1 Census of Great Britain 1851, Population Tables I, British Parliamentary Papers 1852–3, LXXXV, xxxiv.

2 Many of the writers who attempted to estimate the size and composition of the population of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries divided the population into units which they identified ambiguously as ‘houses or families’. See the discussion in Richard Wall, ‘Mean household size from printed sources’, in Peter Laslett and Richard Wall eds., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972), 162–5.

3 Laslett makes the same distinction in his analyses of household composition; see Laslett and Wall, Household and family in past time, 87–8. On the other hand, studies of kinship systems and of kin links between households generally class all such links, whether involving children or other relatives, as ‘kin’; see below, note 8.

4 Some servants were in fact related to the householder although their relationship was not recorded by the census enumerators. See Cooper, D. and Donald, M., ‘Households and “hidden” kin in early-nineteenth century England: four case studies in suburban Exeter, 1821–1861’, Continuity and Change 10 (1995), 257–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, it is unlikely that most servants in English households were related to their employers, given that in pre-industrial England 30 per cent of all males and 40 per cent of females aged 20–4 were in service at any one time and given the frequency with which they moved from one service post to another. See Peter Laslett, Family life and illicit love in earlier generations (Cambridge, 1977), 34, 72–3.

5 As is documented, for example, by Martine Segalen for Brittany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; see her ‘Nuclear is not independent: organization of the household in the Pays Bigouden Sud in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Robert McNetting ed., Households: comparative and historical studies of the domestic group (Berkeley, CA, 1984), 163–86.

6 This is illustrated in the case of the inhabitants of the Greek island of Lesbos in the nineteenth century by Euthymios Papataxiarchis, in ‘La valeur du ménage: classes sociales, stratégies matrimoniales et lois ecclésiastiques à Lesbos au xixe siècle’, in Stuart Woolf ed., Espaces et Familles dans l'Europe du sud à l'âge moderne (Paris, 1993), 109–42.

7 Andrejs Plakans, ‘ Kinship’ in Peter N. Stearns ed., Encyclopedia of European social history from 1350 to 2000 vol. 4 (New York, 2001), 104. All persons known to be related whether by descent or marriage are counted in this connection as kin; see Plakans, ‘Kinship’, 101. Jack Goody, in The European family (Oxford, 2000), 188, also defines kin this way.

8 Plakans, ‘Kinship’, 105.

9 Unfortunately, not only are the networks of particular individuals not fully specified but also they are in many cases atypical even of the elite populations to which they belonged. This is particularly the case with clergymen diarists such as Ralph Josselin and James Woodforde, whose livings took them to parts of the country where, prior to their arrival, they had no relatives. For Josselin, see Alan Macfarlane, The family life of Ralph Josselin (Cambridge, 1970), 17, and for his kinship network, 153–60. See also James Woodforde, Diary of a country parson (Norwich, 1999). For further perspectives on Josselin and Woodforde, see the contribution of Naomi Tadmor in this issue.

10 Lineage is defined by Goody (European family, 189) as a group descended unilineally from a male or female ancestor. The span of the lineage is related to its depth.

11 For an example of bequest patterns in wills, see Richard T. Vann, ‘Wills and the family in an English town: Banbury, 1550–1800’, Journal of Family History 4, 4 (1979), 346–67.

12 See Peter Laslett, ‘Family and household as work group and kin group: areas of traditional Europe compared’, in Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett eds., Family forms in historic Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 526–7.

13 Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’ in Laslett and Wall, Household and family in past time, 25; Laslett, ‘Family and household as work group and kin group’, 537 (point 16).

14 See Laslett, ‘Family and household as work group and kin group’, 536–7.

15 Although it is possible to document specific instances of kin support to wealthier individuals in the form of both significant financial assistance and care in childbirth or illness, it is unwise to infer from such cases that such assistance was regularly provided or indeed could be provided. For examples of assistance involving middle-ranking families, see Eleanor Gordon, ‘The family’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Janes Yeo eds., Gender in Scottish history since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2006), 248; Goody, The European family, 60 (citing Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin). Gordon also claims that small firms often (current author's italics) looked to kin to help them out of a financial crisis but offers no supporting evidence.

