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Early modern English kinship in the long run: reflections on continuity and change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2010

NAOMI TADMOR
NAOMI TADMOR
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Sussex.
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Abstract

The article highlights the significance of alliances of blood and marriage in early modern England and beyond, including both positive and negative relations among kin. Examining different historiographical approaches, it emphasizes the role of kinship in explanations of historical change and continuity. Rather than focusing on the isolated nuclear family or, conversely, on an alleged decline of kinship, it highlights the importance of enmeshed patterns of kinship and connectedness. Such patterns were not only important in themselves (whether culturally, socially, economically, or politically), it is suggested, but they also invite new comparisons with other early modern societies, and in the long run. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’, or aspects of the present-day language of kinship may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties characteristic of the early modern period, the article proposes.

Le type de parenté en angleterre de l'époque moderne dans une perspective de longue durée: continuité et changement

Cet article met en lumière ce que signifiaient alliances de sang et mariage dans l'Angleterre de l'époque moderne et au-delà, en y incluant les relations tant positives que négatives ainsi suscitées entre parents. Il ne s'attarde pas sur le cas de la famille nucléaire isolée, non plus que sur l'hypothèse d'un déclin de la notion de parenté; il souligne au contraire l'importance des modèles très mêlés de parenté et de l'ensemble du réseau qu'ils impliquent. Ces modèles, en soi, n'étaient pas seulement importants culturellement, socialement, économiquement ou politiquement, comme l'indique l'article, mais aussi ils incitent à de nouvelles études comparatives avec d'autres sociétés de l'époque ou sur une plus longue durée. Comme le suggère l'article, même des modèles typiques de notre temps – les ‘nouvelles familles’ ou les ‘familles de choix’ – pourraient nous mettre sur la voie de quelques similitudes avec ce qu'ont été les notions de parenté et de ménages apparentés caractéristiques de la période moderne.

Verwandtschaft im frühneuzeitlichen england auf lange sicht: überlegungen zu kontinuität und wandel

Der Beitrag beleuchtet die Bedeutung von Blutverwandtschafts- und Heiratsallianzen im frühneuzeitlichen England und darüber hinaus und berücksichtigt dabei sowohl positive wie negative Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen. Statt jedoch die isolierte Kernfamilie, oder umgekehrt den angeblichen Verfall der Verwandtschaft ins Zentrum zu stellen, betont er die Bedeutung eng verwobener Verwandtschafts- und Verbindungsmuster. Solche Muster waren jedoch nicht nur für sich gesehen kulturell, sozial, ökonomisch und politisch wichtig. Sie laden vielmehr auch zum Vergleich mit anderen frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaften ein. Dabei ist eine langfristige Perspektive besonders aufschlussreich, denn selbst die für ‘neue Familien’ oder ‘Familien freier Wahl’ in der Gegenwart typischen Muster können Ähnlichkeiten mit den Vorstellungen von Verwandtschaft oder den damit verbundenen Haushaltsbanden aufzeigen, die für die Frühe Neuzeit charakteristisch waren.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 25 , Special Issue 1: SPECIAL ISSUE ON KINSHIP IN BRITAIN AND BEYOND FROM THE EARLY MODERN TO THE PRESENT , May 2010 , pp. 15 - 48
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

ENDNOTES

1 K. Wrightson, ‘The family in early modern England: continuity and change’, in S. Taylor, R. Connors, and C. Jones eds., Hanoverian Britain and empire (Woodbridge, 1998), 2. See also N. Tadmor, Family and friends in eighteenth-century England: household, kinship, and patronage (Cambridge, 2001), and ‘Revisiting the public sphere and the history of the family’, in K. Johansson, K. Gerner, M. Lindstedt Cronberg, S. Oredsson, and K. Salomon eds., Friendship across borders: a festschrift in honour of Eva Österberg (Lund, 2007), 217–32.

2 For this point, see also Wrightson, ‘Continuity and change’, and Hareven, T. K., ‘The history of the family and the complexity of social change’, American Historical Review 91 (1991), 95–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Tadmor, N., ‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present 151 (1996), 111–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Family and friends, chs. 1 and 2.

4 See Wrightson, ‘Continuity and change’; Tadmor, Family and friends, esp. ‘Introduction’ and ch. 4, and ‘Revisiting the public sphere’; and R. M. Smith, ‘“Modernization” and the medieval village community’, in A. R. H. Baker and O. Gregory eds., Explorations in historical geography (Cambridge, 1984), 140–79.

5 H. S. Maine, Ancient law: its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas (London, 1905; 1st publ. 1861), 149.

6 Maine, Ancient law, 240.

7 F. Engels, The origins of the family, private property and the state, intro. M. Barrett (Harmondsworth, 1985; 1st publ. 1884), 11. Influenced by Morgan, Engels also saw this as a transformation from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship; see Engels, Origins, 10–11.

8 F. Tönnies, Fundamental concepts of sociology (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft), trans. Charles P. Loomis, American Sociology Series (1940; 1st publ. 1887).

9 Engels, Origins, 110–11, and reference there to Marx, The communist manifesto. See e.g. p. 110: ‘By changing all things into commodities [capitalist production] dissolved all inherited and traditional relationships, and in place of time-honoured custom and historic right, it set up purchases and sale, “free” contract.’

10 E. Durkheim, ‘The conjugal family’, in E. Durkheim, On institutional analysis, ed. and trans. M. Traugott (Chicago and London, 1978; 1st publ. Revue Philosophique 91 (1921), 1–14), 229.

11 See e.g. Parsons, ‘The kinship system of the contemporary United States’, and ‘The social structure of the family’; T. Parsons and R. F. Bales, Family, socialization and interaction process (Glencoe, IL, 1955); W. Goode, World revolution and family patterns (London, 1963), esp. chs. I and II; W. F. Ogburn, ‘Social change and the family’, in R. F. Winch and L. W. Goodman eds., Selected studies in marriage and the family (3rd edn, New York, 1968; 1st publ. 1953), 58–63; Goode, ‘The role of the family and industrialization’, Ibid., 64–70, and compare R. F. Winch and R. L. Blumberg, ‘Societal complexity and familial organization’, Ibid., 70–92, and references there. See also Hareven, T. K., ‘The history of the family and the complexity of social change’, American Historical Review 91 (1991), 95–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wrightson, ‘Continuity and change’, esp. pp. 2–3; and Tadmor, Family and friends.

