There is no natural form of family, just as there has never been historical agreement about the meaning of the word itself. Throughout most of the early modern period "family" usually referred to all the members of one's household, including nonrelatives, such as servants and lodgers. At the same time some authors of the time clearly conceived of "family" in the sense of an extended kinship network. By the beginning of the nineteenth century both of these meanings had been largely supplanted by the modern sense of a cohabiting nuclear group of parents and children, although neither of the older meanings died out completely. Just as importantly there was no common family and household living arrangement during the early modern era and accordingly no clear transition from "traditional" to "modern" families but rather a plurality of household forms that continued to occur well into the nineteenth century.
Kinship and the Household Before the Early Modern Era
The early modern household represented the basic unit of residence, production, and reproduction in the city and country alike. Its common interchangeability with "family" throughout the period had deep and ancient roots. Almost all modern European languages trace their words for "family" back to the Latin famulus, 'slave', thus signifying the dependence of relatives and servants on the paterfamilias or head of the household. Government officials from antiquity through the early modern period shared this patriarchal view of all authority and accordingly considered the hearth, or household, the key unit in census and tax calculations. Thus for practical as well as ideological reasons, the premodern household was the family.
This residential sense of family, however, coexisted with a broader definition as an extended group of kin or all of the people related by blood. Ancient Greeks and Romans tended to stress the unilineal agnatic kinship group (Latin gens, plural gentes), tracing blood relations only through the father's ancestry, but still recognized the importance of relations through the mother's side (known as cognates). Latin, for instance, had one word for a paternal uncle (patruus) and another for a maternal uncle (avunculus). During the early and High Middle Ages the Germanic understanding of kinship as bilateral, involving blood relations from both parents' families, dominated. The marriage of two individuals from different clans (German Sippe; French race; Spanish raza; Italian razione) thus had repercussions far beyond the couple itself. Now each had new parents, siblings, and cousins who were to be treated as blood relations, even after the death of one of the spouses, at least according to canon or church law. Until at least the twelfth century this type of broadly defined family by extended kinship constituted the strongest social, economic, and political bond throughout Europe.
About this time many aristocrats, knights, and wealthy merchants returned to the ancient practice of a patrilineal definition of kinship, inventing permanent family surnames and coats of arms that were passed down from fathers to sons. By the end of the Middle Ages the patrilineal movement had spread throughout Europe. Admittedly some members of the lower orders did not adopt the practice of a first and a last name until governments compelled them to do so at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but these were rare exceptions to the rule. In most cases the family surname was inherited from the father though some islands of bilateral lineage survived, such as Castile, where men often took their aristocratic wives' surnames. Sometimes, as in parts of France, a surname went with an estate and thus could potentially come from a nonrelative.
The success of the patrilineal form of genealogy, however, did not eliminate the importance of all maternal as well as paternal relatives in matters of inheritance, guardianship, and of course affection. Canon law also made no distinctions between the two branches of family in its restriction of marriage to those individuals outside the fourth degree of kinship. Thus family in both its broadest definition of kinship and the narrower sense of household survived into the early modern era.
The Household Viewed from the Outside: Formation and Composition
The great diversity of marriage and inheritance practices in early modern Europe make generalizations about the formation and composition of the household extremely difficult if not impossible. There are, however, some notable characteristics, a few of them quite distinctive in history. In 1965 the historical demographer John Hajnal famously identified what he called "the European marriage pattern" of the early modern era. This apparently unique phenomenon, which he later revised to "the northwestern European pattern," originally described marriage practices in all the lands west of an imaginary line drawn between Saint Petersburg and Trieste. The two most striking aspects of this model were relatively late marriage (late twenties for men, early to midtwenties for women) and a high percentage (10 to 25 percent) of never married or widowed individuals. Hajnal theorized that various economic factors—such as extended journeyman status in a craft and a population surplus of marriageable girls and women—as well as religious factors (notably the Catholic celibate ideal) contributed to this pattern, which showed no signs of change before the nineteenth century.