16 The following studies were selected for discussion here: Alwyn D. Rees, Life in a Welsh countryside (Cardiff, 1951); J. H. Sheldon, The social medicine of old age: report of an inquiry in Wolverhampton (London, 1948); W. M. Williams, The sociology of an English village: Gosforth (London, 1956); J. M. Mogey, Family and neighbourhood: two studies in Oxford (Oxford, 1956); and Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and kinship in East London (London, 1957). Space and time constraints preclude extending the discussion to include all of what is a quite considerable literature, but for further information on kin support and household structure in the middle part of the twentieth century see M. Kerr, The people of Ship Street (London, 1958); W. M. Williams, A West Country village, Ashworthy: family, country, land (London, 1963); C. Rosser and C. Harris, The family and social change: a study of family and kinship in a South Wales town (London, 1965); and J. S. Nalson, Mobility of farm families: a study of occupational and residential mobility in an upland area of England (Manchester, 1968). See also the published extracts from the diary kept between 1945 and 1948 for Mass Observation by Nella Last, in Patricia and Robert Malcomson, Nella Last's peace: the postwar diaries of housewife, 49 (London, 1948), passim.

17 Rees, Welsh countryside, 71; see also the discussion in Section 2, below. Goody (The European family, 58 and 177) also uses much later evidence to infer earlier practice, arguing that its analytical profitability outweighs the possible dangers.

18 Michael Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971), 43–67, 153–60.

19 E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen and R. S. Schofield, English population history from family reconstitutions 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997). See also the article by Murphy in this number.

20 The library of the Cambridge Group, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, holds copies of the censuses of Cardington, Bedfordshire in 1782 and of Caunton, Nottinghamshire in 1846.

21 Laslett, ‘Introduction’, 31; E. A. Hammel and Laslett, Peter, ‘Comparing household structure over time and between cultures’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16 (1974), 73–110Google Scholar.

22 See the studies cited in Richard Wall, ‘The transformation of European families across the centuries’, in Richard Wall, Josef Ehmer and Tamara K. Hareven eds., Family history revisited: comparative perspectives (Cranbury NJ and London, 2001), 223, 227.

23 Ibid., 222–3 and 226–7.

24 Laslett, ‘Introduction’, 85; Laslett, Family life and illicit love; Laslett, ‘Family and household as work group and kin group’, 518–24.

25 On the limitations of the concept of the ‘no family’ household, see Richard Wall, ‘Life course and socio-economic perspectives on no family households’, unpublished paper presented to the 32nd Social Science History Conference (Chicago, 2007).

26 Laslett, ‘Introduction’, 27.

27 Observations summarized in Wall, ‘Mean household size’, 168–9.

28 John Graunt, for example, who was the first to attempt a serious investigation of mortality in England, allowed three servants as well as a man and his wife and three children when estimating in 1662 the average size of London households as containing eight persons; see his Natural and political observations on the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662), cited in Wall, ‘Mean household size’, 168, and see Peter Laslett, The earliest classics (Farnborough, 1973). Other commentators (such as Arthur Young in the 1770s) tended to over-estimate the number of children in the household, particularly if the parents were poor. In addition, two (presumably prosperous) farmers, responding to an enquiry by Arthur Young into the consumption of meat, reported that they had families (households) of 14 and 16 persons respectively, though in this case this did not signify the presence of many children or relatives but that they had included in their households passing tradesmen, labourers employed on a seasonal basis and harvesters. See Arthur Young, A six months tour through the north of England (1770), cited in Wall ‘Mean household size’, 171; Young, Arthur, Annals of Agriculture XXXII (1784–1815), 517, 525Google Scholar, cited Ibid., 167.