12 Stone's monumental thesis has been criticized in every way, from the thrust of its argument and social attitudes to its source base and documentation. It is remarkable, however, that it still provides a framework for discussion, particularly on continuity and change. See for example key reviews by Thompson and Macfarlane: E. P. Thompson, ‘Happy families – review of Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500–1800’, New Society, 8 Sept. 1977; Macfarlane, A., ‘Review of Lawrence Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England 1500–1800’, History and Theory 18 (1979), 103–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also key works such as R. Houlbrooke, The English family 1450–1700 (London, 1984); D. Cressy, Birth, marriage, and death: ritual, religion, and the life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), and discussions by me (and further references) in ‘The concept of the household-family’ and Family and friends. See also, for example, the introduction and many of the contributions in H. Berry and E. Foyster, The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2008).

13 See, e.g., programmatic statements and retrospective evaluations in P. Laslett, ‘The character of familial history, its limitations and the conditions for its proper pursuit’, in T. Hareven and A. Plakans eds., Family history at the crossroads: a Journal of Family History reader (Princeton, 1987), 277–81; A. Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin: an essay in historical anthropology (Oxford, 1978), The origins of English individualism, and The culture of capitalism (Oxford, 1987); and Wrightson, ‘Continuity and change’. See also my discussions in Tadmor, Family and friends, esp. ‘Introduction’ and ch. 4, and ‘Revisiting the public sphere’.

14 See esp. J. Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in D. G. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley eds., Population in history (London, 1965); P. Laslett, D. E. C. Eversley and E. A. Wrigley, An introduction to English historical demography (New York, 1966); Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin; P. Laslett and R. Wall 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 (Cambridge, 1972), esp. ‘Introduction’ and 125–8; Laslett, The world we have lost (New York, 1965), and ‘Characteristics of the western family considered over time’, Journal of Family History 2 (1977), 89–115, repr. in Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge, 1977); K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and piety in an English village: Terling 1525–1700 (Oxford, 1995; 1st publ. 1979); K. Wrightson, English society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982); and R. A. Houlbrooke, The English family, 1450–1750 (London, 1984). For the labour and mobility of youths and families, see esp. P. Laslett and J. Harrison, ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in H. E. Bell an R. L. Ollard eds., Historical essays, 1600–1750, presented to David Ogg (London, 1963), 157–84 (repr. in Laslett, Family life and illicit love); Laslett, The world we have lost; R. S. Schofield, ‘Age-specific mobility in an eighteenth-century English parish’, Annales de Démographie Historique (1970), 261–74; Wall, R., ‘The age at leaving home’, Journal of Family History 3 (1978), 181–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Kussmaul, Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, 1981); V. Brodsky Elliot, ‘Single women in the London marriage market: age, status and mobility, 1598–1619’, in R. B. Outhwaite ed., Marriage and society, studies in the social history of marriage (London, 1981); Souden, D., ‘Movers and stayers in family reconstitution populations’, Local Population Studies 33 (1984), 11–28Google Scholar; McIntosh, M. K., ‘Servants and the household unit in an Elizabethan English community’, Journal of Family History 9 (1984), 3–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; P. Clark and D. Souden eds., Migration and society in early modern England (London, 1987); S. Rappaport, Worlds within worlds: structures of life in sixteenth-century London (Cambridge, 1989); Earle, P., ‘The female labour market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 42 (1989), 328–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; C. Brooks, ‘Apprenticeship, social mobility and the middling sort, 1550–1800’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks eds., The middling sort of people: culture, society and politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994); I. K. Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth in early modern England (New Haven CT, 1994); and P. Griffiths, Youth and authority: formative experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996).

15 For path-breaking studies on the size and structure of households, see esp. Laslett and Harrison, ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, and Laslett, The world we have lost, and ‘Size and structure of the household in England over three centuries’, Population Studies 23 (1969), 199–223. For regional and chronological variations and variations resulting from industrialization, see esp. M. Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971); Laslett, ‘Characteristics of the western family’; G. Nair, Highley: the development of a community 1550–1880 (Oxford, 1988); and R. Wall, ‘Regional and temporal variations in English household structure from 1650’, in J. Hobcraft and P. Rees eds., Regional aspects of British population growth (London, 1979), 89–113. Note, however, the consistent evidence on the presence of kin in family households, including more than a quarter of all gentry households, 17 per cent of yeomen households, and more than a tenth of the households of craftsmen and artisans, in Laslett's sample of 100 communities from 1599 to 1854 (Laslett, ‘Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century’, in Laslett and Wall eds., Household and family in past time, 154). Evidence such as this can also be interpreted to emphasize the importance of kinship and social networks alongside considerations such as life-cycle changes, mobility, cultural perceptions, and local and occupational variations (discussed below). An initial critique has been made, for example, by Lutz Berkner, who argues that ‘simple’ and ‘extended’ can be seen as different phases in the development cycle of the same family, rather than as different family types. Certain patterns of household and family extension, which can be socially significant, are moreover bound to be represented in no more than a minority of cases. For instance, with a pattern of late marriage, continued labour, and relatively early mortality, there is only a limited period in which a mature couple can possibly accommodate an elderly parent. Berkner thus argues that ‘the real change in family structure should not be sought in the size and composition of residential groups, but rather in the way in which kinship ties function in the society’; see Berkner, L. K., ‘The use and misuse of census data’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1975), 721–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 729–31, and also Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’, and Family and friends, esp. ch. 1 and p. 116.