The implications for household formation were significant. First, there was the size of the household itself. Late marriage tended to reduce the number of pregnancies and live births, the latter to about five to seven per woman by the age of forty. Given the high infant and child mortality rates, this meant a nuclear family under five per household most of the time—considerably smaller than was commonly assumed. At the same time the common practice of sending boys and girls by age twelve to apprentice-ships or domestic service meant that many youths would be considered part of a household other than their parents' for at least five and as much as fifteen years, depending on their securing permanent employment, property, or in the case of young women, a suitable dowry. Finally, the large number of single young people and widowed old people resulted in an unusually high proportion (by premodern standards) of lodgers or single households, especially in cities.
During the last forty years of the twentieth century, Hajnal's thesis underwent testing and considerable refinement. Reconstituting families by examining marriage contracts, wills, baptismal registers, tax records, and other legal documents, many historians have confirmed the frequency of late marriage and single households during the era, but they have also made clear that there was no one marriage pattern or household type among the diverse peoples of early modern Europe, east or west. Rather, certain ideal models tend to appear more in certain places and times, but even so there is a risk of distorting the variability of these household forms and their larger social implications in practice.
It is widely accepted that the most common type of household was the nuclear family, with evidence pointing well back to the Middle Ages, at least in England. Composed only of a married couple with or without children and possibly a servant, the nuclear family appears everywhere and at all times during the early modern era. If a son remained at home with his parents into adulthood and postponed setting up his own household, the nuclear unit became what is known as a stem family, also an apparently frequent model throughout Europe. When three generations of a family lived together or when any relatives other than the nuclear unit cohabited, the household became an extended family. This type of household, typically including one elderly grandparent, was most common in southern France and parts of German-speaking Europe, especially in the countryside. Households without a conjugal unit at the center, known as nonfamily households, were more common in cities. Households composed of several conjugal units—known to demographers as joint, multiple, or complex households and to early modern contemporaries as fraternas (Italian) or frérèches (French)—were most common in southern and eastern Europe. Again though, these geographical generalizations are merely crude approximations that are particularly difficult to support in the so-called transition zones of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, western Poland, and Estonia.
The erroneous presumption that most early modern families were large appears to have originated in the nineteenth century primarily as a reaction against the perceived dangers to the family (by then meaning the nuclear family) from industrialization and other modern developments. Numerous subsequent studies have instead confirmed Hajnal's conjecture that large or multiple households predominated only in eastern Europe, while small households remained the norm in the west. In Russia, for instance, three-quarters of all serf households through the eighteenth century were multiple, while in Scandinavia, England, and northern Germany the majority of households were nuclear, with only 2 percent of English households containing more than twelve people. In fact except for serfs or sharecroppers, whose landlords structurally encouraged large households, the poorer the family, the smaller the household.
The painstaking work of David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber on a fifteenth-century Florentine tax census found that only one out of ten households had more than ten people and that most averaged four to five persons. Significantly those few large households in Florence, England, and elsewhere tended to be proportionate to personal wealth. Royal courts, for example, could encompass hundreds of retainers, and even the household of a seventeenth-century English lord might contain forty or more people (and many aristocrats maintained more than one residence). An ordinary English gentleman, by comparison, might have eight people in his "family," while the average household in the kingdom contained four to five individuals. Even among those households with more than three children, the relatively long span between births in many families combined with the early age of leaving for work often meant than no more than three children might be resident at a given time.
In addition to the various types of blood relatives included in different household models, three types of nonkin might also be in residence and therefore considered members of the family. The most common were domestic servants. In cities these tended to be girls from the country, sometimes relatives but usually strangers contracted for three or more years. The objective for the girls, typically starting work at age twelve or thirteen, was to earn enough money for a decent dowry with which they hoped to secure a good marriage. Salaries were one-half to one-third of what the maids could make in the fields, so there was great mobility during harvest time despite the obligations of their contracts and laws threatening punishment. The one exception to the preference for female domestics was the wealthy household, where many male retainers reflected on the social status and virility of the paterfamilias. Domestic servitude as a life phase was extremely common in early modern Europe, so at least one-third of households at any given time included servants. This also held for apprentices, under contract for up to seven years in the hope of learning a craft. In practice apprentices, who were usually teenage boys, ended up doing many odd jobs and other work not related to a craft and were in that sense on the same level as servants.