29 See the discussion in Richard Wall, ‘Regional and temporal variations in the structure of British households since 1851’, in Theo Barker and Michael Drake eds., Population and society in Britain 1850–1980 (London, 1982), 69. The first national census of Britain was taken in 1801 and they then continued decennially (apart from in 1941). From the outset totals of the households (referred to as ‘families’), houses and persons resident in each parish were published but before 1951 almost no attempt was made to investigate the composition of households, even though from 1851 the relationship of each member of the household to the household head was recorded in the enumeration books and (after 1911) on the schedules completed by householders. There were just two occasions when household composition was analysed and these were for a specially selected set of districts in 1851 and 1861 (but without any particular stress on the kin component of households). It is also difficult to understand why the officials responsible for publishing the results of successive censuses ceased after 1861 to explore the issue of household composition, only taking it up again in 1951. One might perhaps draw the inference that in comparison, say, with information about numbers of people, houses and families, age structure, marital status, occupations and migration (as measured by birthplace against current residence), it was less easy to identify why either central or local government officials needed to have details about the relationships of household members. Yet elsewhere in Western Europe the composition of the household was investigated in detail before the end of the nineteenth century.

30 The various studies are listed in note 16, above.

31 Rees, Welsh countryside, 60.

32 Ibid., 70–1.

33 Richard Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family: an illustration of the adaptive family economy’, in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith and Keith Wrightson eds., The world we have gained: histories of population and social structure (Oxford, 1986), 282–9, but see Laslett, Peter, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the “nuclear hardship” hypothesis’, Continuity and Change 3, 2 (1988), 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the argument that the inclusion of relatives in a household had to be acceptable to the householder and could not be claimed as a right.

34 This is an example of what Peter Laslett termed ‘nouminal normative rules’ that govern behavior; see his ‘Demographic and microstructural history in relation to human adaptation: reflections on newly established evidence’, in D. J. Ortner ed., How humans adapt: a biocultural odyssey (Washington, 1983), 343–70. See also the discussion in the contribution by Lloyd Bonfield to this issue.

35 Rees, Welsh countryside, 68.

36 Ibid., 71. Other instances of the legacy of the medieval past were considered by Rees to include attachment to family and kindred, hospitality shown to strangers, maintenance of community life to counter dispersed settlements, and specialization in the arts; Ibid., 160–1. Rees also noted the weakening of ties to kin by the mid-twentieth century; Ibid., 81. In medieval Wales the kindred had been a patrilineal clan, the members of which had specific obligations to their near kin, although they also had rights and responsibilities to the kinsmen of their mothers; Ibid., 81.

37 Williams, Gosforth, 49.

38 Rees, Welsh countryside, 72; Williams, Gosforth, 52.

39 Jack Ravensdale, ‘Population changes and the transfer of customary land on a Cambridgeshire manor in the fourteenth century’, in Richard M Smith ed., Land, kinship and life-cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 202–3; Moring, Beatrice, ‘Nordic retirement contracts and the economic situation of widows’, Continuity and Change 21, 3 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Williams, Gosforth, 53.

41 Indeed the Irish case was interpreted by Laslett as involving co-residence; see Laslett, ‘Introduction’, 27.

42 Moring, ‘Nordic retirement contracts’, 405, 407.

43 Willams, Gosforth, 46.

44 Ibid., 57.

45 Young and Willmott, Family and kinship, 31.

46 Mogey, Family and neighbourhood, 54.

47 Ibid., 54; Young and Willmott, Family and kinship, 17.

48 Richard Wall, in ‘Widows, family and poor relief in 18th and 19th century England’, unpublished paper presented to the European Social Science History Conference (Lisbon, 2008), includes analyses of lists of the poor in parts of Ipswich and Salisbury from John Webb, Poor relief in Elizabethan Ipswich (Ipswich, 1966), and Paul Slack, Poverty in early Tudor Salisbury (Devizes, 1975); the list of Corfe Castle in the Library of the Cambridge Group; and information on widows in Ipswich in Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Appendix to Interim Report no. 2, Appendix E: 421–8.

49 David Davies, The case of the labourers in husbandry (London, 1795), esp. p. 179.

50 William Boys, Collections for the history of Sandwich in Kent (Canterbury, 1792), cited in Wall, ‘Mean household size’, 166.

51 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: a study of town life. (London, 1902), 117, note 1.

52 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Appendix to Interim Report no. 2, Appendix E: 421–8.

53 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Appendix to Interim Report no. 3.