16 The range of kin recognized in wills was generally narrow, highlighting the privileging of near kin, although women tended to bequeath assets to a relatively wide range of kin and single or childless testators were likely to favour lateral kin; see, for example, Wrightson, ‘Kinship in an English village’, in R. M. Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), specifically pp. 323–4; Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and piety, 91–9, specifically p. 92; Vann, R. T., ‘Wills and the family in an English town: Banbury, 1550–1800’, Journal of Family History 4 (1979), 346–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and C. Howell, ‘Peasant inheritance customs in the Midlands, 1280–1700’, in J. Goody, J. Thirsk and E. P. Thompson eds., Family and inheritance: rural society in Western Europe (Cambridge, 1976), esp. p. 141. and Land, family and inheritance in transition: Kibworth Harcourt (Cambridge, 1983). For similar inheritance practices in the Middle Ages, see R. M. Smith, ‘Some issues concerning families and their property’, in Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle, esp. pp. 56–8. For a discussion of kinship recognition in wills, see Cressy, D., ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 38–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and K. Wrightson, ‘Postscript: Terling revisited’, in Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and piety (1995), esp. pp. 192–4. For a decline in kinship recognition in wills, see Vann, ‘Wills and the family’, esp. pp. 363–7, and Nair, Highley, 67–8, 155–8. For women, see A. L. Erickson, Women and property in early modern England (New York, 1993), esp. pp. 86, 212–16. Note also my discussion of primogeniture in Tadmor, N., ‘Dimensions of inequality among siblings in eighteenth-century English novels: the cases of Clarissa and The history of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’, Continuity and Change 7 (1992), 311–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and references there. In this issue of Continuity and Change see L. Bonfield., ‘Seeking connections between kinship and the law in early modern England’.

17 The Relief Act of 1601 obliged lineal relations to support one another and consequently there were demands at times for parents, grandparents, and children to relieve needy kin. However, such relations were often themselves not in a position to extend a great deal of support, or to do so consistently. Moreover, parish authorities could intervene, enforce removal, and even prevent inhabitants from harbouring needy kin so as not to increase the number of poor in the parish. This was the case especially after the consolidation of notions of parish settlement in 1662. See P. Slack, Poverty and policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988,) esp. pp. 84–5; Laslett, P., ‘The family and the collectivity’, Sociology and Social Research 63 (1979), 432–42Google Scholar; Wrightson, English society, 46–8; Smith, R. M., ‘The structured dependence of the elderly as a recent development: some skeptical historical thoughts’, Ageing and Society 4 (1984), 409–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Some issues concerning families and their property’, in Smith ed., Land, kinship, and life-cycle; Goose, N., ‘Household size and structure in early Stuart Cambridge’, Social History 5 (1980), 347–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; T. Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle: some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk’, in Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle; and W. Newman Brown, ‘The receipt of poor relief and the family situation: Aldenham, Hertfordshire, 1630–1690’, Ibid. More recently, see Ottaway, S., ‘Providing for the elderly in eighteenth-century England’, Continuity and Change 13 (1998), 391–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Tadmor, Family and friends, 109–10, and further discussion in S. Hindle: On the parish? The micro-politics of poor relief in rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004), esp. ch. 1 and pp. 49–50, and ‘Without the cry of any neighbours’, in E. Foyster and H. Berry eds., The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2005), and below n. 28.

18 See the critique of the ‘new orthodoxy’ in Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, esp. p. 44. See also Chaytor, M., ‘Household and kinship in Ryton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, History Workshop 10 (1980), 25–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cf. Wrightson, K., ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 151–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Hara, D., ‘Ruled by my friends: aspects of marriage in the diocese of Canterbury c. 1540–1570’, Continuity and Change 6 (1991), 9–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Mitson, ‘The significance of kinship networks in the seventeenth century: south-west Nottinghamshire’, in C. Phythian-Adams ed., Societies, cultures and kinship 1580–1850 (Leicester, 1993); E. Lord, ‘Communities of common interest: the social landscape of South East Surrey, 1750–1850’, also in Phythian-Adams ed., Societies, cultures and kinship, esp. pp. 162–4; Grassby, R., ‘Love, property and kinship: the courtship of Philip Williams, Levant merchant 1617–50’, Economic History Review 113 (1998), 335–50Google Scholar; B. Reay, ‘Kinship and neighbourhood in nineteenth-century rural England: the myth of the autonomous nuclear family’, Journal of Family History 21 (1996), 87–104; L. Davidoff, M. Doolittle, J. Fink, and K. Holden, The family story: blood, contract and intimacy, 1830–1960 (London, 1998), 31–3, 39, 86; and Tadmor, Family and friends, 112.

19 See also Wrightson, ‘Continuity and change’.

20 See Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 44–9, esp. pp. 44–6 and discussion and references on pp. 40–1; Cressy, Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987), 263–91, esp. p. 263. Indeed, as Cressy argues, migration over the Atlantic may have had the effect of heightening the sense of membership in some extended families. For the role of kin in migration to America, see also E. S. Morgan, The puritan family: religion and domestic relations in seventeenth-century New England (revised edn, New York, 1996), 150–60; and R. Thompson, Mobility and migration: East Anglia founders of New England, 1629–1640 (Amherst MA, 1994), esp. pp. 189–204. For the role of kinship in migration to industrializing Lancashire, North America, or Victorian London, see T. K. Hareven, ‘The dynamics of kin in an industrial community’, in J. Demos and S. S. Boocock eds., Turning points: historical and sociological essays on the family (Chicago, 1978); Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire, esp. chs. 5 and 10; and L. H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979). See also my discussions in Family and friends, esp. chs. 4 and 5, on kinship and friendship and geographical mobility, including negotiations of absence and distance. More recently, see S. M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic families: lives and letters in the later eighteenth century (Oxford, 2008).

21 See, for example, J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society: a London suburb in the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1987), 259–60; P. Clark, ‘The migrant in Kentish towns 1500–1700’, in P. Clark and P. Slack eds., Crisis and order in English towns, 1500–1700 (London, 1972), 135–9; V. Brodsky Elliot, ‘Single women in the London marriage market: age, status and mobility, 1598–1619’, in Outhwaite ed., Marriage and society, esp. pp. 93–5; P. Clark and D. Souden eds., Migration and society in early modern England (London, 1987); Erickson, Women and property in early modern England; Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth, 166–70; and Mitson, ‘The significance of kinship networks’. Note also the points made in Wrightson, ‘Postscript’, esp. pp. 194–7 and references there.

22 R. Grassby, The business community of seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1995); ‘Love, property and kinship’, and Kinship and capitalism: marriage, family, and business in the English speaking world, 1580–1740 (Cambridge, 2000).

