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⁶ For example, Burgess, E., Aging in Western Societies, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1960Google Scholar, and Cowgill, D. and Holmes, L. D., Ageing and Modernization, New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972.Google Scholar

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⁸ See especially Fischer, D. H., Growing Old in America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977;Google ScholarAchenbaum, W. A., Old Age in the New Land, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.Google Scholar See also the exchange between Stone, L., ‘Walking over grandma’, New York Review of Books, 24, 8 (1977), p. 10Google Scholar, and Fischer, D. H., ‘Growing old: an exchange’, New York Review of Books, 24, 14 (1977), p. 48.Google Scholar A more cautious treatment of the history of old age in North America is to be found in Haber, C., Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ Phillipson, , op. cit. p. 38.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid. p. 159.

¹¹ Ibid. p. 158.

¹² The evidence is to be found in Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, London, Edward Arnold, 1981.Google Scholar

¹³ See the population totals in Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, pp. 208–209;Google ScholarWrigley, E. A., ‘Urban growth in early modern England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (forthcoming);Google ScholarTurner, D., ‘A lost seventeenth century demographic crisis’, Local Population Studies 21 (1978).Google Scholar It may be noticed that individual places, especially cities, could have well over 10% of their populations above 60 at dates earlier than industrialisation, in Italy as early as the fifteenth century, in Japan and in Iceland; see Laslett, P., Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations, Cambridge, 1977, table 5.2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²¹ Le Bras, H. ‘Evolution des liens de famille au cours de l'existence. Unecomparaison entre la France actuelle et la France du XVIII^e siècles’, in thé Proceedings of VII^e Colloque National de Démographie, Strasbourg, 5–7 mai 1982, Les Ages de la Vie 1, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1982.Google Scholar The assumptions made were that in eighteenth-century France expectation of life at birth was 30 for both sexes, that 50% of women were still unmarried at age 25, and that 15% of women never married, that husbands were 6 years older than their wives at marriage and that completed family sizes were 5.75. The contemporary French population was assumed to have an expectation of life at birth of 73 years, 50% of women were married by 23, 7% of women never married, the age gap between spouses was three years and that completed family size was 2.2 births per mother. James Smith has assumed in simulating the eighteenth-century English population e ₀s of 36 years for males and 38 years for females, a total marital fertility rate of 8.1, a Net Reproduction Rate of 1.2, an intrinsic growth rate of 1.0%, female and male ages at first marriage of 25 and 28 years respectively. For the present-day English population the following assumptions were made: e ₀a for women and men are 70 and 75 respectively, a NRR of 0.9, an intrinsic growth rate of –0.2% and ages at first marriage of 23 for women and 25 for men.

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²³ Thane, P., ‘The history of provision for the elderly to 1929’, in Jerome, D., Ageing in Modern Society, London, Groom Helm, 1983, p. 191Google Scholar, and Quadagno, J., Aging in Early Industrial Society: Work, Family and Social Policy in Nineteenth Century England, London and New York, Academic Press, 1982, p. 92.Google Scholar

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²⁶ Ibid. p. 56.

²⁷ The classic work is of course Thompson, E. P., ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present 50 (1971);CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also, Walter, J., and Wrightson, K., ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, Past and Present, 71, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar and especially Walter, J., ‘A rising of the people? The Oxfordshire rising and the crisis of the 1590s', Past and Present (forthcoming).Google Scholar

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⁴¹ This is discussed more fully in Smith, R. M., ‘Some issues concerning families and their property in rural England 1240–1800’, chapter 1 in Smith, R. M., editor, Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, Cambridge University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar, particularly section(v), of that chapter, ‘Some issues in the family cycle of the propertyless or deficient’.

⁴² See also the comments concerning the multiple-family households of the Russian serfs as little welfare ‘republics’ in Czap, P., ‘The perennial multiple family household, Mishino, Russia 1782–1853’, Journal of Family History 7 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in ‘A large family: the peasant’s greatest wealth: serf households in Mishino, Russia 1814–58’ in Wall, R., Robin, J., and Laslett, P., editors, Family Forms in Historic Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar There are reasons to believe that welfare and charity recipients in areas of Southern Europe were unlike those in north-west European areas. Some recent research suggests that the elderly were far less prominent in the lists of beneficiaries analysed by Martz, L., Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain, Cambridge University Press, 1983CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Jones, C., Chanté et bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region 1740–1815, Cambridge University Press, 1982.Google Scholar

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