to debate, but it clear that there was a section of the life course which, for the majority, formed an important bridge between childhood and full adulthood. This stage played a vital part in the social and economic order,

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helping to maintain not only the principle of obedience to elders, but, in many cases, those distinctions based on gender and status. It helped to train and socialise future adults, while fulfilling the function of allowing them to gain experience and resources which would be vital in their later lives. Most significantly, it marked the beginning of both sexual activity and courtship, which were crucial in the formation of the families around which the social system was constructed.

8

Sex and sexualities

As already seen, sexuality has been one of the major growth areas of historical study. This partly reflects growing interest in these issues within modern society, but also the uncovering of sources that throw light on such issues. Early work on the early modern era tended to be in the form of literary criticism, relying on the reading, often between the lines, of texts such as Shakespeare’s plays, but has recently expanded into sources that give an indication of popular perceptions and practices, such as court records and parish registers. Critical to understanding these documents is an appreciation of the constraints and conventions behind their creation. They can be seen as ‘narratives’ or ‘fictions’ that were created, replicated and viewed in a specific social and cultural context [21]. As a result, interpreting attitudes to and experiences of sex can be a complex and difficult process. There is a need to consider different sexualities and how ideas of gender were inverted and lines between genders crossed.

Attitudes to sex Attitudes to sex were superficially clear and universally agreed in this period. The only form of sex that was considered correct by most commentators was that within marriage, for the procreation of children and in the missionary position. However, there were significant differences in the emphasis on the value of sexual activity within marriage. Many Catholic commentators saw all sex as an evil, if a necessary one. In contrast, Protestants, particularly the more radical Puritans, following the lead of many thinkers of the Renaissance, had a more positive view of sex within marriage. They tended to depict it as something actively good: a confirmation of the validity of the union between a man and a woman in marriage, as well as a necessary safety valve for containing sexual passions. Ideas on sex derived, ultimately, from ideas about differences between the sexes. It has been argued that there were two views of women in this period. One saw them as sexually neutral, and inert; the other saw them as more passionate (and dangerous) than men. The balance of these two views has been much debated. It has been argued that because of increasing dominance

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of the latter view towards the middle of the period, it became the orthodoxy that sex was not to be over-indulged in. The early modern opinion was of the need for ‘matrimonial chastity’, that is to say moderation within marriage. The idea was that men should satisfy their wives, but not excite so much libido as would enflame their passions. The diarist John Evelyn thought that ‘too much frequency of embraces dulls the sight, decays the memory, induces gout, palsies, enervates and renders effeminate the whole body, and shortens life’ [77 p. 497]. The writers of some early modern conduct books followed the lead of Calvin in regarding some sexual activities within marriage as illicit. Behaviour that was only lascivious and for sexual gratification, or using a wife merely as a sex object, was as Daniel Defoe put it, ‘nothing but whoring under the shelter or cover of the law’ [196 p. 28]. The most significant factors limiting sexual activity were the ability of local elites to report offenders to the church courts and the informal power of gossip. Contemporaries certainly believed gossip was an activity largely undertaken by women and as such it could provide them with a form of social power as they were often able to define and destroy reputations [169]. In one case investigated in detail by Steve Hindle, in 1625 Margaret Knowsely, the servant of a Cheshire clergyman, accused him of rape in at least forty conversations, almost all of them with women [181]. In this way, women had an essential role in defining the moral bounds of the community and the standing of its inhabitants. This is evident in the growing recourse to the courts to bring civil actions for slander when individuals felt their reputation was in danger [176, 177, 231]. As these circumstances indicate, gossip could be malicious and must have destroyed the reputations of many innocent people as well as keeping in check the actions of the majority. Because a woman’s sexual reputation was more central to their standing, although women had a certain social prominence and control through gossip, they were also more likely to be its victims. However, the idea that men were isolated from the problems of sexual reputation has been convincingly challenged by Bernard Capp [204]. Many men, particularly those of some significant social status, did have their reputation damaged by accusations and suspicions of misconduct. That more women than men were prosecuted for sexual offences may be because their actions were likely to be made evident through pregnancy, rather than marking a lack of concern with pursuing offending men. It is true that, before the eighteenth century, moralists and commentators universally condemned the double standard and that once a couple were married they shared a joint responsibility for defending their moral reputation. This indicates that the ‘repressive hypothesis’ criticised by Foucault has some validity, although whether the seventeenth century was a turning point at which repression was introduced in England remains open to question. Sexual knowledge has been characterised by Patrica Crawford as the product of competing narratives. On the one hand, there was the medical and theological understanding of sex, largely produced by educated men from the

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social elite. This tended to see men’s sex drive as natural and inevitable. This can be contrasted by a female discourse evident in handbooks for midwives and in the narratives of sex that can be glimpsed in court and other records, which suggest that this image could be subverted, often mocking men’s claims to sexual prowess [206]. An obvious place to look for sexual knowledge is through pornography, but historians have debated whether this existed in the early modern period [205 pp. 174–5]. The term was not coined until the mid-nineteenth century. Erotic writing was a widespread feature of popular literature, including ballads, news sheets, court reports, small books and pamphlets, and featured strongly in elite literature such as poetry, drama and specialised medical books. This supports Barry Reay’s assertion that it is necessary to push back Foucault’s concept of a society having multiple expressions of sex to at least the sixteenth century in England [25 p. 33]. However, erotic texts were printed along with works on politics, religion and more mundane publications, leading Ian Moulton to conclude that they were not considered as pornography in the modern sense [225]. Just as elite society became refined and ruled by patterns of civility, so from the late seventeenth century erotica became separated from other forms of writing to form a distinct genre that had a less respectable, but distinct role [226 p. 19; 233]. One area that claimed a domain over sex was the law, which in both church and civil courts attempted to regulate and monitor such activity, drawing a distinction between acts that were legitimate and those that were criminal [211]. It is clear from court records that sexual knowledge was commonly shared in conversations between individuals. The understanding of this is, however, limited because this was only reported when the conversation tended to overstep a moral line that pushed them into potential fodder for a case of slander [Doc. 14]. Sexual and gynaecological knowledge was passed on at childbirth and christenings. The women at these events were sometimes called collectively ‘gossips’ and including godparents, close family and more distant kin, friends and neighbours, besides the midwife and servants. However, younger unmarried women did not attend births and this was not a place where this knowledge was shared between generations, as much as within them. Men were largely excluded from childbirths, but christenings were attended by both sexes. Samuel Pepys noted that at one such event women gave him information on ten ways of conceiving [207 pp. 66–8]. If most sexual activity occurred, as it should have done according to the public morals of the time, between two individuals who had little experience before their first marriage, this would have been the key method by which knowledge was gained. Since remarriages were so common, more experienced partners would have passed on knowledge or views of sex to less experienced ones. However, although the evidence of illegitimacy rates indicates that there was relatively little sex outside of marriage, this need not be taken

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at face value. Sexual activity comes in a variety of experiences that do not include penetrative sex and which would not have produced illegitimate offspring. One reason that early modern apprentices paid less for sex – in one sample of court cases about 1s 10d as opposed to 5s 8d for non-apprentices – may be that they were not paying for penetrative sex [149 p. 220]. Sex was understood in moral as well as medical and social terms in early modern England. Opportunities for sexual experience were constrained by the social mores of the time, which significantly limited sexual experience. Sexual knowledge was transmitted by a variety of means, from written advice to erotic publications, gossip and sexual experiences. The understandings of sex in these forums were in a constant dialogue that produced a variety of interpretations.

Sexual activity Baptismal registers indicate that most sexual activity took place in the period between late spring and early summer. The season of least activity was the late summer and autumn, which, in the sixteenth century, was followed by a small peak in the period around late December and early January. These circumstances can be partly explained by the pattern of marriages and by the necessities of the agricultural year. They also indicate that conceptions were being avoided when pregnancy might interfere with the demands of work and that, at the beginning of the period, the celebrations associated with festivals, particularly that of Advent, presented opportunities and circumstances in which sexual activity was more probable [106 pp. 291–2]. Because parish registers often record the baptisms of illegitimate children it is possible to see patterns of illegitimacy and to some degree illicit sexual activity. As already seen, many illegitimate pregnancies were the product of serious but failed courtships; however, there were others who stand out in the records as persistent offenders against the morals of community and society. In terms of illegitimacy not all historians are convinced that there was, as Laslett termed it, ‘a bastardy-prone sub-culture’ in early modern England, but there were certainly ‘repeaters’, women who are identifiable for numerous illegitimate births, often to different men [223]. Within a community these women were often connected to each other by family ties and came from the poorer social orders. They serve as an important reminder that some did not accept the public morals of the majority, but the reasons for their actions are difficult to discern. After the Reformation, all illicit sexual activity was included in the concept of ‘whoredom’. Although the word ‘whore’ was synonymous with prostitute, it could be applied to a married woman who cuckolded her husband, or even one who merely invited lustful admiration. The dangers of whoredom were widely condemned and can be seen as a major preoccupation in the literature of the period, most obviously in Shakespeare’s Othello, where

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Iago repeatedly plays on his master’s fears of Desdemona’s descent into the state [228 pp. 69–70]. Such extreme views led to a campaign for female modesty and concealment among Puritans in the seventeenth century. Illicit sexual activity was roundly condemned, but the legal situation was complex. There was more concern with issues of inheritance than morality. This, and the double standard, meant that men, if prosecuted at all, were often charged with the minor offence of fornication, while women might face the major one of adultery. Adultery was made a capital offence in 1650, but because it brought such a heavy penalty, which fell disproportionately on women, whose pregnancies made their guilt obvious, it resulted in few prosecutions and the act was abandoned at the Restoration in 1660 [236]. Prostitution was condemned by the Church, jurists and moralists throughout the period [203 pp. 825–45]. For many writers on the subject, the issue was not one of the exchange of sexual favours for money as much as the activity with many partners and the breaking of the bonds of marriage, designed to contain and constrain sexual activity [201 p. 123]. It is evident in large cities like London, where it tended to be at its most organised. In the late Middle Ages, because brothels were forbidden in the City of London, a system of organised ‘stews’ grew up just outside the city walls, particularly south of the Thames in Southwalk and Bankside. In a subsidy return of 1524, ten men and two women were even recorded as ‘the bawds of the Bank’. They lost their privileged status in 1546 and were closed, mainly because of fears of syphilis [227 p. 418]. The result was that the practice spread throughout the city as a whole [17 pp. 211–15]. Prostitutes worked from brothels, inns and private homes, all of which were termed ‘bawdy houses’ in court records [208 p. 93]. The growth of London, with a population that disproportionately included unmarried young men, meant that there was a large clientele for prostitutes. Outside the capital prostitution was less ubiquitous and less organised, but court records indicate it was also a feature of small town and rural life. Understanding rape in this period is extremely difficult. The issues of definition and under-reporting were even more problematic than they are today. In the late Middle Ages rape or ‘ravishment’ was not a crime against the person, but one of the removal, use or damage to another man’s property. The loss of a daughter’s or a wife’s virginity, or the potential subversion of a proper line of descent, were the major legal issues. The issue of a woman’s consent was, as a result, largely irrelevant to any legal proceedings [178 p. 90]. Miranda Chaytor has suggested that this situation only began to change in the seventeenth century, with legal commentaries like that of Matthew Hale’s (1609–76) History of the Pleas of the Crown, which began to view it as a sexual crime that involved penetration and put the emphasis on the woman’s consent. This raised the issue of the victim’s reputation and in order to bring an accusation, she needed to be ‘of good fame’. She also needed evidence of resistance, through struggle, running, or crying out and injuries needed to be shown to female witnesses [165]. Although this opened up the possibility of

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women bringing accusations of rape to court in their own right, and to some degree can be seen as an advance towards a position where women gained authority over their own bodies, in practice it was extremely difficult to bring any prosecution of rape successfully. This was particularly true where there was a disparity of reputation or status, as there often was between maidservants and their masters. Prosecution was also hindered by the widespread belief that pregnancy only occurred if a women achieved orgasm and therefore if the woman became pregnant she must have enjoyed (and tacitly consented to) sex [178 p. 91]. Women were also limited by a culture that did not allow them to discuss the sexual act publicly, meaning that narratives of rape tended to focus on circumstances and indirect evidence such as the tearing of clothes, rather than the act itself [199] [Doc. 12]. Hale’s formulation notoriously established the common law principle that a woman could not be raped by her husband, as marriage itself was an act of consent: a formulation that was only finally removed from English law in 1994 [166 pp. 49–50]. Despite the attempts to constrain sexual activity to marriage, there were a variety of heterosexual experiences in early modern England. Many of these appear to be constant in human experience, including forms of mutuality, but also prostitution and rape. What differed were the ways in which these experiences were considered in a world where both men and women were subject to religious, philosophical and legal limitations on their behaviour that shaped and constrained their sexuality.

Other sexualities and genders As attitudes have changed in modern society there has been considerable scholarly interest in other forms of sexual activity, most obviously homosexuality. Sexual relations between men were always treated with public hostility and repugnance and references to the fate of the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were common in the early modern era. Nevertheless, there is some evidence of a sub-culture of homosexual relations, particularly in elite and court circles. This was reflected in poetry by figures including Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, who used highly erotic language to describe relationships between men. Despite his repeated condemnation of sodomy, James I was probably the lover of his favourites, including James Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham [232 pp. 49–53]. Few prosecutions for sodomy were brought and most of those tended to be what would now be classed as child abuse. There were occasional causes célèbres that dealt with accusations of homosexual acts. Among the most notable was the trial of the Earl of Castlehaven in 1631, who was executed under the Buggery Act of 1533 for one count of rape and two of sodomy in a heavily politicised case. Such accusations need to be treated with extreme caution, as moral depravity, like heresy, was a useful charge to put on political enemies and unlikely to be confirmed by those involved [216].

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By the eighteenth century, at least in London, a wider movement emerged, based on ‘Molly houses’, which were named for the effeminate men, known as ‘Mollies’, who frequented them. They often took female names and identities and engaged in sexual acts with other men for money [238, 239]. Whether this formed a distinct sub-culture or was simply part of a wider alehouse culture has been questioned [232 pp. 370–71]. This fits neatly with Foucault’s argument that homosexuality did not emerge as a category until the eighteenth century, but should be treated with caution because these were sexual underworlds which are, by definition, difficult to investigate and understand. For female same-sex relations the evidence is even more problematic and it was once assumed that there was little evidence of the existence of lesbianism in early modern England. The groundbreaking work of Valerie Traub has demonstrated that early modern culture was filled with references to female centred eroticism, including in plays, popular songs and images of idealised nudes, representing such figures as Justice and Prudence [237]. However, evidence of lesbian activity is almost totally absent from the legal records, with few prosecutions or direct reports. Cross-dressing has received the most attention when it appears in cultural works such as Shakespeare’s plays. In Twelfth Night, Viola’s adoption of a male identity and the love triangle created with Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia was given additional levels of complication and comedy because female parts on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage were played by boys. This has led some commentators to conclude that there was a ‘transvestite controversy’ from the 1570s to the 1620s, reflecting concerns about a ‘manly queen’ in Elizabeth I and a ‘womanly king’ in James I [241 p. 139]. However, the phenomenon of men dressing as women was relatively rare outside of the English stage [167]. It occurred in the inversions of May Day and other popular revels. Cases of men dressing as women in enclosure riots or other public disorders were an extension of this form of public theatre [168 pp. 110, 183]. Women were occasionally prosecuted for dressing as men. A rare, and possibly genuine case of cross dressing is the woman from Littlebury in Essex, who in 1585 was reported to ‘wear men’s apparel disorderly in her master’s house’ [5 p. 18]. Most cases were in the context of guising and mumming in the carnival tradition of inversion and so were as much about general disorder and godlessness as about gender boundaries. There is a relatively large number of stories, both factual and fanciful, of women masquerading as men, such as Moll Cutpurse, whose real name was Mary Frith. She acted as a thief and even carried out highway robbery in seventeenth-century London, and was the subject of several popular ballads [170] [Figure 8.1]. Although this might stem from a desire to adopt a gendered male identity, it is hard to separate this from the fact that, in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, this was the only way some women could participate in male

Figure 8.1 Moll Cutpurse, a cross-dressing criminal Source: Facsimile of an image of Mary Frith from the title page of The Roaring Girl. Mary Frith or Moll Cutpurse c. 1584–1659. © Hilary Morgan/Alamy. Stock Photo.

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occupations, particularly in military service, where there are many stories and a handful of reliable cases of women taking on traditionally male roles. The study of sexuality in pre-industrial England raises a large number of areas where different conceptions of the body and sexuality were negotiated or came into conflict. Attitudes to sex were not only different from now, but expressed in different ways. The understanding of sex was transferred through a contrasting set of mechanisms and knowledge much more limited, both in accuracy and scope, than is the case today. While the mechanics of sex remain a constant, sexual experiences were mediated in different ways that formulated those experiences. Much of the language that now surrounds sex was not present in this period and this had a major impact on how sex was experienced. Alternative sexualities were also seen in contrasting ways, and although viewed as acts of immorality, they were not perceived as signalling sexual difference in the way that they now do. The net result of these diverse ways of seeing sex and sexual identity meant that perceptions and experiences of sex were very different.

9

Marriage

The central relationship in early modern family life was that of men and women as husbands and wives. It was the foundation on which the structures of families were built. Its nature, and change in that nature, would therefore have an effect on the entire shape of family relationships. The Reformation saw profound changes in the rites of marriage, where traditions vied with new ideas and expectations. The nature of marriage also underwent demographic and intellectual changes that had profound effects on the lives of individuals. Finally, the way in which marriage was dissolved was different from today, with limited legal means and much greater importance for the impact of mortality.

The marriage model The importance of conjugal relationships in this period was different from what is often assumed today. They were not the norm of social relationships, but the exception. A significant proportion of the population never married. On average this was around 10 per cent, but in some periods the proportion reached as high as one-third [106 p. 260]. Because marriage was relatively late, and mortality high, the average duration of marriage was also much shorter than now, at about twenty years. As a result, roughly only one-third of the population as a whole would have been married at any given time: today it is more than half. Amy Froide has argued that the large numbers of never-marrying women means that caution should be adopted in seeing marriage as the norm in social, economic, and cultural terms. Male authorities tended to see this group as a social problem, because they did not fit neatly into the patriarchal system. Medieval literature largely ignored them, privileging young maidens and virgins. The prevailing view after the Reformation was that it was better for a woman to marry than commit sexual sins. They were often identified administratively as ‘single women’ or ‘spinsters’, the second of which was a major female occupation. By the mid-seventeenth century, it was evident that increasing numbers of adult women were not marrying and while some writers expressed sympathy, earlier terminology began to be replaced by

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references to ‘old maids’. Before the middle of the eighteenth century urban development disproportionately attracted women and this led to increasing numbers of them never marrying [104 pp. 340–54]. Negative language was increasingly used to characterise them as a sexual threat, one pamphlet describing them as ‘nasty, rank, rammy, filthy sluts’ or ‘she-Cannibals’ [174 p. 175]. It would be a mistake to assume that women embraced single status as a means of maintaining their independence. The economic opportunities of many women were limited. They often could not trade independently for most of the period, with the last prosecution for such activity as late as 1702 [174]. Single status for men was also an area of contestation, but as yet has not been as thoroughly investigated. Unmarried men were given the label ‘bachelor’, probably as an honorific from the name of the lowest rank of nobility, the bachelor knight. The drawbacks of the single life for men was satirised in ballads like ‘Slippery Will, or the Old Bachelor’s Complaint’, which contained the lines: ‘I must confesse that I did amisse, in loving of so many, O but now what a plague is this: am not beloved of any’. As patriarchy was tied to concepts of dominance of a household, as Amanda Vickery and Karen Harvey have indicated for the eighteenth century, the phenomenon of single men who formed households raises the question of whether domesticity was simply a female attribute [197, 180]. These individuals were still able to engage with the dialogues of maleness and exercise the power of their position through servants and employees [193 pp. 1–20]. A glance at any English house listing [Doc. 4] confi rms the importance of marriage as the basis of family life. In records of the 100 communities examined by Peter Laslett for the period 1574–1821, some 70 per cent of households were headed by married couples. Single individuals who were widows or widowers of deceased partners were just over 18 per cent, single men only 2.1 per cent and single women only 1.1 per cent [82]. However, these records did tend to favour stable married units and sometimes disregard or conflate the residential habits of the poor. Understanding the life cycle is also important, because, although they might be a relatively small proportion of households, many individuals experienced long periods of being single in their lives. The Church placed a responsibility to marry on both sexes, but particularly on women, for whom the roles of wife and mother were seen as vocations [201 p. 28]. The assumption that women should marry was so common that it was rarely stated. The anonymous author of The Laws Resolution of Women’s Rights (1632) noted of women that ‘all are understood either married or to be married’ [8 p. 72]. The preacher William Perkins, although keen to indicate that marriage was not a sacrament, argued ‘and yet it is a state in itself, far more excellent than the condition of single life’ [2 p. 151]. Not everyone thought of marriage as a desirable state; in ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’, Francis Bacon noted that ‘He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marry – “A young

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man not yet, an elder man not at all” ’ [12 p. 386]. However, the balances of advice and pleasure overwhelmingly favoured marriage. Marriage was a state towards which most aspired and remarriage, after the death of a partner, was common. Even if marriage was not the statistical norm, it was the social and psychological norm by which the people of early modern England constructed their society.

The marriage rite Weddings formed part of the annual social round as well as marking a significant point in the life course. Peak periods in the occurrence of such rites were determined by the ritual and economic year. Many occurred in January and February, after the season of Advent had finished, but before the onset of Lent, when the medieval Church had traditionally discouraged marriage and sexual activity. This was also the period before the intense effort of ploughing began. After Easter another peak occurred in April and June, the time when most contracts of service came to an end, leaving former servants free to wed, and a final one occurred after the harvest had been brought in, from October to November. From the medieval period, marriages should have taken place only in the parish of one of the partners, most commonly that of the bride. This should have been after the banns, a public proclamation of the intention to marry, were read on three consecutive Sundays. This was designed to give the people who knew the partners best the opportunity to object to an irregular marriage, vital in an age without bureaucratic central records. The conditions could, nevertheless, be avoided by obtaining a licence from the local bishop. In addition, there were relatively large numbers of clandestine marriages, kept secret for a variety of reasons, and which were irregular, but remained legally valid. These reached a peak in the late seventeenth century and were not declared invalid until 1753, when the first systematic reform of marriage law was enforced in what is known as Lord Hardwicke’s Act [255]. The act of marriage was more than merely a simple religious ceremony; it was also a collection of complex symbolic traditions. Some of these were ancient and may have lost their meaning for the participants, but they still embellished the rite in this period, and were meant to indicate something about the nature of the married state that emerged from it. As a result, weddings, like many rites used by the Church of England, became potential flashpoints for religious differences. Much is known about conduct at such occasions because these controversies produced writings both for and against popular practice, and because of court cases concerned with misconduct at such events. Wedding traditions varied, not only between different religious movements, but between social groups and regions of the country. A wedding was an important rite of passage, which marked the end of a process formally begun with betrothal. It was the final point in the transition from

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individual to couple. It had a large number of participants, including members of the two groups of kin that would be legally joined by the union, and their friends. However, there were also considerable numbers of neighbours present and alms were often given to the local poor to encourage them to attend. This was meant to be not just a family event, but a communal occurrence [250]. The day’s ritual events often began with leave-taking by the bride and groom of their same-sex peer groups, which was marked by the giving of tokens, such as pairs of gloves, or ribbons. The separation of the bride from her parental home was, in some parts of the country, clearly marked through ritual. Brides were usually ceremonially dressed, but in their best clothes and not in white. Occasionally they wore symbols of future domesticity such as knives. The significance of leaving home was often ritually emphasised. The bride might wait with family and friends for ‘seekers’ or ‘guiders’ to come from the groom to demand her. This was often met with ritual resistance, such as the shutting of doors or by hiding. When this occurred, it culminated in the groom’s friends entering the parental home and hunting for her. However, it was normally the groom, the ‘groomsman’ (now the best man) with the rest of his male friends who ended this process by arriving in person to fetch her. One tradition was that, on leaving, the bride was not supposed to look back at her former home, symbolising her separation from the family of orientation [111 pp. 339–40]. All parties then processed to the church for the ceremony, sometimes over a considerable distance. This was not always straightforward as the path of the bride and groom was often barred by neighbours. They could be locked in a house, prevented from entering or leaving the church or churchyard until a toll was paid, in traditions known variously as the ‘chaining’, ‘footing’, ‘cock-walking’, ‘pitchering’, ‘petting’, or ‘pennying’ [244 p. 85 ]. This was a ritual diffusion of disagreements about the wedding taking place, but it was also a useful source of cash for some of the participants. Within the entire ritual process, the ceremony at the church was relatively unimportant. Before Lord Hardwicke’s Act, it was not clear that it was essential for a marriage to be valid. Vows of chastity had already been exchanged at betrothal and were merely being confirmed here. The blessing of the ring and the confirmation of the bride’s dowry (symbolised by placing coins on the priest’s book) were seen as the more important elements and were a reminder of the economic considerations behind the marriage ceremony. At the end of the rite it was often the parson and not the groom who was expected to kiss the bride. There might then be the sharing of cake or cheese and biscuits within the church to symbolise the unity created by the marriage. Finally, garters might be seized as tokens from both bride and groom by young men. Outside the church, the couple was often greeted by ‘rough music’ on pots and pans, as well as peeling bells. Then a celebratory meal, the bride-ale, was normally provided. This was sometimes paid for by the bride’s father,

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but more often by the couple. If they were poor there might be a ‘pennywedding’, where all the guests contributed a small sum to the festivities. The meal was often at the bride’s former home, but lower down the social scale the local ale-house was a popular venue. A cake, or small cakes, made of flour, salt and water would be eaten and wine would be symbolically shared, sometimes in the same ‘knitting-’ or ‘bride-cup’. Finally, the party moved on to the couple’s new home where they might witness the newlyweds enter their bed or even help them undress and where they would, finally, be left alone to begin their new life [250 pp. 74–5]. Most of these practices were disliked and discouraged by Puritans, and died out from the seventeenth century. This process of de-ritualisation was completed first, and most thoroughly, in the south of England, where Puritanism was most successful. During the Interregnum, between 1649 and 1660, when, albeit briefly, Puritanism became the state creed, church marriage was abolished altogether and weddings were carried out before justices of the peace, but this process was reversed with the Restoration of the monarchy. The removal of the many ‘superfluous’ practices associated with the rite undermined something of its communal nature, making it much more a matter for family and friends.

Married life The theory of patriarchal authority underlay all family relationships in this period. In 1590, William Perkins defi ned a husband as ‘he that hath authority over the wife’. In 1622, William Gouge drew a common analogy, describes him as ‘king in his owne house’ [28 pp. 90–1]. The legal doctrine of coverture, which subsumed a wife’s legal identity into that of her husband, meant that a married woman could not normally hold property or represent themselves in law [366 p. 364]. A husband was free to administer limited corporal punishment and tyrannical husbands, like kings, had merely to be endured. The virtues of womanhood were submissiveness and silence; the vices were disobedience and a ‘prattling’ tongue [Docs 15 and 16]. Commentators, who were for the most part male, generally accepted that women were physically, mentally and emotionally inferior to men. They were, as 1 Peter 3:7 put it, the ‘weaker vessel’ that husbands had to discipline, direct and protect. This image rarely matched up to reality. That so many women were punished for the crime of scolding indicates concerns about female disobedience, but also the failure to prevent it [Doc. 13]. Sometimes women took on part of their husband’s responsibilities, particularly among the nobility and gentry. In the late sixteenth century Lady Margaret Hoby, of Hackness in the East Riding of Yorkshire, frequently had to take on the duties of running the household and estate while her husband was away in Parliament or pursuing Catholics [13]. Lower down the social scale, women could enjoy a distinct social life. Married women presided at events such as birth, or

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rituals such as churching (see page 85) [274]. As outlined above, they also made a major contribution to community life through work and gossip. The picture of the monarchical husband contrasts with a stress on partnership, co-operation and friendship in the same conduct books. Records indicate that most men consulted their wives on important matters, such as large purchases, or the care of children and plans for their marriages. There was a stress in these same conduct books on romantic love. William Gouge likened love to a glue that bound the couple together, while William Whately thought that ‘the wife is to have the highest room in the husband’s heart, and he in hers’ [11 pp. 261–2]. The expectation was that love would flourish and grow after marriage, which can be contrasted with the modern view that marriage is the potential outcome of love. What is more difficult to discern is how much all this was carried out in practice. Model letter books devoted a considerable amount of space to the subject of love and Alan Macfarlane’s study of letters indicates that it was a widespread concept [252]. Men’s diaries indicate that husbands were often affected by the deaths of spouses and women’s diaries indicate deep affection for, and even intense relationships with, their husbands. Lower down in society the best evidence comes from studies of matrimonial court cases, which, like studies undertaken by Martin Ingram and Ralph Houlbrooke, indicate that these ideas were commonplace and that romantic love (developing within marriage) was a universal ideal [219, 266] [Figure 2.1]. Just as now, disharmony and breakdown in marriage could occur and the relationship could become, as William Whately put it, ‘a little hell’. The notebooks of Richard Napier, who acted as the equivalent of a psychologist in early seventeenth-century London, reveal that poor marital relationships could be a source of anxiety to women. Diaries, which were most often written by men, also show worries about the breakdown of married relationships. Adultery and cruelty were common complaints in court cases, but disputes over household management, the failure of husbands to provide for their wives or children, and wives spending and removing goods from the family home were also causes of marital tension [242]. Lawrence Stone estimated that between 1570 and 1659 one in ten of the marriages of peers broke down into disunity [265]. Writers of conduct books were universal in their condemnation of wife beating. Thomas Becon criticised husbands whose treatment of their wives was ‘to beat them, buffet them and put them out of doors, handling them rather like dish clouts than like honest wives’. Wife beating was a common trope, as in the proverb that indicated that three things were better if beaten: ‘a spaniel, a woman and a walnut tree’. Beatings were sometimes dealt with through the church courts, but they only appeared in the civil courts when the results were severe [165 pp. 40–1]. Evidence from Portsmouth from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century indicates a relatively large number of cases of wife beating. Although attacks on strangers and acquaintances were more common, those on wives tended to be more severe,

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often resulting in greater injury. Women generally took action only after several attacks [268]. This indicates the extent of spousal abuse, but also the willingness to punish and pursue severe cases, indicating some public disapproval of extreme physical violence towards spouses. Husband beating was much rarer, but there are a handful of recorded cases; and instances of informal sanctions, beside evidence that it was a common trope in the popular literature of the period, suggest that it did occur [81 p. 64]. It was difficult to dissolve marriages through law. Before the Reformation the Papacy had the power to annul marriages, in effect to say that they had never been valid, but had a theology that marriage was indissoluble once correctly conducted and consummated. This was carried over into the Church of England, and Henry VIII’s three ‘divorces’ (to Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves) were in fact annulments. Commentators argued for divorce as a principle, including Thomas Becon and John Hooper. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was against it for much of his career, but in 1547 he accepted that it should be granted for adultery, as a result of the case of William Parr, the Marquis of Northampton, who was granted a divorce by a special act of Parliament [258 pp. 20–7]. This was designed not to set a precedent, but the case of John Manners, Lord Roos, who introduced a bill into the House of Lords in 1670 that would divorce him from his wife on the grounds of her adultery, did just that. There were some 325 such divorces from this point by private act of Parliament, before a civil law of divorce was passed in 1857, but this was a route only available to a small, rich, influential and male elite [258 pp. 37, 51, 65]. The church courts could, in dire circumstances, offer separation ‘from bed and board’ on grounds of adultery or cruelty [219 pp. 146–7]. When these arrangements became longer term, alimony (usually of one-third of an estate) was awarded to a wife to help her to survive. However, most separations were permitted in the hope of a later reconciliation and neither party was able to remarry legally. Tim Stretton has identified a number of cases where common law courts intervened in marriage breakdowns and there was some ignorant or wilful ignoring of the fact that partners given a separation could not remarry [264 pp. 18–39]. Even so, these options only existed in a tiny majority of cases and many must have lived, as the diarist Henry Newcome noted of one couple, in ‘secret unkindness’ [15 p. 85]. At the bottom of the social scale, those men who had little stake in land or their local reputation did at least have the option of deserting their partners. The records of poor relief are filled with cases of abandoned wives and children. Some of these men simply travelled for economic reasons and gradually decided not to return, or died while away. Others left to avoid an unwelcome marriage or other commitments. It was fear of these circumstances and their moral and economic consequences that lay behind the passing of an act against bigamy in 1603. In the eighteenth century there were occasional ‘wife sales’, which provided an informal, but ritualised method of ending a marriage, probably with the consent of both partners [253].