23 C. Muldrew, The economy of obligation: the culture of credit and social relations in early modern England (Basingstoke, 1998). Macfarlane famously calculated that only a tenth of Josselin's financial interactions were with kin. Considering the fact that Josselin was a migrant, with relatives mostly elsewhere and a clerical profession which tied him to his immediate locality, the fact that a tenth of his transactions were with kin seems remarkable (Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin, 149). See also earlier studies such as Holderness, B. A., ‘Credit in English rural society before the nineteenth century, with special reference to the period 1650–1720’, Agricultural History Review 24 (1976), 97–109Google Scholar; Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and piety, 100–1; M. Spufford, Contrasting communities: English villagers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Cambridge, 1974), 212–13; Mitson, ‘The significance of kinship networks’, 62–70; and M. Finn, The character of credit: personal debt in English culture 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2004). Scholars also emphasize the relation between financial and sexual credit. See, for example, Gowing, L., ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London’, History Workshop Journal 35 (1993), 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Domestic dangers: women, words and sex in early modern London (Oxford, 1996); E. Foyster, Manhood in early modern England (Harlow 1999); and Shepard, A., ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England, c.1580–1640’, Past and Present 167 (2000), 75–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Meanings of manhood in early modern England (Oxford, 2004). For the historical meanings of term ‘friends’, see Tadmor, N., ‘“Family” and “friend” in Pamela: a case study in the history of the family in eighteenth-century England’, Social History 14, 3 (1989), 289–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘The concept of the household-family’, and Family and friends, esp. chs. 4–7.

24 Tadmor, Family and friends, 189–91. This hidden credit relationship went on for years, unknown even to the debtor's wife. In a similar way Ralph Josselin, for example, extended loans to his sister and brother-in-law, partly on account of their future legacy. Forgetting loans, as Muldrew explains, was a widespread form of charity. Its presence in wills highlights the practice among near kin; see Muldrew, The economy of obligation, 261; Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 51; and Tadmor, Family and friends, 128, 178.

25 M. Hunt, The middling sort: commerce, gender and the family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley CA, 1996).

26 Mascuch, M., ‘Social mobility and middling self-identity: the ethos of British autobiographers, 1600–1750’, Social History 2 (1995), 45–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Origins of the individualist self: autobiography and self-Identity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997); K. Wrightson, Earthly necessities (New Haven CT, 2000). On the importance and the fear of ruination, see J. Hoppit, Risk and failure in English business, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1987), and B. Supple, The royal exchange assurance: history of British insurance 1720–1970 (Cambridge, 1970).

27 M. Finn, ‘The Barlow bastads: romance comes home from the empire’, in J. Bourne Taylor, M. Lobbal, and M. Finn eds., Legitimacy and illegitimacy in nineteenth-century law, literature and history (Palgrave, forthcoming).

28 The support of kin and ‘friends’ – when available – could be invaluable and was utilized in combination with other forms of charity, the kindness of neighbours, and parish support. Evidence from rural communities in Essex, Dorset, Warwickshire, Middlesex, and Staffordshire, studied by Laslett and Smith, for example, reveals a high proportion of the poor living with kin as elderly inmates. In Cartfield and Poslingford, Suffolk, as Lynn Botelho concludes (in Old age), family support was important in assisting the elderly, alongside charitable donations and variable levels of parish relief. As Hindle explains (On the parish?, ch. 1, esp. p. 51, and ‘Without the cry of any neighbours’), at the poorest levels of the society, households could be extremely unstable and parish policies for child removal and against the harbouring of needy kin, coupled with labour migration, could easily fracture existing networks. Paupers' attempts to maintain alliances despite all this are therefore not only moving but also telling and suggestive; see Laslett, Family life and illicit love, esp. pp. 201, 204–5, and Smith, ‘Families and their property’, 79. See also Wales, ‘Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle’, 384–5; Newman Brown, ‘The receipt of poor relief’, 406–7; T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe eds., Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997); S. King, Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850: a regional perspective (Manchester, 2000). See also above, n. 17.

29 Thus, for example, Margaret Parke, an orphan of Tallentire, left work to care for her brother, and Elizabeth Birkett of Crosthwaite, who was bedridden, ‘would have starved by now if her sister Susan had not helped her’. The case of Jane Coates reveals that her husband Thomas, afterwas orphaned, was brought up by an aunt (Cumbria Record Office (CRO), Carlisle, Q/11/1/107/10), and Mabel Grayson, a widow, resided with her married daughter and was partly maintained by her son-in-law, in conjunction with parish relief, since she had no means or other ‘friends, or relations to help her’. Conversely, when a migrant worker, lost his money, he asked for support to ‘carry him to friends’ (CRO, Q/11/1/56/27, Q/11/1/116/23). See Hindle, On the parish?, 51, 93, 390. I am grateful to Steve Hindle for enabling me to consult his transcripts of the Cumberland Quarter Session petitions.

30 E. Chalus, ‘“To serve my friends”: women and political patronage in eighteenth-century England’, in A. Vickery ed., Women, privilege and power (Stanford, 2001), and Elite women in English political life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford, 2005); R. O'Day ed., Cassandra Brydges, 1670–1735 (Woodbridge, 2007); C. Campbell Orr, ‘Charlotte: scientific queen’, in C. Campbell Orr ed., Queenship in Britain, 1688–1837 (Manchester, 2002), and ‘Mrs Delaney and the court’, in M. Lard and A. Weisberg-Roberts eds., Mrs Delaney and her contemporaries (New Haven and London, 2009), 40–63; H. Smith, Georgian monarchy: politics and culture, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 2006); and I. Tague, Women of quality (Woodbridge, 2000), and ‘Aristocratic women and ideas of family in the early eighteenth century’, in Berry and Foyster eds., The family in early modern England. As Mears explains, successive Tudor monarchs relied more on social networks formed by kinship, friendship and patronage than on institutional bodies to govern the realm; see Mears, N., ‘Court, courtiers and culture’, Historical Journal 46 (2003), 703–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. p. 716. See also, for example, J. Daybell ed., Women and politics in early modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, 2004), esp. chs. 2 and 7; Questier, M., ‘Catholicism, kinship, and the public memory of Sir Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002), 476–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Catholicism and community in early modern England (Cambridge, 2006); Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’; and Tadmor, Family and friends, for example p. 117 and ch. 6, and see below, nn. 55–6.