The third type of nonrelative who might be considered part of the household was lodgers. These individuals tended to be single young men, often journeymen, who stayed for as little as a few weeks or as long as several years. Unable to set up their own households yet, they were forced to rent and often travel, staying mostly in cities and providing a welcome source of income for many families. Often they worked on the family farm or in some kind of cottage industry.
The Household Viewed from the Inside: Affections and Material Interests
Another modern myth about the premodern family has its origins in the work of the sociologist Philippe Ariès more than forty years ago. Though later scholars have somewhat caricaturized his argument, their criticism has nonetheless thoroughly demolished Ariès's most controversial assertion regarding the family, namely that the sentimental affections seen as normal between parents and their children were alien to Europeans before the eighteenth century. During the 1970s some historians, such as Lawrence Stone and Jean-Louis Flandrin, attempted to modify the thesis with their own theories of an early modern transition, but by the late 1980s the scholarly consensus had clearly swung in favor of greater continuity on the question of familial and parental love and affection. Obviously such matters are highly subjective and thus impervious to quantification. The sources available for an overwhelmingly illiterate society are extremely limited as well. Still one need go no further than the sensationalist press's accounts of infanticide and parricide or the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, or Richard Sheridan to grasp the extreme sensitivity of early modern Europeans to the unnatural treatment of blood relations, particularly acts of betrayal and murder among parents, children, siblings, and other close relatives. There was clearly something special about the relationship between parents and children that went beyond mutual duties and obligations, something that occasionally led to great extremes of passions and above all something that deeply affected one's own sense of identity.
This does not mean that early modern families were immune to material interests or the tensions that property often caused. The common source of such conflicts was of course the question of inheritance, and here early modern Europe possessed as bewildering a set of local variations as can be imagined. Some historians have attempted to tie type of inheritance practice to household type, yet while there is some rough correlation between impartibility and multiple households or between partibility and nuclear households, there are far too many regional exceptions to support any such generalization. Broadly speaking the two most basic distinctions were those between partible and impartible inheritance. In partible inheritance the patrimony, or total estate, was evenly divided among children, usually the sons. Occasionally daughters would inherit (especially if there were no sons), but their property would be administered by their husbands or male relatives. Though intended to minimize conflicts among siblings over inheritance, partibility often had the opposite effect, since the heirs had to inventory anything they received at any time. Dividing up the patrimony every generation could also lead to impoverishment, hence a gradual move toward impartibility developed by the beginning of the early modern era.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries partibility began to be replaced in some parts of central and southern Europe by impartibility, which had already established a foothold in much of southern France and Spain. In most versions of impartibility, one heir (usually the oldest son, a practice known as primogeniture) inherited the entire patrimony, thus acting as a steward to the family property and preserving its integrity. The new practice was especially popular among royal dynasties, large landowners, and other wealthy families. In most places noninheriting brothers and sisters were to receive a "portion," that is, a cash settlement, and in many cases went on to work for the older brother. Among nobles on the Continent, the designated heir was often expected to provide an annual stipend for each of his brothers and a dowry to each of his unmarried sisters. English aristocrats, by contrast, were rarely required to make any such concession and only did so voluntarily.
