The intention of this paper is simple: to provide information which may help to answer the question ‘How important was kinship in the social structure of an English village community and in the lives of English villagers in the early modern period?’ An investigation of this kind is timely, perhaps even overdue, when one considers the current stage of research in both history and the social sciences. It is now some twenty years since Professor Williams argued that ‘it does seem as if the general structure of English kinship is now clearly established’. He pointed to the general predominance of the nuclear family in household structure; the bilateral tracing of descent which gives a unique set of kin to each individual; a recognition of kin which is both shallow in depth and narrow in range. He emphasized that English kinship is ‘a flexible permissive system’ having few strong obligations or rules of behaviour between kin; that kin sentiments are rarely sufficiently strong to overcome geographical or social distance; that kinship is in general functionally unimportant as compared with neighbourliness, being merely one of several networks of connection from which individuals might select one another for various purposes.

Historians probing the very distant past might perhaps expect to discover a very different situation. Those concerned with the early modern period have long been aware of the preoccupation with lineage and of the effective importance of kinship ties among the ruling class of the time.