31 Phythian Adams ed., Societies, cultures and kinship. Mitson's study of eleven parishes in south-west Nottinghamshire reveals short-distance and extensive kinship networks, connecting members of diverse parishes in ‘dynastic families’, that permeated through the neighbourhood; see Mitson, ‘The significance of kinship networks’, 24–76, and also reference there to similar findings by A. Everitt and his definition of ‘dynastic families’ discussed on pp. 25, 71, and 73. Carter's study of St Ives (Huntingdonshire) shows similar dense networks both within and around the town; see Carter, ‘Town or urban society?’, 127–30. In a similar manner, as Wrightson and Levine show, 24 per cent of all the kin mentioned in Terling wills from 1550 to 1699 lived more than 15 miles away from the parish, 32 per cent more than ten miles away, and 44 per cent fewer than ten miles away; see Wrightson, ‘Kinship in an English village’, 326, and Wrightson and Levine, ‘Postscript: Terling revisited’, esp. pp. 194–7. For kinship networks in larger urban setting, see e.g. Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, and below n. 46. Evidently, studies incorporating several parishes are more likely to reveal kinship networks, which are hard to perceive if the focus is on single parishes.

32 A. Everitt, ‘The English urban inn, 1560–1760’, in his Landscape and community in England (London, 1985), esp. pp. 193–8. These dynastic innkeepers, however, rarely continued in innkeeping for more than three or four generations, and they comprised only a minority of the innholders in the town; see M. Prior, Fisher row: fishermen, bargemen and canal boatmen in Oxford, 1500–1900 (Oxford, 1982). See also the discussion and references in Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 44–53. Of the eight youths who left the village of Shepshed, Leicestershire, to be apprenticed in the Brewer's Company in London, four were related either through marriage or blood, with relations including brother, brother-in-law, and cousin; the remaining four were from the same parish (V. Brodsky Elliot, ‘Mobility and marriage in pre-Industrial England’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge (1979), 209–10). ‘Apprenticeship was kept in the family, so to speak’, as Brodsky Elliot concludes (p. 213).

33 D. O‘Hara, ‘Ruled by my friends’, and Courtship and constraint: rethinking the making of marriage in Tudor England (Manchester, 2001). The significance of both affection and familial and material considerations in the choice of marriage partners is importantly discussed in M. Ingram, Church courts, sex and marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), and in D. Cressy, Birth marriage and death.

34 See esp. L. Stone, Road to divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford, 1992), and Broken lives: marriage and divorce in England, 1660–1875 (Oxford, 1995); Amussen, S. D., ‘Being stirred to much unquietness: violence and domestic violence in early modern England’, Journal of Women's History 6 (1994), 70–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Bailey, Unquiet lives: marriage and marriage breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 2003); E. Foyster, Marital violence: an English family history 1660–1857 (Cambridge, 2005); and T. Stretton, ‘Marriage, separation, and the common law in England 1540–1660’, in Berry and Foyster eds., The family in early modern England.

35 For figures on celibacy, see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981), table 7.28, p. 260. Childlessness is harder to estimate. In modern societies, as Berry and Foyster discuss, sterility affects between 5 per cent and 13 per cent of all couples (H. Berry and E. Foyster, ‘Childless men in early modern England’, in Berry and Foyster eds., The family in early modern England, 158–86, esp. pp. 161–2; see also E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen, and R. S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), 354–62)). In particular social groups, such as the English gentry, the problem was evidently more severe: 19 per cent of all first the marriages and 48 per cent of the second or subsequent marriages between 1540 and 1660 are described as childless while in Yorkshire in 1558–1642, despite repeated marriages, nearly a fifth of the resident gentry families died out in the male line (L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965); F. Heal and C. Holmes, The gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (Basingstoke, 1994), 24). The effects of sterility and decreased fertility (owing to late marriage) were moreover exacerbated by infant and child mortality which, according to Wrigley and Schofield, affected 17 per cent of infants under the age of one, 26 per cent of children under the age of five, and 38 per cent under the age of 25 around 1650. Laslett's figures for the late eighteenth century suggest that 27.7 per cent of females aged 33 lacked children, 17.7 per cent of those aged 44, 18.7 per cent aged 66, and 27 per cent aged 88, or an average of 22.77 per cent; see his ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the “nuclear hardship” hypothesis’, Continuity and Change 3 (1988), 153–75, esp. p. 163, and ‘La parenté en chiffres’, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 1 (1988), 5–240. The number of parents who outlived their children and may have wanted to cultivate relations with lateral kin was therefore undoubtedly significant. In addition, 20 per cent of families (as Goody argues) were likely to have daughters only and no sons, leading to their often seeking property arrangements with relations by marriage and other kin (Goody, ‘Inheritance, property and women: some comparative considerations’, in Goody, Thirsk and Thompson eds., Family and inheritance, 10). On single women and men see also, e.g., Erickson, Women and property in early modern England; Peters, C., ‘Single women in early modern England: attitudes and expectations’, Continuity and Change 12 (1997), 325–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. M. Bennet and A. M. Froide, Singlewomen in the European past 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999); Sharpe, P., ‘Dealing with love: the ambiguous independence of the single woman in early modern England’, Gender and History 11 (1999), 209–32CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; B. Hill, Women alone: spinsters in Britain 1660–1850 (London, 2001); A. Bray, The friend (Chicago, 2003); A. Froide, Never married: singlewomen in early modern England (Oxford, 2005); and Berry and Foyster, ‘Childless men in early modern England’.

36 E. A. Wrigley, People, cities, and wealth: the transformation of a traditional society (Oxford, 1989), 13.

37 Macfarlane, Individualism, 146.

38 A kinship system that highlights the individual and the nuclear family is ‘particularly well adapted to an industrial and individualistic system’; Macfarlane, Individualism, 146, 198–201; The family life of Ralph Josselin, 159, n. 4, and ‘The myth of peasantry; family and economy in a northern parish’, in Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle, 344–5, n. 38. In contrast, other kinship systems are seen as typical of ‘peasant societies’. Crucially, Macfarlane believes that the individual is ‘symbolised and shaped by his … kinship system’ (Individualism, 196). My approach, as demonstrated below and elsewhere, highlights rather the social and cultural meanings of kinship and the active appropriation of kinship, while investigating social relations and cultural perceptions in historical contexts.