Despite such counterbalances, many early modern people, especially among the Protestant clergy, considered impartibility inherently unfair and even unchristian. Moreover the multitude of diverse customs throughout Europe could make the rights and prerogatives bestowed upon the head of the household appear quite arbitrary. Within the kingdom of France, for instance, a father in Provence had absolute power over the choice of his heir, an exclusionary tactic that led to the designation of the fortunate beneficiary as l'enfant, 'child' (implying that his excluded siblings were not even children in a real sense). Meanwhile a father in Brittany had no power whatsoever to discriminate among his children. Occasionally a father might attempt to circumvent the local legal tradition and put an entailment in his will (known as a substitution in France; mayorazgo in Spain; majorat in Denmark; fideicommissum in Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Poland; and strict settlement in Britain) that prohibited sale, gift, or division of the land for several generations, but this was not always possible.
The question of inheritance could play a key role in relations within the family, including degrees of affection. Even small amounts of property could trigger bitter rivalries among designated heirs and their brothers and sisters, particularly in the case of children from two different marriages, where each individual or group of siblings attempted to exclude the other from inheritance. Many fathers clearly agonized over their attempts to preserve the patrimony and also provide for all of their children. The results could vary considerably. Impartibility tended to encourage emigration, early marriage, and nuclear households among noninheriting children, especially as travel to the New World became cheaper and more frequent, but many also remained near home. It also usually resulted in an extended family household for the adult heir and parent(s), though this too could vary, depending on the nature of the inheritance, local custom, and preferences of the father. Partibility carried its own set of conflicts and survived in many areas (for example, much of central and western Germany) well into the nineteenth century.
The head of the household's control over the family's patrimony obviously gave him a great deal of authority over his children's lives, particularly over the choice of spouses and the timing of marriages. As a rule the more property involved, the greater the involvement of fathers or male guardians in such matters, although forced marriages remained unusual and in most places illegal. Instead, fathers and children often sought a convergence of economic interests and personal attraction, apparently succeeding a good deal of the time. The prerogatives of inheritance also usually ensured that fathers or mothers would be provided for in old age, either in an extended household or with guaranteed income after passing the family property on. Heads of poor households, on the other hand, especially landless laborers, exercised no such economic authority over their grown children and thus enjoyed much less financial security in old age. Well into the twentieth century small households of single or married people over sixty were the poorest anywhere in Europe or North America, surpassed in that distinction possibly only by female-headed households with children.
The nonrelatives of an early modern household usually had no stake in inheritance strategies but played essential roles in family dynamics nevertheless. Writers of the era were fond of portraying servants and apprentices as scheming enemies of the master and the mistress of the house: lying, stealing, lecherous, and above all lazy. Indeed by the eighteenth century words such as "varlet" and "knave" had taken on almost exclusively derogatory meanings in the English language. Legal and other records convey a more nuanced and complicated tangle of relationships between servants and the relatives of the house. Some servants were treated like surrogate children, while others were clearly neglected or abused, receiving worse or less food, mean accommodations, and no affection. Even that common source of illegitimate babies, the illicit affair between the paterfamilias and a young maid, defies easy generalization. Every case had its own mixture of coercion (even rape) and willingness, of naïveté and cynical manipulation, of secrecy and flagrancy. The authority of the paterfamilias over servants and apprentices moreover was never absolute, though it did generally enjoy the legal benefit of the doubt. Religious authorities held the paterfamilias responsible for the spiritual instruction of the entire household, and immoral acts by children and servants alike reflected directly on his reputation. Protestant consistories and other church bodies frequently censored a father or widow for "bad housekeeping," though secular authorities rarely followed up with any punishments of their own.
The Household As an Economic Unit
Before the wide-scale industrialization of the nineteenth century, the household was the key unit of production in European economies. Urban workshops and rural farms alike relied on the labor of household members, including parents, children, servants, apprentices, and sometimes wage-earning lodgers. The degree to which this "whole house" (das ganze Haus) economic model successfully functioned remains a matter of some dispute among family historians. The key for the early modern paterfamilias lay in meeting his family's immediate and future needs while minimizing the number of mouths he had to feed. In this respect rural households west of the Hajnal line showed much greater flexibility, largely because of the high availability of servants and lodgers to balance the size of the household with the size of the holding. The size of eastern European households, usually complex in structure, was less flexible and therefore fixed the amount of labor available, regardless of the size of the property to be worked. Over all, many factors—type and quantity of product, local agrarian system, interregional and international markets, kin and other social networks, property laws, demographics, and so forth—helped determine which labor strategy a head of household adopted.
