Family and Kinship in England 1450-1800

Will Coster, Will Coster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317198062
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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.

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 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 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 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 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 anti-historical. 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 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 th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Who’s who
• Part I Introduction – methods and structures
• Part II Analysis – the pattern of family life
• Part III Assessment – continuity and change
• Part IV Documents
• Glossary
• Guide to further reading
• Index