39 ‘To have survived the Black Death, the Reformation, the Civil War, and the move to the factories and the cities, the system must have been fairly durable and flexible. Indeed, it could be argued that it was its extreme individualism, the simplest form of molecular structure, which enabled it to survive and allowed society to change. Furthermore, if the family system pre-dated, rather than followed on, industrialization, the causal link may have to be reversed, with industrialization as the consequence rather than a cause, of the basic nature of the family’; see Macfarlane, Individualism, 198; see also, e.g., p. 196, with regard to the individualistic Englishman and his kinship system: ‘it is no longer possible to “explain” the origins of English individualism in terms of either Protestantism, population change, the development of a market economy at the end of the middle ages … Individualism, however defined, predates the sixteenth century changes and can be said to shape them all’, and Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin, 159.

40 See also Tadmor, Family and friends, and J. Carsten, Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship (Cambridge, 2000).

41 See especially the discussions in J. Goody, ‘The evolution of the family’, in Laslett and Wall eds., Household and family in past time, 103–24, and Goody, The development of the family and marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), as well as studies highlighting the universality of the nuclear family in its own right or as a component within other family types, and questioning the necessary correlation between it and industrial growth, such as G. P. Murdock, Social structure (New York, 1949), and Greenfield, S. M., ‘Industrialization and the family in sociological theory’; American Journal of Sociology 67, (1961), 312–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 See Chaytor, ‘Household and kinship’, esp. pp. 29, 38, and the questioning of the category of the ‘extended family’ and ‘the myth of the extended family’ in Goody, ‘The evolution of the family’, esp. pp. 119 and 124; M. Segalen, Historical anthropology of the family (Cambridge 1986), 14; and Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’, 133–4, and Family and friends, esp. p. 37 and ch. 4.

43 See the discussions in Tadmor, Family and friends, 163–4 and 273–4 and esp. pp. 133–6.

44 Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin, esp. pp. 126, 149; Tadmor, Family and friends, 138 and nn.

45 Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’, 127–30, and Family and friends, 31–4.

46 Wrightson, English society, 45; Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 53; Boulton, Neighbourhood and society, e.g. 260: ‘it seems possible … that a substantial minority of Broughside households were involved in locally based kin networks’, despite the low presence of kin within individual parishes. See also Tadmor, Family and friends, esp. chs. 4 and 5, e.g. pp. 140–1, 191, 274–6. In a similar way, for example, historians now emphasize the ways in which inheritance patterns, even when marked by primogeniture, entailed broader commitments on behalf of parents and siblings, for elder sons inherited not only assets but also obligations and the reputations of families also depended on junior or lesser kin.

47 Macfarlane, Individualism; see also his The family life of Ralph Josselin, ‘The myth of peasantry’, Marriage and love in England: modes of reproduction 1300–1840 (Oxford, 1986), and Culture of capitalism.

48 See e.g. P. Earle, The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London 1660–1730 (London, 1989); Grassby, The business community; D. Hancock, Citizens of the world: London merchants and the integration of the British Atlantic community, 1735–85 (Cambridge, 1995); Hunt, The middling sort; Muldrew, The economy of obligation; Mascuch, ‘Social mobility and middling self-identity’; Wrightson, Earthly necessities; Gowing, Domestic dangers; Tadmor, Family and friends; Shepard, Meanings of manhood; and Pearsall, Atlantic families. See also note 26, above.

49 See Tadmor, ‘Family and friends’, chs. 5 and 6.

50 See H. Medick and D. W. Sabean, Interest and emotion: essays on the study of family and kinship (Cambridge, 1984), esp. their chapter ‘Interest and emotion in family and kinship studies: a critique of social history and anthropology’; K. Lynch, Individuals, families and communities in Europe, 1200–1800: the urban foundations of Western society (Cambridge, 2003), 9–11. See also M. Segalen, Love and power in the peasant family: rural France in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1983).

51 Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’, 124, and Family and friends, e.g. 28–9, 175–8, 191–2, 193–4, 259.

52 Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth, and Ben-Amos, I. K., ‘Gifts and favors: informal support in early modern England’, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000), 295–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar; note also her argument that kin support was ‘simply indispensible’ in facilitating the apprenticeship of youths. Life-cycle mobility of youths thus tended to ‘awaken kinship ties’ and reinforce the special social and moral obligations associated with kinship (Ben-Amos, Adolescence and youth, 165–70).

53 See O'Hara, ‘To be ruled by my friends’, and Courtship and constraint.

54 L. B. Namier, The Structure of politics at the accession of George III (London, 1957; 1st publ. 1929).

55 See note 30 above, and also key works such as Walter, J., ‘A rising of the people – the Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, Past and Present 107 (1985), 105Google Scholar; A. Fletcher, A county community in peace and war (London, 1975), 44–8, 52 (also cited in Wrightson, English society, 48); and L. Colley, In defiance of oligarchy: the Tory party 1714–60 (Cambridge, 1982). As Cressy explains (also quoting important work by Everitt), ‘“Clan loyalty” and the “forces of kinship” often cut across political loyalties during the century of Charles I's reign, and, far from eroding, kinship ties of this sort often lay behind political alliances or commercial enterprises in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 49). See also Chalus, ‘To serve my friends’.

56 R. E. Prothero ed., Private letters of Edward Gibbon (1753–94) (London, 1896), vol. I, 23–4, quoted in Namier, Structure of politics, 18. This is discussed in Perkin, Origins of modern English society, 45, and Tadmor, Family and friends, 213–14.

57 Nancy was dependent on her uncle and clearly expressed her disappointment with her near kin. On one occasion, for example, she thanked her uncle for giving her some money and at the same time complained, ‘I never have a farthing from any other of my Relations notwithstanding I have a Mother and Brother who have plenty of money’; see N. Woodforde, ‘Nancy Woodforde: a diary for the year 1792’, in D. Woodforde ed., Woodforde papers and diaries (London, 1932), 38–9 (9 January 1792), and Tadmor, Family and friends, 115, 123, 126.