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An extreme form of marriage dissolution was murder. Domestic homicides were a much smaller proportion of recorded homicides than they are today. In the records from the Essex Assizes in the period 1560–1709 they amount to only 14 per cent of such cases (excluding servants), whereas today murder is overwhelmingly a domestic crime. Over 40 per cent of recorded charges were against women. Of these, most were for the killing of children, but roughly a third were marital homicides, with wives outnumbering husbands as the accused by a factor of two to one [262]. That men who killed their spouses usually employed physical violence, often aided by a sword, knife, cudgel or agricultural tool, indicates that these were crimes of anger. Women were much more likely to use poison, dictated by the physical disparities between men and women and the latter’s control over the preparation of food. Since poisoning a husband was both an affront to the perceived natural order and indicated a measure of premeditation, women were much more likely to be found guilty of such crimes once accused [197 pp. 145–6]. All these forms of marriage dissolution remained extremely rare. For most men and almost all women, it was the high mortality rate that ended partnerships. For some this must have been a blessed release, but the evidence indicates that for most it was an occasion for grief. Even when affection was lacking, most partners appear to have achieved a form of equilibrium that allowed them to conduct their everyday lives without a breakdown into acrimony or violence. Late marriage and high mortality meant that the relationship was a more temporary arrangement. It is likely that the majority of people accepted the model of care and obedience that characterised public thinking on marriage and that this helped to make it a success in most cases. In early modern England, marriage marked the creation of a new family much more clearly than it does today. Weddings were, for that reason, more public and communal events. It is also evident that the activities of married couples were often impinged upon by the attitudes and beliefs of those outside the household. Therefore, the roles of married couples were often defined by common opinion in the local community. In part, this was because marriage was also the means by which sexual activity was regulated. Additionally, it is clear that married relationships were structured within the framework of romantic love that was accepted by almost every social group. Occasionally, the relationship broke down, but largely it provided companionship and emotional and financial security for both partners.

10 Parents and children

Until the 1980s the central debate over childhood in the early modern period was between those who believed that parental relationships were cold and those who argued they were similar to modern emotional ties. It is now impossible to support the former argument, but it remains necessary to advance the debate over childhood in order to understand the nature of past relationships between adults and children in detail and in their own terms. This chapter focuses on the process of having children and their development up until the age of about seven, when relationships between parents and children began to change as children took on new responsibilities of formal education or work. It will then examine the ways in which the experience of childhood was formed through play and material culture.

Having children The obvious answer to the question of why people in early modern England had children is that, lacking contraception, they had little or no choice. This is not entirely true, as there were some options available, including abstention, coitus interruptus, and breast-feeding. Of these breast-feeding, or lactation, was the most significant, as it inhibits conception (although not with absolute certainty) and was often practised for some time after birth. There is also evidence of a limited knowledge of physiology that may have helped. However, this was largely based on the inaccurate ideas of Aristotle, and merged into herbal medicine and folklore, which made it highly unreliable [272, Doc. 18]. Barrier methods of contraception, using fish or animal skins, were available from at least the mid-seventeenth century and possibly to a much wider social range than was once assumed. However, their primary function may have been to limit the risk associated with sexually transmitted diseases, rather than the prevention of conception [275]. Despite these methods, once married, couples rarely enjoyed a long period of income without expenditure on children; perhaps four-fifths of couples who would have children did so within two years [212 p. 60]. The reasons why individuals in the past exercised choice over having children are in many ways similar to those that apply today. There was an accepted duty to

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populate the world and carry on the family line, particularly in the higher social ranks. These desires had echoes throughout society and were part of the roles and expectations placed on married couples. Although infertility was not grounds for legal separation, childlessness was regarded as a sad plight for both men and women [271]. Motherhood, in particular, was seen as a defining characteristic of women and gave them a unique value in society [201 p. 78]. From the medieval period, children were seen as a gift from God. At the lower end of the social scale, although initially expensive, offspring were a potential economic prop and, for all social groups, they could provide care in old age or infirmity. Relationships between parents and children can, as Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos has argued, be seen as reciprocal. In the early stages the parents predominantly invested time and resources in the child, but as the relationship developed throughout the life course, it became more even and, given time, could develop into one where the child repaid the earlier investment in material and emotional terms [284]. Finally, it is possible that one major reason to have children was the obvious one, that many married couples liked them. At least among the higher social orders, married pregnant women, then as now, appear to have derived some temporary status, and attention, from their physical state and were often the subject of considerable pride from their husbands. This was less marked lower down the social scale, where women would often have to continue to undertake physical work late into the pregnancy. Attitudes to pregnancy outside marriage were different, and part of the mechanism that was so successful in keeping most sexual activity within matrimony was the extreme moral social stigma associated with illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were singled out as fornicators and their children were marked as bastards. In these circumstances, many women tried to hide their pregnancies for as long as possible. Some attempted difficult and dangerous processes of abortion, while others committed infanticide [294]. In the common law courts, prosecutions and convictions for infanticide increased significantly after 1624, when a new statute was passed. Some of these cases may have been what are now defined as ‘cot death’ or ‘sudden infant death syndrome’, but this is most common between the ages of two and four months, and large numbers were newborn children. The 1624 act made concealment of a stillborn child a capital offence, and this partly explains the rise in prosecutions [25 pp. 61–2]. However, the overall infanticide rate was not high enough to indicate the widespread abuse of children that was once suggested. It is also true that an increase in prosecutions for this action can also be taken to indicate intolerance of the crime, which suggests the development of a more caring society. As with infant mortality in general, there was no significant distinction between boys and girls as victims of this crime. Male children would have been more welcome than females, and if this was a society where infants were routinely abused and murdered, girls should have been more likely to die than boys. In her survey of early

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modern diarists, Linda Pollock could not find any indication that children were unwanted. Many authors were simply silent on the matter, while some expressed genuine pleasure, commonly seeing children as a blessing from God. The only serious reservations were where the numbers of children were such that economic resources might be stretched until they were too thin [310 pp. 204–5]. In the early modern period, childbirth was not much more dangerous to the mother than it is now. Between 16 and 25 women in 1,000 died in childbirth. Now the figure is lower, but not dramatically so, at around 12 in 1,000 [278]. Most people in the period did not appreciate this and pregnancy, but particularly childbirth, were seen as times of great danger. Without any anaesthetic and with the risk of a difficult birth, it would have been painful for the mother and harrowing for potential fathers. These concerns were reflected in the relief and thanksgiving that tended to follow a successful delivery, which can be seen in both the nature of public ceremonies and expressions in private records. Women were, in an age without any real understanding of the mind and without medicines to treat imbalances in body chemistry, far more subject to the effects of post-natal depression than is the case today. These circumstances are hidden in the deaths of mothers soon after childbirth, which are sometimes recorded in parish registers. These were occasionally listed as suicides, as in the case of Agnes Littlewood from Almondbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire, who in 1575 took herself from her childbed and threw herself down a well, as the vicar recorded, ‘by the instigation of the devil’ [20 p. 94]. Birth was much more dangerous for the child, with perhaps one in three of all pregnancies ending in a miscarriage or a still birth [277]. These circumstances were improved by the presence of midwives, who supervised the largely female event of childbirth [Figure 10.1]. Most midwives were, however, untrained and often of marginal status in the community. The seventeenth century saw the arrival of the man-wives (male midwives), who often criticised the ignorance of poor peasant women, but who themselves may have been as much of a danger as benefit to many women in labour. The most famous man-wives were members of the Chamberlen family of London, responsible for introducing the use of forceps into birth. However, such services were mainly available to the wealthy and those in the capital [281]. It was believed that the poor gave birth much more easily than the rich, suggesting that little interference was necessary. They were expected to recover much more quickly than the wives of the nobility and gentry. As a result most mothers could not undertake the ritual and social isolation proscribed for the first month after birth. This should have ended with the ceremony of churching, which marked the return of a woman to church and community. This has been seen variously as a thanksgiving for deliverance from the pain and risks of childbirth and a popular rite of purification from its pollution. It survived the Reformation, but was objected to strongly by Puritans. It was still being carried out in the 1950s in some parts of the

Figure 10.1 Birth, baptism and a meal for the gossips Source: Sharp, Handbook for Midwives, frontispiece. © Wellcome Library, London.

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country. Recent thinking has tended to downplay the ritual elements and emphasise the social occasion where women enjoyed a certain prominence, basking in their uniqueness as mothers [273, 274].

Infants In the medieval period the assumption was that only the souls of the baptised could be saved, and most commentators suggested that at death unbaptised children went to a state of limbo, but there is some evidence that many feared they would be consigned to hell. As a result, babies were baptised rapidly, usually within three days. If there were a danger that the child might die, the ceremony would often be undertaken immediately by the midwife. Therefore, in this period, the seasonality of baptisms naturally closely followed those of conceptions and of births. They tended to peak in the period between February and April, falling towards July and hitting a lesser peak in the autumn, and became part of the social round of the year [106 p. 228]. In the Middle Ages, this was frequently a private ceremony, often in an otherwise empty church, and lacking the parents (who were not allowed to attend). These practices were discouraged after the Reformation. Baptism ceased to be considered necessary for salvation by the Church of England and reformers wanted it to become a public event. In this, they were largely successful, tending to make it part of the Sunday service. As a result, the interval between birth and baptism gradually widened. By 1655–56 threequarters of children in one London parish were not baptised until after two weeks [270 pp. 462–3]. There is evidence that this was part of a process of change in ideas about the nature of newborn children. The concept of original sin had meant that infants were seen as born into corruption and even demonic possession and became pure only after baptism. However, by the late sixteenth century it was increasingly common for children to be seen as born pure, but corrupted by the world [328 pp. 266–87 ]. In the same period, the role of godparents was declining. In medieval Catholicism, they had theoretical responsibilities to care for children if their parents failed to do so. These were downplayed in the Reformation and Puritans wanted to abolish the institution altogether, because it lacked a scriptural basis and distracted from the role of natural parents in educating their children. However, there is evidence that it remained vital into the mid-seventeenth century, when it was temporarily abolished during the Interregnum. When it was restored with the monarchy in 1660, it was on a more limited basis. Records of godparents in baptismal registers are rare from this point and gifts to godchildren less frequent in wills, but bequests from godmothers remained largely the same, indicating a decline of godfatherhood [132]. Godparents also began to lose one of their major functions in the ceremony of baptism, where they, rather than the parents, had given children their first names, usually their own [279]. The institution was

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further undermined by the rise of religious sects, most obviously the Baptists, who practised adult, rather than infant, baptism. Even in the late medieval period, it is clear that the primary responsibility for the care and upbringing of children lay with the natural parents. That is not to say that they always undertook this process in ways that would now be recognised. One area that has received considerable criticism is the practice of swaddling. This involved either the tying of a cloth, or the wrapping of swaddling bands in mummy fashion, around a child, rendering it unable to move. However, swaddling was only employed for the first two or three months when the movement of babies is limited and therefore was not simply an uncaring mechanism of child control. It may have been unhygienic, but this was not a concept parents in this period understood. Instead, many felt they were benefiting their child by helping its bones to grow straight and by preventing them from scratching themselves [40 p. 132]. Linda Pollock suggests that the crying of infants was not simply disregarded and modern studies indicate that it is, as every parent will be aware, hard to ignore [310 p. 224]. However, if a crying child is left for long enough it will suppress the natural crying reflex. The degree to which this was done varied then, as now, from family to family. One reason why diaries do not appear to contain many references to the crying of infants may be that it had a limited effect on diarists, who were predominately male and wealthy. They were therefore insulated from it, either literally, by distance and thick walls, or because of the likely division of labour in the household, where these responsibilities fell to mothers and servants. Lower down the social scale, and on the female side of the gender divide, it would have been impossible to ignore the cries that punctuate the normal development of children. For the eighteenth century, Joanne Bailey has outlined how parental emotion was structured by the cultural conventions and the language of sensibility, romanticism and domesticity. Parents were expected to feel unique emotions towards their children which were expressed in diaries, letters and in material culture such as simple gifts [62]. This language of feeling and tender parenthood was used across the social scale, with paupers using it in their calls for financial aid [283]. Despite discouragement from the Church, and most commentators, the use of wet nurses to care for and breast-feed infants remained a common practice among the gentry and urban elites until the eighteenth century. This was, and continues to be, seen as limiting the parent/child bonding process in these formative stages and has been taken by some historians to suggest that there was a general indifference to children before the eighteenth century. It considerably reduced the likelihood of the child’s survival, as mortality rates among nursed children were much higher than among the general population. Nevertheless, it is clear from diaries and letters that many of the literate classes took immense pains in selecting nurses and it was a matter of considerable anxiety. Here it is appropriate to cite the acute observation of Ralph Houlbrooke, that ‘the biggest contrast in the quality of

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care and consequent effects on the infant’s prospects lay not between maternal and wet-nursing but between good and bad wet-nursing’ [40 p. 133]. It only applied to a small minority of all families: most women from the lower social orders, in rural areas and less established towns (where no systems of nursing had yet developed), had no choice but to suckle their own children. The evidence of diaries indicates that this was often a painful, difficult, but also emotionally satisfying, process. The age at which children were weaned varied considerably, even within the same family. Six of the children of John Dee, the sixteenth-century astrologer and diarist, were breast-fed until between seven-and-a-half and sixteen-and-a-half months old [310 p. 220]. The mean age appears to have been between these extremes, at just over one year old. However, this fell in the eighteenth century to less than ten months. This was partly due to the greater availability of food substitutes and feeding vessels, but also a product of the abandonment of the practice of wet-nursing. Women suckling their own children were likely to terminate it earlier than those earning their living from the practice [289 pp. 223–40]. The evidence of diaries indicates that this period was a difficult one for children and adults alike. Similarly, teething, which occurs at vastly different ages and with various levels of disruption, was also a time of particular anxiety and distress. In contrast, the transition to independent walking and the uttering of a child’s first words provided almost universally welcome milestones in child development. Then, as now, the ages at which these events occurred varied greatly, at anything between nine and sixteen months in eighteenth-century diaries, for the first independent steps, and sixteen months to two years for the first words. Both these figures suggest that child development was not notably deficient compared with today. Children were encouraged to walk by holding hands and by reins attached to clothes. They were encouraged to speak and, at least by the end of the period the repetition to them of words like ‘da-da’ and ‘pa-pa’ are clearly evident in diaries [310 pp. 225–30]. Attitudes to young children were complex and shaped by high mortality and changing religious attitudes. Generally, they were seen as a welcome gift from God. The role of godparents and other interested parties changed significantly during the period. The use of childcare methods such as swaddling and wet-nursing may also show less about attitudes than the different ways in which childhood was understood and the impact of economic necessity.

The experience of childhood The images of children that survive in increasing numbers from the midsixteenth century are most surprising to modern eyes in their depiction of both young boys and girls in dress-like robes. This suggests that young children were not treated as if they had a gender. There was undoubtedly an element of practicality involved as toilet training was much easier without the need to undo complex and difficult fastenings that were used on breeches.

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However, clothes, at least for the rich, were often gendered by colour, with girls often wearing white or pale colours, and boys darker ones, particularly red [314 p. 185]. A phenomenon that became increasingly important in lives of the young children of aristocrats and the middling sorts was the nursery. One of the first was added on the ground floor of the new building of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, begun in the 1590s [57]. As the scale of estate houses and town houses grew for these groups it became possible to have a distinct room, or series of rooms, set aside for the occupation of children. These early nurseries were relatively sparsely furnished [291 p. xvii]. The nursery was a largely female world, supervised by the mother and staffed by servants, one of whom would usually be a nurse, who evolved from the wet-nurse to become the person chiefly responsible for the day-to-day care of a wealthy couple’s children [293 pp. 57–70]. The nurse played a critical role in the literary culture of childhood. The many nursery rhymes that can be traced to this period are testament to an oral culture that began to be captured in print in the eighteenth century. Of the ‘traditional’ rhymes collected by Iona and Peter Opie, over 80 per cent originated from before the end of the eighteenth century: almost a quarter from the sixteenth century or before [14 p. 7]. Tommy Thumb’s Little Pocket Book (1744) is the first known printed nursery rhyme collection, containing early versions of well-known verses including ‘Bah, Bah, a Black Sheep’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. The nursery was also a place for stories as children grew a little older. Samuel Richardson ends his novel Pamela (1740) with his heroine in the nursery telling two stories to her children that are ‘a little specimen of my nursery tales and stories’, suggesting that the telling of such tales was commonplace [321 p. 42]. There was considerable concern about the female dominated nature of this world among commentators and fathers. Anthony Fletcher has described this as becoming hysterical in the eighteenth century, with fears that boys might be permanently damaged by female influence evident in advice and novels of the period [291 p. 149]. Once they were able to walk, young boys in poorer families spent roughly the same amount of time with both parents, while girls appear to have been disproportionately in the company of their mothers [39 p. 184]. In the late Middle Ages boys helped with activities such as shooing away ducks from a pond, which is found in an illustration from the Luttrell Psalter, and collecting apples or water, as late medieval coroners’ rolls indicate when reporting fatal accidents [142 pp. 42–3]. Keith Thomas argued that children occupied a sub-culture of their own, which had its own values, rules and activities [320 pp. 57–63]. Because of the separate nature of this world, little is known of the activities they undertook. Ariès pioneered the investigation of this aspect of childhood, but his sources meant it was largely confined to the French court. References to play in diaries tend to express dislike of the activity because it distracted from

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education [310 p. 237]. Little is known about everyday informal play, except on those odd occasions where it resulted in a tragedy, such as children who fell into water while staring at their reflections [39 pp. 185–6]. References in written sources, images and surviving items, demonstrate that children occupied a material world that would have been familiar to children until the second half of the twentieth century, when new materials, particularly plastics, transformed the shape and scale of children’s toys and games. In the late Middle Ages, small children often had walking frames and pull-along toys on wheels, made of wood [305, 295]. Toys for older children were gendered. Boys had wooden models of boats and tin or clay models of knights and later soldiers [305]. Girls had dolls, with those of the aristocracy appearing to be carefully made and clothed. Increasingly common illustrations of children indicate that they played games that included versions of skittles and golf and that they used stilts and swings hung from trees. By the eighteenth century, at least for the children of the rich, there were the first mass produced (although still largely handmade) toys, such as rocking horses, model cannon and simple board games, sold in the first designated toy shops. In the houses of the rich, elaborate dolls’ houses began to be available in this period [291 pp. xvi–xvii]. Because it tended to be less durable, the material culture of poorer and earlier children has largely been lost and can only be glimpsed in occasional references, but still may have been rich and complex and a critical part of the lives of children. In early modern England, as now, having children was for many the raison d’être of existence, but it was also often difficult to avoid. Children’s lives were frequently short, but for many they were still seen as a blessing from God. There is evidence that the functions of parenthood now associated with the role were becoming more concentrated in the biological parents and attitudes to the nature of children and childhood were also changing. Childhood also developed a rich literary and material culture. Amid all of this, many of the ideas and experiences that are now taken for granted about children and childhood also applied in the past.

11 Growing up

The age of seven was traditionally seen as a watershed in the life of a child and most apprentices and servants left home in their mid-teens. This left a period in which they were at home with their parents and siblings, roughly between the ages of 7 and 15. Play would increasingly give way to work, training and, if available, formal education. As the heat has gradually gone out of the debate on relations between parents and children, there has been an increasing emphasis on the experience of childhood in wider terms. Understanding other relationships has become a major focus of studies, particularly between siblings. There has also been an awareness of the increasing importance of formal education and the problem of discipline, which helped shape the experience of growing up in the past and to formulate attitudes to children.

Siblings While the familial relationships between parents and children have received considerable attention from historians, the potentially important relationships between siblings have been largely neglected outside of a literary context [303]. This is despite the fact that they were generally the longest relationships of an individual’s life [190]. The importance of sibling relationships has begun to receive some serious scholarly attention and it is possible to trace the ways in which these relationships were formed in early childhood, to what degree this created lasting bonds of affection and to understand the nature of those complex relationships, which, just as today, could involve a mixture of affection, rivalry, co-operation and conflict. There are also reasons for thinking that sibling relationships were different in the past. Siblings were often separated relatively early by the practice of service. The importance of primogeniture in England, by which inheritance was focused on one heir, preferably the oldest surviving male, meant that sibling relationships were not equal in a financial sense. However, these differences were mitigated by a concern to find occupations for younger sons and to provide dowries and suitable marriages for daughters.

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There is evidence of close and affectionate relationships between young siblings. It is possible to see that the young demonstrated their affection and sympathy for siblings who were ill, as in the case of Martha Hatfield who became gravely sick at the age of eleven in 1652, whose four-year old sister being ‘very fond of her’ would lie by her, often kissing her. Half a century later Anne Finch, Countess of Nottingham (1668–1743), observed that her little girl had got into her brother’s room while he was suffering from the smallpox, and kissed him. Children, particularly when ill or near death, often expressed a desire to be with lost siblings [302 pp. 164, 217]. There is also evidence that genuine affection was created between siblings when they were young, through attitudes and actions in later life. In poetry Mary Sidney (1561–1621) mourned the loss of her brother Philip, and Lady Jane Cavendish Cheyne (1621–69) commemorated the death of her sister, Elizabeth Eggerton, Countess of Bridgewater [303 p. 3]. Richard Grassby in his study of over 28,000 business families in the period 1580–1740, concluded that relationships between siblings were generally warm and cordial [134 pp. 201–15]. As a counter to this picture, not all evidence of sibling relationships is positive. Ralph Josselin noted in his diary that when he was young he had nearly fallen victim to a knife attack by his sister, who he described as a ‘wild child’ [11 p. 1]. However, sibling homicides seem to have been rare, with only five cases recorded out of the 431 homicides before the Essex Assize Courts in the period 1560 to 1709. The same systems of service and apprenticeship that limited the bonds of siblingship, limited acrimony by removing brothers and sisters from the same locality [156]. Using probate evidence for the Georgian period, Amy Harris has argued that emerging ideas about social equality based on an idealised concept of siblinghood were at odds with deeply engrained family hierarchies based on age, gender and marital status. The result was messy and fluid sibling politics that manifested itself in property disputes when ideas of equality were not matched by the hierarchical distribution of resources between generations [297]. It is difficult to assess sibling relationships among the lower ranks of society, but it is dangerous to assume that these relationships were not formed or could not be maintained without wealth [288 p. 3]. There are indications that sibling relations could be all the more important as individuals might have to rely on them for aid, support for advancement and at times of crisis. This was the case with the sons of Derbyshire artisan Leonard Wheatcroft, the eldest of which invited his younger brother to London where he could be apprenticed [207 p. 219]. Previously neglected investigations of sibling relationships clearly indicate their importance and longevity. They could be intimate and important in the family of orientation and beyond; they also could be factious and competitive. This should come as no surprise to anyone brought up in a modern family with siblings. What differed was the exact nature and expectations

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of such relationships and the ways in which life-cycle structures and systems of inheritance shaped and moulded these relationships.

Children and work A peculiarity of histories of children and work is that they often begin at the Industrial Revolution, with only a nod in the direction of pre-industrial exploitation of children for work. Historians have often distinguished child labour, which is organised and exploitative, from child work, which is seen as dignified and central to the family economy. The distinction is a largely semantic one. Children in the home, or as apprentices, were every bit as exploited by parents and masters, and in some ways were more harshly treated. Work was far more characteristic of the lives of children in preindustrial England, as from the start of the nineteenth century child labour began to be regulated and increasingly replaced by formal education. What was different was that child labour in factories and mines was more obvious and organised. Before industrialisation, the role of the child in work was small scale, most of it agricultural and within the context of the family economy. It was universally accepted as natural and normal, at least below the level of the social elite, where it was a necessity as many existed close to the breadline and an available source of labour could not be ignored. There was a widespread belief that idle children were immoral children and that this would lead them to adopt forms of deviant behaviour, such as thieving and drunkenness. The proverb that was first set down in this form in the eighteenth century cautioned that ‘The Devil makes work for idle hands.’ Children also needed to work because it provided them with useful skills that they would use in the future and because many households needed the additional economic support they provided, even if it was relatively limited [298]. Before the nineteenth century, England was predominately a rural society. As a result, most of the work of children was connected to agriculture. Diaries and autobiographies indicate that the most common tasks tended to be connected to livestock. These included hens, geese, goats, sheep, pigs and cattle, but also working animals such as horses and oxen. This was particularly common in the North and the West of the country where pastoral agriculture predominated, but even in the South and East, where cereal crops tended to be the main form of production, animals were still needed for self-sufficiency, particularly in the early part of the period, when there were far more independent husbandmen and yeoman farmers. In the spring boys often helped with ploughing and later in the year with sowing, harrowing, weeding and picking fruit. The whole family tended to participate in the most labour-intensive period of the agricultural year, the harvest, with children bringing food to those in the fields, leading horses, helping to bind sheaves and, for the poor, taking part in the practice of gleaning, picking up loose ears of corn [143 p. 41]. While older boys were increasingly occupied with agricultural tasks in the fields, there was also work to be undertaken

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around the home, often allocated to younger boys and girls, such as fetching water, milking, gathering firewood and undertaking errands. Girls began to develop vital needlework skills and helped with mending, cleaning, washing and cooking. By the eighteenth century manufacturing processes were being developed, particularly in the North and Midlands, that often relied on production within the home. These included the wool and cloth industries. Children were taught to card wool and spin [Doc. 25]. More developed skills involved hand-knitting, stocking-knitting and lacemaking. In some towns there were manufacturing specialisms, such as pin making in Gloucestershire and London, where children would be paid to put knobs on pins by hand. From the 1570s pins made from brass wire became common and children in London were often employed in their production [143 p. 41]. Despite all this potential activity, most children in pre-industrial England were underemployed. Agricultural work was seasonal and there were many tasks that children could not undertake effectively [286]. This was the reason that much schooling was located in the winter months, a pattern still reflected in long summer holidays. Anecdotal evidence from diaries and autobiographies indicates that children left home for short periods before entering a state of service or apprenticeship. These were often formative experiences for the child, giving them skills and contacts that might be important later in life [143 pp. 39–40]. Demand for child labour increased during the pre-industrial phase of economic development. From the late seventeenth century it became increasingly common for local authorities to make poor children parish apprentices [299, 300]. This period also saw increasing use of a social policy of putting orphaned and pauper children to work in hospitals and later workhouses. Arguably this smoothed the path by which poor and working-class families would later send their children to work in the new factories, mills and mines [311].

Education, discipline and abuse As the period progressed, larger numbers of children were removed from the household and family for formal and organised education. Hugh Cunningham identifies three main reasons why parents in this period sent their children to school. The first is the religious imperative, massively expanded after the Reformation by the need to be able to read the Bible and supporting works [287 pp. 101–3]. Some 350 different catechisms – summaries or expositions of the main points of faith, often designed specifically for children – were published between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries [148]. The second is the secular use of literacy, for business and work, but also for pleasure as it provided access to the thousands of books, news sheets, ballads and verses published in the period. Finally, there was the more mundane reason that, particularly for younger children, schools were able to act as a child care service that freed up parents, and particularly mothers, for work.

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Education outside the family took many forms. In the Middle Ages, song and grammar schools were designed to train priests with emphases on music and Latin grammar. There was private tuition in the families of lords and wealthy merchants that sometimes developed into household schools. Educational provision for girls was much more limited, but some members of noble families were taught in nunneries. In the early modern period there was a massive expansion of provision, characterised by Lawrence Stone as an ‘educational revolution’ [318], with the endowment of large numbers of ‘free’ schools. Sometimes these were established by a single benefactor, sometimes by remarkable community effort, as at Willingham in Cambridgeshire where in 1593, 102 villagers subscribed to found a school [54 p. 193]. The result was that by the end of the period roughly half of communities had access to a parish or ‘petty’ school that provided an elementary education to boys and girls. By the eighteenth century there were also a number of ‘dame schools’, so named because they were run by women. They catered for young girls and acted mainly as child minding services for parents, particularly for mothers who needed to seek employment away from the house. Humanist writers advocated the education of women, but this had its main impact in court circles. Even among the social elite this was mainly aimed at producing women who were deferential and obedient to men, even if they were capable of running a household or estate when necessary [179 p. 23]. Much of this spectrum of educational institutions was highly unstable, often dependent on individual initiatives, with tutors, masters and institutions coming and going with bewildering speed. Schools often began in any available space, such as a house, shop, barn or even an alehouse, and only later, if they endured, would they acquire a purpose-built schoolhouse. These were not evenly distributed or evenly utilised by all social ranks. The cost of around a halfpenny a day was too much for many labouring families, and the need to have children work, particularly in times of intense agricultural activity such as harvest, meant that what education they received was likely to be fragmented [304]. As a result, although often created with the intention of serving the entire community, many schools only survived by catering to the children of the wealthy. At the elementary level, children of all ages were taught together in a crowded single room. Some images depict children and master around one table. The model of benches and desks that dominated the layout of grammar schools developed as individual schools became more established and funds became available. There was a focus on basic literacy. Boys were often taught number skills, while girls often received training in needlework. Teaching was by rote, with verbal repetitions and copying out onto slates a major feature. This type of education included religious instruction and the instilling of obedience and manners. The hours of attendance tended to increase as educational institutions became more organised. Formal education ended for the majority of girls at the elementary stage. Boys from better-off families, and occasionally others if they were talented, might move on to a grammar

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school. A small, male, wealthy elite might complete their education at one of the two universities at Oxford and Cambridge, or the Inns of Court in London, which trained lawyers. Understanding the impact of all this activity is extremely difficult. The best indicators of literacy are signatures on official documents such as wills and court records, rather than marks, usually an X. This is a deeply flawed measure, as it is impossible to distinguish those who could only sign their name from highly literate individuals; it is also possible to be able to read without being able to write and sometimes the reverse [292, 319]. A final problem is that a signature was a public action and it is impossible to know how many reluctant individuals opted to use a mark rather than that to expose themselves to the embarrassment of having to form unfamiliar letters. Nevertheless, statistical analysis of such marks suggests that there was a profound change in early modern society towards a ‘literate’ society. This was most marked among men, of whom perhaps only one-fifth could read and write in the sixteenth century, but this was two-thirds by the end of the eighteenth century. To a lesser degree (and at a later date) there was a similar effect among women, of whom only one in ten could read and write in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it was perhaps two-fifths by the end of the period. Literacy was socially biased towards the top ranks of society, which were almost universally literate, according to this measure, by the end of the era. It was skewed in other ways, for example towards urban populations, with their concentration of craftsmen and local notables, who were far more likely to embrace literacy. However, these figures mean that by the end of the eighteenth century, only two countries in Europe (Scotland and Sweden) had higher literacy rates than England [24 pp. 61–3]. The other indicator of an increasingly literate society is the outpouring of print that occurred in this period. Millions of ballad sheets were circulating by the sixteenth century [387 p. 11] and some 400,000 almanacs a year were sold in the seventeenth century [367 p. 23]. All this activity could only have been possible if there was a literate audience that was expanding both in size and social depth. Concern with the discipline of children was commonplace in pre-industrial society. Affection was mixed with fears of spoiling a child. In the early part of the period, all religious groups were pessimistic about the nature of children, because of the doctrine of original sin, which depicted children as naturally inclined to evil. This justified some corporal punishment. Lawrence Stone detected a shift from a parental relationship based on the ‘stick’ of beatings to one based on the ‘carrot’ of affection and the threat of its withdrawal, but the evidence remains inconclusive. Many of the contrasts to which he pointed do not mark differences between different eras, but between parents and other figures of authority. It is hardly surprising to find that parents were less likely to use such physical forms of discipline than teachers and masters [77 p. 435]. The same natural reaction implies that orphans, or those separated from their parents, were far more likely to experience physical

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punishment and even abuse. Yet in general, this was not symptomatic of an uncaring society, but one where parental love played a crucial part in limiting physical punishment. Awareness of this problem was one motive behind the sending of older children away to work, to be trained or educated in another household, as parents felt that others could correct their children better than they could themselves. Normally the man of the house was responsible for disciplining any boys and male servants and the woman of the house did the same for girls or maid servants, since this avoided potential sexual entanglements and potential inversions of patriarchal rule. Children and apprentices were sometimes subject to horrific abuse under the guise of discipline. Of the 431 homicides before the Essex Assize Courts in the period 1560 to 1709, in roughly half the cases the victim was a child or step-child of the accused, often in cases where they had been beaten to death [262]. Beatings were a regular part of school life. Illustrations of masters with sticks and rods abound and there are seemingly endless anecdotes of beatings administered by masters on pupils, usually on the hands and buttocks of unfortunate boys [77 pp. 105–7, 161–74, 439–44]. However, one of the most influential commentators, Erasmus, condemned the practice and many followed suit or argued for moderation. Some schoolmasters had a reputation for excessive use of the rod, including figures such as Richard Cox at Eton and Richard Busby at Westminster; others at the same schools were noted for their moderation. When John Postlestwayt was recommended for the post of High Master at St Pauls in 1697, it was noted that although his previous pupils at Archbishop Tenison’s School were, ‘in awe of him . . . he doth not terrify them’. However, one of his successors, George Charles, was dismissed for brutality [376 p. 94]. The situation was similar to that within families and with servants, in that although it might be judged brutal by modern standards, moderate physical punishment was accepted, if not always used. Excessive use of force that endangered life or caused severe harm was likely to be discouraged or eventually result in some action by the local authorities. Elizabethan astrologer and doctor Simon Forman recorded several incidents of physical violence from his childhood. When young he was beaten by his schoolmaster, which he recalled ‘made him the more diligent to his book’ and after which his master did not beat him again. Another schoolmaster, Dr Bowles, he described as ‘furious’ and beatings were probably part of this fury. When he was aged 11 he was apprenticed to a mercer and grocer in Salisbury, where he remembered particularly suffering at the hands of a kitchen maid who ‘would knock him that the blood would run about his ears’. When he grew older, he reversed the situation and took a yard (a tailor’s measuring stick), and struck her on the hands, ‘and belaboured her so, ere he went, that he made her black and blue all over’. When his mistress blamed him for the loss of some flax from the stall, she attempted to beat him with a yard, as she had evidently often done, but he was now 15 or 16 years old

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and took the yard from her and pushed her behind a door where he kept her for some time. He received a reluctant beating from his master for the incident, but observed ‘she durst not meddle with Simon again’. These incidents indicate something of the routine brutality of childhood, both from other children and youths and from masters and mistresses, and how balances of power could change within a household with age [59 pp. 274–81]. The extent to which childhood experience shaped future relationships, particularly those with brothers and sisters, is increasingly clear. The experience of growing up was shaped for a growing proportion of the population by institutions that encroached on what can be seen as the territory of the family, particularly in service and education. The experience of childhood was also shaped by attitudes to discipline. While deMause’s idea of the past as a repository of childhood suffering is wide of the mark, there was real cruelty in the past, which began to be rivalled by new and more positive ideas of childhood and education that would eventually manifest themselves in a less harsh world for children and new ideas about children and how they grow and develop.

