|
[94] sanctifying holy
matrimony and in making the family serve as a partial substitute for
the parish. At the same time, these and other forces were at work to
bring about a third important development: the reinforcement for a time
among these same social groups of the pre-existing patriarchal aspects
of internal power relationships within the family. This occurred partly
because the nuclear family became more free from interference by the
kin, especially the wife's kin, and partly because of wider religious,
legal and political changes which enhanced the powers of the head of
the household. The period is,
therefore, one in which two overlapping family types can be seen to
coexist among the upper and middle ranks, each slowly but imperfectly
replacing the other.
2. THE LANDED CLASSES: THE DECLINE OF KINSHIP AND CLIENTAGE
Between 1500 and 1750 it is clear that there was a decline in the role
played in landed society by both kinship and clientage. One indication
is that claims to cousinhood ties in the subscription of letters occur
far less frequently in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
than in the sixteenth or early seventeenth, presumably because it was
no longer so useful in creating a favourable predisposition in the recipient.
It would, for example, be hard to find a parallel in the eighteenth
century for the claim to cousinhood advanced in the early seventeenth
century by Thomas Wentworth in a letter to Sir Henry Slingsby. The connection
was indeed there, but there were no fewer than seven links in the genealogical
chain which joined the two, three of them by marriage through the female
line. Kinship connections certainly continued to be important for many
purposes, especially economic aid and job placement, but they were increasingly
limited to the closer relatives. Uncles and' aunts, fathers-in-law,
brothers-in-law and sons-in-law were still called upon to serve surrogate
or interchangeable roles with members of the nuclear family.
Another significant
pointer to a change in both kinship and clientage relations is the decay
of 'hospitality' among the aristocracy and greater gentry, which was
a common burden of complaint in the seventeenth century. When in the
late sixteenth century Lord Burgh- [95]
ley advised his son, 'Let thy kindred and allies be welcome to thy table,
grace them with thy countenance and ever further them in all honest
actions,' he was giving advice that was already becoming out of date.
The practice of open-handed hospitality was something about which one
boasted on one's tombstone. There was, of course, more to this ideal
than personal honour defined by generosity demonstrated by open-handed
support of kin relatives, clients and allies, for it extended to a whole
way of life, including the retaining of hordes of largely idle servants
and the keeping of an open table for all comers. The decline of these
habits in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries involved
a major reorientation of consumption patterns, caused by the growth
of a more inward-looking, more private and more urbanized life-style
for the aristocratic family. It was characterized by the withdrawal
of the family from the great hall to the private dining-room and by
the increasing habit of residing for long periods in London to enjoy
the 'season'.
The decay of the gigantic and fantastically expensive funeral ritual
attended by literally hundreds of kindred, cousins, retainers, domestic
servants and poor was another symbol of the same shedding by the social
elite of outer layers of familial and extra-familial client ties, and
a slow withdrawal to a more private domestic existence. The decline
of these late feudal practices represented primarily a decline of traditional
good lordship, of the function of a great house hold as a centre of
patronage for kin, clients, retainers, servants and tenants. But this
decline of good lordship carried with it a weakening of ties to the
kin, and a narrowing of the focus of concern down to the interests and
pleasures of the nuclear core.
More concrete evidence than these indicators of a decline of expenditure
on, and attention paid to, the ramifications of the kin and clientage
network is provided by the very clear decline in the concept of kin
responsibility for individual crimes and actions. In the early and mid-sixteenth
century, at any rate in the Highland zone of the north and west, the
royal writ and the royal law courts were less important as law enforcement
agencies than the blood feud and the vendetta. Under the vendetta there
is collective kin responsibility for individual action, as opposed to
the legal theory of individual responsibility: the law will punish the
individual criminal but no one else; the vendetta is perfectly satisfied
by the punishment of the criminal's brother, father, uncle or nephew,
which is a classic example of the principle of interchangeability. By
the end of the six-
[96]
teenth century,
this custom had virtually died out in England. Henry VIII was the last
English king to punish whole families, such as the De La Poles, for
the treason of one member.
The degree to which kinship, clientage and even family loyalties had
become subordinated to the principle of autonomy of choice of political
and religious ideology became clear during the English Revolution of
the 1640s, when one aristocratic family in seven was divided father
against child or brother against brother. If the divisions within the
nuclear core were so frequent, it is obvious that the cousinhood was
even more hopelessly fragmented, and that clientage was equally weak.
