Richard Wall

Marriage, residence, and occupational choices of senior and junior siblings in the english past

Even when parents had few resources to transfer to their children, the dynamics of the family life-cycle may serve to advance the occupational, residence and marriage careers of certain children and hinder the careers of others. This hypothesis is tested by calculating for a number of small English communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the proportions of children, ranked according to their position in the birth order at the time of the census, who were resident in the parish of their parents. The data suggest that even when parents had few resources and their children made their own way in life, certain differences in residence and marriage patterns and in occupational histories were associated with specific birth ranks.

Economic collaboration of family members within and beyond households in English society, 1600–2000

This article evaluates the extent of economic support provided by the family in English society. The first issue addressed is the importance given to relationships between family members both by contemporaries and by historians when attempting to distinguish different types of household. Following sections of the article discuss the role of households in redistributing income from the better-paid to the less well-paid or non-earners and the significance of economic support received from members of the family living elsewhere relative to that provided from within the household and from other outside sources, such as the community, employers and neighbours. A further section then assesses the impact of demographic change on the size and composition of the kin group and the extent to which population mobility made regular contact with close kin more difficult.

Broken families: Economic resources and social networks of women who head families

Over the past forty years family history has been one of the main growth areas in the development of social history. The lines of inquiry have been broad and fruitful, shedding light on many aspects of family life in the past: regarding demographic patterns, emotional bonding among family members, the economy of households, and more recently the interaction between families and their institutional environment (Anderson, 1995). Though immensely diverse in approach, methodology and subject matter, historical research on family life has one thing in common: it defines families as economic, social or emotional household units, containing parents and children, sometimes including servants, tenants or young employees. Although recognizing that demographic patterns of high mortality resulted in a surplus of women, especially in pre-industrial European urban societies, still a lot of research remains to be done on how such demographic patterns precisely affectedwomens position in the household and their chances of economic and emotional survival. One major effect of demographic patterns was that relatively large groups of women and their families had to cope, temporarily or permanently, without a male (adult) breadwinner. This seems to have been the case inWestern European seafaring communities and highly urbanized areas especially. This special issue presents new research on the ways in which women and their families survived economically and socially without a male household head (temporarily or permanently) and the ways in which society responded to such families. What legal and economic resources did widows and seamens wives and their families have? Did governments, church organizations, or business companies respond to demographic patterns by setting up regulations and networks that would better the familys chances?

Elderly widows and widowers and their coresidents in late 19th- and early 20th-century England and Wales

This article examines the family and household patterns of widowers and widows in England and Wales between 1891 and 1921 in terms of the proportion of widowers and widows who lived with never- or ever-married children, servants, or inmates, with nonrelatives only, or on their own. The absence of marked change between 1891 and 1921 in the frequency with which elderly widowers and widows lived with a married or never-married child are in line with the Laslett [J. Fam. Hist. 12 (1987) 263.] expectation that family patterns evolve only slowly, certainly much slower than the forces of political and economic change. Where changes can be detected, as in the decline in frequency of coresidence with servants or inmates, these changes were experienced by the younger as well as the older widowed and by married people. Apparently, the residence patterns of the elderly widowed changed due to the introduction of means-tested old-age pensions in 1910. A second investigated is the extent to which the socioeconomic environment influenced the residence patterns of the widowed in a given time period. The effect in general proves to be weak with little difference between one environment and another in the frequency with which widowers coresided with their children and evidence of gender balancing of the household (relatively more widows living with sons and more widowers with daughters) visible only in agricultural environments.

Widows and unmarried women as taxpayers in England before 1800

A variety of taxes levied at various dates between the 1540s and the early nineteenth century are analysed to ascertain whether the frequency with which widows and unmarried women are listed as taxpayers matches the ratio between the numbers of widows and unmarried women and the number of men in the adult population. Examination of the tax assessments indicates that the proportion of taxpayers who were women often fell well below their proportion in the general population. This applies in the case of all taxes levied between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries and regardless of whether a tax was assessed primarily on goods, houses occupied, or land owned or occupied. That double the proportion of female than of male householders were exempted from payment of the hearth tax on houses they occupied in the second half of the seventeenth century indicates that many women maintained households on very depleted resources. However, the proportion of taxpayers who were women amongst those paying the least tax did not usually exceed the proportion of women amongst those paying most tax.