12 Death and burial

While death has exerted a fascination over historians for a long time, it was relatively slow to become a major academic topic in its own right. Death was one of the major subjects to occupy pioneers of the sentiments approach, providing a focus for investigating the strength and nature of relationships. Demographic historians, particularly those associated with the Cambridge Group, carried out important work that dispelled many myths about death and provided an empirical basis for understanding the nature of morality and its relationship to family life. For those focusing on the life cycle, death is the key point of property transmission, where resources move from one to another, and for those who focus on kinship it signals a reordering and a change in the nature and strength of relationships. It is now possible to talk of a culture of death in pre-modern England, and understanding this culture provides an important means of interpreting many other factors in past society.

Mortality People in the medieval and early modern periods have often been seen as obsessed with death, which was frequent and ubiquitous. Philippe Ariès, who pioneered the study of the history of death, much as he pioneered the study of the history of childhood, saw the Middle Ages as a period in which death was an accepted part of life, and which was accordingly faced with a sort of stoicism and acceptance, rather than hostility. In the late Middle Ages death became a point of judgement of the soul, and that led to a widespread depiction and even celebration of death that can be seen in images of the danse macabre [Figure 12.1]. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ariès saw death becoming less normalised, something exceptional, to be mourned, with the result that by the eighteenth century death was dramatised, exalted, feared, even worshipped [223, 224]. Throughout the period there was an emphasis on the transitory nature of life in both literature and art. Rather than making for a morbid society, this helped prepare individuals for death. Lacking modern medicine and hygiene, death tended to come more unexpectedly and earlier. It could be

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Figure 12.1 The imagery of the dance of death persisted into the early modern period Source: Dance of Death (Holbein). © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy. Stock Photo.

on a massive and more harrowing scale, particularly in times of famine and outbreaks of plague. However, since everyone dies, the ratio between life and death was the same in the past as now and, logically, since there were far fewer people, there was a lot less death. In the nineteenth century, rapid population expansion meant that the infrastructure of death came close to collapse as it became grimly impossible to fit large numbers of bodies into parish churches and churchyards. The result was the creation of enormous cemeteries and necropolises on the outskirts of towns and cities, and the abandonment of the centuries-old Christian prohibition of cremation [325; 332 pp. 220–1]. These changes were part of a process by which death was less immediate and obvious, removed to the edges of society, rather than constantly and visibly present at its centre as it was in the pre-industrial past. Burials are seen as a reliable guide to actual mortality, since it is a process that cannot long be avoided and it is fortunate for English historians that they have access to large numbers of parish burial registers from the early sixteenth century. Across the year, the pattern of burials was similar to that for baptisms. There was a peak between February and April and a fall towards July, followed by a steady rise in mortality through the year. This was partly because of the high mortality among newborn infants, who made up a considerable minority of these figures. Falls in temperature also

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contributed to vulnerability and some forms of infection. However, this pattern looked different in towns, and in periods of epidemic disease or famine, it tended to create more deaths in summer, when the food supply was low and some diseases thrived [106 pp. 293–7 ]. As already seen, many deaths were of children, particularly young children, with those under five reaching 40 to 50 per cent of all recorded burials in some Kent, Essex and Sussex parishes at the end of the period. Overall infant mortality (death during the first year of life) was about 140 out of 1,000 live births. Perhaps 30 per cent of children died before the age of 15 as a result of infectious diseases such as fevers, dysentery, scarlet fever, whooping cough, influenza, smallpox and pneumonia. Mortality rates were much lower in upland parishes, where infectious disease was much less of a problem, and higher in towns. There were possible differences between feeding practices and use of narcotics for children, with drops containing arsenic, opium and locally grown hemp dried and used as cannabis, administrated in or beside alcohol, particularly in marsh communities. [89 pp. 164, 172, 304–5]. Arnold Radtke argues that the major factor was inadequate nutrition due to early weaning and unsuitable substitute food, which led to a form of malnutrition [97]. Infant mortality rates peaked in the first half of the eighteenth century and then eased. These high rates meant that life expectancy at birth was low, in most areas in the mid-forties. However, because of the concentration of death in the early years, for those that survived childhood life expectancy could be relatively high and in some upland parishes 40 was considered relatively young [89 pp. 164, 172]. There was fear of accidental death and the shifts of fate. Under Catholic tradition, if unshriven (without a fi nal confession) a person’s sins counted against them in Purgatory [341]. Catholics and Protestants alike saw the importance of making a good end. This was the ars moriandi: the art of dying. If circumstances allowed, this would involve family gathering around the death-bed [311]. In the medieval period, bells were rung to alert neighbours, family and friends so that they could comfort, aid and pray for the dying. If there were alienated relatives, this was a point at which reconciliation could be achieved. The dying needed to give their blessing before they departed and to demonstrate their faith in God. Since most wills were made on the death-bed, it represented a last opportunity to influence the dying in their distribution of wealth and property. After death there was a long period of mourning, which involved the wearing of black among close family and during which certain events (such as marriages) were not conducted. The length of this period tended to vary with the closeness of kinship to the deceased [79 p. 35]. Suicide provided one of the most intractable forms of death. From the medieval period it was a sin and from the sixth century had been criminalised in canon law as ‘self murder’. In the early modern period it was both a sin, which carried social stigma, and a felony. Those that were declared by a coroner’s jury to have been felo de se (lit. felon of himself) forfeited their goods

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to the crown, local lord or borough, but if they were declared non compos mentis (not sound of mind), it remained in the family [345 p. 24]. Recorded suicides rose in the sixteenth century. In the King’s Bench inquisitions they peaked in 1570 and then fell thereafter, although it is unclear whether this reflected a real rise or changes in recording practices. Poverty, rather than melancholy, was the major factor and these changes may reflect the widespread economic deprivation of the late sixteenth century [345 p. 266]. Suicide was much more common among men than women and the rate of suicide among early modern children and adolescents was much higher than that found today [346 pp. 259–70]. Methods varied, with men tending to resort to hanging and women to drowning, although this later group includes a significant number of cases that were accidental rather than deliberate. Popular attitudes to suicides seem to have changed over the period, with many regarding them more with pity than hostility, although the law against suicides was not fully removed until the late twentieth century [345].

Burial and commemoration The period between death and burial was short. In summer, or where infectious disease was involved, it could be very rapid. If circumstances permitted, the body would be washed and prepared, often by the local midwife. It was then ‘wound’ in bands or a single cloth shroud. There was then a period in which it was ‘watched’, under constant attendance until the appointed time of the funeral. This was partly to ensure that the body was not tampered with, but it was also a mark of respect for the dead. During this period interested parties would visit the body, further helping them to come to terms with bereavement, particularly if they had been unable to attend the death-bed [111 pp. 421–30]. The body would then process to the place of burial, sometimes carried on a bier, sometimes on a horse-drawn hearse. The mourners, composed of family, friends and kin, would accompany the body in a display of respect and sorrow. In medieval wills, cloaks and hoods were often given to poor men to act as mourners and, although this practice disappeared at the Reformation, the poor could often expect a dole of money if they attended. Although the body would be carried in a coffin, often this was owned by the parish and the body would usually be placed in the ground in a linen (later a woollen) shroud. However, the rich were buried in their own coffins and this practice expanded down the social scale throughout the period [338 pp. 282–9]. The burial rite of the medieval Church was an elaborate process of intercession for the dead, while that of the established Protestant Church emerged from the mid-sixteenth century as a commemoration of a life. This was a function emphasised by the increasing use of funeral sermons for those of high status, which dwelt on their virtues and achievements. After the ceremony food and drink would be provided, particularly for the chief mourners, but often, especially where the rich were concerned, for all those

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participating. Like marriage, burial thus remained a public event; however, Puritan desires to limit the pomp of elaborate ceremonies reduced participation, particularly from the mid-seventeenth century [342 pp. 152–6]. Many practices were associated with burial, most of which are apparent because after the Reformation they were objected to by the clerical authorities as superstitious and as a result are recorded in visitations and parochial returns. The 1607 visitation articles of Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, included investigations into superfluous ringing, superstitious burning of candles over the corpse in the daytime, after it bee light. Or praying for the dead at crosses or places where crosses have beene, in the way to the church, or any other superstitious use of crosses with towels, palmes, metwands, or other memories of idolatry at burialls. The ringing of bells at Halloween, lighting candles and the laying of crosses on a body or coffin all smacked of popery to concerned Protestants and Puritans. The exact meaning of placing metwands (measuring wands) in the grave is unclear. It may have been to drive away wild beasts or devils, but more likely, as Peter Marshall suggests, it was a token of salvation connected with the angel who measures the walls of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22:17. Some traditions such as putting a penny in a corpse’s mouth, the distribution of ‘soul-cakes’, and ‘soul-eating’ (by which individuals, for a meal and drink, took on the sins of the deceased), or the singing of the ‘Lyewake Dirge’, which referenced elements of the idea of Purgatory, continued in parts of England long into the seventeenth century. They may have become detached from Catholic theology and become part of general folkloric tradition [342 pp. 135–41]. As already seen, the early modern period has been perceived as one of increasing individualism in the commemoration of the dead. In the medieval period, burials in church were common. Many burials of the wealthy were marked by brasses and occasionally in stone, with some individuals having strikingly elaborate monuments. These were designed to remind future worshippers of the departed and to invite prayers for their souls, a point often made explicit with the words ‘pray for me’ recorded on many surviving brasses. For this reason, medieval brasses were largely removed during the Reformation (with most of those that survive having been hidden and later replaced). Elaborate monuments were unpopular in some quarters during the mid-to-late sixteenth century, but began to make a comeback over the next fifty years as they became distanced from their implications of Catholicism. They were often not simply depictions of individuals, but also of families. Wives, occasionally in their multiples, and children, were often shown. Heraldry also became common on tombs, showing the ancestry and kinship of the deceased, as did symbols of death such as hourglasses and scythes.

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Despite the frequently repeated claim that death was the great leveller, shared by late medieval Catholicism and English Protestantism alike, monuments deliberately reflected the greater social status of some individuals [342 pp. 286–7]. The ‘monumental body’ displayed in churches and cathedrals had the effect of reminding the living of the uneven nature of power in society and of reinforcing the idea that hierarchy was sanctioned by religion and ultimately by God [340]. Even within the church, locations were not socially equal. The most prestigious places were near the east end, where the high altar had stood before the Reformation. After that, side altars and aisles were often considered the most prestigious places of burial and after the Reformation the pulpit assumed a particular significance. One of the reasons that there were so many disputes over pews in the early modern period was that precedence within the community was reflected by these locations, but in defending claims to a pew individuals and families were also defending their proximity to the dead and the place where they would one day be interned with their families and ancestors [329]. As the population expanded, increasing proportions of the dead were buried outside the church, within the churchyard. This suggests a separation between the living at worship and the dead, but it may simply indicate that the interior was unable to cope with the number of burials. External monuments were rare before the seventeenth century and most graves were marked with wooden crosses that have not survived. These gave way to individual headboards and then headstones, which became increasingly common for most social groups. The eighteenth century saw the development of the family ‘house tomb’, which often distinguished the rich from the more ordinary dead. Sites near to the church door, or outside of the church near the altar, were the most prestigious [336, 326]. Some individuals were excluded from burials in churchyards. These included executed felons, suicides, Catholics, the unbaptised and unchurched women. They were often placed outside the churchyard wall, or at a crossroads, marking their exclusion from the Christian community. However, these policies were far from universally applied. Unchurched women were sometimes buried with their families. Unbaptised children were often placed in a convenient grave of an adult who had died about the same time and a blind eye was often turned to the burial of recusant Catholics within churchyards, a ceremony usually carried out under the cover of darkness [329]. In the eighteenth century, an increasingly common occurrence for those who could not afford an individual burial, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas, was the pauper funeral. This was often in large, anonymous, partially open graves. The threat of such a fate was often used to spur the poor to greater efforts and marked a significant change in attitudes to the poor and communal obligations [333 pp. 64–6]. Beside grave markers and tombs, the dead could be commemorated in other ways. Mourning jewellery was a feature of the period, beginning with rings and broaches with skulls and skeletons and developing into classical

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motifs in the eighteenth century [333 p. 125]. One of the reasons for the explosion of charitable trusts was to provide monuments to men (and more rarely women), with schools and almshouses commemorating their benefactors in stone [356, 357, 358].

Afterlife People in this period had a belief in the afterlife and this must have made the consequences of mortality ultimately less wrenching, at least after the initial and inevitable shock. This meant that the dead can be seen as a continued part of the family. In the formulation of Natalie Zemon Davis, they can be seen as an additional ‘age group’, at least within traditional pre-Reformation society, who were still locked in a reciprocal relationship with the generation of the living [371 pp. 327–8]. Before the Reformation it was believed that dead Christians went first to Purgatory, until their sins were expunged and they could move on to Heaven. Prayers for the dead would speed this process. This could be done individually, or by paying a priest to sing masses for the dead. The result of this system was that, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, English churches abounded with chantries, altars and chapels at which masses were conducted. For the poor and those dead without relatives and friends, All Souls’ Day (2 November) assumed a particular importance, as general prayers guaranteed that all the dead would ultimately ascend to Heaven. The prevalence of this system led A. N. Galpern to characterise pre-Reformation Catholicism as ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’ [375 p. 149]. At times, indulgences were sold on behalf of the Church to speed or, as some believed, complete this process. This was the issue that sparked the Reformation in Germany and a subsequent period of religious turmoil across Europe. One of the most visible impacts of reform on the appearance of church fabric in England, and on the idea of death, was the removal and destruction of these chantries and altars in 1547. The Protestant view of the afterlife was far more streamlined. The dead were allotted either to Heaven or Hell, and could not move between them [341 pp. 110–30]. The dead could be remembered, but their fate could not be affected. Some historians have characterised this as a separation of the community of the living from that of the dead. If this is an accurate assessment, it must also have meant a distancing of family members by the barrier of death [111 pp. 465–9]. However, even the most fervent Protestants looked forward to a reunion after death or at Judgement Day. The habit of Protestants to have their places of burial in close proximity to their family and kin indicates a desire to be resurrected together. Until recently there was little scholarly treatment of the issue of ghosts; however, pioneering work by scholars such as Peter Marshall and Laura Gowing has opened up the field as one of major importance for the study of

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religion, society and the family [342, 343, 344, 335]. An understanding of ghosts can inform what is known about relationships before death as well as attitudes to it. From the perspective of people at the time, their relationships with members of their family and kin did not normally terminate at death. The appearance, or apparent appearance, of ghosts was an important part of these relationships. In the late Middle Ages recorded ghosts were usually relatives who returned to remind their relatives to pray for them and speed their escape from the pains of Purgatory. These ghost stories were often pious in intent and designed to support the system of prayer and altars. Occasionally the returning dead were ‘revenants’, unquiet corpses, often of an evil person, who rose to plague the living, as recorded in a handful of stories of the period, such as those of the Monk of Byland Abbey in the fifteenth century [327 pp. 3–4]. After the Reformation, since the dead could not revisit this world, they were either frauds of men, or frauds of the Devil. The first is the most common sort of ghost story that appears in court cases, where individuals were believed to have created a ghost, either through inventive narrative or occasionally by fabricating an apparition, in order to defraud and deceive. Since the dead could not return, if something genuinely supernatural did appear it was clearly a demonic impersonation, designed to deceive and possibly to corrupt those who witnessed it [344]. Despite theological views to the contrary, benign ghosts were reported in court records, popular pamphlets and the writings of antiquarians: righting wrongs, providing confirmation of the afterlife and sometimes giving consolation to the living. In the late seventeenth century the antiquarian John Aubrey recorded the story of an acquaintance of his who reported being visited by his deceased wife about three months after her burial. According to Aubrey, as he lay in bed awake with his grand-child, his wife opened the closetdoor, and came into the chamber by the bedside, and looked upon him and stooped down and kissed him; her lips were warm, he fancied they would have been cold. He was about to have embraced her, but was afraid it might have done him hurt. When she went from him, he asked her when he should see her again? She turned about and smiled, but said nothing. [1 p. 83] One of the most popular books of the eighteenth century was Elizabeth Rowe’s Friendship in Death, published in 1728 and going through thirty editions before the end of the century. It took the form of a series of letters between the living and the dead, which indicates a need to find consolation and continue such relationships [349 p. 182]. Clearly, familial relationships could continue even after death in Protestant England. What is most

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difficult to discern is the degree to which these instances were the tip of an iceberg of popular belief that connected the living with the dead. Death and commemoration underwent considerable changes in this period, but it is far from certain that this fits the pattern of a shift from collective and anonymous burial to an individualistic system of marked and named resting places. Some changes indicate evolving religious ideas and needs; others reflected the massive shifts in social structure and population. While patterns of death and burial underwent a transformation, they appear to have been the result of a more complex set of causes and events than many historians have previously assumed.

13 Broken families

Just as families in early modern England were formed by the creation of new households around the institution of marriage, so they were dissolved as essential members of the household died. Broken families could be reconstituted through remarriage, but for some there were long periods of poverty, disability and old age. How early modern society coped with the members of broken families is highly revealing of the nature and experience of everyday life, and can indicate much about how families and individuals were regarded.

Widows, widowers and orphans Broken families were more common in pre-industrial England than in even the modern United States of America. Modern Western societies tend to have high rates of separation and divorce, and while these circumstances were rare in the past, the prevailing demographic conditions meant that many parents did not to live to see their children reach adulthood. Perhaps between a quarter and a half of all children lost one or both parents before the age of 25 [93 pp. 160–73]. Early modern society thus had a relatively large proportion of widows, widowers and orphans. With no adequate social security system, no legal adoption, and no real tradition of fostering, the care of orphans was a considerable problem. Where they had been left some means, the fatherless and orphaned were often catered for through the system of guardianship. Among the aristocracy, until 1646, this was administered through a system of wardships, which could be used for profit, were able to decide the marriage of the children concerned and could be sold by the Crown. The church courts and those of some larger towns, such as London and Bristol, held a wider jurisdiction where there was an estate to be administered for a child. Guardians could and often were nominated in wills, but if this was not done, they could be appointed by the courts to look after the financial and legal aspects of parenthood. This was one instance where wider kin proved significant. Almost half the guardians nominated in wills from three Yorkshire parishes in the sixteenth and early

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seventeenth centuries were mothers, but a significant minority, nearly onefifth, were members of the wider kinship network [120 p. 16]. Grandparents, in particular, were singled out by the Poor Law from 1601 as responsible where poor orphans could not work. However, given that demographic conditions made the chances of individuals surviving to see their grandchildren low, this would have tended to be a relatively infrequent occurrence. In these circumstances, the chances were that another relative would be found, but if none were available, or willing, then the children of the poor remained a particular problem. The systems of service and apprenticeship could be, and increasingly were, pressed into service for older children, but young orphans were vulnerable. Some major urban centres had charitable institutions designed to deal with this problem, such as Christ’s Hospital in London, which was founded in 1552 for orphaned and foundling (abandoned) children, who were too young to go into service. By 1634, it had reached a peak of admitting over 1,000 inmates a year [408 pp. 69–70]. Conditions were far from pleasant and the mortality rate was high, passing 50 per cent in some periods in the late sixteenth century. Despite this, it was never able to match the demand of the capital, let alone the country as a whole. Most children in this situation appear to have been catered for in a more informal manner. In many cases families took such children into their households in exchange for additional relief. The growing numbers of the poor in the eighteenth century led to increasing intervention in family life by the state. The passing of the Act for the Better Regulation of the Parish Poor Children in 1767 led to the establishment of Guardians of the Poor, who kept records and monitored the fate of such children and which resulted in the creation of a system of parish nursing, with ‘baby farms’ surrounding London. This increased the survival rates of poor children and many did not return to their parents, but were apprenticed or went into service. In general, the development of provision resulted in increasing separation of the children of the poor from their parents [301]. While the loss of a parent could have profound effects on the life of a child, the demise of a partner was often the most emotionally distressing event an individual would suffer. Despite high mortality, most first marriages tended to last over twenty years, intensifying the wrench between partners when it occurred. In surveys of households between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, around a fifth were headed by only one partner, indicating that widowhood was a fairly common circumstance. Since women were, on average, two to three years younger than their husbands, there tended to be more widows than widowers for most of the period. The financial consequences were often less of a problem for men, who continued to control their wives’ financial contribution to the marriage. Women could be in a more precarious position. In the Archdiocese of York and in London they automatically received one-third of their husband’s estate if there were children and half if none, but elsewhere there was the usual confusing pattern of local custom. In most cases where married men made wills, they

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were careful to make some provision for their wives and to ensure that any money, land or goods they left went, ultimately, to their children [353]. For bereaved adults, many of the same pressures that applied to marriage applied to remarriage. In addition, the survival of children from a previous marriage might make it imperative. Fathers with relatively young children, in a society where their nearest helpful kin might be some considerable distance away, particularly if they could not afford a nurse, had a serious problem. Many widowed women had much greater incentives in the difficulties they would encounter in providing for themselves and any children in the absence of a husband’s labour, skills and connections. Women who were widowed undoubtedly gained a positive social and legal position, which was otherwise unavailable to them, but were often on the social margins and particularly susceptible to the vicissitudes of economics [187 pp. 227–35]. It is possible that the position of widows in inheritance weakened in the eighteenth century, with fewer appointed as executrix of their husband’s wills and gaining a share of the residue of an estate. Despite this they were rarely left destitute, and often received some land, cash and goods in addition to a house [363]. It was easier for men to re-enter the marriage market than it was for most women, as their position as a potential partner was most dependent on wealth and status, which tended to increase towards the middle of the life course. Widowed women, particularly if they had children of their own, could be a less attractive prospect. Any wealth they carried with them might be earmarked for existing children, and their physical attractiveness and ability to have more children were likely to be diminished by their relative age. These circumstances partly explain why almost half of men, but less than twofifths of women, had remarried within a year [187 pp. 258–9]. However, a wealthy widow could be considered a good match and there are many examples of younger men making their fortunes by securing an estate or business through such a marriage. The limited available picture of these circumstances indicates that remarriage was relatively common among both sexes. Figures for the majority of the population are difficult to determine, but among the married children of the English peerage born in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, over one-third married twice [93 p. 21]. One result of common remarriage was the reconstitution of families. This could become complicated: for example, two sets of children could be brought into a new household and then half-brothers and sisters born to a new couple. If a parent married more than twice, or if the new husband and wife both brought their existing children into a new household, these relationships could become intensely complex. As in modern ‘blended’ families, it is clear that step-relationships were often problematic and could be acrimonious. Just as dying fathers often ‘ring-fenced’ inheritances for their children (to prevent them being taken over by a new marriage partner of their spouse), step-fathers would specifically exclude their wife’s children as beneficiaries. Relations between step-kin were sometimes close, but more often they resented

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each other and the early age at which individuals tended to leave home sometimes seemed a blessing to those on both sides of the relationship. Nevertheless, despite their many problems, the reconstruction of family relationships shows the importance of the model of the domestic family and how vital it was to economic survival.

Disability As age increased, so did the likelihood that infirmities would add to an individual’s difficulties. Similar problems and solutions were needed for a relatively large number of those who would now be considered disabled people. This topic has remained under-researched outside the context of the Poor Law, but some major trends can be discerned. Where families were more prosperous, they cared for those with both physical and mental disabilities within their own homes. Wills occasionally singled them out for attention, or ensured them a room and a bed. Many were able to make an economic contribution to the household despite their disabilities. Among the poor and isolated the problems were much more acute and they were forced to turn to the major religious, charitable and state institutions for help. The medieval Church made an explicit link between sin and disability. Impairment was seen as a judgement from God for past sins of an individual or for the sins of their parents. However, the relationship was a lot more complex than this. Although impairment could be a punishment from God, it did not always reflect on the individual concerned. There was a positive side to medieval attitudes to disability, particularly the emphasis on charity as a major Christian duty. The focus in the New Testament on helping the sick and needy boosted charitable impulses and injunctions to care for the poor and infirm were frequently broadcast from medieval pulpits. The story of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) was particularly popular, reflected in medieval wall paintings, manuscript illustrations and wall hangings. Judging by what survives, it was one of the four most popular biblical subjects for illustration [387 p. 202]. It usefully combined a reminder to the rich about their duties to the poor and sick, while encouraging the unfortunate to be content with their lot and await a revaluation in the afterlife. There was individual giving and some more organised distribution by the authorities in towns, but the Church was the greatest focus of charitable distribution. Parish churches, cathedrals, but particularly abbeys and priories were major centres of doles of food and small sums of money for the needy, which would have included many with impairments such as loss of limbs or longterm diseases such as leprosy. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and with the secularisation of the parish, these functions began to be taken on by government, although paid for and administered locally. The growth of poverty as a problem, as an expanded and mobile population were unable to support

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themselves, particularly in crisis years of harvest failure like the 1590s, was seen by W. K. Jordan, one of the first historians to exploit wills as a historical source, as amounting to a sea change in charity, with the rise of a ‘new philanthropy’, reflected in many bequests [356]. The value, meaning and novelty of this phenomenon have since been disputed. However, Jordan was observing a significant change in the way in which charity was organised, particularly from the seventeenth century in the creation of charitable trusts, most obvious now in the architecture of almshouses, designed to provide ordered, stable, if limited, accommodation to the deserving, which included many of the elderly and infirm, as in Kent at Goodnestone in 1676 and Hawkhurst in 1723 [411 p. 649]. This ‘new’ philanthropy sat beside a clear distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, or ‘God’s poor’ and the ‘Devil’s’. The undeserving included those who were fit but unemployed. The deserving included widows, particularly those with children, and most of the obviously physically disabled. The deserving might be helped through ‘outdoor relief’, that is to say a distribution of money, food or other goods that did not affect their residential status. The Acts of 1598 and 1601 specifically listed ‘lame, impotent . . . [and] blind’ persons as subjects for payments from local rates [408 p. 29]. They therefore surface in surveys of the poor and poor relief, like the two ‘innocents’ and the blind woman who needed relief in Gillingham, Kent in the crisis famine year of 1596 [408 p. 64]. The undeserving poor might be subject to incarceration in a house of correction, often known after the first one at Bridewell Palace in London, as Bridewells. These were highly punitive institutions that controlled the lives of the individuals within them ruthlessly, forcing them to work on mundane tasks for food and a bed. These merged into many poor houses, large local institutions, not established to punish, but keeping the poor alive in harsh conditions [400 pp. 169–70]. The numbers of the physically impaired would swell after a period of war, such as the late Elizabethan period and particularly after the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century, because battle-damaged limbs were almost always removed. Parliamentary soldiers were relatively well cared for after the period of the Civil Wars, but royalists were not [352]. This switched after the Restoration in 1660, with the Cavalier Parliament passing an Act in 1662 that ordered pensions for wounded royalist veterans. By 1671, 6,100 persons had successfully petitioned for such pensions, most from the West and West Midlands [355]. For the mentally ill, the options were much more limited. London and major cities had the most institutions, including the Bethlem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam, which had become a home for ‘poor distracted people’, or the insane. It had poor conditions and was moved to a new purposebuilt location at Moorfields in 1675. The lunatics were first called ‘patients’ in 1700, and ‘curable’ and ‘incurable’ wards were opened in 1725–34 [361].

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Old age Despite the idea that early modern society was a gerontocracy, getting older did not always result in increasing status. There came a point where, for many, age began to diminish an individual’s social position. Among the poor the old were one of the few groups, along with widows and children, that tended to qualify as deserving and so were often at the top of this social group in the eyes of many. The Bible, particularly verses such as Leviticus 19:22 with its injunction to ‘honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God’, was used to buttress the divine order to respect the old. The story of the forty-two youths torn to pieces by bears for mocking the ‘bald pate’ (head) of Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23 was a stark lesson for those who might flout such strictures. However, the degree to which this theory was carried out in practice was variable and complex. As Lynn Botelho has pointed out, few of the middling sort who had contributed to local poor rates in their prime fell on such hard times that they would have been eligible for poor relief. Instead it was the working poor who gradually became its objects as their physical and mental powers faded. As a result the relationship between charity and old age was linked to ideas of social stratification and control. An individual had to pay due deference and act in an appropriate manner or their entitlement to relief might be suspended or cancelled. For those better off, their families, not their communities, were the primary source of support in old age and ensuring the smooth implementation of that support was a primary consideration for those who managed to make it to their later years [354 pp. 104–7]. Like youth, the existence of old age as a category in pre-industrial England is a matter of definition and debate. In a society with a relatively low mean life expectancy, it might be anticipated that a small proportion of the population would be elderly. Nevertheless, these figures are averages and some lived to be very old indeed. Almost a third of the population in the late seventeenth century were aged forty or more and almost one in ten were sixty or over [106 p. 218]. As with youth, people of pre-industrial England defined their own age groups. By the eighteenth century sixty was often used as a mark of old age and seventy as the mark of decrepitude [359]. Unlike today, few couples experienced a period in which children had left home, but during which they were able to enjoy relatively high earning power. These circumstances were largely the product of late marriage and low life expectancy. Additionally, even if they survived to see the adulthood of their children, many parents, particularly in the middling groups of society, found it was necessary to break up their holdings in order to give portions to the next generation. This process of the dissolution of an estate would tend to begin relatively early, on average in the mid-to-late forties, as children began to reach maturity. As a result, the ‘adult’ section of the life course would normally be short and, if an individual survived, they might be increasingly dependent on others and unable to supply their own needs,

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which could be said to be a reasonable definition of ‘old age’. The same can be said of the labouring poor, where an individual would tend to experience a decline in their physical (and therefore earning) power from roughly the same point. In this sense, the elderly, as a group, remained a significant minority of the population, arguably more so than youth. Partly because of late mean marriage, many elderly couples shared households with their children. In six communities for which household listings survive between 1599 and 1796, almost half of those couples aged sixty or over had one or more offspring resident with them [93 p. 201]. Many of these, but particularly the girls, remained or returned to look after their parents in infirmity. However, as already seen, it was rare for such elderly couples to share a household with a married child and his or her spouse. The ways in which children contributed to the care of their elderly parents can be seen in the case of Leonard Wheatcroft, of Ashover in Derbyshire. His primary employment was as a tailor; after the death of his wife in 1689, he experienced both declining finances and health. He was probably cared for by his youngest daughter until in 1694, when aged nineteen, she went to act as a servant to her father’s brother. At this point, his youngest son, Titus, aged about fourteen, returned from his apprenticeship as a tailor to keep house for his father for nearly two years. At the end of this time, Sarah came home to help and probably stayed until her father’s death in 1701. In the meantime, Wheatcroft’s successful eldest son appears to have provided financial assistance and another daughter visited and brought an ointment to relieve her father’s lameness. This pattern of the burden falling on the youngest children, but with some financial aid, and occasional visits from other children, may have been fairly typical, at least among the middling sort [7 p. 192]. Old age was not always as harmonious as this example suggests. Some continued to be active to the end of their lives, but others, by choice or because of infirmity, divested themselves of both property and responsibility. With no social security system, or pensions, such an old age was a particularly difficult prospect. The loss of authority that went with property, or earning power, often created a conflict between the theory of patriarchy and the realities of ownership and ability. One example from the social elite is that of John Parton, a Worcester gentleman, who settled his house on his daughter Ann and his granddaughters, and moved into only half of it. In 1632, two years before his death, he commented on how strained family relationships with the younger generation had become, noting that his daughter ‘keepeth me out of my house and robbes me’ [10 p. 235]. In these circumstances, the elderly could be reduced to the status of ‘sojourners’ (a term also applied to the wandering poor) within their own homes [54 p. 105]. At the lower end of the social scale, old age could be an even greater problem. The proportion of the population that was elderly varied across the period and between different locations. In the booming cloth towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire in the late sixteenth century, there were relatively

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few, but in more established areas, particularly after a period of low birth rates (such as the mid-seventeenth century), they could be a significant minority. Those over sixty made up 14 per cent of the needy in the Norwich survey of the poor in 1570 and over 30 per cent of those in Salisbury in 1625. The same laws that, after 1601, placed the responsibility for orphans on their grandparents, placed duties on children and grandchildren for their impoverished elders [408 pp. 78–9, 84]. Death and survival were potential social problems in early modern England. However, people had developed and adapted social mechanisms to deal with both sets of circumstances. Such solutions often led to social and personal tensions, but they did allow society and the family to continue to function. Old age, disability and death demonstrate a reaffirmation of the family as the primary social unit for the dissemination of wealth, but also affection, companionship and aid. The question to be answered in the remaining section of this book is the degree to which this re-creative process was forced to adapt due to long-term cultural and economic change.