54 Rowntree, Poverty, 171.

55 Rees, Welsh countryside, 63; Williams, Gosforth, 43.

56 See the accounts of households in Rees, Welsh countryside, 69, and Williams, Gosforth, 51.

57 Rees, Welsh countryside, 65.

58 Ibid., 65–6; Williams, Gosforth, 45.

59 Census of Corfe Castle 1790, copy in the library of the Cambridge Group.

60 Frederic Morton Eden, The state of the poor, or an history of the labouring classes in England (London, 1797), 797–8.

61 M. F. Davies, Life in an English village: an economic and social history of the parish of Corsley in Wiltshire (London, 1909), 218.

62 The value of the food provided has been estimated using the information on the cost of these items when purchased by other families in Corsley.

63 Davies, Corsley, 190.

64 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Interim Report 4, 217.

65 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Appendix to Interim Report 5, Appendix B 92), Govan, 180. The cases were selected for the Royal Commission as typical.

66 See Richard Wall, ‘Relationships between the generations in British families past and present’, in Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber eds., Households and families; divisions and change (Basingstoke, 1992), 81, calculated from Charles Booth, The aged poor in England and Wales (London), 339–40. Wives supported by the earnings of their husbands were included by Booth among those with earnings. Booth's term ‘own resources’ has been interpreted as indicating income derived from property and savings.

67 Rowntree, Poverty, 272 (brother), 332 (brother); Davies, Corsley, 198–9 (donor not specified), 214 (butcher); Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII: Appendix to Interim Report 5, Appendix B 92), Govan, 180 and Appendix E (13), Paisley, 195.

68 On the availability of kin see Beatrice Moring and Richard Wall, The welfare of widows in northern Europe (forthcoming).

69 Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Appendix vol. XVII, Interim Report 3, 182–3.

70 J. E. Smith and J. E. Oeppen, ‘Estimating numbers of kin in historical England using demographic microsimulation’, in D. Reher and R. S. Schofield eds., Old and new methods in historical demography (Oxford, 1993), 302–17. See also the analysis of kinship patterns in England and Wales between 1875 and 2000 by Mike Murphy in this issue, suggested by the application of the SOCSIM micro-simulation model.

71 These results were produced by Jim Oeppen, who was at the time a member of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and who is at the time of writing at the Max-Planck-Institut in Rostock, using the CAMSIM micro-simulation programme.

72 There is no standard definition of ‘the same locality’. In most historical studies it is represented by residence in the same parish, which can of course vary considerably in size. In some studies conducted after 1960, residential proximity is measured by residence within 5 miles or 10 kilometres. See Wall, ‘Relationships between the generations’, 73.

73 Ruggles, Steven, ‘Multigenerational families in nineteenth-century America’, Continuity and Change 18, 1 (2003), 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ruggles, Steven, ‘The decline of intergenerational coresidence in the United States, 1850–2000’, American Sociological Review 72 (2007), 962–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 My estimates are derived from application of the CAMSIM micro-simulation by Zhongwei Zhao; see Wall, Richard, ‘Elderly widows and widowers and their coresidents in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England and Wales’, The History of the Family 7, 1 (2002), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 My calculations are from Lyn Boothman, ‘Mobility, stability and kinship: the population of Long Melford in the late seventeenth century’, unpublished Master of Studies dissertation, Department of Community Education, University of Cambridge, 1997, 41. For the simulation see Smith and Oeppen, ‘Estimating numbers of kin’. The comparison may, however, be distorted to the extent that the rates of fertility, nuptiality and mortality in Long Melford varied from the rates used to construct the micro-simulation.

76 Ibid. However, Lyn Boothman has advised in a personal communication that the estimates of proportions of grandparents and more distant kin living locally may have been under-estimated because of the greater uncertainty about the identity of those kin where the relationship had to be traced through two or more intermediaries.

77 For an illustration of the migration rates of different age groups, see Anderson, Family structure, 39.

78 Although there was considerable random variation; see Boothman, ‘Mobility, stability and kinship’, 41. The survivorship of cousins was not measured in the micro-simulation.

79 Although the average distance between the homes of parents and married children has increased because significantly larger proportions now live in different parts of the country and abroad than was the case in the past. Another difficulty is that there could have been more substantial shifts over time, in the proportions of adult children living close to their parents if the specific populations that have been studied were unrepresentative of migration patterns in the wider society of the time, but there is no reason to consider this as likely.