At the end of the seventeenth century, the English political nation
was bitterly divided into two parties, going under the labels of Whigs
and Tories. In binding together these political groupings, there were
four main elements: clientage, meaning dependence on a political patron;
kinship; professional ties; and personal friendship. Kinship was certainly
a help, and was used by politicians to increase their influence. But
for every family connection which carried clear political associations,
there w'ere three or four about which nothing is known. There may have
been no connection, or the kin may in fact have been split down the
middle. Thus of the ten MPs and candidates of the Bertie kin in the
reign of Queen Anne, seven were Tories, two Whigs, and one a Whiggish
waverer. Kinship often remained useful in the formation of the Whig
factions in the eighteenth century, such as the Walpole group, the Pelham
Whigs or Rockingham Whigs, but it was no more than one element among
several, and not necessarily the most important or the most durable
one.
In local affairs, kin ties undoubtedly continued to be important well
into the eighteenth century. As t4e English elite was fissured down
religious lines in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, fairly
strict religious endogamy developed among Catholics and Puritans, but
in this case the lines of kinship followed and reinforced the ties of
religion, not vice versa. After the middle of the seventeenth century,
the amount of social mobility shrank significantly, so that relatively
little new blood was coming into the squirarchy to keep the system fluid.
Meanwhile in each county for century after century the squires had been
intermarrying with one another, until the web of cross-cousinhood became
so dense and so universal that it lost its meaning. If everybody is
everyone else's cousin, the connection does not matter any more, which
is why the recent discovery that Charles
[97]
I was a remote
cousin of John Hampden does nothing to advance our understanding of
the English Revolution of the seventeenth (century.
Another test of the declining role of kinship is the moral legitimacy
accorded to nepotism as a factor in recruitment to state and private
offices. It is, of course, a truism that ties of blood and clientage
remained very important and respectable elements in appointments in
Church and state well into the middle of the nineteenth century. Generation
after generation of younger or illegitimate sons were found comfortable
berths in the public service, either at home or in the colonies. But
each time there had to be a struggle, and each time there was competition
to the ties of blood or marriage from the alternative principles of
money and merit. Moreover, the influence was primarily exercised by
fathers for sons, or sometimes uncles for nephews, and only rarely for
more distant members of the kin. It was thus a product of the bonding
of the nuclear family rather than of the lineage.
To conclude, everything points to a very slow erosion of the significance
of kinship ties among the landed classes, but there is also good reason
to suppose that they persisted and continued to play a part in family
strategy and local and national politics well into the nineteenth century.
A slow trend should not be mistaken for radical change. Moreover, with
the decline of ideological passion in national politics after 1720,
there was a positive revival of the power of patronage networks and
clientage, until ideological conflict rose again towards the end of
the century.
3. THE MIDDLE RANKS: THE MODIFICATION OF KINSHIP
Lower down the social scale, changes in the ties of kinship are more
difficult to determine. On the one hand, the same factors as were affecting
the elite --especially religious loyalties --were also influencing the
middle ranks of society. Just as with the elite, there is plenty of
evidence that the closer kin relatives, particularly paternal and maternal
uncles, continued to playa large part in family decisions, especially
when the parents died and the children had to be found jobs or husbands.
In 1637-40 a young Cambridge graduate, the Reverend Ralph Josselin,
used one uncle's credit to borrow money to tide him over, stayed with
another when he was
[98]
unemployed, and found his first church living by the good offices of
the first uncle, who in fact paid £10 of his £44-a-year
income. On the other hand, Josselin's links to more distant kin relatives,
such as cousins, were very remote and casual. Of his thirty-odd first
cousins, his elaborate diary over a period of forty-two years mentions
only three of them more than five times, and only fourteen even once.
Among the peasantry, the same pattern seems to have prevailed. In one
Leicestershire village in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, peasant
wills show that it was only those who had no nuclear family obligations,
or who had already fulfilled them by other means, who left real or personal
property to members of the kin. This evidence is supported by an examination
of wills in a Worcestershire village between 1676 and 1775, which shows
over half of the testators making bequests to the nuclear family, and
only a quarter to kin relatives. By this test, the economic role of
the kin among small property-owners in the village was now very limited.
Certain groups, however, continued to lay considerable stress on kin
ties for social, political or economic purposes. Intermarriage was very
commonly used as social bonding among parish gentry families within
the county in the early seventeenth century. It was also used for economic
bonding among the recently mobile mercantile elites in London and the
major cities. In these latter circles, economic circumstances -the need
for capital and for reliable business associates -stimulated the search
for marriage and kinship connections, which were more carefully cherished
than among other social groups. They were particularly common among
successful wealthy bourgeoisie without ambitions to transform their
children into gentlemen. These upwardly mobile groups might cut the
ties of blood which bound them to their humbler relatives back home,
but would cement business connections with their economic peers or superiors
by a new set of kinship relations. Much joint investment with, and much
borrowing from, kin relatives continued to take place throughout the
eighteenth century, although the growth of country banks and joint stock
companies provided increasingly important alternatives.