Part III

Assessment – continuity and change

14 The impact of ideas on family life

In the twentieth century it was widely accepted that the family underwent a fundamental transformation in the early modern period. This picture has altered radically and there has been a stress upon continuity in the most important aspects of family life. Nevertheless, the early modern era remains one in which it is still accepted that economic, social and intellectual change did take place, even if it failed to fit the predicted pattern of class creation and modernisation that was once assumed. In the light of these circumstances, it is necessary to understand whether these factors had any impact on the experience of family life in the early modern period and, if so, what exactly that impact was. This final section of this book will attempt to look at the two major areas in which change has been perceived: the realm of ideas and that of economics. There are a number of strands of intellectual change in the period that have, at various times, been advanced as having profound effects on the nature of family life. The first contrasts medieval ideas with the humanism that came to prominence in English intellectual circles at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. The second is the Reformation, which began to affect English religion in the early to mid-sixteenth century, but was not entirely played out even at the end of the period. The third and final strand is the Enlightenment, which was gathering speed towards the end of the eighteenth century and, arguably, did not have its most important effects until long after the period had closed. All these intellectual movements have been perceived as creating new concepts of the family and of family life. The degree to which they represented new ideas about society and the degree to which they affected the pattern of family life remain some of the most important issues in understanding this institution in the period.

Humanism The Renaissance, the rediscovery of classical art and thought, which began in Northern Italy towards the end of the fourteenth century, reached its peak in Northern Europe in the early decades of the sixteenth century. The intellectual movement associated with these ideas, referred to as humanism,

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stressed classical standards of scholarship and logical argument, condemning many perceived abuses in the Catholic Church. Its most famous exponent in Northern Europe, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), has also been credited with defining a new view of aspects of family life which were to be profoundly influential [386]. The most obvious contrast between humanist thinking and what came before was its general optimism concerning human nature. This was particularly important in relation to children, as most medieval commentators tended to follow St Augustine’s lead, stressing the concept of original sin to a point where the newborn child was sometimes depicted as actively evil. Following pagan and classical writers, many humanists side-stepped much of the Christian theology of the medieval period. Erasmus depicted the child as morally neutral and therefore a vessel that needed to be protected from the contamination of the world and educated to avoid these evils [316 p. 115]. The process of education could commence much earlier. Whereas medieval commentators were universally agreed that children could not be educated until they were about seven years old, Erasmus argued that education was possible and even desirable from the earliest age. It has been suggested that this emphasis changed the pattern of care for the young child from the mother to the father, but, in re-emphasising maternal breast-feeding as the beginning of this process and condemning the use of wet-nurses, Erasmus was also attempting to reinforce the maternal bond [287 pp. 43–4]. It should be pointed out that Erasmus assumed that this education should be limited to boys; however, he suggested that women had equal intellectual and moral capacities. His friend and the most famous English humanist of this period, Thomas More, is noted for having educated his daughters to a high level. Additionally, Erasmus said a great deal that concerned relations between men and women. He placed considerable stress on the suitability of temperaments between marriage partners, opening the possibility of perceiving marriage as a partnership, rather than a divinely ordained dictatorship. There was also a more positive view of sexual intercourse between married partners, always treated with reservation by the Catholic Church. Rather than being perceived as a necessary evil, this was now a healing process and a means of strengthening the links between them. This positive view of marriage, added to the endorsement of female learning and underlining of women’s intellectual capacities, has been seen as instituting a new and more positive view of women. In the words of Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘the Renaissance mounted the first serious attack on the medieval belief in women’s natural inferiority in intellect and virtue and their physiological imperfection’ [440 p. 32]. This is not to ascribe to humanists the tenets of modern feminism, but they did provide a view of both women and relations between the sexes which was to be picked up by different groups and individuals across the period.

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Humanism had profound effects on the way in which family relations were depicted, both in art and literature. Its influence can be seen in classically inspired funerary monuments, which, as already seen, began to depict the departed in greater realism. They also became much more likely to incorporate epitaphs that emphasised individual achievement as a model for the living, in the classical style. There were also classical influences that helped to change portraiture to a more realistic depiction of the living, and it is from the 1520s that there are paintings of family groups, starting with the household of Thomas More. Humanism influenced styles of writing, including the diary, but also the way in which letters were constructed, tending to encourage simpler forms of expression and terms of address. Because humanism helped to change the form of art and literature, it is tempting to overstate its impact. This was a problem that deceived many of the pioneers of the history of the emotions of family life. It is possible that these changes mirrored changes in feeling and affections, but it is equally possible that they simply reflect new forms and means of expressing constant values. It is possible to push the distinctiveness of humanism as an intellectual movement too far. Many of the elements of the picture of childhood and relationships between the sexes that humanist writers depicted were not necessarily alien to other branches of medieval thought. One problem is that in examining humanist writings and those of other strands of late medieval philosophy is not to compare like with like. Surviving medieval writings on the family were produced by clerics for clerics, often with a pastoral or legal role in mind. This was a different audience and intention from those commentaries and conduct books that begin to appear in the sixteenth century, which were aimed at a lay audience who had different needs and expectations [18]. Humanism did represent a significantly different emphasis concerning relations between parents and children and men and women. However, the degree to which this emphasis was revolutionary and how much it simply provided new means for expression is open to debate. There is also the question of the extent to which these shifts in intellectual thought had an impact on the daily lives of the people of England in the early modern period.

The Reformation In recent years, there has been a shift in the study of religion in early modern Europe from an emphasis on theology and institutions to its reception and impact. The series of religious movements that swept across Western Europe from the second decade of the sixteenth century have been increasingly perceived as a motor of social change and historians have naturally looked to the family as an element in this pattern. Two major areas of thought have been debated for England. The first is the nature of early sixteenthcentury Protestant thought compared with medieval Catholic teaching on

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the family. The second is the impact of Puritanism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Steven Ozment and Lyndal Roper argue that the Reformation reinforced patriarchy and that Martin Luther (its founding father), in his rejection of celibacy both theologically and personally, elevated the married state to a higher level [380, 138]. He and his followers were keen to state that the patriarchal system was to be pre-eminent. Fathers were to rule their wives and children, just as magistrates ruled their towns and provinces. They were keen to bury clerical celibacy and monastic religious orders by stating that marriage was not only a ‘hospital’ for lust, where it could be properly contained, but a higher state, inspired by God. One problem is that in their emphasis on patriarchy, Luther and his followers may simply have been restating medieval ideas about family life. What is significant is that in the sixteenth century they would be expressed so often and in a climate of social disruption. In this atmosphere, all parties, Protestants and Catholics alike, were tempted to clamp down on any perceived threat to the patriarchal system. Particularly in England, Protestantism owed much to humanism, especially in the area of family life. Kathleen Davis, in her study of literary advice on marriage, pointed to the continuity between what she characterised as ‘medieval Catholic’ and ‘later Protestant’ advice on areas such as adultery, relationships between husband and wife and patriarchy [370]. Patrick Collinson, however, noted that the advice she had described as ‘medieval’ was from early sixteenth-century humanist handbooks and this supports the view that the watershed in ideas was between medieval Catholicism and humanism and not between Catholicism and Protestantism [18]. Both reforming movements drew on classical and biblical precedents and, not surprisingly, came to similar conclusions. One of the most influential writers on marriage, the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger, made considerable use of Erasmus, and was himself much quoted, emulated and copied by English writers [370 p. 80]. This link is so marked that it has been argued that ‘Protestantism can be seen as ensuring the continuance of the Christian humanist tradition’ [69 p. 43]. What has been assumed of Protestantism has been particularly applied to Puritanism, the more radical branch of reformed religion that came to prominence in England from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. In 1969, Levin L. Schucking presented the image of the Puritan family as a unit cut off from general society, introspectively focusing on the Bible and their place among God’s elect [384] [Figure 14.1]. Schucking’s ideas were particularly significant because it was felt that Puritan attitudes were those which became dominant, not only in modern England, but also in North America. This thesis was expanded by other authors, including Christopher Hill, who examined the spiritualisation of the household [377]. In many ways, Puritan ideas were similar to those of other religious groups and tendencies. They all shared an emphasis on patriarchy and

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Figure 14.1 A godly family, as shown in the sixteenth century Source: ‘Puritan family, 1563’. © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy. Stock Photo.

companionate marriage. However, there were some areas where Puritans did differ significantly from their contemporaries. A number of these have been encountered throughout this book. Most importantly, they tended to have a more elevated view of marriage. Naturally, Catholics, having retained clerical celibacy and religious orders, usually saw celibacy as a higher state. But the same tendency can be detected in the works of conservative Protestants in England, who like Richard Hooker in 1594, saw the single life as ‘a thing more angellicall and divine’ [69 p. 39]. As already seen, Puritans disliked the institution of godparenthood and generally disapproved of elaborate public ceremonial, arguably making the family a smaller, devoted circle. Elsewhere, they differed significantly, not so much in their opinions, as in the ferocity with which they pursued these views. The particular condemnation of the double standard evident in Puritan polemic can be seen as a result of a view of sex as a positively good thing within marriage. This element has, controversially, been seen as a factor in the development of a more tolerant attitude to women, which expressed itself in the extreme sects that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century, a number of which had women as leading figures and even preachers [369]. However, there was another side to such

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ideas. Most obviously, Puritans were far harsher in their attitude to sex outside marriage. The ultimate expression of this view was the notorious Adultery Act of 1650, brought in by the Puritan regime that followed victory in the Civil Wars, which made it, and incest, capital offences [236]. Regarding general attitudes to women, the more optimistic view of their educational abilities evident in humanism survived in literate circles within English Protestantism. It is apparent from time to time in the seventeenth century in works of a relatively radical bent, such as The Women’s Sharpe Revenge, published in 1640, but also in conservative tracts like Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, published in 1697, but these remained highly contested views and it is less than certain that they had a wider impact on the place of women in society. Focusing on Germany, Susan Karant-Nunn has explored the impact of the Reformation on the emotions. Taking her lead from Barbara Rosenwein, her analysis of the shifts in the way in which grief was to be expressed around the death-bed demonstrates how emotional communities could impact on critical moments in the family life cycle. Whereas medieval Catholicism stressed the public demonstration of grief, often using models such as the death of the Virgin Mary, Lutheranism, and particularly Calvinism, constructed a more constrained mourning process that was sombre and less demonstrative [66 pp. 189–214]. Many of the ideas contained within humanism were preserved and even intensified in English Protestantism. Ideas of patriarchy, attitudes to the double standard, women, emphasis on the family as a self-contained spiritual unit and the constraining and containment of emotion all seem to have been marked. However, other attitudes, traditional and popular, were in contestation with these concepts and the degree to which a ‘Protestant view’ of the family was successfully imposed on the population as a whole, and how long-lasting this picture might have been, is much more difficult to assess.

The Enlightenment The Enlightenment was a rationalist movement with roots in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but which began to dominate intellectual thinking in the eighteenth. It rejected many aspects of formal religion, often substituting deism or even atheism. This movement is often seen as the origin of modern intellectual thought, having profound effects on ideas about the universe, men, women and society. It has also been depicted as making important alterations to a number of areas that affect the nature of family life, including childhood, sexuality, morality and attitudes to women. If the writings of Erasmus marked the beginnings of a shift to a view of children as morally neutral, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, published in 1762, is often credited as the first work that depicted the child as inherently

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good, later to be corrupted by the influence of society. Rousseau was not the first to draw attention to childhood, but he is often credited with being among the first to attempt to investigate it as a separate state, and not simply an annex to adult life. He adopted a different approach from that which had dominated literate thinking from the Renaissance, replacing the emphasis on education with an intention to leave young children to their childhood, learning from nature and not from man. Tutors, if they could not be avoided, were to be facilitators not dictators. It is possible to recognise in these ideas debates that have come to dominate thinking on education into the present century. It is possible to overstate Rousseau’s originality. More positive ideas on childhood also have a longer history and he owed much to the tabula rasa or ‘piece of clean paper’ approach to childhood, attributed to John Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education, published in 1693 [Doc. 22]. Here it was argued that children were born, like animals, without a moral sense and therefore must be forced to obey, but later would develop both will and conscience and had to be treated accordingly. Similarly, the two ideas for which Rousseau receives most credit, his opposition to swaddling and wet-nursing, were not his. Locke had already expressed doubts about swaddling and, as already seen, the employment of wet-nurses was questioned from at least the sixteenth century [287 pp. 62–4]. In these respects, the Enlightenment in England did not mark the beginnings of new ideas about childhood and childcare, but the intensification and wider distribution of existing ideas. A similar pattern can be seen in Enlightenment thinking about sexuality. Foucault’s picture of a growing interest in sex in the eighteenth century, which derived from the beginnings of modern medicine and the science of the mind, is reflected in learned texts [209]. There were the beginnings of an understanding of the human body and, for the first time, a shift away from the erroneous assumptions of Aristotle concerning the female reproductive system, on which, frighteningly, much medical practice had previously been based. There was an explosion of sexual literature and artistic representations of sex in the late eighteenth century, but whether this marked new attitudes or more print is difficult to discern. The way in which women’s sexuality was perceived has been seen as changing in the Enlightenment, from that of women as sexually active (and therefore dangerous) to being perceived as purely neutral, with men as the active (or over-active) element. This has been used to explain the disappearance of witchcraft accusations, as images of women were transformed from sexually charged and potentially destructive witches to the bland heroines of novels like Richardson’s Pamela. However, the scientific basis of the Enlightenment in these areas was limited. For example, although there had long been concern about the effects of masturbation, there was a virtual panic in the eighteenth century because it was believed that personal physical and even national decay would inevitably follow the waste of so much semen [383 p. 3 ]. The explanation of a

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decline in witchcraft prosecutions is unconvincing, since these had virtually disappeared across Europe by the seventeenth century, and in England were in decline before the sixteenth. It should be pointed out that homosexuality was just as abhorrent to the moral community in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as it was to be in the eighteenth and nineteenth. Finally, the boom in sexual literature and pornography is better evidence of wider literacy and less effective censorship. A greater claim for originality can be made for another aspect of Enlightenment thinking, that affecting sexual morality. Medieval and humanist authors, but particularly Protestants influenced by Calvin, were almost universal in their condemnation of the double standard, but many major thinkers in the eighteenth century fully embraced it. Many literate men felt able to talk about their numerous affairs in a way that would have been unacceptable previously. For example, Samuel Johnson argued that good wives would turn a blind eye to their husband’s philandering [383 p. 5]. Another area where the Enlightenment does appear to have seen the emergence of a new and important strand in intellectual thinking is that of attitudes to women. Many Enlightenment figures were pessimistic about the abilities of women. They tended to re-emphasise the traditional line on their subjugation to men. Rousseau himself stated that ‘the woman is made to please the man’ and that she ‘is always subordinate to man’ and learning in a woman is ‘unpleasing and unnecessary’. This was exemplified by his character of Sophie, who acted as an inferior counterpart to Emile [77 p. 358]. Nevertheless, what emerged in the eighteenth century was a remarkable level of polemic written by women that argued for their intellectual and even social equality [Doc. 23]. This was in part built upon the foundation left by humanism and Protestant thinking about women’s education, but it was able to advance because of the contradiction evident in much Enlightenment thinking about human rights and the position of women. The obvious example is the tract by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, written in 1792, which extended the ideas Thomas Paine had set forth in The Rights of Man [381 pp. 7–32]. It should not be assumed that these ideas were widely accepted – they were strongly argued against in many intellectual circles and lacked popular appeal – but nevertheless they were to prove an important foundation for later intellectual and social change in this aspect of social and family life. Thus Anthony Fletcher has perceived a major, if gradual, change in attitudes to patriarchy in this period, which detached itself from the biblical model and moved to one based on different roles and needs [172]. Clearly, new ideas of the family, gender and sexuality did become prominent, at least in intellectual circles, during the eighteenth century. However, it would be wrong to think of the Enlightenment providing one single and dominant view of these issues. Rather, there were changes of emphasis in a pattern of contestation and debate. What was more significant in the long term was the abandonment of traditional and religious bases for these views, which ultimately undermined the consensus on these issues that had

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dominated since the Reformation, and this resulted in much greater change in the perceived role of the family and its members, first among the elite and then later in wider society. Although shifts and changes in practice can be seen as results of major intellectual movements, they do not form a linear pattern; conflicting systems of thought existed side by side. New ideas do not necessarily come to dominate, and what commands attention are those ideas that are acceptable to the existing cultural values of the population. Changing ideas could have a considerable impact on the experience of family life, but this does not necessarily mean that they indicate different conceptions of childhood, gender or the family. Rather they appear to have marked the same attitudes and ideas in different contexts.

15 Economic change

The process of industrialisation, which began in the second half of the eighteenth century, has traditionally been seen as a major watershed in the social history of England. However, it is now widely accepted that many of the important trends of this period had a much longer history, stretching back into the early modern era. These processes began to transform England from an agricultural and rural society into an industrial and predominately urban one. There were alterations to agriculture, increases in manufactured output and important changes in the structure of populations through evolving patterns of migration and the growth of towns. Although it is now rare for historians to speak in stark terms of a shift from one family form to another, the possibility remains that these changes had a profound impact on the nature of family life.

Proletarianisation As already seen, in the early sixteenth century in the majority of English rural communities, where mixed pastoral and agrarian agriculture predominated, there were relatively large numbers of small farmers, calling themselves husbandmen, who owned a few acres that formed a mainstay of their economic support. By the end of the seventeenth century, this stratum had almost disappeared to be replaced by a slightly enlarged grouping of wealthy farmers, often describing themselves as yeomen, and a much larger section of poor rural labourers, who appeared to own little or no agricultural land. This process is referred to as ‘proletarianisation’, because in Marxist theory these groups would form the proletariat or working class in industrialisation. Traditionally, this pattern of social division was blamed on enclosure (a process by which common land and the sub-divided holdings of the medieval strip system were claimed and partitioned by large landholders for more efficient agriculture) and engrossing (by which smaller farms were combined to produce more viable holdings) [29 pp. 137–8, 173–80] [Figure 15.1]. However, the impact of these changes in land use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries pales into insignificance beside the parliamentary enclosures of the late eighteenth century, long after this process of social division

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Figure 15.1 The impact of enclosure on family life Source: ‘Enclosure, eighteenth century’. © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy. Stock Photo.

had been completed in most of lowland England. It is therefore likely that the cause was the relatively high inflation of the period, which reduced the viability of smallholdings, forcing their sale. The more successful farmers were able to buy up much of this land, increasing the size of their estates and allowing them to make their agriculture more efficient. This was exacerbated by the related factor of an increasing population, which meant that resources had to be sub-divided between larger numbers of children to a point where

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they ceased to be viable. As a result, they were sold to ensure survival and the former smallholders and their descendants were forced to rely on their labour for income. The results of these events on family life were profound. As the period progressed, fewer and fewer men would have been undertaking agricultural activities on their own behalf. Instead of generating agricultural produce, then consuming, bartering or selling it, their role would have been to undertake labour for another in exchange for wages, often on daily basis. In a rural context, this would have been a large farmer or estate owner. This shifted economic power across the life course. As already seen, landowners tended to have the greatest resources towards the middle of their life course, but landless labourers were at their peak of earning power in young adulthood. What is more, the landless had no incentive to postpone marriage until they had acquired sufficient resources to establish a viable household through savings and inheritance. This has been seen as weakening the links between generations, as the economic significance and control of parents lessened. Furthermore, younger generations would now have had every incentive to marry early and have as many children as possible because they were a potential source of income. Thus, the collapse of the systems of life-cycle service, and the fall in mean ages at marriage, which occurred toward the end of the period, can be seen as direct consequences of proletarianisation and can be argued to amount to a fundamental change in the demographic pattern of English society [146]. This pattern can be seen to have had profound effects on the economic roles of women and children. As already seen, the wages of labourers were rarely sufficient to sustain a household and as this social group grew, the economic role of women outside the family was likely to become more important. Alice Clark argued that proletarianisation destroyed the economic and domestic partnership of men and women on the smallholding. First men, then women, worked away from the home and this caused a significant deterioration in status. This was acute in the latter case, as the pay of women tended to be lower. This simple picture must be considered against the differences in social structure that mean it did not apply across the population. Moreover, it is obvious that proletarianisation did not occur evenly across the country, but affected different social, economic and geographically located groups at different rates and to different degrees. Thus, women and men did maintain a domestic, economic partnership on the land in some circumstances, for example in the families of rural yeoman farmers. They retained an internal domestic role in some areas where there was need or place for them in the workforce. This pattern of change was also far from new. In the late medieval period when the population was falling, women have been seen as enjoying a golden age in terms of participation in the workforce [175]. Finally, much of the manufacturing work that was undertaken by women was still pursued within the home. For example, in the Bedfordshire village of Cardington in 1782, some two-thirds of housewives were

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engaged in a form of handicraft such as spinning or lace-making [24 p. 58]. A similar situation can be seen with children, who have been viewed as a potential source of income in the proletarianised family. It is evident that proletarianisation could have profound effects on family life. It not only altered the shape of the life cycle, and with it the demographic regime of early modern England, but it also adjusted the relationships and roles within families. It had other important implications that are associated with the essential problem of the location of this emerging social stratum. With far fewer ties to the land, it is to be expected that these social groups were highly mobile. Naturally they gravitated to where the opportunities for employment were greatest. The possibilities for relocation in ‘close’ parishes were often limited, both in terms of economic opportunity and social control. As a result, rapid growth is often associated with ‘open’ parishes, where land could be claimed for building and economic opportunities were greater. Many open parishes were located in the highland regions of the country, while similar opportunities existed in some developing towns, particularly outside their limits in the suburbs. The result was a shift in the balance of population, away from close to open and some urban parishes and, as a result, from the South and East towards the West and North of the country. As will be seen, the different circumstances prevailing in these areas had potentially profound effects on family life.

Proto-industrialisation Industrialisation can be roughly defined as a process of manufacture dependent on technological innovation and the division of labour within a factory system. It is often associated with a process of technological change that increased efficiency through the use of new sources of power and machines that allowed mass production. These conditions cannot accurately be said to have existed in England on a significant scale before the second half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, historians have argued that before this transformation of the economic landscape there were processes of production that can be identified as proto-industrial, which were similar in what they manufactured, but lacked these organisational and technological aspects [404, 405]. A good example is early modern woollen manufacture, which produced both raw wool and cloth, but which, by the sixteenth century, occurred largely in the context of rural households within or close to areas of widespread sheep-farming, such as Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. This was without the widespread use of water power and steam-driven mills that were to dominate the industrial landscape of the nineteenth century. They lacked the mechanical spinning machines and looms that would make the textile factory a place of extreme noise and dirt. As a result, such production was not only limited in scope, but also highly labour intensive. The areas where this pattern was clearest were those ‘upland’ regions of England concentrated in the North and West. In the far northern counties

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of Northumberland and County Durham, small-scale mining, particularly of coal, was significant, while in the far West, in Cornwall and Devon, it tended to be the rare metals of tin and copper. In southern Lancashire, and particularly in the West Riding of Yorkshire, textile weaving predominated. In South Yorkshire and the West Midlands, metalworking was the most significant manufacturing sector, and ‘nailer’, ‘cutler’, ‘scissorsmith’ and ‘scythsmith’ were common occupational descriptions. However, there were other manufacturing employments across the country. In the East Midlands, it was often hosiery and shoemaking. In East Anglia and around the Wash, reed weaving was common [409]. Finally, throughout these regions there were pockets of other industries, such as woollen weaving at Haddon in Northamptonshire and Banbury in Oxfordshire [24 pp. 39–40]. It would be wrong to characterise all this activity as indicating workers continually engaged in manufacturing. Most of those undertaking these tasks also took part in agricultural work, either on their own behalf or as paid labourers, and the proportion of time spent on each activity could vary from individual to individual and season to season. There were advantages to this mode of living, not least, as Joan Thirsk has argued, if misfortune attended one activity, as there was always the other to fall back on [409]. These potential problems included failed harvests or fluctuations in market conditions. However, unlike agriculture, variations in markets for goods could be extreme and long lasting, as was the case, for example, in the collapse of European trade because of warfare in the 1630s. As a result, those proto-industrial workers who did not have alternative sources of income could be much more adversely affected by circumstances than their agricultural counterparts. The effect of proletarianisation meant that there were far more labourers who had no alternative source of income, and in these circumstances suffering could be extreme. As one observer put it in 1677, ‘they are only preserved from starving while they work; when age, sickness and death comes, themselves, their wives or their children are most commonly left on the parish’ [29 p. 139]. It is necessary to distinguish between those who undertook this manufacturing activity on their own behalf and those who were employed in a system of ‘putting-out’, where a wealthy individual invested money in raw materials and paid for finished items. The workers involved in such a system would be saved the initial outlay on, for example, a loom and raw wool, and to an extent did not need the same skills, since patterns of finished items could be produced for them to copy. As a result, proto-industrialisation appears to have intensified the impact of proletarianisation upon the process of family formation. Where such employment was available, it was no longer essential to save or acquire skills through apprenticeship before marriage could be considered. This further eroded the system of service and late marriage that had previously dominated [403]. However, the main function of such a system was to increase the profits for those in charge and to reduce the control and gains for those who became the outworkers. The evidence

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suggests that such organised patterns of investment and control were becoming more common through the period. Historians have been keen to differentiate between the related processes of proletarianisation and proto-industrial expansion, but they shared important effects. Both helped to remove control of the mode of production from the hands of the majority, who increasingly ceased to be independent workers and became mere employees in a wider enterprise. They were thus dependent on wages and subject to the fluctuations of an increasingly unstable economic environment. Particularly at such times, the elderly and disabled became more of a burden. This created greater hardship, and it has been argued that it resulted in a greater tendency to take drastic measures to reduce family size, for example through infanticide and child abandonment. It has been suggested that, in a reversal of original expectations, households that were more complex began to emerge as relatives huddled together for economic survival in times of hardship, or at those points of the life cycle when families were under particular stress. David Levine found this ‘huddling’ to be a feature of the decline of framework knitting in the parish of Shepshed in Leicestershire [116]. Evidence from Lancashire, one of the first areas to be influenced by proto-industrialisation, largely through the cloth industry, indicates that the household became volatile in both its form and size. Demographic change and the limitations of the communal welfare led to a process by which kin were distributed between households in attempts to find the most economical solution to the problem of survival [401]. The result was that families could take on a form seemingly similar to the much-debated peasant stem family, with parents and their married children even sharing households. However, this was not part of a life-cycle system that saw property and households gradually shift from one generation to the next. Instead, it was economic desperation that forced families to break what appears to have been a common rule in family life in the past and combine two households in the hope of increasing their chances of survival. In the words of Steven King and Geoffrey Timmins: ‘As the industrial revolution instigated new life-cycle risks and intensified new ones, it is likely that dense and functional family and kinship groups were one of the few effective defences that individuals could employ’ [402 p. 275]. Unfortunately, the ways in which these households functioned is almost unknown, and it is possible that the sources that would allow their investigation in detail simply do not exist for what were some of the poorest groups in society. However, examples of similar behaviour from later periods suggest that the older generation took on many of the domestic tasks normally associated with women, including housework and childcare. This allowed the members of younger generations to try to make the best of their labour skills outside the household. Again, there is no need to assume a rosy view of these occasional ‘extended’ families. Because relatives lived under the same roof does not mean that they necessarily formed positive relationships. Particularly where widely accepted principles of household formation and

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social roles were being overturned, they were likely to be quite the opposite. What is more, given these conditions and that these were the groups in society that had the highest rates of mortality, it is reasonable to suppose that such relationships were likely to be short-lived. In addition, the impact of the factory system on family life has been called into question. Given the knowledge of the lack of peasant stem families in early modern England, it is no longer possible to suggest that the factory cut the young off from their parents. In fact, age at leaving home may have risen for factory workers. As married women, contrary to many expectations, rarely participated in the industrial work force, it did not often rob children of their mothers and destroy this crucial family bond. This meant that there was a clear division of labour between the husband working away from home and the mother largely within and around it, but, as already seen, this division had existed, with varying degrees of intensity, since the medieval period.