The division of labor in the early modern household had not always been gender and age specific. During the Middle Ages wives apparently often shared in their husbands' craftwork, even into widowhood. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, this type of labor was increasingly restricted for women, who nevertheless often continued to bring in income through sewing or spinning work (which came to be defined as part of "housekeeping" and thus not really "work"). The division of labor along gender lines was long familiar in rural settings, where men were assigned to tasks requiring greater physical strength, such as plowing and planting, while women (and children) worked on food preparation, cleaning and mending of clothing, housecleaning, water carrying, and so forth. During harvest all members of the household played various parts in getting crops from field to market.
Two major economic events during the early modern era had especially significant consequences for the household economy. The first was the rise of wage labor following the late fifteenth century. At the very time when new impartible inheritance laws were sweeping across Europe, an increasing number of wage-earning jobs in the West provided noninheriting children with an alternative basis for setting up their own households. This loss of labor forced some farmers to hire their own help, further increasing the number of wage earners in the economy and nonrelatives in the household.
The second development began in the mid–seventeenth century and likewise fed the growth of a wage economy in many parts of western Europe. Proto-industrialization, particularly in the textile industry, had the greatest impact on small landholders, whose members (women, children, and sometimes men) increasingly turned to some phase of cloth production for their households' incomes. Unlike the traditional guild system, in which all phases of production were under the direct supervision of a master in the craft, the "putting-out system" (German Verlagssystem) assigned an intermediate task to an outsider, who was paid at an agreed-upon piece rate. The growth of these so-called cottage industries was gradual and came as a consequence of changes in agrarian markets as well as higher demands and therefore increased production. Before the mechanization and factories of the industrial revolution, for instance, it took four to ten spinners to produce the amount of yarn woven by a single weaver in one day. Like large landowners who had increasingly enclosed and converted their farmland to sheep-grazing fields, these cottagers found income from the cloth industry both more profitable and more reliable than farming.
The immediate impact of increased wage labor and proto-industrialization on household forms was not always clear-cut. Clearly wage labor tended to encourage earlier marriage and more nuclear households. No longer forced to wait for inheritance, noninheriting children had little reason to remain part of an extended or complex household rather than start their own. Yet many such individuals, for reasons of security or family solidarity, did stay on well into adulthood despite the conditions. Similarly proto-industrialization sometimes encouraged more nuclear households and other times had the opposite effect. The formation of new households depended on many factors, including the skills required for production (an important limitation in such industries as arms manufacture in Belgium), the initial outlay of capital required for equipment (for example, expensive looms), and the size of the household.
Ideas About the Household and Family
Since antiquity family and household have served as powerful metaphors as well as social realities. Aristotle considered the household (Greek oikos) the chief building block of society as well as the model for a successful state. "It was out of the association formed by men with . . . women and slaves," he wrote in his Politics, "that the household was formed. . . . The next step is the village. . . . The final association, formed of several villages, is the city or state." Aristotle considered both the household and the state "naturally" hierarchical and patriarchal, with the head of the household and head of state each possessing certain duties as well as prerogatives. Their paternal authority demanded filial obedience but also obliged household heads to display loving concern. Later the Roman paterfamilias and emperor enjoyed expanded rights, often to a shockingly autocratic degree by modern standards. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European writers revived the classical tradition of the household as metaphor for the state, arguing for a strengthening of the patriarchal leader of each. In Germany a number of popular Protestant pamphlets, the so-called Hausvaterliteratur, lamented that the authority of the head of household, or Hausvater, was under assault from an unholy alliance of shrewish wives, wild children, papist agitators, and a variety of devils bent on destruction of the family. A father should be as a king in his own household, they argued, providing biblical, classical, and anecdotal evidence in support. Publications elsewhere in Europe similarly invoked the sovereignty of the paterfamilias, whom Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) likened to the head of a small monarchy.
