There are some undertakings which, while they cannot hope to be fully scholarly in the professional sense, may be illuminated by a particular background of experience and thought, of theory and practice. My own curiosity about how European patterns of kinship, marriage and family came to develop as they did owed something to reading medieval drama, Scottish history, the works of Marc Bloch and George Homans on France and England, and the ‘comparative sociology’ of the nineteenth-century legal historians and jurists. In trying to make my knowledge somewhat more extensive and up-to-date, I am deeply in debt to a number of scholars on whose generosity and friendship I have presumed. The value of my links with Past and Present and with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris are apparent. Clemens Heller and La Maison des Sciences de l'Homme have always provided the right combination of interest and disinterest. And it was due to a timely invitation from Pierre Bourdieu that I was able to undertake a final revision over Easter 1982. Keith Hopkins, Keith Thomas, Edward Miller and Patrick Wormald read through substantial portions of the first draft, corrected many errors of fact and made many suggestions. Diane Owen Hughes read the second Appendix and her comments caused me to rethink and reformulate. Chris Dyer offered suggestions and emendations for Chapter 6. Peter Linehan, John Bossy, Keith Wrightson, David Sabean, Robert Pollock and Bob Ombres supplied me with important references.