Urbanisation If industrialisation did not necessarily mark a watershed in the nature of family life, it is clear that the associated urbanisation, a process that, as already seen, was occurring throughout the period, did have obvious effects on family life. The relatively high mortality of the period was extreme in the densely packed conditions of the early modern town. High local mobility to and from towns ensured involvement in national outbreaks of infectious disease, most obviously the bubonic plague before the mid-1660s, but accompanied by a whole host of different epidemics of lesser impact. High population density and the particularly unpleasant lack of hygiene in towns (which had no closed sewers or refuse collection and had to deal with uniquely large quantities of general, human and animal waste) tended to ensure the spread of plague, along with the associated dangers of typhus, dysentery and cholera. Furthermore, in times of harvest failure, urban dwellers tended to suffer the most, as rural populations, lacking a surplus, would fail to supply them. Infant mortality was particularly high, often exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, and some large towns could only maintain their size through a largescale process of continual migration, leading to highly unstable populations [393 pp. 85–90]. In 1500 only around 10 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in towns of over 3,000 inhabitants; by 1750 the proportion had almost doubled. This amounted to a significant restructuring of the population of the country, but this expansion was uneven. Perhaps half of the inhabitants of large towns lived in London, which passed 700,000 by the end of the period, making it the largest city in Europe [393]. What is more, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, perhaps one in six of the population lived in the capital at some point in their lives [412]. Although London dominated, regional centres such as Bristol and Warwick shared

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similar rates of expansion, while places like Sheffield, which were little more than villages at the beginning of the period, began to grow prodigiously towards the end. Much of this expansion was possible because of migration, particularly into unregulated suburbs, like those in the East End of London, transforming the shape and nature of the urban experience [Doc. 24]. The nature of the process of urbanisation was partly the product of the two economic processes that have already been examined. The landless labourers created by proletarianisation often tended to gravitate towards towns to find employment, because begging was more successful, or because urban centres had systems of charity and thus provided greater chances of economic survival. However, the rate at which this drift to the towns occurred was slowed, rather than speeded up, by the rise of proto-industrial production. Particularly in the first part of the period, there was a drift of manufacturing away from towns, partly because of the restrictive controls of guilds and civic authorities. The often perceived decline of the regulatory ability of these institutions and the introduction of new areas of manufacture meant that in the eighteenth century economic development ceased to be a break on urban expansion and became an accelerator. As proto-industrialisation was replaced by full industrialisation towards the end of the period, there was a decisive shift towards factory production that was often located in towns, both old and new. That is not to say that this occurred in all urban centres. Some, such as Norwich, York and Bedford, which had all been significant towns in the medieval and throughout the early modern periods (although they saw some generally lighter industrial employments), were more significant as social centres and local markets, and therefore expanded at a slower rate. Some established towns, such as Bristol, Coventry and Leicester, became important industrial centres, as did newer towns such as Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester. This was not the only form of employment within them, and well beyond the eighteenth century factories accounted for a minority of workers within even the most significant industrial towns. Traditionally, this process of urbanisation has been seen as destroying links between the family and both traditional communities and distant relatives. However, there is considerable evidence that urbanisation, like proto-industrialisation, could actually invert this model. For Preston in the nineteenth century, Michael Anderson found that industrial workers tended to live together in more complex households, highly dependent on each other for contact and survival, often resulting in higher proportions of more distant kin sharing residence [388]. There are indications that this was not a function of industrial society, but that urbanisation produced similar effects in early modern England. The work of Peter Clark on migrants to Kentish towns suggests that relatives were particularly significant as points of entry into urban life, often continuing to act as a focus for housing and employment [391]. It has already been seen how the higher mortality associated with urban environments forced individuals to rely on more distant relatives after the death of members of the nuclear family. However, it should

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be noted that although urbanisation might have affected the relationships between households and short-term patterns of residence, there is little evidence that urban society possessed distinctly different patterns of household structure before the end of the period. Urbanisation had other effects on family life. Although it would be wrong to idealise the cottages of the rural poor, the conditions of urban poverty were inevitably more unpleasant because housing was bound to be at a premium. The drift to the towns unavoidably increased the numbers of urban poor. This in turn placed particular stresses on family economics, a problem often only resolved through begging, theft or prostitution. In times of recession, proto-industrial workers in towns were the most vulnerable, as they could rarely fall back on agriculture as a source of income. They were one of the most densely concentrated groups and in times of crisis their ranks would often be swelled by incoming rural poor from the hinterland of a town, hoping to utilise the more sophisticated systems of poor relief that tended to exist in urban centres. The result was often that the local authorities were simply overwhelmed and conditions became acute. The effects of urbanisation were thus twofold, with an increase of the importance of more distant kin, but a consequent decrease in security and standards of living. As a result, many had to raise and maintain families in urban poverty or squalor, a circumstance that became increasingly common as towns emerged as major centres of employment in the industrialised economy of the following century. A complex set of economic changes did have a profound impact on the nature of family lives of many in this period. The collapse of the system of life-cycle service, late marriage and low fertility, and the rise in population that became a feature of English society in the eighteenth century, can all be attributed to such a process. What is more, proto-industrial production provided an economic system that could accommodate much of this wage-dependent population and provided a vital bridge to the more rapid industrialisation that began towards the end of the period. However, important as these changes were, it is still unclear whether these amounted to a fundamental shift in the nature of the family or whether they were simply adjustments within an intrinsically stable system, and this issue will be the theme of the final chapter of this book.

16 The family and kinship in perspective

An examination of family life between the late Middle Ages and early modernity clearly indicates the difficulties of finding the family in the past and the complexity of understanding contributing factors while maintaining an understanding of individual experiences. This final chapter will attempt to draw together some of the threads of family life to assess whether it is still possible to create a generalised picture of the early modern family. To that end it will evaluate change in family life and attempt to fit the elements of this picture together through an examination of the ideology of the family and the ways in which it adapted to change and different circumstances.

Ideology A key problem in understanding the nature and scale of changes to family life in the early modern period is the need to connect transformations in the world of ideas with those driven by economic change. The relationship of cause and effect in this picture is extremely complex and has rarely been convincingly explored. As R. T. Vann put it, what is needed is the equivalent of a ‘unified field theory’ in physics, which links the two major branches of the history of the family [45 p. 149]. Intellectual historians have often assumed that changes in how the family was regarded resulted in change in the institution, which then allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place. Such an assumption is obviously unsatisfactory. As is evident from the preceding chapter of this book, industrialisation was not a single event to which one set of ideological causes can be ascribed. It was a complex series of changes, which were partial, overlapping and inconsistent in their impact on families. By the same token, the assumption that economic change created alterations in thinking, in essence that ideas are merely responses to structural changes that justified and then underpinned them, does not hold water. Many of the intellectual changes of the period were external in origin and locally interpreted and adapted. If industrialisation was a process that resulted from changes in ideas, it is extremely difficult to explain why England became the first industrial nation, as it absorbed humanism, Protestantism and the Enlightenment from outside. They could work against the

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process of industrialisation, for example by trying to limit the movement of the workforce, or by emphasising aspects of community and charity. One way of assessing this relationship is through the concept of ideology, particularly through the dominant ideology of the family in patriarchy. Ideology is used in the sense outlined by Marx, to mean the ideas of the ruling groups in society, which are imposed on the population in general as a means of maintaining that group’s hegemony. Marx saw this in almost entirely class terms, but since the rise of studies of gender and age, ideology can be seen as much wider in its impact. The family is a key element of this picture and much of the output of political rhetoric, conduct books, the use of the courts and even popular literature, can be seen as part of an ideology that reinforced control over the poor, women, children and youth. Poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu, while accepting the concept of ideology, complicated this picture in different ways, particularly by suggesting that how ideology functioned was not a straightforward process by which the rulers imposed beliefs on the ruled, although they all differed in their emphasis on how this occurred [32 p. 159]. A recurring theme that has emerged in the last few decades is the way in which the people of early modern England both conformed and at the same time resisted, adapted and helped to modify ideology. Dominant ideologies, like that of patriarchy, were thus in a constant process of contestation and negotiation. The theory of patriarchy rested on divinely ordained principles that were fixed and unchanging in the laws of God and man. It can be seen as underpinning the institution of the family, but also more generally the dominance of national and local elites, who were overwhelmingly male and adult. The common analogy drawn between the family and the state made perfect sense to early modern people. As the treatise God and the King put it in 1615, ‘as we are born sons, so we are born Subjects’ [162 p. 198]. However, borrowing from one form of authority to the other did not simply act as a mechanism for strengthening both. It linked them in a way that meant that the questioning of one might lead to questioning of the other. This helps to explains much of the paranoia about different forms of authority seen in the period, which can be seen as a fragile house of cards in the eyes of those that rule. It is clear that patriarchy underwent significant modification. For example, in the earlier part of the era, claims that women could not be educated were common, but by the end of eighteenth century, as has been seen, these were challenged by the many examples of female authorship. Between these periods many women, presumably with the agreement or even encouragement of their parents, demonstrated a capacity for education and writing. Some attempted to keep their efforts within a framework of patriarchal authority, but a few explicitly attempted to challenge such concepts. Thus the process of contestation and negotiation led to change in the nature of patriarchal thinking, which survived in part by incorporating changes in

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such issues, with fathers still retaining authority over their daughters, but, at least in the educated elite, they had to do so over educated and sometimes articulate individuals. Authority remained, but the nature of that authority underwent subtle change. In a similar way patriarchy was adjusted in areas including attitudes to the disciplining of children, to sex, to divorce and to death. Some of this negotiation was forced by economic change. The increasing numbers of unmarried women, the loss of life-cycle service and earlier marriage were all developments that had to be incorporated into dominant ideologies. Sometimes they forced changes in that ideology, but often they resulted in greater legal and ideological controls. Thus change in the family was an inter-related process by which economic circumstances and ideas interacted and were in a process of continual adjustment. What remains to be seen is the nature and extent of this change.

Continuity and change The rise and rapid expansion of the history of the family, particularly since the last quarter of the twentieth century, led to a massive increase in the understanding of its nature and role in early modern society. However, while early pioneers in the field were happy to construct overarching narratives of the family, which depicted the transition from one familial form to another, or argued for almost complete continuity and stability, the detailed investigations these pioneers helped inspire have led to a fragmentation of these grand narratives. As a result, a clear understanding of what happened to family and kinship across the period has become more elusive and overarching theses have largely disappeared from more recent works. Without making grand claims for such a narrative, this section is an attempt to assess just what did change and what remained the same in family life across the period and how this fits into the wider social landscape of the era. One of the most important areas of change across the period was the deterioration of the system of life-cycle service. Rather than being a stage undertaken by a wide range of individuals in late childhood and early adulthood, as it had become by the sixteenth century, service became a delineator of occupation and social status. The servant or apprentice in the early part of the period might one day be a mistress or master of a house, with their own servants and apprentices. However, by the end of the period a household servant was likely to be a servant for life. They might progress up through the hierarchy of posts that existed within the households of the rich, but they were essentially confined and defined by their social status. Most would not enter domestic service or apprenticeship at all and for the poor, these occupations were replaced by industrialised work that needed limited skills and cheap labour. As a result of this process, the broad continuity of household forms suggested in household listings across the era hides important changes in the

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functions of the household that cannot be seen in examinations of residence alone. In economic terms, even if it occurred in a more partial and staged way than was once assumed, it has long been accepted that industrialisation transformed the economic role of the family. For most of the period the household had been the primary economic unit, but by the nineteenth century the mine and the factory were emerging as the focus of working life. While the household remained the primary unit of consumption, it began to lose its role as the unit of production. Rather than being the centre of both work and domesticity, the family home became a retreat from the discipline, physical labour, noise, danger and communal companionship of the workplace: what Christopher Lasch described as ‘a haven in a heartless world’ [42]. However, the family was never hermetically sealed off from the wider world. The poor were increasingly located in small, unsanitary and overcrowded houses and tenements that allowed little practical privacy. There were increasing interventions by local elites and employers in their lives that would reach their peak in the mid-nineteenth century. Retreats from the discipline of labour can also be seen in the products of a working-class culture that were memorably outlined by E.P. Thompson, in public houses, festivities, games and sports as well as in new and reinvigorated old forms of religion, popular literature and entertainments [28]. All of these can be seen as rivals to the primacy of family life, but the participants probably did not see them that way, with their roles negotiated with the primacy of the domestic sphere. Although the household could be a place of domestic comfort and respite, particularly for many women and children, it remained a locus of hierarchical repression. This dual nature of the domestic sphere has remained a major theme in examinations of gender and age in the period. Marx and Engels first highlighted the ‘bourgeois family’ as a by-product of industrialisation, by which all men, in all classes, adopted the position of a petty capitalist within their families, in Engels’ words: ‘within the family he is the bourgeoisie and the wife is the proletariat’, asserting authority and exploiting the labour of his wife and children [45 p. 149]. This picture of authoritarian patriarchy is difficult to sustain in the face of so many obvious exceptions, where the authority of husbands and even fathers had to be constantly negotiated, redefined and sometimes relinquished with age. There was almost nothing new about the ideologies of domesticity and patriarchy at the end of the period. They had existed and had been developing for hundreds of years before industrialisation. What was new was the ways in which they were now being fitted into changing economic and social structures. The roles of women also changed significantly. Some women were much more confined to the domestic sphere, but others were forced to undertake low paid work inside and eventually outside of the home as the factory system developed. In contrast, middle-class and aristocratic women had much wider horizons in 1800 than they had been able to contemplate in 1450. The possibilities of education, the expectations of companionate marriage,

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the likelihood that they would play a major role in running a house or an estate, all indicate different views of and roles for women, even if assumptions of inferiority and subservience remained widespread. Ideas on sexuality also reflected change, particularly on issues such as the double standard and same-sex relationships. The system by which marriage was used to contain and constrain sexual activity did not entirely break down, but illegitimacy rates did begin to rise significantly in the later part of the period. More importantly, earlier marriage meant that completed families tended to be much larger than they had been in the past. One effect of this was that many women experienced pregnancy and motherhood much earlier than had previously been common. Fathers also tended to have more children to care for and at an earlier point in the life cycle. The results have significantly adjusted the experience of parenthood and childhood. Childhood itself certainly underwent significant changes across the period. At the beginning, as a period free from adult responsibility it was relatively short, but distinct. By the end of the era, childhood was in some ways less clearly defined as a period of the life cycle, with the intrusion of formal education growing across the period and significantly changing horizons for some. For the poor, children were much more quickly swallowed up into the industrial system in areas where cloth working and mining came to dominate. In contrast, among the wealthy childhood became much more of an insulation. Education might have become central, but the rise of the nursery and a new physical and printed culture of childhood suggest that, in contrast to the lives of the poor, it was becoming a more distinct and separated state, arguably reaching its apogee in the literary products of the early twentieth century, which still dominate idealised views of childhood. Clearly some areas of family life changed radically across the period, particularly as the growth of social divisions underpinned different experiences of family life. A key issue that emerges from an examination of change in family life is the degree to which the growing divisions in society that helped contribute to issues of class in the industrial era meant that there was not one familial system, but polarised experiences of family life, that were radically different at different ends of the social ladder.

Structural change and adaptability This final section of the book will examine the degree to which the varieties of family life can be seen as occurring within one system by the end of the period: in short, the degree to which social difference can be seen as the adaptability of familial systems and the degree to which the structures can be seen to have undergone fundamental change. Accordingly it returns to the different structures and definitions of family life – emotional, demographic, circular, organisational and cultural – that were outlined at the beginning of the book, and examines each in turn in order to evaluate the pattern of change and adaptability.

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A fundamental issue in understanding the degree to which experiences of family life diverged is the issue of how emotional life can be understood. The assumption of pioneers of family life like Ariès, Stone and Shorter was that changes in emotional life were evidence of fundamental transformations in family life in general. It is clear that many of these perceived changes were contrasts in available sources and between different social strata. A key debate among exponents of the new history of the emotions is between those such as psychologist Paul Ekman, who see the emotions as essentially biological or natural and expressed in different contexts, and those, such as anthropologist William Reddy, who see them as largely socially constructed or cultural [71 pp. 147–52]. The expression of emotion did change over time, but the degree to which differences of expression are differences of sources is still debatable. It can also be argued that the major differences of expression were between the rich and the poor. The same context that emphasised emotions in family life towards the end of the period also suppressed or ignored them among the poor. However, unarticulated emotions can still be keenly experienced and occasional evidence strongly suggests that the poor did undergo the same heady mix of joy, love, bitterness and loss as their social superiors. It is also clear that they were not universally disregarded. When courts listened to evidence of parental affection in cases of charity, they were tacitly admitting that the feelings of the poor were real and identifiable in what they would have expected of their own peers. In terms of demographic change the distinctions between rich and poor appear starker at the end of the period than the beginning. By the late eighteenth century the rich lived in specially designed country and town houses that accommodated servants and attempted to preserve privacy and comfort for their owners. In contrast, the poor can be seen huddling together for protection and survival in fragile circumstances where, as we have seen, opportunities for privacy were strictly limited. It is difficult to see this as one demographic system, but rather two connected systems that created different familial experiences. There were some significant changes in the nature of the life cycle. For the proletarianised poor the importance of inheritance was much diminished because they had little to inherit, whereas inheritance was increasingly significant among the primary landholders and rising members of the middling sort. There were also contrasts in the experience of mortality, with industrial rural communities experiencing high rates of infant and child mortality, while those in market towns saw falling mortality rates. In the early- and mid-nineteenth century, England would be divided between high mortality in Midlands and Northern industrial and mining regions and falling mortality in the South and East [402 p. 216]. These changes also reflected the differing experiences of the wealthy and the poor. There were some minor changes to the kinship system over time, both legal and in the use of terminology, but there were much greater contrasts in the use of the system of kinship between different social groups. Kinship

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could be useful and even vital to the rich and the poor. It might make the difference between advancement and personal progress for the wealthy. For the poor it could literally be a matter of survival with kinship proving a useful means of social security and support at times of crisis. What changed this was the increasing intervention of the state in the lives of the poor. By the end of the period, kinship was either clearly inadequate or considered only secondary in dealing with the problems of poverty, and these functions were increasingly taken on by the parish. Kinship did not become completely irrelevant, but here the contrast was not between a declining wider kinship and the rise of the nuclear family, as much as the replacement of informal systems of relief and control by the increasingly formal and impersonal ones that made up the Old Poor Law. Finally, in terms of culture, the degree to which there can be seen to have been two cultures by the end of the period has been much disputed. More complex models of inter-related cultures provide a model for understanding family life. As in culture, there were not two sorts of families in England at the close of the eighteenth century, one popular and one bourgeois. Rather there was a multiplicity of families, drawing on shared assumptions and systems of belief, but expressing these in different ways depending on where they were in the social structure. The experience of family life differed with personal circumstances, but remained largely governed by the same rules, assumptions and ideologies. There is little evidence that the inhabitants of early modern England saw themselves as participating in two systems. Rather there was sufficient flexibility within those systems to accommodate different circumstances and, while the family life of the poor may have been lived in contrast to that of the wealthy individual, they still remained at different ends of the same spectrum of the experience of one system of family organisation.

Part IV

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Document 1 Margaret Paston’s letter to her son John, 15 November 1463 The Pastons were a prominent noble family from Norfolk, who had a fringe involvement in the Wars of the Roses. Their letters are among the first from below the ranks of royalty to survive in any numbers, and form one of the most extensive and detailed collections of private correspondence from before the seventeenth century. This letter contains concerns that appear very modern. To my well-beloved son Sir John Paston, be this delivered in haste I greet you well, and send you God’s blessing and mine, letting you weet [know] that I have received a letter from You the which ye delivered to Master Roger at Lynn, whereby I conceive that ye did think ye did not well that ye departed hence without my knowledge, wherefore I let you weet I was right evil paid with you; your father thought, and thinketh yet, that I was assented to your departing, and that hath caused me to have great heaviness; I hope he will be your good father hereafter, if ye demean you well and do as ye owe to do to him; and I charge you upon my blessing that in anything touching your father that should be [to] his worship, profit, or avail, that ye do your devoir and diligent labour to the furtherance therein, as ye will have my good will; and that shall cause your father to be better father to you. It was told me ye sent him a letter to London. What the intent thereof was I wot not, but though he took it but lightly, I would ye should not spare to write him again as lowly as ye can, beseeching him to be your good father; and send him such tidings as beth in the country there ye beth in; and that ye ware [guard] of your expense better [than] ye have be before this time, and be your own purse-bearer; I trow ye shall find it most profitable to you. I would ye should send me word how ye do, and how ye have shifted for yourself sin ye departed hence, by some trusty man, and that your father have no knowledge thereof; I durst not let him know of the last letter that ye wrote to me, because he was so sore displeased with me at that time. Item, I would ye should speak with Wykes and know his disposition to Jane Walsham; she hath said, sin he departed hence, but [unless] she might have him she would never [be] married; her heart is sore set on him; she told me that he said to her that there was no woman in the world he loved so well. I would not he should jape [deceive] her, for she meaneth good faith; and if he will not have her let me weet not in haste, and I shall purvey for her in other wise. As for your harness and gear that ye left here, it is in Daubeney’s keeping; it was never removed since your departing, because that he had not the

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keys; I trow it shall apeyer [grow worse], but if [unless] it be taken heed at betimes; your father knoweth not where it is. I sent your grey horse to Ruston to the farrier, and he saith he shall never be naught to road, neither right good to plough or to cart; he saith he was splayed, and his shoulder rent from the body; I wot not what to do with him. Your grandmam would fain hear some tidings from you. It were well to do that ye sent a letter to her how ye do, as hastily as ye may, and God have you in his keeping, and make you a good man, and give you grace to do as well as I would ye should do. Written at Caister the Tuesday before Saint Edmund the King. Your Mother, M. Paston I would ye should make much of the parson [of] Filby, the bearer hereof, and make him good cheer if ye may. Source: J. Fenn and A. Ramsay, Paston Letters: Original Letters Written During the Reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV., and Richard III., by Various Persons, Charles Knight, London, 1840, pp. 179–80.

Document 2 The notebook of Nehemiah Wallington, 1625–26 Wallington (1598–1658) was a turner from Eastcheap in London and the first person of relatively humble origins to leave us an extensive account of his life. He is described as a Puritan. The following extracts deal with the deaths of two of his children. Elizabeth, aged 2, 1625 And about eight o’clock at night [my] wife was in the kitchen washing of dishes, my daughter being merry went unto her mother and said unto her, ‘what do you here, my wife?’ And at night when we were abed, says she to me, ‘father, I go abroad tomorrow and buy you a plumb pie’. These were the last words I did hear my sweet child speak, for the pangs of death seized upon her on the Sabbath morning, and so she continued in great agonies (which were very grevious unto us, the beholders) till Tuesday morning, and then my sweet child died at four o’clock in the morning, being the eleventh day of October, and was buried that night. John, aged 1, 1626 The night before he died he lay crying all that night: ‘Mame, Oh John’s hand, Oh John’s foot.’ For he was struck cold all one side of his body, and about three o’clock in the morning Mrs. Trotter that watch with him

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wakened my wife and I and told us he was departing now. And my wife started up and looked at him. He then being aware of his mother, he said ‘Mame, John fall down, op-a-day.’ And the next day he had two or three fits . . . and at eleven o’clock at night he said to the maid Jane ‘some beer’ and she gave him some beer. Then he said ‘op-a-day’. These were the last words that my sweet son John spake, and so ended this miserable life on Tuesday the fifth day of April 1626. Source: [60], pp. 87–9.

Document 3 The autobiography of Alice Thornton, 1668 Mrs Alice Thornton (1626–1707) was a member of a prominent Yorkshire family. She had nine children before her husband’s death in 1668, an event on which she reflects in this passage. That night was spent in somme little slumbers, but very unquiett and full of feares, trimblings, and sad apprehensions. In the morning my brother Denton came home and very disceetely prepared me with good advice and councell to entertaine the Lord’s determinate will in all things with patience and submittion, if the worst should fall upon me according to my feares. But withall said that God could raise my dearest joy up againe, were he never soe weake, as I had experience of, if He see it fitt for us, although, indeed, my deare heart was then very weake; at which words my faintings renewed with my exceeding sorrows, for the feares of being deprived of this my sole delight in this world next under God. The Lord pardon my impatience in this conserne, which had for the three last past yeares bin waning him and myselfe from this world, through great and manifold tribulations. Thus, betwixt hopes and fears I remained till the next messenger came, at four o’clock on Thursday, in the affternoone, at which time I receaved newes (for me) of the most tirrable loss that any poor woman could have, in beeing deprived of my sweet and most exceeding dear husband’s life. Source: C. Jackson (ed.), The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, Surtees Society, 62, 1875, pp. 174–5.

Document 4 Selections from the household census for Bilston, Staffordshire, 1695 House listings form one of the most important sources for the study of family life in the past. Even a selection from a listing, such as this, gives an

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impression of the way households were constructed. This example is interesting because of the comments added about many of those named.

John Hoo, Esq., Widdower. Mrs. Joan Hoo, Widd. She Dyed Aged & Consumptive December ye 29th, 1703. Samll. Pipe, Gent. Dyed of a Colick, Nov. 2nd, 1706. Aged abt. 65. Mrs Howard, his Wife. Sarah, ⎫Children of Mr Pipe ⎥ Anne, Dorothy, ⎥ married to Mr. Davies a Grocer in Chester, Nov. ye 8th, 1701 Mary, ⎥ married to Mr. E. Perry, Feb. 2nd, 1701. Buried March 18th, 1706 Humphrey, went to Oxford in June as I take itt, 1700. Enter’d in Pembroke Coll. Tho. Stokes. ⎫ Will. Bayly. ⎥ Servts att Mr. Hoo’s. Joanna Horton, ⎭ Will Perry. ⎫ Eliz Perry. ⎥ Servts to Mr. Pipe. married to Tho. Stokes of this town. Eliz Price. ⎭

⎭

Eliz. Cooper, Widd.: she was Daughter of Ric. Hammons of Willenhall & was Baptised March ye 27th, 1614, as I found in Wolverhampton Register. She died Jan. 21, 1705/6. Aged 91 yrs. Ric. Cooper. Letitia, his Wife. ⎧ Eliz. married to Wm. ye son of Mr. John Turton iii Sedgley parish abt. Oct. 16, 1708. their William, married Eliz., ye daughter of ye said Mr. Turton, May ye children⎥ 1st, 1709. ⎥ John. Richard. he died of a Consumption, March ye 30the, 1701, abt 11 of ye Clock. Richard Leese, ⎫ who went to Willenhall & married Ric. Molineaux’s Daughter. Ric. Hale, ⎭ Apprentices there (i.e., with the Coopers.) Jos. Stokes. ⎫ Jane, his Wife. ⎥ he and his family went to Dudley, 1701. Anna, his daughter, ⎭ John Smith. Issac Smith. Abra’m Smith. Anne Pinston, servt there: married to Hen. Taylor

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Susanna Mousell, Widd.: married to John Bickley John ⎫ Catherine ⎥ her children Elizabeth ⎭died S Apr., 1709, after a long Weakness ye Kings Evill. Jos. Perry. Anne, his Wife. Joseph. ⎫ ⎥ Their Children. Mary. William. ⎥ Elizabeth. ⎭ Sarah. ⎫ Sarah Feriday. ⎥ Servants Mary Beckett. ⎭ John Smith, died 10 May, 1709, Aged, after abt a month’s Weakness abt ye middle of ye day [?]. Eliz., his wife, died almost Suddenly of an Apoplexy att Ettingsall, Feb. ye 19, 1709/10 Tho. Smith, Apprentice, died March 20, 1704, of a Feaver. Thos. Stephens. Married Mary ye Daughter of Wm. Steward. John Beavan. Rachel his wife. John. ⎫ Thomas ⎥ Their Children. Issac. ⎭ Tho. Hadley. Apprentice. Edwd. Beavan. Ric. Norgrove, married Anne Smith. Thoo Smith, Senr., died abt 2 or 3 yeares after. Ann, his wife, died abt an yeare after. Sarah. Ann Sarah Taylor John Cox. Eleanor Perry, Widd. Edward. ⎫married Mrs Mary Pepe, Feb. 2, 1701. ⎥ their children Catherine ⎥ married to Geo. Perry, Nov. 8, 1701. Eleanor married Tho. Ebrall of Basall, Warwicksh. about end of January, 1701.

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John Perry de Gate. Mary his wife. John ⎫ Alexandra. ⎥ Issabella. ⎥ their children Wiliam. ⎥ Augustine. ⎥ Peter. ⎭ Source: H. R. Thomas (ed.), Bilston Parish Register, Staffordshire Parish Register Society, privately printed, 1937–38, pp. 178–81.

Document 5 Extracts from the burial register of St Michael le Belfrey, York, 1581 Parish registers can be used to find a variety of information about family life in the past. This short extract, like many, also contains considerable additional information that can be highly informative about ages at death and places of baptism. Johanne Joye, Daughter to Rob’te Jove, christned in the howse at home by ye grace woman, buried the fyft day of april Mrs. Anne childe, wif to Mr Thomas childe, about xlij yeares of age, was buried the xxijth day of aprill Randal Loshe, sonne to George Loshe, buried the first day of June, beinge foure months and somewhatt more, oulde Isabell Jameson, wydowe, aboute thadge of lxviij years, buryed the thirde Day of June Elizabeth Fale, wif to Edmunde Fale, of xl years of age, buried the xxth day of Julye Francis Proctour, sonne to Henrie Proctour, beinge baptised at home by the mydwyf, was buried the xxjth Day, of Julye Christofer caverlay, sonne to John caverlay, buryed the xxviijth Day of July, beinge aboute two yeares oulde John Sargeanson, about xl years of age, buryed the first day of Aug. John Cowp[er], sonne to John Cowp[er], aboute two years ouide, was buried the vij day of August Mr. Blythe, secretorye and one of the Quenes ma’tyes councellours in these north p’tes, was buryed the xijth day of August James hudson, sonne to Richard hudson, advocate, was buryed the xiijth day of August, beinge but thre days oulde Hellen bussye, daughter of John bussye, buried the xxjth of august Elizabeth Johnson, wydowe, aboute thadge of lx yeares, buryed the xxviijth day of August

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Agness Carre, wydowe, about xliijtie yeares olde, buryed the said xxviijth day of August Anne Bardgement, Daughter of George Bargment, beinge two moneths oulde, was buryed the ixth day of september Will’m Bowe, about thadge of lvj yeares, buryed the xxth of Sep. Matthewe walker, sonn to Edwarde walker, beinge vj dayes oulde, buryed the xxixth day of september Mary Blenkarne, wife of Mr thomas blenkarne, aboute xxxiiijtie yeares oulde, was buryed in the high quyer of St. olyves the thirde day of october Source: F. A. Collins (ed.), The Registers of St. Michael le Belfry York, Part I, 1565–1653, Yorkshire Parish Register Society, 1, 1899, p. 36.

Document 6 Hearth tax returns, Peter-le-Willows, the City of York, 1665–74 The hearth tax was a graduated assessment based on the number of hearths in a house. These three assessments of part of a parish over a decade demonstrate something of the social structure, how the life cycle affected residence and some of the problems caused by irregular spelling of names. (a) 1665 Name Henry Belton Thomasson Belton Will. Johnson Will Dobissen Christopher Dinnes Richard Dobinsen Phillep Mennton Rob. Lenne Rich. Mason Will Mennton

Number of Hearths 1 2 1 1 3 1 2 2 2 1 16

(b) 1670 Name Mr Henry Bolton Allex Hayward Ann Chapman & Halladay Ann Hornesey Rich. Dobbison Rich Mayson

Number of Hearths 3 2 2 1 2 -

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[?] Dynnis John Walton Robt. Allon Willm Dobson Robt Smyth Robt Clarke or Richard Mason William Moncton Mr Charles Blcshre Henry Skelton

3 2 2 3 1 2 1 3 1 29 [28]

(c) 1674 Name Sinolis Spendlore Mr Thomas Bouth Rc. Dobison Wm Dobyson Margt Robins Wm Mountain Robt Clarke Robt Allen Will Mason John Jackson Mr Blashrard

Number of Hearths 2 4 2 3 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 21 Source: York Civic Archives, Hearth Tax M30:22, M30:23 and M30:25.

Document 7 The will of Bray Rolfe, gentleman, 1607 Extensive use has been made of wills in an attempt to understand both patterns of inheritance and the nature of kinship relationships in the past. This example comes from a gentleman who had no clear heir and therefore reveals rather more detail about his wider relationships and wishes. In the name of God Amen the thirtieth Day of December in the yeere of our Lord God 1606. I Bray Rolfe of Sarratt in the County of Hartf[or]d gent sicke in body but of p[er]fect minde and memory thanckes be given to Almighty God doe make and ordayne this my last will and Testament in manner and forme followinge. First I bequeath my soule into the handes of Almighty god my maker and my body to be buryed in the p[ar]ish Church of St. Albans soe neere my Fathers corpes as conveniently may be.

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Item I give and bequeath to the poore people of St. Albans XXXs to be distributed amongest them at the day of my Buryall. Itm my Will is that my Executors here undernamed shall by their discretions bestowe w[it]hin six monethes after my decease the Soom of £XX of lawfull English money for and towardes the behoofe and benefitt of Ann Ireland all[ia]s Crouche my Kinswomen of Hartf[or]d the same money soe to be placed as that the p[ro]fitt may yeerly redowne to hir and the Heirs of her bodey and that the same stocke or any parte thereof shall not com to the possession or disposition of Edward Crouche hir Husband. Item I will and bequeath unto Rob[er]t Johnson servant unto my brother James Rolfe six pounds thirteen shillings four pence of lawfull english money to be paid unto him w[i]thin one yeere after my decease. Itm I give and bequeath unto my godson John Rockitt £VI XIIIs IIId. Itm to my Kinsman william Peacocke XXVIs. eight pence to buy him a ringe to wear for my sake. Itm to Dorothy Peacoke XLs. Itm to Samuell Grane and Ann Rockitt XLs a peece all w[hi]ch legacies to be paid w[i]thin one yeere after my decease. Item I give and bequeath unto my kinsman Rob[er]t Gillmett five pounds. Itm to his sonn Henry £V. Itm I give and bequeath to Mary Rolfe daughter of my Brother James £X. Itm to Nicholas Rolfe XLs. Itm my love and affection to my Sister Ann Kaye and hir sonn Thomas my Will and meaninge is that the howse wherein Thomas Goddriche dwelleth, now morgaged for £L shall not be redeemed by my executors or eyther or them but shall remayne for ever to my said Sister and hir heirs. Itm I doe will and bequeath to Michaell Rolfe sonn of my Brother William deceased if he attaine to the aidge of XXIty yeers the soom of a of Lawfull English Money to be then paid and deliv[er]ed unto him if he happen to decease before he attaine the said aidge then the foresaid legacy to be of noe effect and I doe bequeath unto Faith Rolfe his sister £XX to be paid at hir day of mariadge or at the aidge of XXIty yeers if she live to be married or attaine the saide aidge and that hir said Brother be livinge. Itm I give and bequeath to Mary Jewett my maide fV of lawfull English money. Itm my will and meaninge is and I doe require and chardge my Lovinge Brother James Rolfe whom together w[i]th my foresaid Kinsman Robn[er]t Gillmett I make joyntly and wholley my Executors. That if my welbeloved mother dorothy Rolfe doe delive[er] discharge and release my bond w[hi]ch she hath for the enjoyinge of that coppy hold landes or the rentes thereof to my Executoirs that my said Brother his heirs and Ass[igne]s doe enter like bondes quitly to p[er]mitt and suffer my said Mother duringe hir naturall life to feceive p[er]ceive and take of the rent of my Coppy hold Landes the full Soom of £XIII six shillinges she payinge the rentes due to the Lord and not otherwise. And the rest of the rentes I will to be ditayned and kept by my said Brother for the better satisfaction of my debtes & legacies herein bequeatherd. The rest of my goodes Chattells Cattells moveables ymovables & rightes whatsoev[er] I doe appoint my said Executors to take recieve and ymploye towardes the payment

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of my debtes and legacies. And the remaynder if any be to my said Brother. In wittnes whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seale the day and yeere first above written. Bray Rolfe Sealed subscribed and deliv[er]ed as his last will and Testament to the Executors w[i]thin names in the p[re]sence of John Fryer curate of Sarret the mark of Thomas Lee the mark of Alice Jewett Rob[er]t Johnson no[ta]ry pub[lic]. Source: P. Buller and B. Buller (eds), Pots, Platters and Ploughs: Sarratt Wills and Inventories 1435–1832, privately printed, 1992, pp. 80–2.