58 Ralph Josselin, The diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. A. Macfarlane, Records of Social and Economic History, new ser. 3 (Oxford, 1991), records for 1636–1639, pp. 5–6; however, note the help of his uncles.

59 See Pollock's, L. innovative article, ‘Anger and negotiation of relationships in early modern England’, Historical Journal 47 (2004), 567–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For negative relations and disputes, see also the discussion and references in Lynch, Individuals, families and communities in Europe, and J. Thirsk, ‘The debate on inheritance’, in Goody, Thirsk and Thompson eds., Family and inheritance. See Muldrew, The economy of obligation, on litigation following breaches of trust.

60 S. Yanagisako, Producing culture and capital: family firms in Italy (Princeton, 2002), e.g. 115, 143.

61 See Laslett's findings on the consistent presence of kin in family-households in a sample of 100 communities from 1599 to 1854, in his ‘Characteristics of the Western family’, 22–3, and also my comment above, n. 15 and critiques in ‘The concept of the household-family’ and Family and friends.

62 For the ‘fear of ruination’ and risk limitation in early modern England, see above, n. 23.

63 As Carol Dyhouse has shown with regard to the years between the First and Second World Wars, ‘the networks of family obligation spread wide, and grandparents and godparents, aunts, uncles, and other relations frequently gave support’ to enable children's education. Siblings also extended help, in particular elder brothers and sisters who were in employment and assisted their siblings: ‘Going to university in England between the wars: access and funding, History of Education 31 (2002), 1–14, esp. p. 13. Compare, for example, Ben-Amos's findings concerning the ‘indispensible’ role of kin in facilitating the apprenticeship and professional training of youths in early modern England, (see above, n. 52), and Thomas Turner's active interest in the education and professional training of his siblings and half-nephews, explored by me in Family and friends, 27, 31–3, 38, 180–1 and 186–8; see also Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction’, 50.

64 S. Szreter, Fertility, class and gender in Britain 1860–1940 (Cambridge, 1996); E. Garret, A. Reid, K. Scurer, and S. Szreter, Changing family size in England and Wales 1891–1911: place, class and demography (Cambridge, 2001); S. Szreter, Health and wealth: studies in history and policy (New York, 2005), esp. ch. 3.

65 For 2005, the Office of National Statistics reported that 45 per cent of couples divorced, with the highest rate of divorce in couples married for under ten years. By 2008 the rate had fallen and was the lowest number recorded since 1977 (possibly also reflecting a general fall in marriages), and 20 per cents lower than the peak of divorce cases recorded in 1993. In 2006, 39 per cent of all marriages were remarriages for one or both parties, whereas 61 per cent were first marriages. By comparison, in 1940, 91 per cent of all marriages were first marriages. Remarriages rose by about a third 1971–1972, following the introduction of the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, but have fallen thereafter; see figures provided by the Office of National Statistics at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=322 and http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/Population_Trends_131_web.pdf (both accessed 9 January 2009). See also, for example, K. E. Kiernan, ‘Cohabitation and divorce across nations and generations,’ in P. L. Chase-Lansdale, K. Kiernan and R. Friedman eds., Human development across lives and generations: the potential for change (Cambridge, 2004), 139–70.

66 The census of 2001 recorded that 40 per cent of all live births occurred outside marriage. Figures for 2007 show 44 per cent (with 65 per cent of babies registered jointly by cohabiting parents, 20.1 per cent by both parents under a different address and 15 per cent by sole mothers). The figure for 1960 is 6 per cent. Such figures also attract public interest, as is evident, for example, in the Daily Mail headline for 13 December 2007 (Daily Mail, at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-501865/More-half-British-babies-born-marriage.html), or a BBC report from 2004 (at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4733330.stm); see also the figures provided by the Office of National Statistics at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=716 and http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/Population-Trends-134.pdf (all accessed 9 January 2009).

67 L. Davidoff discusses the change in legal and moral discourse away from notions of incest to notions of abuse; see ‘The meanings and boundaries of kinship’, paper delivered at the Ellen McArthur Fund workshop ‘Kinship in Britain and beyond, 500–2000’, Cambridge, 25–6 July 2005.

68 See, for example, discussions of the demise of the modern nuclear family from the 1960s and 1970s, leading to the creation of the post-modern family, in J. Stacey, Brave new families: stories of domestic upheaval (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998), esp. p. 6; F. K. Goldscheider and L. J. Waite, New families, no families? The transformation of the American home (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991); K. Weston, Families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship (New York, 1992); and J. Weeks, B. Heaphy and C. Donovan, Same sex intimacies: families of choice and other life experiments (London and New York, 2001).

69 Stone, Road to divorce, 417. In early modern England, one marriage in three was broken prematurely by the death of one partner before the end of the wife's fecund period and mortality risks continued thereafter. ‘It was only in the early 1770s’, as Anderson notes, ‘that half of any marriage cohort could have celebrated a silver wedding’ (M. Anderson, ‘What is new about the modern family’, Occasional Papers of the Office of Population Censuses & surveys, The Family 31 (1983), reprinted in M. Deake ed., Time, family and community: perspectives on family and community history (Oxford, 1993), 76). In 1993/4, 36.2 per cent of those married for up to 20 years divorced, and in 2005 37.5 per cent; see Stone, The family, sex and marriage, 55–6; D. Levine, Reproducing families: a political economy of English population history (Cambridge, 1987), 79. For mortality and life expectancy, see Wrigley and Schofield, The population history of England, e.g. pp. 228–36, 248–53, 412–17, 452–3; for marriage, see e.g. pp. 189–91, 257–65, 421–30. For divorce figures, see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/Population_Trends_131_web.pdf (accessed 11 January 2009). Note, however, differences in the economic bases of families post-bereavement and post-divorce, and differences in the subjective and social understanding of such experiences. Note also changes in the age-specific context of family break-up when change over time is considered, as suggested in R. Wall, ‘Historical development of the household in Europe’, in E. van Imhoff, A. Kuijsten, P. Hooimeijer and L. van Wissen eds., Household demography and household modelling (New York, 1995).

70 See e.g. figures in Laslett, ‘Characteristics of the Western family’, 22–3, and also discussions of ‘single person's families’ in Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’ and Family and friends, esp. chs. 1–2.

