Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England

Abstract

Since 1981, nuptiality has been identified as the main driver of rapid eighteenth-century English population growth. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, “national” rates of female non-marriage declined while female age at first marriage fell by roughly three years, reaching 22–23 years by the 1820s. The cumulative impact of more and earlier marriage on fertility is believed to have greatly outweighed the effect of falling mortality in generating aggregate population growth. Such a perspective has not gone unchallenged. There have been persistent calls for the re-examination of the place of urban demography within this framework. Concern has also been voiced over the sources which underpin the family reconstitutions on which calculations of marriage ages are based, the technique of family reconstitution itself, and over the representativeness of the marriage samples which family reconstitution yields. However, the most recent work of the Cambridge Group, based upon twenty-six family reconstitutions, appears to confirm the centrality of marriage ages to the English demographic system. Percentile distributions of marriage ages suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an important decline in the proportion of marriages undertaken by women in their late twenties and thirties, more than balanced by the development of an early marrying group in their late teens.