Document 8 Archbishop Parker’s Table of Kindred and Affinity, 1563 Parker’s table was an attempt to rationalise the legislation on the laws of incest after the chaos left by changes of regime in the middle decades of the century. It was posted in parish churches and prayer books. A Table of Kindred and Affinity, Wherein whosoever are related are forbidden in scripture and our laws to marry together. A man may not marry his: 1 Grandmother, 2 Grandfather’s Wife, 3 Wife’s Grandmother, 4 Father’s Sister, 5 Mother’s Sister, 6 Father’s Brother’s Wife. 7 Mother’s Brother’s Wife, 8 Wife’s Father’s Sister, 9 Wife’s Mother’s Sister. 10 Mother, 11 Step-Mother, 12 Wife’s Mother. 13 Daughter, 14 Wife’s Daughter, 15 Son’s Wife. 16 Sister, 17 Wife’s Sister, 18 Brother’s Wife. 19 Son’s Daughter,

A woman may not marry her: 1 Grandfather, 2 Grandmother’s Husband, 3 Husband’s Grandfather, 4 Father’s Brother, 5 Mother’s Brother, 6 Father’s Sister’s Husband. 7 Mother’s Sister’s Husband, 8 Husband’s Father’s Brother, 9 Husband’s Mother’s Brother. 10 Father, 11 Step-Father, 12 Husband’s Father. 13 Son, 14 Husband’s Son, 15 Daughter’s Husband. 16 Brother, 17 Husband’s Brother, 18 Sister’s Husband. 19 Son’s Son,

Documents 20 Daughter’s Daughter, 21 Son’s Son’s Wife. 22 Daughter’s Son’s Wife, 23 Wife’s Son’s Daughter, 24 Wife’s Daughter’s Daughter. 25 Brother’s Daughter, 26 Sister’s Daughter, 27 Brother’s Son’s Wife. 28 Sister’s Son’s Wife, 29 Wife’s Brother’s Daughter, 30 Wife’s Sister’s Daughter.

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20 Daughter’s Son, 21 Son’s Daughter’s Husband. 22 Daughter’s Daughter’s Husband, 23 Husband’s Son’s Son, 24 Husband’s Daughter’s Son. 25 Brother’s Son, 26 Sister’s Son, 27 Brother’s Daughter’s Husband. 28 Sister’s Daughter’s Husband, 29 Husband’s Brother’s Son, 30 Husband’s Sister’s Son.

Source: W. M. Campion and W. J. Beamont (eds), The Book of Common Prayer, London, 1871, p. 400.

Document 9 Constitutions and Canons of the Church of England, 1603 The increasing use of catechisms as a means of instructing and controlling the young can be seen with the inclusion of this duty for ministers in the canons of 1603, which formed the basis of the revised law of the English Church. 59. Ministers to Catechise every Sunday Every Parson, Vicar, or Curate, upon every Sunday and Holy-day, before Evening Prayer, shall, for half an hour or more, examine and instruct the youth and ignorant persons of his parish, in the Ten Commandments, the Articles of Belief, and in the Lord’s Prayer; and shall diligently hear, instruct, and teach them the Catechism set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. And all fathers, mothers, masters and mistresses, shall cause their children, servants, and apprentices, which have not learned the Catechism, to come to the Church at the time appointed, obediently to hear, and to be ordered by the Minister, until they have learned the same. And if any Minister neglect his duty herein, let him be sharply reproved upon the first complaint, and true notice thereof given to the Bishop or Ordinary of the place. If, after submitting himself, he shall willingly offend therein again, let him be suspended; if so the third time, there being little hope that he will be therein reformed, then excommunicated, and so remain until he will be reformed. And likewise if any of the said fathers, mothers, masters, or mistresses, children, servants, or apprentices, shall neglect their duties, as the one sort in not causing them to come, and the other in refusing to learn, as aforesaid; let them be suspended their Ordinaries, (if they be not children,) and if they so persist by the space of a month, then let them be excommunicated. Source: Anon (ed.), The Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical, SPCK, London, 1908, p. 34.

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Document 10 Deposition before the mayor and aldermen of Norwich, 1563 Under the Statute of Artificers of 1563 servants who left their masters without a certificate could be imprisoned and whipped. Here some of the problems of master–servant relations and their consequences are revealed in the attempts of one apprentice to avoid these possibilities. Robert Myller, of the cittie of Norwich, Tanner, of the age of xvi yeares or ther a bowte, examined before Mr William Farrow, Mayor of the Cittie of Norwich, W. Mingay Henry Croke Henry Bacon Jo. Aldrithe, Justices of the peace, on Wednesdaye the xiiiith of Aprrell, Anno 1563, sayth: That he was in the servyce with one William George of Hempton, Tannor, and dwelte with hym by the space of Thre yeares, And upon a tyme a boute sevenight before candlemas Last paste the wyfe of the sayde William George ded falloute with this examinate and Rebuked hym for his worke very moche, And this examinate sayed unto hys dame: I am sory that I cannot please you, but yf my Sarvice maynot please you, yf you and my Master Will geve me Leave to departe I shall provide me of a service in some place I truste. And heruppon his sayde dame declaryd un to her husbonde the same night that the sayde Robart Myller coulde be content to go from hym and to place hym selfe in some other survice. And therupon he callyd this examinate unto hym and askyd hym whether he wolde go from hym or not, and he sayde: for that my survice cannot please you nor my dame If you will geve me Leve to departe I canbe contentyd to departe, and then the sayde William George his Master sayde: with a good will you shall departe and provide yourselfe of a Master so well as you can. And there upon he drewe to his purse and payed to this examinate seven shillings in mony that he ought hym for certeyne calve skynnys that he had solde of his. And on the Sundaye mornyng this examinate came to his sayde Master to take his leve, And then his sayde Master sayde unto him seying: you will go a waye, you shall not go owte of the hunderde, but you shall serve eyther Mr Clyfton or ells Mr Raymer in husbondry. And this deponent sayed: Master, I have served thes thre yeares in your occupacion and can no skyll in husbandry and I wilbe lothe to lose all this tyme that I have served in the occupacon. And then the sayed William George sayde: Tarry tyll Sondaye and you shall have a new payer of shoos; and so this examinate tarryed styll ther with the sayde William George tyll the Tewesdaye next followyng, and in that tyme he had understandyng that ther was a warrant procured for hym to serve in husbondry, and thereupon he cam from his sayde Master thesayde Tewesday, And so cam strayght to Norwich and placed hym selfe in the service of one Richarde Smethe, Tanner. And further this examinate saythe that the sayde Richarde Smythe sent hym from Norwiche to Elmeham Fayer on our laydys daye with certeyne lether to sell, And there the sayde William George met with this examinate and sayde unto hym: How sayest thou Robyn? hadest

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not thou as good to have [ ?] served me for thre yeares as to serve where thou doest serve for vii yeares? for now thou arte bounde thou cannest not get owte of the Cittie nowe [ ?] . . . Source: R. H. Tawney, and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, vol. 1, Longmans, London, 1924, pp. 350–1.

Document 11 The diary of Ralph Josselin, on his youth and courtship, 1639–40 Josselin (1617–83) was a clergyman in Earls Colne, Essex for most of his life, despite his Puritan leanings. He left one of the fullest and most revealing diaries from the early modern period. Here, at the opening of his book, he describes his youth and courtship. . . . the Lords day being [Octob:] 6: was my eye fi xed with love upon a Mayde; and hers upon mee: who afterwards proved my wy wife: Decemb: 13: my uncle Mr Joslin in Norfolke, sent mee the offer of a place [by] him; but my affection to that mayde that god had layd out to be my wife would not suffer mee to stirre, so I gave the messenger 5s. and sent him away. in that month of December I was ordayned Deacon by the Bishop of Peterburg. the charges amounted to: Ili.14s. 9. in my jorn[ey]. in my returne I preached at Deane. December 25t. and coming home from hence, I read prayers at Olny, and thatday found Jane Consrable the mayde before mentioned in our house. which was the beginning of our acquaintance. the next Lords day I preached at Olny: on Acts. 16:31. [and] so also on. Jan: 1: Newyears day: at night invited to supper to Goodman Gaynes: I went in to call Goodwife shepheard, and their my Jane being I stayed with her, which was our first proposall of the match one to another, which wrought a mutual promise one to another on: 23: and by all out consents a Contract: Sept. 28. 1640: and our marriage. October. 28. following . . . Source: [11], pp. 7–8.

Document 12 Deposition of Bridget Pakeman in a defamation suit before the Essex Archdeacon’s Court, 1570 The records of the church courts throw interesting light on the problems associated with sexuality. This case, of what might now be called sexual harassment, shows the vulnerability of serving girls and the importance of reputation, even for men. She dwelt some time at Wrabness, fi rst with one Godfrey and after with Mr. [Thomas] Sayer, parson there, three quarters of a year, during the

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which time Sayer would have ravished her, first flattering her and embracing her when she was turning a flooring of malt and promised her if his wife died of child he would marry her and attempted to handle her shamefully, taking up her clothes. Another time on the kell [kiln] as she was heaving of malt, at which time using her as before she fell out with him and was going away from him but he coming after her stayed her. And another time about midsummer she having gathered a bundle of rushes and gathering up the old rushes to have stowed the hall, Sayer came to her, his hose being down, and did shamefully use her, at which time she was forced to take him by the members to save herself, wherewith Sayer gave her a blow on the ear and therewithal departed. Howbeit she denieth that he had his pleasure of her at the time. Source: [5], p. 212.

Document 13 The court rolls of Acomb, York, 1575 Manorial rolls represent the functioning of the English legal system at almost its lowest level. Most of the work of these courts was concerned with agricultural matters, even after the exclusion of the transfer of land, which was their primary function. However, these extracts throw some light on family relations and the nature of concerns about gender and age in the period. 1577 Presentments Wm. Vesse for an affray against John Vesse, his son John 3s. 4d. Vesse for drawing blood of Wm. Vesse, his father 6s. 8d. [. . .] Penalties Edward Smythe, John Vesse, Thos. Wood, Wm. Nabelsone and Wm. Monkton not to allow their wives to chide or scold with their neighbours each 3s. 4d. Elizabeth Blanke not to chide or scold with her neighbours and to kepe hir house in the night season and not be an esinge droper under mens’ windows 5s. 0d. [. . .] 1580 Presentments Hy. Rundall and Ric. Butterfeilde, servants of Simon Butterfeilde, for making an affray on Stephen Skadlocke 3s. 4d. [. . .] Thos. Smythe, brewer, for allowing other men’s children and servants to eat hens in his house in the night time 4d Source: H. Richardson (ed.), The Court Rolls of the Manor of Acomb, 1, Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 131, 1969, pp. 60–9.

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Document 14 Paper in the Michaelmass Sessions Roll, Essex Archdeacon’s Court, 1583 Popular sanctions against perceived breaches of sexual mores are highly revealing of popular attitudes to sexuality. The following verse was probably pinned up on a door beside cuckold’s horns and formed part of the evidence in a defamation suit. Here dwelleth an arrant bichant whore, Such one as deserves the cart. Her name is Margaret Townsend now. The horn showns her desert. Fie, of honesty, fie, fie, Your whore’s head is full of jealousy. Therefore I pray your whore’s tricks fly, And learn to live more honestly. Alack for woe. Why should I do so? It will cause a sorrowful hey-ho. Thus do I end my simple verse, He that meeteth her husband, a horned beast. Source: [4], p. 68.

Document 15 Thomas Becon, David’s Harp: The Seventh String, 1542 Thomas Becon (c. 1512–c. 1567) was chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer and Protector Somerset. He was a radical Protestant who urged further reform, publishing a number of polemical works, particularly directed against Catholicism. David’s Harp was an exposition based on Psalm 115. Let husbands love their wives as their own bodies, and be not bitter, churlish or unkind to them, but ‘give honour unto them as unto the weaker vessels, and as unto them that are fellow-heirs with them of the grace of life’. Likewise let the ‘wives be in subjection to their husbands, as unto the Lord’ in all things, and so behave themselves as it becometh women of an honest and godly conversation. ‘Let them array themselves in comely apparel with shamefacedness and discreet behaviour; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearl, or costly array, but with such as becometh women that profess godliness though good work’. Let the ‘inward man of the heart be uncorrupt, with a meek and quiet spirit, which before God is much set by. For this manner in the old time did the holy women which trusted in God [en]tire themselves, and were obedient to their husbands; even as Sara obeyed Abraham,

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and called him lord, whose daughter the wives are, so long as they do well, not being afraid for any trouble’. Let ‘fathers not rate their children, lest they be of a desperate mind, but bring them up in the nurture and information of the Lord’. Let the ‘children also obey their parents in all things; for that is well pleasing unto the Lord’. Let ‘masters do unto their servants that which is just and equal, putting away threatenings, and know that they also have a master in heaven, with whom there is no respect of persons’. Let the ‘servants again be obedient unto their bodily masters in all things, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ; not with service only in the eyesight, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ; doing the will of God from the heart, with good will. Let them think that they serve the Lord and not men, and let them be sure, that whatsoever good a man doeth, he shall receive it again of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.’ To conclude, let every one of us do our duty, and live according to the vocation whereunto God hath called us. So shall it come to pass, that we shall not walk unworthy the kindness of God. So shall we truly pay our vows unto the Lord. So shall we faithfully perform that which we heretofore promised in baptism. So shall we daily more and more increase in the love of God, and taste more plenteously of his bounteous gifts. Source: J. Ayre (ed.), The Early Works of Thomas Becon, Parker Society, Cambridge, 1843, p. 287.

Document 16 Richard Baxter, The Poor Man’s Family Book, 1674 Baxter (1615–91) was a minister of the Church of England, but his Puritan leanings led to his exclusion from the Church after 1662 and eventual imprisonment. He published several works, including this attempt to reproduce views on family life for a relatively humble audience. The Special Duties of the Husband They are: 1. To exercise love and authority together (never separated) to his wife. 2. To be the chief teacher and governor of the family and the provider for its maintenance. 3. To excel the wife in knowledge and patience, and to be her teacher and guide in the matters of God, and to be the chief in bearing infirmities and trials. 4. To keep up the wife’s authority and honour in the family over inferiors. The Special Duties of the Wives 1. To excel in love. 2. To be obedient to their husbands and examples therein to the rest of the family. 3. Submissively to learn of their husbands (that can

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teach them) and not to be self-conceited, teaching, talkative or imperious. 4. To subdue their passions, deny their own fancies and wills, and not to tempt their husbands to satisfy their humours and vain desires in pride, excess, revenge or any evil, not to rob God and the poor by a proud and wasteful humour (as the wives of gentlemen ordinarily do). 5. To govern their tongues, that their words may be few and sober; and to abhor a running and scolding tongue. 6. To be contented in every condition, and not to torment their husbands and themselves with impatient murmurings. 7. To avoid the childish vanity of gaudy apparel, and following vain fashions of the prouder sort. And to abhor their vice that waste precious time in curious and tedious dressings, gossipings, visits and feasts. 8. To help on the maintenance of the family by frugality and by their proper care and labour. 9. Not to dispose of their husband’s estate without his consent, either explicit or implicit. Above all, to be constant helpers of the holy education of their children . . . And so they may become chief instruments of the reformation and welfare of churches and kingdoms of the world. Source: R. Baxter, The Poor Man’s Family Book, London, 1674.

Document 17 Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, 1702 Richard Gough, a farmer on the verge of being a gentleman, left one of the most remarkable documents of the period, a history of all the families in the parish of Myddle in Shropshire, organised by the pews they occupied in the parish church. It provides countless insights into family life, and social life in general, in the early modern period. The second peiw on the North side of the North Isle This seat belongs whoally to the farme called the Hollins, whose leawan [rent] is 1s. 6d. This farme is the Earle of Bridgewater’s land; and it is reported that the house was a dayry house belonging to Myddle Castle. I can give no accompt of any tenant of this farme, further than Humphrey Reynolds who was Churchwarden of this parish when the register was transcribed in Mr. Wilton’s time. One William Cleaton marryed a daughter of this Reynolds, and soe beecame tenant of this farme, and had a lease for the lives of himselfe, his wife, and Francis, his eldest son. Hee lived in good repute, and served several offices in this parish. Hee had 4 sons. I. Francis, who displeased his father in marrying with Margaret Vaughan, a Welsh woman, sometimes servant to Mr. Kinsaton, Rector of Myddle, and therefore hee gave him lytle or nothing dureing his life. 2. Issac who marryed a daughter of one White, of Meriton, and had a good portion with her. The widow Lloyd, of Leaton, who is very rich in land and money, is a daughter of this Issac. 3. Samuell, who marryed Susan, the daughter of Thomas Jukes,

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of Newton on the Hill, and lived a tenant to Mr. Hunt, in Basechurch. 4. Richard, an untowardly person. He marryed Annie, the daughter of William Tyller, a woman as infamous as him-selfe. ‘Pares cum paribus facilime congregantur’ [Like is most often brought together with like]. The parents on both sides were displeased, (or seemed soe,) with this match, and therefore allowed the new marryed couple noe maintenance. Richard Cleaton soone out run his wife, and left his wife bigge with child. Shee had a daughter, which was brought up by Allen Challoner, (the smith) of Myddle; for his wife was related to William Tyler. This daugh-ter came to bee a comely and handsome woman. Shee went to live in service toards Berrinton, beyond Shrewsbury, but I have not heard of her lately. Source: [6], pp. 35–6.

Document 18 Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, 1651 Culpeper (1616–54) was a Cambridge-educated physician and astrologer. His works on medicine were widely read among interested parties. These extracts give an indication of the limits of even professional knowledge about women’s physiology and the nature of childbirth. Medicines for a woman that would have children By way of a caution: 1. Use not the act of copulation too often: some say it makes the womb slippery, I rather think it makes the womb more willing to open than shut. Saitety gluts the womb and makes it unfit to do its office, and that’s the reason whores so seldom have children; and also the reason why women after long absence of their husbands, when they come again usually soon conceive. 2. Let the time be convenient, for fear of surprise hinders conception. 3. Let it be after perfect digestion; let neither hunger nor drunkeness be upon the man or woman. 4. Let the desire of copulation come naturally, and not by provocation. The greater the woman’s desire for copulation is, the more subject is she to conceive. 5. Women are most subject to conceive a day or two after their monthly terms are stayed. 6. Avoid eating or bearing about you all such things as cause barreness: such be the none of a stag’s heart, emeralds, sapphires, ivy berries, jet, burnet, leaves and roots, hart’s tongue, steel dust, mints &c. 7. Apish ways and manners of copulation hinder conception. Source: [2], p. 124.

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Document 19 A Caveat for Young Men, or The Bad Husband Turn’d Thirsty, c. 1650 Popular ballads provide a fascinating, if sometimes confusing, insight into popular expectations and ideas about some aspects of family life. This extract from a mid-seventeenth-century ballad, written by James Wade, is typical in its moral tone, but unusually highlights the expectations on husbands by concentrating on the evils of drink. This Caveat may serve both for Old and yong, For to remember that Old Age will come; If you these Verses do minde and read, I hope hereafter you will take better heeed: This Song it was set forth and penn’d To teach Bad Husbands to amend, Therefore bad husbands mend your lives, And be more kinder to your Wives. To the Tune of, Hey ho my Honey. All you young Ranting Blades, that spend your time in vain, Remember that old age, you cannot it refrain: And whilst that you are young, this Caveat take of me, Be ruled by no tempting tongue, to bring you to poverty. I have been a bad husband long and have spent store of silver and gold, Yet now Ile save something whist I am yong, to keep me when I am old. I had good store of means, and I liv’d most gallantly: But yet upon Whores and Queans, I spent it by and by: My Hoastis she was full of laughter, so long as I had money good store; And my Children must drink butt water, whilst I in the Ale-house did roar. I have been &c.

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Documents My Wife would me intreat, the Alehouse to refrain; Then I with anger great, made answear straight again: If you begin to scold, then I will hang thy coat; What woman her tongue can hold, when a man swallows all down his throat. I have been, &c. . . . Source: W. G. Day (ed.), The Pepys Ballads, vol. 2, Brewer, Cambridge, 1987, p. 22.

Document 20 Gervase Holles, Memorials of the Holles Family, 1656 Gervase Holles (1607–75) was a royalist in exile in the Netherlands when he put together this account of the history of his family. This extract describes the last years of his grandfather, also called Gervase Holles, and highlights some of the problems of old age among the gentry. . . . (being now very olde) he left London and retired himselfe into the country desirous to end his dayes amongst his children and kindred. So having shipt his trunckes and household stuffe he went to sea himselfe and sayled from Gravesend to Hull about the end of February, a strange voy-age and in a strange season for his yeares, being then about 74 yeares of age. From thence he came to Grimesby to my father wth whom he continued about a yeare untill Sr Percivall Willughby, by insinuating letters and praetence of better ayre, enticed him to him at Wollaton, where he continued about fower yeares: untill at length falling dangerously sicke Sr Percivall most dishonestly and ungratefully, in the extremity of his weaknes, employes one Percival Hynde a parson and one Harvy his servant to guide my grandfather’s hand to a release of all the debtes he owed him and after yt set his seale to themselves. But upon his recovery, he, getting notice of what was done, bid farewell to Sr Percivall Willughby and returned backe to my father . . . He lived after he made his last will just two yeares and two days and died at Great Grimesby in the law wainscot roome of my house there upon the fifth day of March 1627. He continued sick but two dayes nor could I understand (I was then in London) yt he died of any disease save the incur-able one of olde age. Had he lived until May day following he had accomplisht 81 yeares. His close was pious and his exit so free from sense of payne that he seemed to steale away out of the world, and he retayned his memory to the last. Source: A. C. Wood (ed.), Memorials of the Holles Family 1493–1656 by Gervase Holles, Camden Society, 3rd series, 55, 1937, pp. 122–4.

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Document 21 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 1580 Tusser originally issued his instructions in 1557 as A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry; the work was expanded and republished in 1570, 1577 and 1580 and instructions were included for housewives that give an indication of what was expected of them. Huswiferie 1 Getvp in the morning as soone as thou wilt, with ouerlong slugging good seruant is spilt. 2 Some slouens from sleeping no sooner get vp, but hand is in aumbrie [a cupboard], and nose in the cup. That early is donne, Count huswifely wonne. 3 Some worke in the morning may trimly be donne, Morning that all the day after can hardly be wonne. 4 Good husband without it is needfull there be, good huswife within as needfull as he. Cast dust into yard, And spin and go card. 5 Sluts corners auoided shall further thy health, much time about trifles shall hinder thy wealth. 6 Set some to peele hempe or else r[u]shes to twine, to spin and to card, or to seething of brine. Grind mault for drinke, See meate do not stinke. 7 Set some about cattle, some pasture to vewe, some mault to be grinding against ye do brewe. 8 Some corneth, some brineth, some will not be taught, where meate is attainted, there cookrie is naught. Source: W. Payne and S. J. Herrtage (eds), Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, Thomas Tusser. The Edition of 1580 collated with those of 1573 and 1577. Together with a Reprint, from the Unique Copy in the British Museum, of ‘A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie’, 1557, Trubner & Co, London, 1878, p. 75.

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Document 22 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693 Locke (1632–1704) was a philosopher, physician, scientist and politician. He is best remembered for his political ideas, but he also made a major contribution to the debate on the nature of the family. Here he outlines his view of the discipline of children, on which his Enlightenment successors were to build and which already owed much to humanist and Protestant thinkers. If severity carried to the highest pitch does prevail, and works a cure upon the present unruly distempter, it is often bringing in the room of it worse and more dangerous disease, by breaking the mind; and then, in the place of a disorderly young fellow, you have a low-spirited moped creature: who, however, with his un-natural sobriety he may please silly people, who commend tame inactive children, because they make no noise, nor give them any trouble; yet, at last, will probably prove as uncomfortable a thing to his friends, as he will be, all his life, an useless thing to himself and others. Beating then, and all other sorts of slavish and corporal punishments, are not the discipline fit to be used in the education of those who would have wise, good, and ingenious men; and therefore very rarely to be applied, and that only on great occasions, and in cases of extremity. On the other side, to flatter children by rewards of things that are pleasant to them, is as carefully to be avoided. He that will give to his apples, or sugar-plums, or what else of this kind he is more delighted with, to make him learn his book, does but authorise his love of pleasure, and cocker up that dangerous propensity, which he ought by all means to subdue and stifle in him. Source: P. Gay (ed.), John Locke on Education, Columbia University Press, New York, 1964, pp. 34–5.

Document 23 Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 1799 Mary Robinson (1758–1800) was a poet, novelist, actress and mistress of the Prince of Wales. Writing here at the end of her life under the name of Anne Francis Randall, her views contrast sharply with the conduct books of the preceding centuries. If a women be the weaker creature, why is she employed in laborious avocations? why compelled to endure the fatigue of household drudgery; to scrub, to scower, to labour, both late and early while the powdered lacquery only waits at the chair, or behind the carriage of his employer? Why are

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the women, in many parts of the kingdom, permitted to follow the plough; to perform the laborious business of the dairy; to work in our manufactories; to wash, to brew, and to bake, while men are employed in measuring lace and ribands; folding gauzes; composing artificial bouquets; fancying feathers, and mixing cosmetics for the preservation of beauty? I have seen, and every inhabitant of the metropolis may, during the summer season, behold strong Welsh girls carrying on their heads strawberries, and other fruits from the vicinity of London to Covent-Garden market, in heavy loads which they repeat three, four, and five times daily, for a very small pittance; while the male domesticks of our nobility are revelling in luxury, to which even their lords are strangers. Are thus women compelled to labour, because they are of the WEAKER SEX? Source: V. Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 238.

Document 24 A letter to the Master of the Rolls, from the Privy Council, 1590 The problems of both proto-industrialisation and urbanisation were no more keenly felt than in the City of London, which endured a radical increase in its size across the period. The problems this created for family life, and the fears of central government, can be seen in the attempts to force local authorities to deal with the problem in the sixteenth century. Wheras yt pleased the Queen’s Majestie more than two yeres past to command proclamacion to be published for the restrayning and prohibiting of new build-ing of howses and tenements for habitacion in and about the Citie of London, whereby as by the access of multitudes of people to inhabit the same and the pestering of many families in one smale house or tenemente termed inmats and undersitters, the Cittie hath ben over largelie increased to the decaie of other townes, bouroughes and villages within the Realme, but also th’infeccion of the plague thereby the rather continued and augmented to the los of great nombers of people, the inconveniencie whereof as of other like disorders hereby followed and like further to ensue (which at large were expressed in the said proclamacion) having been then by her Majestie and us graciouslie and gravely considered, moved her to take ordre for the reforming thereof and gave auctoritie to you as wel to forbid and inhibit al such buildinges as to punish the persons that after the publishing of the said proclamacion should attempt to build and erect houses and tenementes contrarie to her Majestie’s prohibicion therein contained. Howbeit her Majestie’s gracious intent and care had from I sic the preventing of th’inconviencies and disorders aforesaid have taken so slendre effect as sithence the said proclamacion published the building of houses and tenementes about the Citie hath contin[u]ed and gretlie increased, which her Majestie conceaveth

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to have grown especiallie by the negligence and remisnes of you to whom the charge and trust thereof hath bin committed, whereat her Highness and we do not a litle marvaile. Her pleasure and straight comaundment therefore is that with all diligence upon the receipt hereof you call unto you some of the Justices of Peace in the countie of Middlesex or a y that is a Lord of any liberties, or steuards or bailives, and imparting unto them the tenour of theis our lettres, you proceed by waie of inquisition upon the oaths of good and sufficient persons, and to discover and find out throw all parties of your jurisdiction what houses &c. have ben from the tyme of the prohibicion mentioned in the proclamacion until this daie to the same builded and errected by any person or persons, and who hath bin the principle offendours therein, and thereof receiving their presentements by oath, to make a formal certificat thereof in writing to be sent to us with al expedicion, and to take good bonds of such as shalbe found to have so offended to appeare before us at Star Chamber to answer their offence according to the tenour of her Majestie’s proclamacion at such daie and tyme as shalbe signified unto you . . . Source: R. H. Tawney and E. Power (eds), Tudor Economic Documents, 1, Longmans, London, 1924, pp. 130–1.

Document 25 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1726 Defoe’s (1660–1731) impressionistic account of his tours of Britain contains one of the best descriptions of the functioning of proto-industrial cloth manufacturing in West Yorkshire and the villages around Halifax and Huddersfield. Among the manufacturers houses are likewise scattered an infinite number of cottages or small dwellings, in which dwell the workmen which are employed, the women and children of whom, are always busy carding, spinning, &c. so that no hands being unemploy’d, all can gain their bread, even from the youngest to the antient; hardly any thing above four years old, but its hands are sufficient to it itself. This is the reason also why we saw so few people without doors; but if we knock’d at the door of any of the master manufacturers, we presently saw a house full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-fat, some dressing the cloths, some in the loom, some one thing, some another, all hard at work and full employed upon the manufacture, and all seeming to have sufficient business. Source: G. D. H. Cole, and D.C. Browning (eds), Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 2, Everyman, London, 1962, p. 195.

Glossary

£sd Pounds, shillings and pence. 12d = 1s; 20s = £1. Affinal kin Those kin where a relationship is created by law or custom. Aggregative analysis The production of statistics concerned with demography by comparing different pieces of quantitative evidence. Bilateral descent A system of kinship where descent is counted through both mothers and fathers. Conjugal couple A man and woman who are (usually) married. Conjugal family One of many terms to describe families composed only of parents and their children, but lacking implications of mental or residential isolation that are associated with the term ‘nuclear family’. Consanguineal kin Kinship through ‘blood’. Coroner’s jury Usually a collection of local people, called to decide the reasons for the death of an individual. Danse macabre A late medieval artistic motif that signified the universality of death by showing a dance of the dead with individuals from different social groups. Dispensation Permission to disregard some of the laws of the Church, most commonly those on marriage. Ego-centred kinship A kinship system based on individuals where each has a distinct set of kin and distinct names for them. This is sometimes known as an Eskimo system. Family of orientation The family into which an individual is born and where they are usually brought up. Family of procreation The family that an individual creates, usually for the purpose of having children. Family reconstitution A method of deriving findings from demographic evidence by connecting the pieces of evidence concerning individual and family groups. Gavelkind A series of customs in Kent that encouraged partible inheritance. Mean household size A measure of the average numbers of people resident within a household in a given community.

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Middling sort A term used in the later part of the period to describe those in professions and landholders who were not members of the titled aristocracy. Mores The social rules and expectations of a society. Northwest European marriage pattern A pattern of late marriage and a large proportion of unmarried individuals, often said to predominate north and west of an imaginary line from Brest to St Petersburg. Nuclear family One of many terms to describe a family composed only of parents and their children. The implication is one of mental or residential isolation. Partible inheritance A system where inheritance is divided between several children, usually sons, on the death of a father. Patriarchal family A family form identified by Frederick Le Play in which relatively distant kin share residence and/or ownership of property. Patriarchy Rule by fathers, and therefore by old men, often used to describe a system where women are subordinate to men. Primogeniture A system of inheritance where the eldest son acquires the entire estate on the death of his father. Servant One in a subservient role to another. They are often divided into domestic (home) servants and servants in husbandry (agricultural). Spiritual kinship The most common term for relationships that mirror consanguinity, but are usually created through religious ceremonies. The most important form in medieval and early modern England was godparenthood. Spousals A promise of marriage in the present tense in front of witnesses, or in the future tense followed by the sexual act. These were binding in popular opinion and law as much as marriage. Stem family (famille souche) A family form identified by Frederick Le Play, in which one child (usually the eldest or youngest son) remains in the parental home, even when married, and then inherits the estate on his parents’ death. Strict settlement A system helped to keep intact the estate of a man without sons by entailing it away from daughters towards a single male relative. Unigeniture A system of inheritance where an estate is divided equally between children on the death of their parents. Sometimes only sons inherit, but sometimes all children. Unstable family The term used by Frederick Le Play to describe families composed only of the conjugal couple and their children. Wardship A system by which the property, and sometimes the person, of a minor was managed by the Crown.