71 See Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family’, and Family and friends, chs. 1 and 2, and more broadly Anderson, M., ‘The origins of the modern life cycle’, Social History 10 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 They are also attracting attention; see for instance ‘The dynamics, networks and social capital of “the household-family”, 1750–1850’, topic of the sixth Gustav Wasa seminar, Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 6–7 June 2008.

73 Family and friends, ch. 4 and 165.

74 See ‘partner’ in OED online.

75 OED online.

76 See Tadmor, ‘Inequality among siblings’, and an array of usages discussed in Family and friends, ch. 4.

77 See ‘brother Jeremy’ and ‘sister Betty’, in Josselin, Diary, 19 (4 September 1644) and 246 (19 May 1651). The same entry also includes a reference to ‘Jeremy and wife’. For ‘brother Worral’, see 124 (2 May 1648), 543 (1 July 1668), and 593 (13 Sept. 1676). See also ‘sister Hodson’, 569 (14 September 1673). In a similar way, the Lancashire gentleman Nicholas Blundell wrote an account of his daughter's wedding, naming her by her new name: ‘Gloves given at my Daughter Coppingers Marriage’. Similarly he re-named his second daughter (The great diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, Lancashire, 3 vols. (1720–1728), The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, ed. J. J. Bayley, transcribed and annotated F. Tyrer (Preston, 1968–1972), vol. III (1720–28), 259, 261)). Samuel Richardson was quick to refer to his married daughter by her new name, ‘my daughter Ditcher’ (The correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. A. L. Barbauld, 6 vols. (London, 1804), vol. II, 46.) James Woodforde's way of referring to his beloved sister changed over the years from ‘sister Jenny’ or ‘sister Jane’ to ‘My Sister Pouncett’ (W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley ed., Woodforde at Oxford, 1759–76 (Oxford, 1969), 64 (15 Dec. 1761), 66 (22 Dec. 1761), 90 (30 Oct. 1762), 92 (8 Nov. 1762), 109 (5 Feb. 1763), 230 (9 June 1774), etc. See also I. Schapera, Kinship terminology in Jane Austen's novels, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Occasional Paper no. 33 (London, 1977).

78 See esp. Family and friends, ch. 4, and the principles of ‘recognition and opacity’, ‘incorporation and differentiation’, and ‘plurality’, which are characteristic of the early modern language of kinship.

79 Tadmor, Family and friends, ch. 4 and esp. pp. 165–6.

80 See the discussion of ‘recognition and opacity’ in Tadmor, Family and friends, ch. 4, 122–32.

81 The broad scope of ‘revisionist’ studies is evident, for example, in works by Hajnal and Laslett (see note 14 above). Note also the comparative dimension of Macfarlane's work, highlighting English exceptionalism.

82 See, for example, S. Kettering, Patrons, brokers, and clients in seventeenth-century France: the Parlement of Aix, 1629–1659 (Oxford, 1986), ‘Friendship and clientage in early modern France’, French History 6 (1992) 139–58, and Patronage in 16th- and 17th-century France (Aldershot, 2004); R. Mettam, Power and faction in Louis XIV's France (Oxford, 1988); and P. Campbell, The ancien régime in France (Oxford, 1988), ch. 3.

83 See in particular the networks of family and the dense and overlapping webs of vrunden, explored by A. Goldgar, with particular focus on the 1630s, in her Tulipmania: money, honour and knowledge in the Dutch golden age (Chicago, 2007), e.g. pp. 18, 139–40, 151–3, 167–70, 182, 223, 292. More broadly, and with particular reference to the elite and the state, see J. Adams, Ruling families and merchant capitalism in early modern Europe (Ithaca NY, 2005).

84 Goldgar, Tulipmania, 167–9.

85 See, for example, Grassby, The business community, ‘Love, property and kinship’, and Kinship and capitalism; Hancock, Citizens of the world; Müller, L., ‘The Swedish East India trade and international markets: re-exports of teas, 1731–1813’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 51 (2003), 28–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Scottish and Irish entrepreneurs in eighteenth-century Sweden: East India trade and iron’, in D. Dickson, J. Parmentier, and J. Ohlmeyer eds., Irish and Scottish mercantile networks in Europe and overseas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Ghent, 2007); J. Price, ‘The imperial economy, 1700–1770’, in Marshall, The Oxford history of the British empire, vol. II: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 1998); H. V. Bowen, Elites, enterprise, and the making of the British overseas empire, 1688–1775 (Macmillan, 1996); and Pearsall, Atlantic families.

86 See the works quoted in the above note and in note 83 and, e.g., S. Subrahmanyam ed., Merchant networks in the early modern world (Aldershot, 1996), and C. A. P. Antunes, Globalisation in the early modern period: the economic relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640–1705 (Amsterdam, 2004). Likewise, the ‘associates’ described by Hancock drew heavily on obligations among ‘friends’, made strategic marriages, extended strategic loans so as to create obligations, and combined blood relations with other ties in order to both cement relationships and spread risks. Thus, although they started their way as ‘outsiders’ in the London business world, they both drew on and further created networks of kinship and connectedness. In their London counting house, as Hancock describes ‘almost all but the lowest were introduced to the firm by relatives, friends, or clients of partners’. Both success and failure were thus understood in familial terms and employed in cementing kinship and family ties; see Hancock, Citizens of the world, 58, 64, 106–7, 243–6, 250 and esp. p. 109. In a similar way, Irish and Scottish merchants, who found it hard to break into English networks, nonetheless established themselves in Sweden, where they eventually linked with local merchants through marriages and so on, and continued to play a major role in the Swedish iron trade for more than a century (Müller, ‘Scottish and Irish entrepreneurs’). For Jewish networks, see F. Trivellato, The familiarity of strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno, and cross-cultural trade in the early modern period (New Haven, 2009) also emphasizing, however, the uniqueness of the Jewish networks.

87 K. Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy (Princeton, 2000).

88 Berry and Foyster, The family in early modern England, ‘Introduction’, 17.

89 Wrigley, People, cities, and wealth, 13, and above n. 36.

90 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II (New York, 1973), vol. II, 1244.