Steven King

Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England

Since 1981, nuptiality has been identified as the main driver of rapid eighteenth-century English population growth. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, “national” rates of female non-marriage declined while female age at first marriage fell by roughly three years, reaching 22–23 years by the 1820s. The cumulative impact of more and earlier marriage on fertility is believed to have greatly outweighed the effect of falling mortality in generating aggregate population growth. Such a perspective has not gone unchallenged. There have been persistent calls for the re-examination of the place of urban demography within this framework. Concern has also been voiced over the sources which underpin the family reconstitutions on which calculations of marriage ages are based, the technique of family reconstitution itself, and over the representativeness of the marriage samples which family reconstitution yields. However, the most recent work of the Cambridge Group, based upon twenty-six family reconstitutions, appears to confirm the centrality of marriage ages to the English demographic system. Percentile distributions of marriage ages suggest that over the course of the eighteenth century there was an important decline in the proportion of marriages undertaken by women in their late twenties and thirties, more than balanced by the development of an early marrying group in their late teens.

“I Fear You Will Think Me Too Presumtuous in My Demands but Necessity Has No Law”: Clothing in English Pauper Letters, 1800–1834

This article investigates the way in which the English poor used the rhetoric of clothing in their engagement with local officials as they attempted to secure poor relief. Using letters written about or by the dependent poor from a wide selection of English communities, the article suggests that the poor employed concepts such as raggedness, lost clothing, nakedness, compromised dignity, and community presence and the link between poor clothing and unemployment, to assert their deservingness. An exemplar of a series of letters from the same person is used to explore how paupers developed the rhetoric of clothing over a sustained period of correspondence, suggesting that paupers had a keen appreciation of the impact of compromised clothing in their negotiations with officials. Ultimately, this paper will argue, paupers and officials had a shared concept of minimal clothing standards and a shared linguistic register for linking clothing and deservingness.

The English protoindustrial family: old and new perspectives

English research on protoindustrial communities in general and the protoindustrial family in particular has fallen somewhat behind that in many continental countries. Constrained by inadequate sources and a historiographical literature that has constantly placed the small and simple nuclear unit at the heart of English residential arrangements, English historians have often seen the protoindustrial family as little different in form and function from those to be observed in rural areas or market towns. This article uses sources generated by the English poor law to offer different perspectives. Focusing on Lancashire, as the protoindustrial phase of its development began to truly break down in the early 19th century, the article suggests that the English protoindustrial family was volatile in form and size and that the nature of underlying protoindustrial demography and the communal welfare system provided a powerful impetus to a process that saw the constant redistribution of kin between related households. It concludes that in Lancashire the expectation among protoindustrial families must have been volatility and that complex families rather than simple nuclear families have long held the English imagination.