Guide to further reading

Primary sources 1 Aubrey, J., Miscellanies upon Various Subjects, volume 2, London, 1696. 2 Aughterson, K. (ed.), Renaissance Women, Constructions of Femininity in England, Routledge, London, 1995. 3 Davis, N. (ed.), The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983. 4 Emmison, F. G. (ed.), Elizabethan Life: Disorder, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, 1970. 5 Emmison, F. G. (ed.), Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts, Essex County Council, Chelmsford, 1973. 6 Gough, R., The History of Myddle, D. Hey (ed.), Penguin, London, 1981. 7 Houlbrooke, R. A. (ed.), English Family Life 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries, Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. 8 Henderson, K. U., and McManus, B. F. (eds), Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 1985. 9 Kirby, J. (ed.), The Plumpton Letters and Papers, Camden Society, 5th series, 8, 1996. 10 MacCulloch, D., and Hughes, P. (eds), ‘A bailiff’s list and chronicle from Worcester’, Antiquaries Journal, 75, 1995. 11 Macfarlane, A. (ed.), The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–83, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976. 12 Millard, A. (ed.), Francis Bacon: The Works, London, 1753. 13 Moody, J. (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, Sutton, Stroud, 1998. 14 Opie, P., and Opie, I. (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1951. 15 Parkinson, R. (ed.), The Autobiography of Henry Newcome, 2 vols, Chetham Society, old series, 26 and 27, 1852. 16 Rollins, H. E. (ed.), The Pepys Ballads: 1691–1693. Nos. 342–427, Volume 6 of The Pepys Ballads, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931.

General social and religious histories 17 Archer, I. W., The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.

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18 Collinson, P., The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988. 19 Coward, B., Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England 1590–1750, Longman, London, 1988. 20 Coster, W., ‘Popular religion and the parish register 1538–1603’ in K. G. Gibbs, and B. Kumin (eds), The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997. 21 Davis, N. Z., Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1987. 22 Hutton, R., The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994. 23 Laslett, P., The World We Have Lost – Further Explored, Methuen, London, 1965, 1983. 24 Malcolmson, R. W., Life and Labour in England 1700–1780, Hutchinson, London, 1981. 25 Reay, B., Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750, Longman, London and New York, 1998. 26 Sharpe, J. A., Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750, Longman, London, 1984. 27 Spufford, M., Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 28 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, Vantage, London, 1966. 29 Wrightson, K., English Society 1580–1680, Hutchinson, London, 1982.

General histories and historiographies of the family 30 Anderson, M., Approaches to the History of the Western Family 1500–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, 1995. 31 Berry, H., and Foyster, E., (eds), The Family in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 32 Blommaert, J., Discourse: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. 33 Burns, R. M., Historiography: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, Taylor & Francis, London, 2006. 34 Casey, J., The History of the Family, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989. 35 Durston, C., The Family in the English Revolution, Blackwell, Oxford, 1989. 36 Flandrin, J. L., Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. 37 Goody, J., The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. 38 Goody, J., The European Family, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. 39 Hanawalt, B. A., The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986. 40 Houlbrooke, R. A., The English Family 1450–1700, Longman, London, 1984.

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41 Laslett, P., Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977. 42 Lasch, C., Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, Basic Books, New York, 1977. 43 Merquior, J. G., Foucault, Fontana Press, London, 1985. 44 Mitteraur, M., and Sieder, R., The European Family, Blackwell, Oxford, 1972. 45 Vann, R. T., ‘Marxism and historians of the family’ in H. Kozicki (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1993.

Local studies 46 Chalklin, C. W., Seventeenth-Century Kent: A Social and Economic History, Longman, London, 1965. 47 Fletcher, A., A County Community at Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660, Longman, London, 1975. 48 Hey, D. G., An English Rural Community: Myddle under the Tudors and Stuarts, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1974. 49 James, M. E., Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of the Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region 1500–1640, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974. 50 Levine, D., and Wrightson, K., The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560–1765, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991. 51 Phythian-Adams, C., Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. 52 Razi, Z., Life, Marriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demography in Halesowen 1270–1400, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 53 Spence, R. T., ‘The pacification of the Cumberland Borders, 1593–1628’, Northern History, 13, 1977. 54 Spufford, M., Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Sutton, London, 1974, 2000. 55 Watts, Sheldon J., and Watts, Susan J., From Border to Middle Shire: Northumberland 1586–1625, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1975. 56 Wrightson, K., and Levine, D., Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, 1995.

Individual families and the aristocracy 57 Girouard, M., Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1978. 58 Macfarlane, A., The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970. 59 Rowse, A. L., The Case Books of Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age, Picador, London, 1976. 60 Seaver, P. S., Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London, Methuen, London, 1985. 61 Verney, H., The Verneys of Claydon: A Seventeenth-century English Family, Pergamon Press, London, 1968.

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Emotions 62 Bailey, J., Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012. 63 Baseotto, P., ‘Puritan children and the emotions of conversion’ in C. Jarzebowski and T. Safley (eds), Childhood and Emotion: Across Cultures 1450–1800, Routledge, London, 2014. 64 Boddice, R., ‘The affective turn: historicising the emotions’ in C. Tileaga˘ and J. Byford (eds), Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014. 65 DeMause, L. (ed.), The History of Childhood, Souvenir Press, London, 1976. 66 Karant-Nunn, S. C., The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010. 67 Madder, P., ‘How children were supposed to feel: how children felt: England 1350–1530’ in C. Jarzebowski and T. Safley (eds), Childhood and Emotion: Across Cultures 1450–1800, Routledge, London, 2014. 68 Mount, F., The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982. 69 O’Day, R., Family and Family Relationships 1500–1900: England, France and the United States of America 1500–1900, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1994. 70 Plamper, J., The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015. 71 Reddy, W. M., ‘Against constructionism: the historical ethnography of emotions’, Current Anthropology, 38, 1997. 72 Reddy, W. M., ‘Emotional liberty: politics and history in the anthropology of emotions’, Cultural Anthropology, 14, 1999. 73 Rosenwein, B. H., ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, 107, 2002. 74 Rosenwein, B. H., Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015. 75 Shorter, E., The Making of the Modern Family, Collins, London, 1976. 76 Stearns, P. N. and Stearns, C. Z., ‘Emotionology: clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards’, American Historical Review, 90, 1985. 77 Stone, L., Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1977. 78 Tarbin, S., ‘Raising girls and boys: fear, awe and dread in the early modern household’, in S. Broomhall, and S. Finn (eds), Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, London, 2015. 79 Trumbach, R., The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-century England, Academic Press, New York, 1978.

Household studies 80 Goose, N., ‘Household size and structures in early-Stuart Cambridge’ in J. Barry (ed.), The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in Urban History 1530–1688, Longman, London, 1990. 81 Herzog, D., Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2013.

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82 Laslett, P., ‘Mean family size since the sixteenth century’ in P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds), Household and Family in Past Time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972. 83 Laslett, P., and Wall, R. (eds), Household and Family in Past Time: Comparative Studies in the Size and Structure of the Domestic Group over the Last Three Centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and Colonial North America, with Further Materials from Western Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972. 84 Razi, Z., ‘The myth of the immutable English family’, Past and Present, 140, 1993. 85 Tadmor, N., ‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 151, 1996. 86 Vickery, A., Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2010. 87 Wachter, K. W., Hammel E. A., and Laslett, P. (eds), Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure, Academic Press, New York, 1978.

Demographic studies 88 Borsay, P., Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland: Change, Convergence, and Divergence, British Academy, 2002. 89 Dobson, M. J., Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 90 Dyer, A., ‘Bastardy and prenuptial pregnancy in a Cheshire town during the eighteenth century’, Local Population Studies, 49, 1992. 91 Glass, D. V., and Eversley, D. E. C. (eds), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, Edward Arnold, London, 1965. 92 Harding, V., Baker, P., Davies, M., Merry, M., Newton, G., Myhill, O., and Smith, R. M., People in Place: Families, Households and Housing in Early Modern London, Centre for Metropolitan History, London, 2008. 93 Hollingsworth, T. H., ‘The demography of the English peerage’, Population Studies, 18 (supplement), 1964. 94 Laslett, P., Oosterveen, K., and Smith, R. M. (eds), Bastardy and Its Comparative History, Edward Arnold, London, 1980. 95 Newton, G., ‘Infant mortality variations, feeding practices and social status in London between 1550 and 1750’, Social History of Medicine, 24 (2), 2011. 96 Newton, G., ‘Recent developments in making family reconstitutions’, Local Population Studies, 87, 2011. 97 Radtke, A., ‘Rethinking the medical causes of infant death in early modern Europe: a closer look at church registers and medical terminology’, The History of the Family, 7, 2002. 98 Rotherberg, R. I., and Rabb, T. K. (eds), Population and Economy: Population and History from the Traditional to the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986. 99 Schofield, R. S., ‘The representativeness of family reconstitution’, Local Population Studies, 8, 1972. 100 Schofield, R. S., ‘English marriage patterns revisited’, Journal of Family History, 10, 1985. 101 Scott, J., and Tilly, L., Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth-century Europe, Studies in Society and History, 17, 1975.

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102 Smith, R. M., and Oeppen, J., ‘Place and status as determinants of infant mortality in England c. 1550–1837’ in E. Garrett, C. Galley, N. Shelton and R. Woods (eds), Place and Status as Determinants of Infant Mortality in England c. 1550–1837, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007. 103 Soulden, D., ‘Movers and stayers in family reconstitution populations’, Local Population Studies, 33, 1984. 104 Weir, D. R., ‘Rather never than late: celibacy and age at marriage in English cohort fertility, 1541–1871’, Journal of Family History, 9, 1990. 105 Wrigley, E. A., ‘Family limitation in pre-industrial England’, Economic History Review, 19, 1966. 106 Wrigley, E. A., and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, Edward Arnold, London, 1981, 1989.

Life cycle and life course 107 Berkner, L. K., ‘Rural family organisation in Europe: a problem in comparative history’, Peasant Studies Newsletter, 1, 1972. 108 Berkner, L. K., ‘The use and misuse of census data for the historical analysis of family structure’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 5, 1975. 109 Bryman, A., Bythewas, W., Allatt, P., and Keil, T. (eds), Rethinking the Life Cycle, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1987. 110 Chaytor, M., ‘Household and kinship: Ryton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, History Workshop Journal, 10, 1980. 111 Cressy, D., Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 112 Erickson, A. L., Women and Property in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 1993. 113 Glick, P. C., and Parke, R., ‘New approaches in studying the life cycle of the family’, Demography, 2, 1965. 114 Hareven, T. K., ‘The family as process: the historical study of the family cycle’, Journal of Social History, 7, 1974. 115 Hareven, T. K. (ed.), Transitions, the Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, Academic Press, New York, 1978. 116 Levine, D., Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism, Academic Press, New York, 1977.

Inheritance 117 Bonfield, L., ‘Affective families and strict settlements in early modern England’, English Historical Review, 39, 1986. 118 Bonfield, L., Devising, Dying and Dispute: Probate Litigation in Early Modern England, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2012. 119 Clay, C., ‘Marriage, inheritance, and the rise of large estates in England, 1660–1815’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, 21, 1968. 120 Coster, W., ‘ “To bring them up in the fear of God”: guardianship in the Diocese of York, 1509–1668’, Continuity and Change, 10, 1995. 121 Erickson, A. L., Women and Property in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 1993. 122 Faith, R., ‘Peasant families and inheritance customs in the later middle ages’, Agricultural History Review, 14, 1966.

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123 Hoyle, R. W., ‘The land–family bond in England’, Past and Present, 146, 1995. 124 Larmintie, V., ‘Settlement and sentiment: inheritance and personal relationships among two Midland gentry families in the seventeenth century’, Midland History, 12, 1987. 125 Macfarlane, A., The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979. 126 Spufford, M., ‘Peasant inheritance customs and land distribution in Cambridgeshire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries’, in J. Goody, J. Thirsk and E. P. Thompson (eds), Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976. 127 Sreenivasen, G., ‘The land-family bond at Earls Colne (Essex) 1550–1650’, Past and Present, 131, 1991. 128 Thirsk, J., ‘Younger sons in the seventeenth century’, History, 54, 1969. 129 Vann, T. K., ‘Wills and the family in an English town: Banbury, 1550–1800’, Journal of Family History, 4, 1979.

Kinship 130 Coster, W., ‘Kinship and inheritance in early modern England: three Yorkshire parishes’, Borthwick Papers, 82, 1993. 131 Coster, W., ‘ “From fire and water”: the responsibilities of godparents in early modern England’, Studies in Church History, 31, 1994. 132 Coster, W., Baptism and Spiritual Kinship in Early Modern England, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002. 133 Cressy, D., ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early Modern England’, Past and Present, 113, 1986. 134 Grassby, R., Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the EnglishSpeaking World, 1580–1740, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001. 135 Hill, C., ‘Sex, marriage and the family in England’, Economic History Review, 31, 1978. 136 Mitson, A. ‘The significance of kinship networks in the seventeenth century: south-west Nottinghamshire’ in C. Phythian-Adams (ed.), Societies, Culture and Kinship 1580–1850, Leicester University Press, Leicester, 1993. 137 Reay, B., ‘Kinship and the neighborhood in nineteenth-century rural England: the myth of the autonomous nuclear family’, Journal of Family History, 21, 1996. 138 Smith, R. M., ‘Kin and neighbours in a thirteenth-century Suffolk community’, Journal of Family History, 4, 1979. 139 Wiebracht, B., ‘First-cousin marriage in Tudor and Stuart England: 1540–1688’, Journal of Family History, 40, 2015. 140 Wolfram, S., In-Laws and Outlaws: Kinship and Marriage in England, Croom Helm, London, 1987. 141 Wrightson, K., ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal, 12, 1981.

Youth and service 142 Bailey, B. G., Bernard, M. E., Carrier, G., Elliott, C. L., Langdon, J., Leishman, N., Mlynarz, M., Mykhed, O., and Sidders, L. C., ‘Coming of age and the family in medieval England’, Journal of Family History, 33, 2008.

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143 Ben-Amos, I., Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1994. 144 Brigden, S., ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, Past and Present, 95, 1982. 145 Cooper, S. M., ‘Service to servitude? The decline and demise of life-cycle service in England’, The History of the Family, 10, 2005. 146 Gibbs, G. G., ‘Child marriages in the Diocese of Chester, 1561–1565’, Journal of Local and Regional Studies, 8, 1988. 147 Gillis, J. R., Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations 1770–Present, Academic Press, New York, 1974. 148 Green, I., ‘ “For children in years and children in understanding”: the emergence of the English catechism under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37, 1986. 149 Griffiths, P., Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. 150 Kussmaul, A., Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981. 151 Lambrecht, T., ‘English individualism and continental altruism? Servants, remittances, and family welfare in eighteenth-century rural Europe’, European Review of Economic History, 17, 2013. 152 Meldrum, T., Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household, Longman, London, 2000. 153 Mitterauer, M., A History of Youth, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. 154 Pelling, M., ‘Apprenticeship, health and social cohesion in early modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 37, 1994. 155 Seaver, P., ‘A social contract? Master against servant in the Court of Requests’, History Today, 39, 1989. 156 Sharpe, J. A., ‘Domestic homicide in early modern England’, Historical Journal, 24, 1981. 157 Smith, S. R., ‘London apprentices as seventeenth-century adolescents’, Past and Present, 61, 1973. 158 Tudor, P., ‘Religious instruction for children and adolescents in the early English Reformation’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34, 1984. 159 Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History, 3, 1978. 160 Wright, S. J., ‘Confirmation, catechism and communion: the role of the young in the post-Reformation church’, in S. J. Wright (ed.), Parish Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, Hutchinson, London, 1988. 161 Yarbough, A., ‘Apprentices as adolescents in seventeenth-century Bristol’, Journal of Social History, 13, 1979.

Gender 162 Amussen, S. D., ‘Gender, family and the social order’ in A. Fletcher and J. Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 163 Amussen, S. D., An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993. 164 Charlton, K., Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 2002.

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165 Chaytor, M., ‘Husband(ry): narratives of rape in the seventeenth century’, Gender and History, 7, 1995. 166 Conaghan, J., Law and Gender, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. 167 Cressy, D., ‘Gender trouble and cross-dressing in early modern England’, The Journal of British Studies, 35, 1996. 168 Cressy, D., Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 169 Deal, L. K., ‘Widows and reputation in the Diocese of Chester, England, 1560–1650’, Journal of Family History, 23, 1998. 170 Dugaw, D., Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989. 171 Flather, A., ‘Gender and the organisation of sacred space’ in P. Stock (ed.), The Uses of Space in Early Modern History, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2015. 172 Fletcher, A., Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1995. 173 Foyster, E. A., Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage, Longman, London, 1999. 174 Froide, A. M., Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. 175 Goldberg, P. J. P. (ed.), Women in English Medieval Society, Sutton, London, 1997. 176 Gowing, L., ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 34, 1984. 177 Gowing, L., Domestic Dangers: Women, Work and Sex in Early Modern London, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. 178 Gowing, L., Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2003. 179 Gowing, L., Gender Relations in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 2014. 180 Harvey, K., ‘Men making home: masculinity and domesticity in eighteenth-century Britain’, Gender and History, 21, 2009. 181 Hindle, S., ‘The shaming of Margaret Knowsley: gossip, gender and the experience of authority in early modern England’, Continuity and Change, 9, 1994. 182 Hufton, O., ‘Women without men: widows and spinsters in Britain and France in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Family History, 9, 1984. 183 Ingram, M. J., ‘ “Scolding women cucked or washed”: a crisis in gender relations in early modern England’ in J. L. Kermode and G. Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 1994. 184 Ingram, M. J., ‘Juridical folklore in England illustrated by rough music’ in C. W. Brooks and M. Lobban (eds), Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150–1900, Bloomsbury, London, 1997. 185 Jones, D., Rebecca’s Children: A Study of Rural Society, Crime and Protest, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994. 186 King, H., The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013. 187 Laurence, A., Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1994. 188 Mendelson, S., and Crawford, P., Women in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

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189 O’Day, R., Women’s Agency in Early Modern Britain and the American Colonies: Patriarchy, Partnership and Patronage, Pearson/Longman, London, 2007. 190 Pollock, L. A., ‘Rethinking patriarchy and the family in seventeenth-century England’, Journal of Family History, 23, 1998. 191 Purvis, J., ‘From “women worthies” to post-structuralism? Debate and controversy in women’s history in Britain’, in J. Purvis (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, Routledge, London, 2008. 192 Scott, J. W. ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review, 91, 1986. 193 Shepard, A., Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. 194 Shoemaker, R. B., Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? Routledge, London, 2014. 195 Simonton, D., and Montenach, A. (eds), Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830, Routledge, London, 2013. 196 Turner, D. M., Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 197 Vickery, A., ‘An Englishman’s house is his castle? Privacies, boundaries and thresholds in the eighteenth-century London house’, Past and Present, 199, 2008. 198 Walker, G., ‘Expanding the boundaries of female honour in early modern England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 6, 1996. 199 Walker, G., ‘Rereading rape and sexual violence in early modern England’, Gender and History, 10, 1998. 200 Walker, G., Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 201 Wiesner, M. E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000.

Sexuality 202 Bray, A., ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, 29, 1990. 203 Brundage, J. A., ‘Prostitution in the medieval canon law’, Signs, 1, 1976. 204 Capp, B., ‘The double standard revisited: plebeian women and male sexual reputation in early modern England’, Past and Present, 162, 1999. 205 Crawford, K., The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010. 206 Crawford, P., ‘Sexual knowledge in England, 1500–1750’ in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. 207 Crawford, P., Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England, Pearson Education, London, 2004. 208 Dabhoiwala, F., ‘The pattern of sexual immorality in seventeenth and eighteenthcentury London’ in P. Griffiths and M. Jenner (eds), Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000. 209 Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, translated by R. Hurley, Pantheon, New York, 1978.

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210 Fox, A., ‘Ballads, libels and popular ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present, 145, 1995. 211 Garrett, J. M., ‘Witchcraft and sexual knowledge in early modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 13, 2013. 212 Hair, P. E. H., ‘Bridal pregnancy in rural England in earlier centuries’, Population Studies, 20, 1966. 213 Hair, P. E. H., ‘Bridal pregnancy in earlier rural England further examined’, Population Studies, 24, 1970. 214 Halperin, D. M., ‘Forgetting Foucault: acts, identities, and the history of sexuality’, Representations, 63, 1998. 215 Henderson, A., Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830, Longman, London, 1999. 216 Herrup, C., ‘The patriarch at home: the trial of the second Earl of Castlehaven for rape and sodomy’, History Workshop Journal, 41, 1996. 217 Hunt, M., ‘Afterword’ in J. Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1994. 218 Ingram, M., ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’, Past and Present, 105, 1984. 219 Ingram, M., Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 220 Ingram, M., ‘Charivari and shame punishments: folk justice and state justice in early modern England’ in H. Roodenberg and P. Spierenburg (eds), Social Control in Europe, Volume I: 1500–1800, Columbus, Caldicot, 2004. 221 Karras, R. M., Common Women, Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. 222 Laqueur, T., Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1990. 223 Laslett, P., ‘The bastardy-prone sub-society’, in P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith (eds), Bastardy and Its Comparative History, Edward Arnold, London, 1980. 224 McLuskie, K. E. ‘Lawless desires well tempered’ in S. Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: The Dynamics of Desire in the Renaissance, Routledge, London, 2005. 225 Moulton, I. F., Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000. 226 Moulton, I. F., Love in Print in the Sixteenth Century: The Popularization of Romance, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014. 227 Post, J. B., ‘A fifteenth-century customary of the Southwalk stews’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 5, 1977. 228 Price, V., ‘ “Made to write ‘whore’ upon”: Othello and the cultural projection of whoredom’, Genre, 28, 2008. 229 Quaife, G. R., Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives, Croom Helm, London, 1979. 230 Sedgwick, E. K., Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, Oakland, 1990. 231 Sharpe, J. A., ‘Defamation and sexual slander in early modern England: the church courts at York’, Borthwick Pamphlets, 58, York, 1980. 232 Smith, B. R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994.

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233 Toulalan, S., Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007. 234 Toulalan, S., The Routledge History of Sex and the Body: 1500 to the Present, Routledge, London, 2013. 235 Thomas, K., ‘The double standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 20, 1959. 236 Thomas, K., ‘Puritans and adultery: the Act of 1650 reconsidered’ in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in SeventeenthCentury History Presented to Christopher Hill, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978. 237 Traub, V., The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002. 238 Trumbach, R., ‘London’s sodomites: homosexual behavior and western culture in the 18th century’, Journal of Social History, 11, 1977. 239 Trumbach, R., ‘The birth of the queen: sodomy and the emergence of gender equality in modern culture, 1660–1750’ in M. Duberman, M. Vicinus and G. Chauncey, Jr (eds), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, New American Library, New York, 1989. 240 Warnicke, R., ‘Sexual heresy at the court of Henry VIII’, Historical Journal, 30, 1987. 241 Woodbridge, L., Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1984.

Marriage 242 Bailey, J., Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. 243 Carlson, E., Marriage in the English Reformation, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996. 244 Chapman, C. R., and Litton, P. M., Marriage Laws, Rites, Records and Customs, Lochin Publishing, Dursley, 1996. 245 Davidoff, L., and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, Routledge, London, 1987. 246 Durston, C., ‘Unhallowed wedlocks: the regulation of marriage during the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 31, 1988. 247 Erickson, A. L., ‘Common law versus common practice: the use of marriage settlements’, Economic History Review, 43, 1990. 248 Fissell, M., ‘Gender and generation: representing reproduction in early modern England’, Gender and History, 7, 1995. 249 Foyster, E., Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. 250 Gillis, J. R., For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985. 251 Hunt, J. M., ‘Wife beating, domesticity and women’s independence in eighteenthcentury London’, Gender and History, 4, 1992. 252 Macfarlane, A., Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. 253 Menefee, S., Wives for Sale: An Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce, Blackwell, Oxford, 1981. 254 O’Hara, D., ‘ “Ruled by my friends”: aspects of marriage in the Diocese of Canterbury, c. 1540–1570’, Continuity and Change, 6, 1991.

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255 Outhwaite, R. B., Clandestine Marriage in England 1500–1850, Hambleton, London, 1995. 256 Pennell, S., ‘ “Pots and pans history”: the material culture of the kitchen in early modern England’, Journal of Design History, 11, 1998. 257 Pennell, S., ‘Consumption and consumerism in early modern England’, The Historical Journal, 42, 1999. 258 Phillips, R., Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society, Cambridge, University Press, Cambridge, 1988. 259 Schofield, R. S., and Wrigley, E. A., ‘Remarriage intervals and the effect of marriage order on fertility’ in J. Dupaquiert, E. Hain, P. Laslett, M. Livi-Bacci and S. Sogner (eds), Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past, Academic Press, London, 1981. 260 Schutte, K., ‘Marrying out in the sixteenth century: subsequent marriages of aristocratic women in the Tudor era’, Journal of Family History, 38, 2013. 261 Shammas, C., ‘The domestic environment in early modern England and America’, Journal of Social History, 14, 1980. 262 Sharpe, J. A., ‘Domestic homicide in early modern England’, The Historical Journal, 24, 1981. 263 Slater, M., ‘The weightiest business: marriage in an upper-gentry family in seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, 72, 1976. 264 Stretton, T., ‘Marriage, separation and the common law in England, 1540–1660’ in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 265 Stone, L., The Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990. 266 Stone, L., Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England 1660–1753, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1995. 267 Wall, A., ‘Elizabethan precept and feminine practice: the Thynne family of Longleat’, History, 75, 1990. 268 Warner, J., and Lunny, A., ‘Marital violence in a martial town: husbands and wives in early modern Portsmouth, 1653–1781’, Journal of Family History, 28, 2003. 269 Wrigley, E. A., ‘Clandestine marriage in Tetbury in the late seventeenth century’, Local Population Studies, 10, 1973.

Childbirth 270 Berry, B. M., and Schofield, R. S., ‘Age at baptism in pre-industrial England’, Population Studies, 25, 1971. 271 Berry, H., and Foyster, E., ‘Childless men in early modern England’, in H. Berry and E. Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. 272 Biller, P., ‘Childbirth in the Middle Ages’, History Today, 36, 1986. 273 Coster, W., ‘Purity, profanity and Puritanism: the churching of women 1500–1700’, Women in the Church, Studies in Church History, 27, 1990. 274 Cressy, D., ‘Purification, thanksgiving and the churching of women in postReformation England’, Past and Present, 141, 1993. 275 McClaren, A., A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.

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276 Rusden, J., ‘The secret “iron tongs” of midwifery’, Historian, 30, 1991. 277 Schofield, R. S., ‘Perinatal mortality in Hawkshead, Lancashire 1581–1710’, Local Population Studies, 4, 1970. 278 Schofield, R. S., ‘Did the mothers really die? Three centuries of maternal mortality in the world we have lost’ in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. Wrightson (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure. Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on his Seventieth Birthday, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986. 279 Smith-Bannister, S., Names and Naming Patterns in England 1538–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 280 Tucker, N., ‘Boon or burden? Baby love in history’, History Today, 43, 1993. 281 Wilson, A., The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, UCL Press, London, 1995.

Childhood and parenthood 282 Ariès, P., Centuries of Childhood, Penguin, London, 1962. 283 Bailey, J., ‘ “Think wot a mother must feel”: parenting in English pauper letters c. 1760–1834’, Family and Community History, 13, 2010. 284 Ben-Amos, I. K., ‘Reciprocal bonding: parents and their offspring in early modern England’, Journal of Family History, 25, 2000. 285 Charlton, K., ‘Mothers as educative agents in pre-industrial England’, History of Education, 23, 1994. 286 Cunningham, H., ‘The employment and unemployment of children in England c. 1680–1851’, Past and Present, 126, 1990. 287 Cunningham, H., Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, Longman, London, 1995. 288 Davidoff, L., Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780–1920, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012. 289 Fields, V., ‘The age of weaning in Britain’, Journal of Biosocial Science, 14, 1982. 290 Fields, V. (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England. Essays in Honour of Dorothy McLaren, Routledge, London, 1990. 291 Fletcher, A., Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2008. 292 Ford, W., ‘The problem of literacy in early modern England’, History, 78, 1993. 293 Gathorne, H. J., The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1972. 294 Gowing, L., ‘Secret births and infanticide in seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, 156, 1997. 295 Hall, M. A. ‘Merely players? Playtime, material culture and medieval childhood’ in D. M. Hadley and K. A. Hemer (eds), Medieval Childhood, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2014. 296 Hanawalt, B., Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993. 297 Harris, A., ‘That fierce edge: sibling conflict and politics in Georgian England’, Journal of Family History, 37, 2012.

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298 Hendrick, H., ‘Periods of history: child labor and child work c. 1800–present’ in H. D. Hindman (ed.), The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey, Routledge, New York and London, 2014. 299 Hindle, S., ‘ “Waste” children? Pauper apprenticeship under the Elizabethan poor laws, c. 1598–1697’ in P. Lane, N. Raven and K. Snell (eds), Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850, Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004. 300 Honeyman, K., Child Workers in England, 1780–1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013. 301 Levene, A., The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-Century London, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2012. 302 Newton, H., The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012. 303 Miller, N. J., and Yavneh, N., ‘Thicker than water: evaluating sibling relations in the early modern period’ in N. J. Miller (ed.), Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World Sisters, Brothers and Others, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006. 304 O’Day, R., Education and Society, 1500–1800: Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain, Longman, London, 1982. 305 Orme, N., ‘The culture of children in medieval England’, Past and Present, 141, 1993. 306 Orme, N., ‘Children and the church in medieval England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45, 1994. 307 Orme, N., Medieval Children, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 2003. 308 Pinchbeck, I., and Hewitt, M. (eds), Children in English Society. Vol. I: From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century, Routledge, London, 1969. 309 Plumb, J., ‘The new world of children in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 67, 1975. 310 Pollock, L., Forgotten Children: Parent – Child Relationships 1500–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983. 311 Rahikainen, M., Centuries of Child Labour: European Experiences from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. 312 Salmon, M., ‘The cultural significance of breastfeeding and infant care in early modern England and America’, Journal of Social History, 28, 1994. 313 Sather, K., ‘Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century child-rearing: a matter of discipline’, Journal of Social History, 22, 1989. 314 Scheussler, M., ‘ “She hath over grown all that she ever hath”: children’s clothing in the Lisle letters, 1533–40’, in R. Netherton and G. R. Owen-Crocker (eds), Medieval Clothing and Textiles Volume 3, Boydell Press, Oxford, 2007. 315 Schofield, R. S., ‘Dimensions of illiteracy, 1750–1850’, Explorations in Economic History, 10, 1972. 316 Shahar, S., Childhood in the Middle Ages, Routledge, London, 1990. 317 Shahar, S., ‘The boy bishop’s feast: a case-study in church attitudes towards children in the high and late Middle Ages’, Studies in Church History, 31, 1994. 318 Stone, L., ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640’, Past and Present, 28, 1964. 319 Thomas, K., ‘The meaning of literacy in early modern England’ in G. Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986.

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320 Thomas, K., ‘Children in early modern England’, in G. Avery and J. Briggs (eds), Children and their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989. 321 Watson, V., ‘Jane Johnson: a very pretty story to tell children’ in M. Hilton, M. Styles and V. Watson (eds), Opening the Nursery Door, Routledge, London, 2012. 322 Wrightson, K., ‘Infanticide in earlier seventeenth-century England’, Local Population Studies, 15, 1975.