A few examples will serve to illustrate this point. An extraordinarily
tight web of family ties linked the twenty-eight men who in 1580 formed
the Court of Aldermen, the ruling elite of the City of London. Of these
twenty-eight, three were sons of aldermen,
[99]
nine sons-in-law,
two brothers, six brothers-in-law, and one had married an alderman's
widow. Many of them were also linked to other aldermanic families by
marriages of their children. There were some fifteen cluster families
whose connections by blood or marriage in one way or another embraced
two thirds of the sixty-four men who held office as Lord Mayor and served
as aldermen throughout the whole Elizabethan- period. What is most significant,
however, is that these clusters did not form coherent groups in terms
of trading interests, wealth or political connections, so that this
evidence for family linkage in the higher echelons of the London business
elite should not be pushed too far. Nor was it a closed world by any
means, for the cluster families did not dominate the scene, and out
siders could fight their way in. But family ties, mostly fairly close
ones, certainly helped to cement pre-existing bonds of friendship and
mutual economic and political interests, and also helped to ease the
access of outsiders into this elite world. Newcomers were easily co-opted
and absorbed through marriage.
This use of marriage ties to develop or to cement commercial alliances
among urban patriciates was a practice which flourished in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries and only began to weaken in the eighteenth.
Among the eighteenth-century merchants of
Leeds and Hull, the family firm predominated, and Robert Pease could
explain 'we keep entirely together to help one another'. In Hull, however,
there is clear evidence that by the late eighteenth century more and
more partnerships, loans, etc., were being contracted outside the family.
Even among the urban patriciates, the bonds of kinship were on the decline.
4. THE CAUSES OF CHANGE
The modern state
is a natural enemy to the values of the clan, of kinship, and of good
lordship and clientage links among the upper classes, for at this social
and political level they are a direct threat to the state's own claim
to prior loyalty. Aristocratic kinship and clientage lead to faction
and rebellion, such as the Wars of the Roses or the Fronde, to the use
of kin loyalty and client empires by entrenched local potentates to
create independent centres of power, and to make the working of the
jury system of justice impossible by the subordination of obj.ective
judgement to ties of blood or local [100]
loyalty. In the sixteenth century, the state in England increasingly
assumed monopoly powers of justice and punishment, military protection,
welfare, and .,the regulation of property. This takeover was accompanied
by a massive propaganda campaign for loyalty, inculcating the view that
the first duty of every citizen is obedience to the sovereign, that
man's highest obligation is to his country, involving the subordination
of all other considerations and loyalties, even life itself.
This fundamental shift in human values and in the social arrangements
that went with them in the period from 1560 to 1640 has been well described
by one historian as a shift from a 'lineage society', characterized
by bounded horizons and particularized modes of thought, to the more
universalistic standard of values of a 'civil society'. The causes of
this vast change are clear enough: the Reformation with its powerful
drive for the christianization of society and its claim to overriding
moral allegiance through the preaching of the Word; grammar school and
university education in the rhetoric of Humanism with its stress on
loyalty to the prince; Inns of Court education in respect for an abstraction,
the common law, as superior to any private or local loyalties to individuals;
the growth of more commercialized relationships between man and man;
the rise of 'possessive market individualism' that was slowly beginning
to erode old communal affiliations. Finally there was the institutional
expansion of the nation state: the growth of its bureaucratic size,
organization and powers, as literacy and record-keeping expanded and
were taken over by the laity; the extension of its claims to universal
obedience to the sovereign; and the persistent and progressive intrusion
by the central authorities into local government, local jurisdiction
and local patronage networks. These were not autonomous processes, but
were driven forward by the massive transformation of popular and elite
ideas about where prior loyalty lay. Fuelled initially by a general
desire for security, the expansion of the bureaucratic nation state
soon took on an independent life 'of its own. The consequent decline
of kinship and clientage was ,a major cause of the rise of the nuclear
family.
This shift of emphasis towards the nuclear family was given powerful
support by Reformation theology and practice. The medieval Catholic
ideal of chastity, as a legal obligation for priests, monks and nuns
and as an ideal for all members of the community to aspire to, was replaced
by the ideal of conjugal affection. The
[101]
married state now became the ethical norm for the virtuous Christian,
its purpose being more than what Milton described contemptuously, referring
to the Pauline view, as 'the prescribed satisfaction of an irrational
heat. .., the promiscuous draining of a carnal rage'. The great Puritan
preacher William Perkins now described marriage as 'a state in itself
far more excellent than the condition of a single life' -a clear contrast
to the contemporary Catholic view of Cardinal Bellarmine that 'marriage
is a thing humane, virginity is angelical' -in other words that it is
no more than an unfortunate necessity to cope with human frailty. This
sanctification of marriage--'holy matrimony'--was a constant theme of
Protestant sermons of the sixteenth century, which were directed to
all classes in the society, and is to be found in both Puritan and Anglican
moral theology of the early seventeenth century from William Gouge to
Jeremy Taylor.
