Introduction

If land is to yield a profit or even a livelihood to its possessors it has to be worked. Whether the labour comes from the family or is hired depends on the size of the enterprise, the nature of the agricultural activity (some demanding more labour than others), and the ease with which non-family labour may be purchased. It would seem to follow, therefore, that land must influence the composition of the possessor's household. More precisely it could be said that this should contain (though not, of course, at all stages of its development) either offspring of working age, or farm servants who live in or even kin in need of employment or shelter, or one or more of these in various combinations. If land were the only economic influence on household forms we might risk a further prediction that possessors of land would have larger, more complex households with more servants and adult offspring than those without, always assuming of course that such economic influences are not overridden by cultural or social-status ones.

However, if we are thinking in terms of English villages, the influence of non-farming occupation has also to be considered and has indeed already been observed to have an important bearing on household structure. Peter Laslett, for example, has demonstrated for pre-industrial England that gentry households more often contained kin and servants than did yeoman households and that the proportion of yeoman households with kin and servants exceeded in turn those of the husbandmen as those of the husbandmen did the tradesmen and craftsmen and so on down the status hierarchy until one reached paupers with the smallest households, fewest servants and fewest kin.