Death 323 Ariès, P., Western Attitudes Towards Death, Marion Boyers, London, 1976. 324 Ariès, P., The Hour of Our Death, Allen Lane, London, 1981. 325 Arnold, C., Necropolis: London and Its Dead, Simon and Schuster, London, 2008. 326 Beaver, D., ‘ “Sown in dishonour, raised in glory”: death, ritual and social organization in northern Gloucestershire, 1590–1690’, Social History, 17, 1992. 327 Caciola, N., ‘Wraiths, revenants and ritual in medieval culture’, Past and Present, 152, 1996. 328 Coster, W., ‘Tokens of innocence: infant baptism, death and burial in early modern England’ in B. Gordon and P. Marshall (eds), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 329 Coster, W., ‘A microcosm of community: burial, space and society in Chester 1598–1633’ in W. Coster and A. Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. 330 Daniel, C., Death and Burial in England 1066–1550, Routledge, London, 1997. 331 Dunn, R., ‘ “Monuments answerable to men’s worth”: burial patterns, social status and gender in late medieval Bury St Edmunds’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 46, 1995. 332 Jupp, P. C., and Gittings, C., Death in England: An Illustrated History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999. 333 Gittings, C., Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England, Routledge, London, 1984. 334 Gordon, B., and Marshall, P. (eds), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 335 Gowing, L., ‘The haunting of Susan Lay: servants and mistresses in seventeenthcentury England’, Gender and History, 14, 2002. 336 Harding, V., ‘ “And one more may be laid there”: the location of burials in early modern London’, London Journal, 14, 1989. 337 Houlbrooke, R. A., ‘The Puritan death-bed c. 1560–1660’ in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1560–1700, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996. 338 Houlbrooke, R. A., Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. 339 Litten, J., The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450, Robert Hales, London, 1991.

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340 Llewellyn, N., Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009. 341 Marshall, P., ‘Fear, purgatory and polemic in Reformation England’, in W. Naphy and P. Roberts (eds), Fear in Early Modern Society, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997. 342 Marshall, P., Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. 343 Marshall, P., Mother Leakey and the Bishop: A Ghost Story, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. 344 Marshall, P., ‘Transformations of the ghost story in post-Reformation England’ in H. Conrad-O’Briain and J. A. Stevens (eds), The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Four Courts Press, Dublin, 2010. 345 MacDonald, M., and Murphy, T. R., Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990. 346 Murphy, T. R., ‘ “Woful childe of parents rage”: suicide of children and adolescents in early modern England, 1507–1710’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 17, 1986. 347 Porter, S., ‘From death to burial in seventeenth-century England’, Local History, 23, 1993. 348 Schofield, R. S., ‘Perinatal mortality in Hawkshead, Lancashire 1581–1710’, Local Population Studies, 4, 1970. 349 Tarlow, S., Ritual, Belief and the Dead in Early Modern Britain and Ireland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010. 350 Todd, B. J., ‘The remarrying widow: a stereotype reconsidered’ in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 1500–1800, Methuen, London, 1985. 351 Wilson, J., ‘Icons of unity’, History Today, 43, 1993.

Disability, poverty and old age 352 Von Arni, E. G., Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing, Medical Care, and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and Their Families During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, 1642–1660, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2001. 353 Botelho, L. A., ‘ “The old woman’s wish”: widows by the family fire? Widows’ old age provisions in rural England, 1500–1700’, The History of the Family, 7, 2002. 354 Botelho, L. A., Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2004. 355 Hudson, G.,‘Internal influences in the making of the English military hospital’, Journal of British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600–1830, 20, 2007. 356 Jordan, W. K., Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660: A Study of the Changing Patterns of English Social Aspirations, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959. 357 Jordan, W. K., The Charities of London, 1480–1660: The Aspirations and the Achievements of the Urban Society, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1960. 358 Jordan, W. K., The Charities of Rural England, 1480–1660: The Aspirations and the Achievements of the Rural Society, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1961. 359 Ottaway, S. R., The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. 360 Pelling, M., ‘Old age, poverty and disability in early modern Norwich’ in M. Pelling and R. M. Smith (eds), Life, Death and the Elderly, Routledge, London, 1991.

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361 Porter, R., Madness: A Brief History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. 362 Shahar, S., Growing Old in the Middle Ages: ‘Winter Clothes Us in Shadowed Pain’, Routledge, London, 1995. 363 Wall, R., ‘Bequests to widows and their property in early modern England’, The History of the Family, 15, 2010.

The impact of ideas 364 Bossy, J., ‘The Counter-Reformation and the people of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, 40, 1970. 365 Bossy, J., Christianity in the West 1400–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1985. 366 Brooks, C. W., Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008. 367 Capp, B., English Almanacs, 1500–1800: Astrology and the Popular Press, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1979. 368 Chartier, R., ‘Culture as appropriation: popular cultural uses in early modern France’ in S. L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin, 1984. 369 Crawford, P., Women and Religion in England 1500–1720, Routledge, London, 1993. 370 Davies, K. M., ‘Continuity and change in literary advice on marriage’, Social History, 1, 1977. 371 Davis, N. Z., ‘Some tasks and themes in the study of popular religion’ in C. Trinkaus and H. Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Brill, Leiden, 1978. 372 Durston, C., and Eales, J. (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1996. 373 Fox, A., Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. 374 Freedman, J. S., ‘Philosophical writings on the family in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Europe’, Journal of Family History, 27, 2002. 375 Galpern, A. N., ‘The legacy of late medieval religion in sixteenth-century Champagne’ in C. Trinkaus and H. O. Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Brill, Leiden, 1974. 376 Green, I., Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2013. 377 Hill, C., Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, Secker and Warburg, London, 1966. 378 Houlbrooke, R. A., Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520–1570, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979. 379 Outram, D., The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. 380 Ozment, S., When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1983. 381 Rendall, J., The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1985. 382 Roper, L., Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, London, 1994.

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383 Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, R. (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987. 384 Schucking, L. L., The Puritan Family: A Social History from the Literary Sources, Routledge, London, 1969. 385 Scribner, R., ‘Is a history of popular culture possible?’, History of European Ideas, 10, 1989. 386 Todd, M., ‘Humanists, Puritans and the spiritualised household’, Church History, 44, 1980. 387 Watt, T., Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993.

Economics 388 Anderson, M., Family Structure in Nineteenth-century Lancashire, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971. 389 Beer, A. L., ‘Social problems in Elizabethan London’ in J. Barry (ed.), The Tudor and Stuart Town: A Reader in Urban History 1530–1688, Longman, London, 1990. 390 Clark, A., The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge, London, 1919, 1982. 391 Clark, P., ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1580–1640’ in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700, Routledge, London, 1972. 392 Clark, P., ‘Migration in England during the late seventeenth century’, Past and Present, 83, 1979. 393 Clark, P., and Slack, P., English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976. 394 D’Cruze, P., ‘Care, diligence and “useful pride”: gender, industrialisation and the domestic economy, c. 1770–1840’, Women’s History Review, 3, 1984. 395 Everitt, A., ‘Social mobility in early modern England’, Past and Present, 33, 1966. 396 Harris, C. C., The Family and Industrial Society, Allen and Unwin, London, 1983. 397 Holderness, B. A., ‘ “Open” and “close” parishes in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Agricultural History Review, 20, 1972. 398 Horrell, S., and Humphries, J., ‘Old questions, new data, and alternative perspectives: families’ living standards in the industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 294, 1992. 399 Houston, R., and Snell, K. D. M., ‘Proto-industrialisation? Cottage industry, social change and Industrial Revolution’, Historical Journal, 27, 1984. 400 Jütte, R., Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. 401 King, S. A., ‘The English protoindustrial family: old and new perspectives’, The History of the Family, 8 (1), 2003. 402 King, S. A., and Timmins, G., Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution: English Economy and Society 1700–1850, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001. 403 Levine, D., ‘Industrialisation and the proletarian family in England’, Past and Present, 107, 1985.

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404 Medick, H., ‘The proto-industrial family economy: the structural function of household and family during the transition from peasant to industrial capitalism’, Social History, 1, 1966. 405 Medick, H., Industrialisation Before Industrialisation: Rural Industry and the Genesis of Capitalism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976. 406 O’Brien, K., ‘Companions of heart and hearth: hardship and the changing structure of the family in early modern English townships’, Journal of Family History, 39, 2014. 407 Pelling, M., ‘Apprenticeship, health and social cohesion in early modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 61, 1973. 408 Slack, P., Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England, Longman, London, 1988. 409 Thirsk, J., ‘Industries in the countryside’ in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961. 410 Thirsk, J., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 4: 1600–1640, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1967. 411 Thirsk, J., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 5: 1640–1750, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. 412 Wrigley, E. A., ‘A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy 1650–1750’, Past and Present, 37, 1967.

Index

abortion 84 Acomb, Yorkshire 18, 160 adolescence see youth adoption 62, 109 adultery 70, 80–1, 122 Adultery Act, 1650 124 Advent 69, 77 advice 12, 20, 43, 51, 64, 69, 122 affection 12–17, 116, 142; marital 80, 82; parental 97, 121, 142; sibling 92–3 affinal kinship 39 aggregative analysis 25 agriculture 29, 33–5, 60, 94–6, 128–32, 136; agrarian 128; pastoral 45, 94 alehouses 61, 64, 72, 96 Almondbury, Yorkshire 45, 85 alms see charity almshouses 106, 113 ancestors 39, 105 Anderson, Michael 7–9, 28, 135 Anne of Cleves 81 anthropology 9, 10, 38–9, 142 apprentices and apprenticeship 30, 57–62, 93–5, 110, 115, 132, 139; abuse and discipline of 98–9; in London 58–9, 93; and residence 19, 92, 95; and sex 62, 69 Archbishop Tenison’s School, London 98 architecture 16, 18–19, 43, 113 Ariès, Philippe 8, 13, 21, 90, 100, 142 aristocracy see nobles and nobility Aristotle 83, 125 Astell, Mary 124 Aubrey, John 107 aunts 39–41, 43 Austria 23 autobiographies 8, 16, 94–5

bachelors see never marrying individuals Bacon, Francis 5, 76 Bagot, Walter 44 Bailey, Joanne 88 ballads 59, 68, 72, 76, 95, 97, 165 Banbury, Oxfordshire 132 Bankside 70 baptisms 26–7, 39–40, 68–9, 87–8, 101; unbaptised children 105; see also parish registers Baptists 88 bastards and bastardy see illegitimacy Baxter, Richard 162 beatings see corporal punishment Becon, Thomas 80, 161 Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman 84 Berkner, Lutz 23 Bethlem Royal Hospital 113 betrothal 54, 77–8 Bible 16, 71, 79, 95, 112, 114, 122, 126 bigamy 18, 81 bilateral kinship 38–9 Birmingham 135 birth 24–7, 29, 43, 57–8, 68–9, 79, 83–7, 102, 134, 164; rates of 116 Black Death 4–5 blended families 111 Blithfield, Staffordshire 44 Boleyn, Anne 81 Book of Common Prayer 40, 156–7 Botelho, Lynn 114 bourgeois family 140, 143 Brasebridge, Joseph 19 breast-feeding 83, 88–9, 120 bridegrooms 27–78 brides 27–8, 64, 77–9 Bridewells 113

194

Index

Bristol 109, 134–5 brothels and bawdy houses 70 brothers see siblings Brownlow, William 15 Buggery Act, 1533 71 Bullinger, Heinrich 122 burial 24, 26, 101–8; see also parish registers Burke, Peter 51–2 Busby, Richard 98 Byland Abbey 107 Calvin, Jean 16, 67 Calvinism 16, 124; see also Puritanism Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure 8, 22, 100 Canterbury, Archdiocese of 36 Capp, Bernard 67 Cardington, Bedfordshire 130–1 Castlehaven, Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of 71 catechisms and catechising 59, 95, 157 Cathedrals 105, 112 Catherine of Aragon 40, 81 Catholic Church and Catholicism 15–16, 26, 41, 49, 66, 79, 87, 112, 120; and death 102–8, 120–4, 161; see also Pope and the Papacy Cavendish Cheyne, Lady Jane 93 celibacy 35, 122–3 Chamberlen, William (Guillaume) 85 chapbooks see popular print Charier, Roger 52 charitable trusts 106 charity 78, 110, 112–13 charivari 47, 53, 78 Chaytor, Miranda 9, 43, 70 child abandonment 110, 133 children and childhood 6, 8–9, 17, 22–5, 28, 30–43, 45, 48–9, 57–64, 66, 68–9, 71, 80–3, 103, 109–11, 114–16, 120–2, 124–34, 138–42; abuse of 84, 98–9; conception 83; and death 100–5; and discipline 97; infants 87–9, 101; newborn 84–5; unbaptised 105; and work 94–5; see also affection; education; inheritance; orphans; and siblings Christ’s Hospital, London 110 christenings see baptisms Church of England 62, 76–7, 81, 87–8, 103, 157, 162 churching of women 80, 85, 105

churchyards see graveyards Civil Wars 17, 52, 59, 113, 124 Clans 45–6 Clark, Alice 34, 130 Clark, Peter 135 Clifford, Lady Anne 15 clothes 34, 71, 73, 78, 89–90 coffins 103–4 Collinson, Patrick 122 commemoration 12, 16, 93, 103–6, 108 common and customary rights 32–4, 45 community 4, 18, 23–4, 41–2, 45, 52–3, 67, 76, 80, 82, 96, 114–15, 128, 135, 142; emotional 15, 124; see also neighbourhood and neighbours companionate marriage see love conduct books 8, 13, 18, 50–2, 63, 67, 80, 121, 138, 168 conjugal couples, family and groups 17–19, 22–3, 30–2, 41–3, 75 consanguinity 39–40, 42 contraception 83 Cornwall 132 coroner’s jury 102 coroner’s rolls 90 corporal punishment 12–13, 61, 79, 97 cot death see sudden infant death syndrome Counter Reformation 49, 51 County Durham 43, 132 courts 48, 50, 52, 64, 66, 68; assize 61, 98; church 18, 36, 67, 80; civil and common 47, 80–1; manorial 18 courtship 12, 43, 57, 59, 62–5, 69, 159 cousins 38–41, 43 Coventry 22, 135 Cox, Richard 98 Crafts 34, 59–61, 97; see also guilds Cranmer, Thomas 81, 161 Crawford, Patricia 67 cremation 101 Cressy, David 9, 43 Cromwell, Thomas 24 cross-dressing 72 crosses 104–5 cuckolds 52, 69, 161 Culpepper, Nicholas 164 Cumberland 45 customs 33, 36–7, 39 danse macabre 100 daughters 15, 17, 36–7, 40, 62–3, 70, 92, 120, 139

Index Davis, Kathleen 122 Davis, Natalie Zemon 106 death 6, 13, 14–15, 24–7, 29–32, 43, 57–8, 77, 80, 82, 84–5, 87, 93, 124, 132, 135, 139, 148–9, 152; attitudes toward 100–3; and inheritance 35–7; see also burials; infant mortality; and mortality rates death-bed 102–3, 124 Dee, John 89 Defoe, Daniel 67, 170 deMause, Lloyd 7, 13, 99 Derbyshire 90, 93, 115 Derrida, Jacques 10 Devil 59, 85, 94, 104, 107 Devon 132 diaries 8, 13, 19, 64, 80, 85, 88–90, 94–5, 121, 159 disability 109, 112–13, 116 disease 27, 40, 83, 93, 101–3, 112, 134; see also Black Death; sexually transmitted diseases dispensations 41 divorce 3, 81–2, 109, 139 domesticity 18, 19, 48, 76, 78, 88, 130, 140 double standard 48, 67, 70, 123–4, 126, 141 dowry 64, 78, 92 drama 52, 72 education 58, 62, 95–9, 120, 124–6, 138, 140, 168 Eggerton, Elizabeth Countess of Bridgewater 93 ego-centred kinship 38 Ekman, Paul 142 Elias, Norbert 49 Elizabeth I 72 Engels, Fredrich 140 Enlightenment 5, 51, 119, 124–7, 137, 168 Erasmus, Desiderius of Rotterdam 98, 120, 122, 124 eroticism 49–50, 68–9, 71–2 Essex 42, 61, 72, 82, 93, 98, 102, 159 Eton school 98 Evelyn, John 67 extended families 20, 93, 133 family of orientation 6, 24, 31, 78, 93 family of procreation 6 family reconstitution 25, 28 famine 25, 27, 101–2, 113

195

fathers and fatherhood 33, 37–9, 42, 61, 64, 78, 85, 87, 90, 111, 115, 120, 122, 139–41 femininity 47, 67, 72–4 feminism 48, 120 fenland 24, 33 fertility 27, 32, 136 fictive kinship 62 Finch, Anne, Countess of Nottingham 93 fishing 33 Flandrin, J. L. 8 Flather, Amanda 48 Fletcher, Anthony 90, 126 folklore 83, 104 folk songs 52 Forman, Simon 98 fornication 61, 63, 70, 84 fostering 109 Foucault, Michel 10, 49–51, 53, 67–8, 72, 125, 138 foundlings see child abandonment Fox, Adam 52 Foyster, Elizabeth 43 France 10, 13, 21, 25, 31, 47, 90 Freud, Sigmund 7 friends 41–2, 68, 78–80, 102–3, 106, 120 Frith, Mary see Moll Cutpurse Froide, Amy 43, 75 funeral sermons 103 funerals 103, 105 games 59, 61, 63, 91, 140 gavelkind 36 gender 7, 10, 47–9, 51, 53, 58, 60, 63, 65–6, 71–2, 93, 126–7, 138, 140, 160; and childhood 89–91; see also men; women gentlemen, gentlewomen and gentry 4, 24, 32, 43–4, 46, 63, 88, 115, 154, 163 Germany 106, 122, 124 ghosts 106–7 Gillingham, Kent 113 Gillis, John 63 Gloucestershire 95 godparents and godparenthood 40, 43, 68, 87, 89, 123 Goodnestone, Kent 113 Goody, Jack 9 gossip 67–9, 80 gossips see godparents and godparenthood

196

Index

Gouge, William 79–80 Gough, Richard 163–4 Gowing, Laura 51, 106 grandparents 40–1, 110, 116 Grassby, Richard 93 graveyards 78, 101, 105 grief 12–15, 82, 93, 124 guardians and guardianships 63, 109–10 Guardians of the Poor 110 guilds 15, 34, 59, 61, 135 Hackness, Yorkshire 79 Haddon, Northamptonshire 132 Hale, Matthew 70–1 Half-siblings 6, 39, 111 Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire 90 Harris, Amy 93 Harvey, Karen 76 Hawkhurst, Kent 113 hearses 103 Heaven 106 Hell 87, 106 Henry VIII 40, 81 Henry, Louis 25 heraldry 16, 38, 43, 104 heresy 71 Hill, Christopher 122 Hindle, Steve 67 Hoby, Lady Margaret 79 holidays 61; see also Advent; Lent; May Day Holles, Gervase 166 homicide 61, 82, 93; see also infanticide homosexuality 49–51, 71–2 Hook, Robert 5 Hooker, Richard 123 Hooper, John 81 Houlbrooke, Ralph 7, 9, 14, 80, 88, 120 House of Lords see Parliament households and 6–9, 19, 21–4, 26–8, 30–8, 41–6, 48, 53, 76, 82, 88, 94–6, 115, 121; dissolution 109; formation 57, 62, 64, 111, 130–1, 133, 135–6, 138–40, 149; management 79–80; spiritualisation of 122–3 housework 34, 95, 133 Howard, Catherine 40 humanism 16, 96, 119–22, 124, 126, 137 hunting 33 husband beating see spousal abuse

husbandmen 4–5, 44, 94, 128 husbands 4, 14, 19, 31, 33, 48, 53, 66, 69, 71, 79–82, 84, 110–11, 122, 126, 134, 140, 149, 165 illegitimacy and illegitimacy rates 16, 25–7, 62, 64, 68–9, 84, 141 indentures 61 individualism 12, 16–17, 104, 108 industrialisation and Industrial Revolution 3–5, 7, 16–17, 22, 61, 63, 94–5, 128, 131–42, 169–70 infant mortality 84, 88, 101–2, 134 infanticide 84, 133 infertility 84 infidelity 126 Ingram, Martin 80 inheritance 9, 16–17, 22, 27, 31–3, 35–8, 45, 58, 62, 70, 92, 94, 111, 130, 142, 154; see also inventories; probate Interregnum see Protectorate inventories 35 Italy 5, 119 James I 71–2 Johnson, Samuel 126 Jordan, W. K. 113 Josselin, Ralph 42, 63, 93, 159 Judgement Day 106 Karant-Nunn, Susan 124 Kent 36, 40, 42, 102, 113, 135 King, Helen 51 King, Steven 133 King’s Bench 103 Kirby Lonsdale, Westmorland 45 Lacan, Jacques 10 Lancashire 25, 131–3 landholding 33, 36 Laqueur, Thomas 51 Lasch, Christopher 140 Laslett, Peter 7–8, 10, 22–4, 27, 41, 69, 76, 157 Law 18, 37, 39–41, 53, 58, 63, 68, 72, 77, 79, 102–3; canon 40, 68, 102; common and civil 36, 64, 68, 71, 81, 84; criminal 33; see also probate Laws of Settlement 18 Le Play, Frederick 22 Leeds 135 Leicester 135

Index Leicestershire 133 Lent 77 lesbianism 72 letters and letter books 8, 13, 16, 19, 44, 80, 88, 107, 121, 147, 169 Levine, David 42, 133 life expectancy 25, 58, 102, 114 limbo 87 lineage 17 literacy and literacy rates 95–7, 126 Littlebury, Essex 72 Locke, John 125, 168 London 23, 36, 58–60, 62, 70, 72, 80, 85, 87, 93, 95, 97, 109–10, 113, 134–5, 147–8 Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, 1753 77–8 love 13–16, 63, 72, 80, 82, 98, 123, 140 Luther, Martin 122 Lutheranism 124 Macfarlane, Alan 9, 17, 42, 45, 80 maids see servants and service Malthus, Thomas 28 Manchester 135 manhood 48 Manners, John, Lord Roos 81 Mannheim, Karl 57 manors and manorial rolls 18, 36, 160; see also courts, manorial manufacturing 29, 34, 95, 115, 128, 130–2, 135, 142, 170; see also industrialisation and Industrial Revolution man-wives 85 Marlowe, Christopher 71 Marriage 8, 16, 20, 22, 24–8, 30–2, 34–5, 42–4, 57–8, 61–4, 75–82, 84, 92, 102, 104, 109, 114–15, 120, 122–4, 130, 132, 136, 139–41; breakdown 43, 80–2; of children 58; clandestine 18, 77, irregular 77; litigation 18; prohibitions on 40–1; and sex 66–71; see also love; remarriage; weddings Marshall, Peter 104, 106 Marx, Karl 138 Marxism and Marxist history 3, 10, 12, 22, 128 masculinity 47–8, 72–4, 76 Mass 16 masters 19, 61–2, 70–1, 94, 98–9

197

masturbation 125 matriarchy 62 Matthew, Tobias, Archbishop of York 104 May Day 52, 59, 63, 72 Mean Household Size 22 medical text books 50–1, 164 medicine 34, 67, 83, 100, 125, 164 Meldrum, Tim 19, 23 memorials 16, 104 men 8, 12–13, 16, 25, 27, 33–5, 47, 51, 58, 62–4, 67–72, 75–6, 80–4, 96, 103, 106, 110–11, 120, 124, 126, 130; see also gender; masculinity; marriage mental illness 49, 112–14 merchants 4, 19, 44, 96 middle class 4, 140 middling sort 4, 44, 46, 60, 63, 90, 114 midwives 34, 68, 85, 87, 103, 164 migration 45, 128, 134–5 mistresses 61, 98–9, 139 Mitteraur, M. 8 Moll Cutpurse, aka Mary Finch 72–3 mollies and molly houses 72 monasteries 112, 122 monuments 104–6, 121 moorland 33, 45 More, Thomas 120–1 mores 69, 161 mortality rates 6, 8, 13, 23, 25, 27–8, 32, 35, 37, 44–5, 57–8, 75, 82, 101–3, 110, 134–5, 142; see also infant mortality mothers and motherhood 38–9, 76, 84–5, 87–8, 90, 95–6, 110, 120, 134, 141; unmarried 84–7 Moulton, Ian 68 mourners and mourning 100, 102–3, 124 mourning jewellery 105 murder see homicide Myddle, Shropshire 44, 163–4 names and naming 22, 72, 87, 97, 108; see also surnames Napier, Richard 80 neighbourhoods and neighbours 15, 35, 42, 68, 78, 102 nephews 40, 44 Netherlands 31 never marrying individuals 27, 75–6 Newcome, Henry 81

198

Index

Newton, Isaac 5 nieces 40, 43 nobility and nobles 4, 19, 32, 41, 44, 46, 51, 63, 76, 90–1, 96, 109, 111, 140, 147 non-conformity 26, 88; see also Baptists Norfolk 116, 147 North America 15, 21, 47, 109 Northumberland 45, 132 Northwest European Marriage Pattern 3 Norwich 116, 158–9 nuclear family 12–13, 17–20, 22, 41–2, 133, 135, 143 nursery 90, 141 nursery rhymes 90 nurses and nursing 90, 110–11; see also wet-nursing O’Day, Rosemary 9, 24, 44, 48 O’Hara, Diana 43 old age 41, 84, 109, 113–16, 133 orgasms 71 original sin 97 orphans 41, 43, 95, 97, 109–12 Ozment, Steven 122 Paine, Thomas 126 parents and parenthood 6, 8–9, 14, 20, 22–4, 26, 30–9, 41, 48, 57–60, 63–4, 68, 78, 92, 94–8, 108–9, 112, 114–5, 121, 130, 133–4, 138, 141–2 133; and children 83–91 parents-in-law 39, 41 parish churches 40, 101, 104, 112, 158, 163 parish registers 8, 24, 30, 66, 69, 85–7, 101, 152 parishes 18, 22–4, 26, 28, 31, 42, 45, 53, 77, 87, 95, 102–4, 109–12, 132–3, 14; close and open 18, 131 Parker, Matthew 40, 156–7 Parliament 17, 59, 79, 81, 113, 128 Parr, William, Marquis of Northampton 81 partible inheritance 36 Paston, Margaret 14, 147–8 patriarchal family 13, 22 patriarchy 44, 48, 62, 72, 79, 98, 115, 122, 124, 126, 138–40 pauper funeral 105 penny-weddings 79 pensions 113, 115 Pepys, Samuel 68

Perkins, William 63, 76, 79 perversion 49–50 pews 105, 163 play 52, 59, 83, 90–2 pleasure 16, 49, 77, 85, 95 Plumpton, Sir Robert 115 Pollock, Linda 9, 14, 85, 88 poor houses 113 Poor Law 110, 112, 143 poor rates and poor relief 81, 114 Pope and the Papacy 81 popular culture 10, 47, 51–3, 126 popular print 50, 59, 68, 95, 97, 125, 141 pornography 16, 68, 126 Portsmouth 80–1 post-natal depression 85 poverty and the poor 4–5, 18, 22–5, 31–3, 35, 44, 46, 48, 60–2, 69, 76, 78–80, 85, 88, 90–1, 94–5, 103, 105–6, 109, 112–16, 133, 136, 138–43; see also poor law; poor rates and poor relief; vagrants prayers 16, 102, 104, 106–7 pregnancy 64, 69–71, 84–5, 141 primogeniture 17, 36–7, 92 privacy 18–19, 64, 140, 142 probate 30, 35–7, 87, 93, 102–3, 113, 154–6 proletarianisation 128–31 prostitution 62, 70–1, 136; see also brothels Protectorate 52, 79 Protestantism see Reformation proto-industrialisation see industrialisation puberty 58 Purgatory 102, 104, 106–7 Puritans and Puritanism 16, 19, 27, 49, 52, 59, 63, 66, 70, 79, 85, 87, 104, 122–4, 148, 159, 162–3 Radtke, Arnold 102 rape 67, 70–1 Reay, Barry 42, 68 Reddy, William 15, 142 Reformation 5, 16, 18, 49, 51, 61, 66, 69, 75, 81, 85, 87, 95 119, 121–24, 127, 136, 161; and death 102–8 remarriage 6, 68, 77, 109–11 Renaissance 5, 16, 66, 119–20, 125; see also humanism Restoration 27, 52, 70, 79, 113

Index retirement 31–2 Richardson, Samuel 90, 125 Rickman, John 25 rings 14, 64, 105 riots 72 rituals 24, 39, 48, 52, 59, 63, 77–80 Robinson, Mary 168–9 Roper, Lyndal 7, 122 Rosenwein, Barbra 15, 124 rough music see charivari Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 124, 126 Rowe, Elizabeth 107 Ryton, County Durham 43 St Augustine 120 St Margaret 14 St Pauls school, London 98 St Valentine’s Day 63 Salisbury 98, 116 Schofield, Roger 8, 26, 28 schoolmasters 96–9, 123 schools 95–8, 106; see also education Schucking, Levin L. 122 scolding 18, 47 Scotland 45, 97 sects see non-conformity Sedgewick, Eve 50 servants and service 6, 18–19, 23–4, 30–1, 34–5, 59–62, 67–8, 71–82, 88, 90, 92–3, 98, 110, 115, 130, 136, 139, 142 sex and sexuality 8, 10, 13, 18, 27, 40, 47–51, 53, 58, 62–75, 77, 82, 84, 98, 120, 123–6, 139, 141, 159, 161 sexually transmitted diseases 70, 83 Shakespeare, William 10, 66, 69, 71–2 Sheffield 135 Shepshed, Leicestershire 133 Shoemaker, Robert 48 Shorter, Edmund 8, 13, 20, 21, 41, 142 siblings 17, 36, 38–42, 92–4, 99, 111, 115; see also half-siblings Sider, R. 8 Sidney, Mary 93 sin 75, 102; see also original sin single women 41, 43, 60, 75–6; see also never marrying individuals skimmingtons see charivari slander 67 small holdings 35, 129–30 small landholder see husbandman sociology 7, 17, 29, 38, 57 sodomy 51, 71

199

sons 15, 17, 23, 36–7, 63, 92–3, 115, 138, 147 Southwalk 70 spinsters see single women spiritual kinship see godparenthood spousal abuse 18, 53, 80–1 spousals 64 Stearns, Carol Z. 15 Stearns, Peter N. 15 stem family 22, 133 step relationships 6, 39–40, 98, 111 stillbirth 84 Stone, Lawrence 8, 13, 16, 19, 21, 41, 80, 96–7, 142 Stretton, Tim 81 strict settlement 17 sudden infant death syndrome 84 suicide 102–3, 105 Sunday 61, 77, 87 surnames 38, 45 Sussex 102 swaddling 88–9, 125 Sweden 97 Switzerland 122 syphilis see sexually transmitted diseases Tables of Kindred and Affinity 40 Tadmor, Naomi 24 tax returns 8, 28–9, 153–4 teachers see schoolmasters Terling, Essex 42 theatre see drama Thirsk, Joan 132 Thomas, Keith 59, 90 Thompson, E. P. 140 Thornton, Alice 149 Timmins, Geoffrey 133 total reconstruction 42 towns 19, 35, 42, 44, 53, 64, 70, 76, 88–90, 95, 101–5, 109–10, 112, 115, 122, 128, 131; see also urbanisation toys 91 trade and trading 4, 29, 34, 60–1, 76, 132 Traub, Valarie 72 Trumbach. R. 8 Tunbridge, Kent 40 Tusser, Thomas 34, 167 Tutors see schoolmasters uncles 38–41 unigeniture 36 universities 97

200

Index

unstable family 22 urbanisation 128, 134–6 US see North America vagrants and vagrancy 4 Vann, R. T. 137 verses 52, 90, 95 Vickery, Amanda 47, 76 villages 4, 19, 42, 48, 130, 135 Villiers, James, Duke of Buckingham 71 Virgin Mary 124 Walker, Garthine 48 Wall, Richard 8, 22 Wallington, Nehemiah 148–9 wardships 109 Warwick 134 Weddings 77–9, 82 Westminster school 98 Westmorland 45 wet-nurses and wet-nursing 88–9, 90, 120, 125 Whately, William 31, 80 Wheatcroft, Leonard 93, 115 Whig history 12 whoredom 69 widowers 109–112 widows 41, 109–112, 115 wife beating see spousal abuse

wife sales 81 Willingham, Cambridgeshire 96 wills 33, 43, 45, 58, 64, 87, 97, 97, 109–10, 112–13, 154; see also probate witchcraft prosecutions 126 wives 14, 19, 34, 48, 52, 64, 66–7, 104 Wollstonecraft, Mary 126 Woman’s Sharpe Revenge, The 1640 124 womanhood 79 women 5, 8, 25, 28, 35, 43, 47, 63–4, 66–74, 76, 79–82, 84–5, 87, 89, 96, 98, 103, 105–6, 110–11, 120, 123, 126, 130, 133–4, 138, 140–1; see also mothers; single women; wives; widows Worcester 115 Worcestershire 27 workhouses 95 Working class 128, 140 Wrightson, Keith 42 Wrigley, Anthony 8, 26, 28 yeomen 4, 19, 130 York, Archdiocese of 36, 110 Yorkshire 79, 109, 115, 132, 149 youth 57–62, 64, 99, 103, 114, 138