The other side of the patriarchal metaphor consisted of a paternalization of political authority. This imagery too was ancient and continued to inspire many medieval paeans to fatherly kings, such as Saint Louis (Louis IX; ruled 1226–1270) of France. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, proponents of a stronger "absolutist" monarchy, such as Jean Bodin (1530–1596), applied paternal claims of sovereignty to argue for greater political authority for their kings. Only a father's strong hand, Bodin maintained in his Six Books of a Commonwealth (1576), could prevent the anarchy that had overtaken France during its religious wars.
The comparison of a kingdom to a household probably reached its zenith with the writings of the Englishman Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653). Beginning in the 1630s Filmer published several tracts that made an argument similar to Bodin's but with even more extensive use of patriarchal imagery. Unlike the proposed absolute monarch of Thomas Hobbes, Filmer's ruler—like a true father—ruled more by moral suasion and education than by force. His ultimate authority, however, was beyond dispute, dating back to Adam and later the dispersion of Babel: "The Nations were distinct Families, which had Fathers for Rulers over them; . . . God was careful to preserve the Fatherly Authority, by distributing the Diversity of Languages, according to the Diversity of Families." After the English Civil War and Commonwealth, Filmer's writings received new attention, culminating in the printing of his previously unpublished masterwork, Patriarcha (The natural power of kings) in 1680. By then patriarchal political imagery and language were so pervasive that even John Locke (1632–1704), who dismissed Filmer's absolutist arguments as "glib nonsense," was forced to acknowledge the paternal nature of government.
The patriarchal revival also had its religious dimension. Both kings and fathers, as Filmer noted, received their authority directly from God, most explicitly in the fourth commandment to love and obey one's parents. This "divine right" to rule became closely identified with the absolutist monarchies of England's Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) and France's Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), but the sentiment, if not the political implications, was widespread in early modern Europe. At the same time both fathers and political authorities had clearcut responsibilities for the religious welfare of their respective "families." Martin Luther (1483–1546) even referred to both figures as bishops expected to lead by example and discipline every member of their respective realms. This highly idealized patriarchal hierarchy was best expressed by German authors, who wrote of a Hausvater (head of household) subject to a Landesvater (prince or "father of his country"), with both overseen by the Gottesvater (God the father) himself.
Throughout the early modern period many religious sects and political groups also employed the language and imagery of family. All of the Reformation's leaders spoke to their congregations as "families," and some groups, notably the Anabaptists and their successors, called each other "brother" and "sister." Later movements, such as the Society of Friends (that is, Quakers) and Moravian Brethren, similarly turned to the language of family for coherence and identity. Finally, secular political groups from the Masons to the Jacobins of the French Revolution openly proclaimed brotherhood (French fraternité) as one of their foundational tenets.
Birth of the Modern Family?
Just as no single "traditional" family model ever existed, no single modern family model succeeded it. Nuclear households admittedly became more common during the nineteenth century, but complex and alternate household forms continued to thrive in some places, particularly southern and eastern Europe. "Modernization," in the guise of either industrialization or increased individualism, also did not spell the end of the importance of kinship; some historians argue that family relations became even more important as a result of such larger social transformations. On the other hand, the household itself did experience some significant changes. Most notably, historians detect a discernible increase after the sixteenth century in the desire for privacy, resulting in somewhat larger and more compartmentalized residences among the middle and upper classes. The idea of "home" itself took on a form of separation from society, a haven in a tumultuous world. By the eighteenth century a new "cult of domesticity" was growing, and by the following century it spread to lower-middle-class and working-class cultures. Like the patriarchal model that preceded it, the new idealization of the household often remained a common point of reference rather than a social reality. Still it corresponded nicely with the continuing rise of nuclear households, a convergence one might call the congealment of the modern family if not its birth.
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—JOEL F. HARRINGTON