Domestic servants in comparative perspective: Introduction

The condition of domestic workers employed in western societies in past times has attracted much recent academic interest. Although a number of paintings (see Waterfield, French, & Craske, 2003) and texts, century after century, have depicted the lives and working conditions of servants in pre-industrial Europe, domestic service as a field of study was much neglected until recently. Laslett stressed in his pioneering book The world we have lost that domestic service was often a blife-cycle occupationQ (see Laslett, 1965, 1977) to be studied in historical perspective. Sheila Cooper, in her contribution to the present issue, extends earlier research (Wall, 1978, 1987) by assessing the role of service within the framework of what Hajnal (1965, 1982, 1983) has called the bnorthwest European marriage patternQ of delayed first marriage. This theme was extensively discussed during the conference bDomestic service, a factor of social revival in Europe,Q held at the University of Essex in May 2003 as part of the European Servant Project (Fauve-Chamoux, 2004b). Some issues remain unclear, such as the extent and characteristics of service in southern Europe (Kertzer & Brettell, 1987). The quantitative importance of the servant population, particularly its share of the population of adolescent and young adults, is still a question of intense debates, given its variances

Widows: perceptions, demography, residence patterns, and standard of living

The role of the widow in society can be explored from a variety of perspectives. Five of these are featured prominently in the set of articles assembled below: specification of the range of behaviours deemed appropriate for widows; the standard of living of widows from different strata of society; widows as intermediaries in the transfer of resources between generations; the demography of widowhood; and residence patterns. All these issues are, of course, interconnected. For example, just as the law, custom, and practice of inheritance shapes living arrangements, who inherits what also governs in some circumstances the choice of residence, as when a larger share of the parental property passes to the child who takes primary responsibility for the care of the parents in their old age. Similarly, although a widow’s standard of living was in large measure determined by when she had married, how many children she had borne (and how many had survived), and how old she was at death of her husband, economic circumstances earlier in the life course might have influenced when she married and the later fertility and mortality experience of her family. Inevitably, therefore, the contributors to this special issue of The History of the Family rarely limit themselves to the study of one aspect of widowhood but comment directly or implicitly on several. Bernhard Jussen adopts a particularly broad approach in discussing the formulation around 500 AD and later modification of the rhetorical formula ‘‘virgins, widows, and spouses.’’ This was a concept of society according to which the greatest merit (and moral standing) was attributed to virgins, rather less to widows and least to the married and applied (despite the terminology) to men as well as to women. Later in theMiddle Ages, however, thinking changed evenwhile the formulawas retained. The focus narrowed first to define a specificmoral code for women and then ceased to be used to define morality. Once morality was no longer perceived in terms of a hierarchy, it is evident that there had been a major transformation of interpretation of the social structure. What is far less clear is what the impact of all this might have been on how women (and men) in general viewed their roles in society. The ideas of the theologians spread only slowly even within the community of clerics, and some of the implications of their way of thinkingwere not always comprehended. Yet, onemight well expect the waning of amoral code that applied equally to men and women to have some affect on how they conducted their lives. This is an issue that it is to be hoped medievalists will take up. Working on a later period, Sylvia Hahn is very much concerned with how widows perceived their role. The prevailing ideology of widowhood that she argues was designed to discipline women through associating particular patterns of behaviour with widowhood extending from

Family relationships in comic postcards 1900–1930

This paper discusses how comic postcards circulating in Europe and North America between 1900 and 1930 featured various aspects of family life. A range of situations were considered amusing involving babies, children, parents, mothers-in-law, servants and the elderly. The four situations that were pictured most frequently were flirtations, fertility, the struggle between husband and wife for dominance in the household, and courtship. The presence of widely shared attitudes to family life within the western world is suggested by the fact that the same sort of humour featured in cards sent and received in different European countries and in North America. On the other hand, the text on the back of the cards indicates that some writers had ignored or misunderstood the humour represented on the front of the card, whereas others had chosen their cards with care.

English population statistics before 1800

The first national census of the British population was organized in 1801; the civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths commenced in 1837; and the first tentative attempt by the state to compile statistics on migration was included in the census of 1841. Prior to 1801, the chief source of information on the demography of the country was provided by the clergys registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials that had occurred in their parishes, supplemented by information on mortality in the Bills of Mortality that were published for certain large towns and by inferences drawn from various counts of taxpayers. The article focuses on the reliability of the parochial registration system and the way in which it was exploited by the state as measured against the states objectives for establishing it in 1538. These objectives were rarely achieved. By the end of the 18th century, the parish registers were falling short of providing a national system of registration. Neither had the registers at any time provided the requisite detail to allow the verification of age, lineal descent, or right of inheritance. They had not been used as a way of raising revenue except briefly between 1694 and 1705. Moreover, the Anglican Church was extremely lax about the enforcement of its own regulations regarding the appropriate time for registering baptisms, burials, and marriages.

Bequests to widows and their property in early modern England

This paper analyses those wills made by persons with the surname Farrer between 1500 and 1849 that mention both a widow and children in order to see how different testators divided their property when the interests of more than one family member had to be considered. It is argued that the economic position of women following widowhood was weaker in the eighteenth century than it had been earlier. In the eighteenth century, fewer widows were appointed executrix of their husbands estate and fewer received a share of the residue of the estate. Relatively more bequests of houses and land went to children and not to the widow. These trends occurred in all regions we examined and were experienced by all social groups who made wills. However, while husbands in the eighteenth century were relatively less generous to their widows in their wills than their predecessors, their widows were far from destitute, often receiving some land, cash and goods in addition to a house.