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History of the Family
Peter Foden of Ancestrography
is preparing a course on family settlements for the University of Keele Mediaeval
Latin Summer School, 2008, and courses on the history of the
family for Combined Studies at the University of Nottingham in
2008-2009.
These are some of the key themes & controversies covered in
his Combined Studies module at the University of Nottingham in the
autumn term 2006:
Affect and affective individualism: there is an underlying but
controversial assumption made by some historians about the
warming of human emotional relationships during the early modern
period. It influences their views about kinship, marriage,
childhood, bereavement and inheritance. Revisionists such as
Rosemary O'Day have tempered this mechanistic mindset with
examples of genuine human warmth in family relationships and
choices made throughout the period. Historians and researchers
must make up their own minds.
Kinship: Surnames &
genealogy, Kin or Country? Kinship, community and Lordship.
Affective kinship. Spiritual kinship. Class & kinship.
Genetics. Lawrence Stone suggests that there was a shift
from a "lineage society" to "civil society" taking place
through Early Modern England. Up to the mid-18th century, it
is common for testators to make bequests to a wide circle of
their "kin"; thereafter the pool of legatees narrows to the
nuclear family.
Starting a family: Choice of
partner, dynastic alliances, arranged marriages, prohibited
degrees of affinity, consent & "maritalis affectio",
affective individualism. Age at marriage: the Malthusian
marriage system; impact on population history. Marriage
customs. Direct and indirect dowries, Marriage settlements.
The Household:
Hearth and
Home. Family size, family planning, prenuptial conception &
illegitimacy. Birth, baptism and naming customs. Extended
families (grandparents, servants, dependents): Co-resident
and affective families. Wetnursing. Roles of husband, wife,
and children including Paternalism & Life cycle service.
Step families and foster families. Friends and Foes (blood
feud).
Damaging the family:
Infant/child mortality. Parental mortality and attitudes to
death & bereavement, funeral customs. Adultery. Family law
including divorce was secularized in 1857; the Church was
the main loser, but were there any winners? Earlier methods
of separation used by unhappy couples had included wife
selling and "Criminal Conversation" cases; were these
collusive or exploitative? Disownment
Continuing the family:
Remarriage of bereaved parents; role of kin and guardians.
Education, careers and endowment of children. Inheritance
customs and choices, including Dower. What was an heirloom?
Feoffees and The Strict Settlement.
Alternative families:
What
about the childless? Alternative & unstable families.
Institutional life from the Convent to the Department Store!
Follow
this link to a very select reading list!
Research interests These
are other projects that Peter would like to have an excuse to
pursue!
- Peasant dower
houses: the division of
houses between generations of peasant families is well
documented (the English like most north Europeans have never
liked to live in co-resident extended families although many
were forced into it through poverty after the industrial
revolution). Throughout the country there are many early
modern houses and cottages so divided or extended. Brunskill,
looking at such houses in Yorkshire, thought that these were
lodgings for farm labourers - "the men's end".
Documentary evidence suggests that such arrangements were in
fact the precursors of "granny flats". It would be
great to bring together documentary and
architectural/archaeological evidence and draw some firm
conclusions about the history of the English family.
- The real end
of feudalism:
No one talks about "manors" any more except TV
cops! But to most of our ancestors they helped to define
their place in the world up until the eighteenth century
(and in a few places the twentieth). For some they were the
core of local government and the local springboard for both
civil and criminal litigation; for some they were an
invisible community of duties and privileges drawing
together individuals from several villages. The surviving
records are a fraction of what was created. How did they
end? And what was the impact on communities and
individuals?
- Town and
Country:
My family and local history research suggests that town and
country were closer in the early modern period than they are
today, although communications were so much more difficult.
It is a given that the gentry had town and country houses
and migrated seasonally between London, Bath, country house
and county town, but some professionals, craftsmen and
traders also seem to have kept a foot in both camps. A late
example of this that I have found in my own family is the
Hawkers from the Staffordshire Moorlands who tramped the
streets of London with their silk buttons in the mid-19th
century.
- Nineteenth
century handwriting: there
is no book available about handwriting between 1750 and
1850. This was a period of growing literacy and of
standardizing modernization before universal education and
the educational fads of the twentieth century made
graphology possible. Many family historians struggle and
give up at about this point; there are many reasons
including social turmoil and lack of evidence, but practical
illegibility must be a significant factor.
- Families with
disabled members:
as a parent of a profoundly disabled child, I'd like to know
how families coped with such situations in the past. The
answers to this question might not always have been
particularly happy or heroic. The evidence will be slight,
particularly in the distant past, too early for oral
history. But it seems a very "relevant" question
to me and well worth the asking.
If you share any of these
interests or would like
Peter's help with your own research project, send an e-mail to
enquiries@ancestrography.co.uk to kick off a discussion
about it. |