80 Summarized from Wall, ‘Relationships between the generations’, 73. The five towns were Maidstone, Stockport, Merton, Melton Mowbray and Oakham with any adjacent villages; see Warnes, A. M., ‘The residential mobility histories of parents and children, and relationships to present proximity and social integration’, Environment and Planning, Series A, 18 (1986), 1581–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

81 Wall, ‘Relationships between the generations’, 75. It should be noted that these proportions of those living locally are considerably lower than those calculated by Lyn Boothman for Long Melford in the late seventeenth century; see text above and Boothman, ‘Mobility, stability and kinship’, 41.

82 Cited Ibid., 71; see also Sheldon, Social medicine.

83 Wall, ‘Elderly widows and widowers’, 142–6. In 1891, 57 per cent of widows over the age of 65 had one of their children in their household whereas only 43 per cent of married women over 65 had a child present. Of widowers aged over 65, 55 per cent lived with a child compared with 52 per cent of married men of this age. (Figures are from a sample of different localities defined in terms of contrasting economic and social environments from the census returns of 1891.)

84 ‘Kin’ is defined here as relatives other than children in line with the distinction made in the introduction to the 1851 Census and adopted by Laslett; see note 3, above. For the relative proportions of kin and servants as household members, see Richard Wall, ‘The household, demographic and economic change in England 1650–1970’, in Wall, Robin and Laslett, Family forms, 498, and see note 4, above.

85 Wall, ‘Relationships between the generations’, 82, citing Booth, The aged poor, 339–40.

86 Some instances are documented in Thomas Sokoll, Essex pauper letters 1731–1837 (Oxford, 2001), 261, 282, 571.

87 Cases of obligations to immediate family taking precedence are documented; see Ibid., 486, 578–9. See also Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1909, Suffolk, 12 and 23.

88 For the latter, see note 61, above.

89 Wall, ‘The household, demographic and economic change’, 497, and Wall, ‘The transformation of European families’, 231.

90 See Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family’, 284–5.

91 See in particular, Michael Anderson, ‘Household structure and the industrial revolution; mid-nineteenth-century Preston in comparative perspective’, in Laslett and Wall, Household and family in past time, 226.

92 Rees, Welsh countryside, 94.

93 An example would be the occasional gifts of food to poor neighbours in Corsley; see Davies, Corsley, 198–9, 214, and note 67, above.

94 Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford, 1945). For a fuller analysis of the contacts with kin and neighbours in Lark Rise, see Wall, Richard, ‘Beyond the household: marriage, household formation and the role of kin and neighbours’, International Review of Social History 44, 1(1999), 64–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Rees, Welsh countryside; Williams, Gosforth.

96 For Long Melford see note 75, above, and for Terling, see Wrightson, K., ‘Household and kinship in sixteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal 12, 1 (1981), 151–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, Goody (European family, 60) questions, perhaps correctly, whether the records for Terling document mutual help among kin and neighbours. Lyn Boothman also argues that more kin of the inhabitants of Terling might have been identified had the analysis been extended beyond the borders of one small parish; see Boothman, ‘Mobility, stability and kinship’, 29.

97 Boothman accounts for the denser kin network in Long Melford than in Terling partly in terms of the availability in Long Melford of more employment outside of agriculture and more housing; see her ‘Mobility, stablility and kinship’, 30, 89 and 102. However, Boothman also shows that communities with very different economies could have similarly dense kin networks, noting that there were as many first-order kin links between households (those involving parents, children or siblings) in the small cloth-producing town of Long Melford in the late seventeenth century as there were between households in pastoral Gosforth in the early 1950s.

98 Anderson (‘Household structure’, 229) noted larger proportions of households containing parents and married children in the two industrial towns of Preston and Oldham in 1851 compared with the situation in pre-industrial England, but in fact the households of almost all social groups were more complex in 1851 than between 1750 and 1821; see Wall, ‘The household, demographic and economic change’, 509. For the clustering of related families in the nineteenth century in working-class areas of Preston, see Anderson, Family structure, 61, and for a middle-class district of Glasgow in the nineteenth century, see Gordon, ‘The family’, 248.