It was Archbishop Cranmer who in England first officially added a third
to those two ancient reasons for marriage, the avoidance of fornication
and the procreation of legitimate children. In his Prayer Book of 1549
he added the motive of 'mutual society, help and comfort, that the one
ought to have 'of the other, both in prosperity and in adversity'. Later
on in the sixteenth century Robert Cawdrey, as revised by Cleaver and
Dod, and. then Thomas Gataker, William Perkins and William Gouge, authors
of the most popular family handbooks of their day, also emphasized that
the purposes of marriage included spiritual intimacy.
Having beaten back efforts to legalize divorce with remarriage by the
innocent party for the adultery or desertion of the wife, which was
recognized by most Reformed churches abroad, the Tudor Protestants had
no alternative but to urge the importance of affective ties as a necessity
for marriage, in addition to the old Pauline arguments. Although they
were as respectful as ever of the need for social equality and economic
security as prime factors in mate selection, they were nonetheless obliged
to oppose the strongly commercial attitude to marriage which had been
prevalent in the late middle ages and the early sixteenth century, by
which bride and groom had been bartered by their parents without their
consent. Since the Puritan moral theologians were equally insistent
upon the need for filial obedience to parents, the result was often
to place the dutiful child in an impossible conflict of role models.
They had to try to reconcile the often incompatible demands for obedience
to parental
[102]
wishes on the one hand and expectations of affection in marriage on
the other. Puritans solved this dilemma by arguing that affection could
and would develop after marriage, provided that no violent antipathy
manifested itself at a first brief interview.
In England in the
1630s this new attitude to marriage gave rise to some extravagant hyperbole,
used by both laity and Anglican theologians. In 1638 Robert Crosse spoke
of marriage as 'an earthly paradise of happiness', though he added the
conventional warnings against 'an oversottish and doting affection'
and 'unlawful and raging lusts'. In 1642 Daniel Rogers thought that
'husbands and wives should be as two sweet friends' and Jeremy Taylor
declared that 'the marital love is a thing pure as light, sacred as
a temple, lasting as the world'. It is no accident that Charles I and
Henrietta Maria were 'the first English royal couple to be glorified
as husband and wife in the domestic sense', even if this development
owed as much to the rarefied cult of neo-Platonic love in court circles
as it did to the attitude of the contemporary Anglican moral theologians.
It should be noted that hardly any of these Protestant or Puritan writers
were willing to carry their ideas about the spiritual nature of the
marital union to the point of giving it priority over all other considerations.
It was left to Milton, tormented by his own unhappy marriage and influenced
partly by Renaissance thought and partly by previous Puritan theologians,
to demote all other ends to marriage --the procreation of children,
sexual control, the public interest in law and order, and the clerical
interest in an ecclesiastically blessed rite de passage. For him the
prime object of marriage was 'the apt and cheerful conversation of man
with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the solitary life'. The
logical conclusion to this step was to advocate --as Milton did, three
hundred years ahead of his time and with almost no contemporary support
-divorce and remarriage in cases of hopeless temperamental incompatibility.
The argument was very simple, based on the proposition that 'Where love
cannot be, there can be nothing left of wedlock but the empty husk of
outside matrimony.' By minimizing the sexual and procreative functions
of marriage, he easily came to the conclusion that 'natural hatred is
a greater evil in marriage than the accident of adultery'. On the other
hand, Milton had very strong views about the subordinate function of
women --'Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not
man for woman?' --and he therefore demanded divorce only when the 'unfitness'
lay with the
[103]
wife, not the husband. It could be demanded by both parties or by the
husband alone, but not by the wife alone. Milton thus carried the Protestant
concept of holy matrimony about as far as it could go without abandoning
the sexual superiority of the male. The roots of affective individualism
in seventeenth-century Puritan sectarianism are clearly demonstrated
in these writings.
The intensification of married love brought about by the stress on holy
matrimony played a part in the shift from, a kin-oriented to a nuclear
family. In the open lineage family: where affect was low and widely
diffused, the lack of privacy and the self-interest of the kin put a
damper on intensive marital emotional bonding. But with the churches
now ringing with sermons encouraging such bonding, the influence of
the kin tended to decline, as the married couple presented a more unified
front towards the external world. The rise of married love and the decline
of kin influence were therefore mutually reinforcing trends. The former
also was important in helping to detach the couple psychologically from
their parents. This major shift in moral allegiances was well understood
by the preachers who advocated married love, one of whom frankly stated
that 'it is a less offence for a man to forsake father and mother and
to leave them succourless ...than it is for him to do the like towards
his lawful married wife'. The opposition of parents and kin to the principle
and practice of married love was based on a perceived threat to their
power and interests.
There were also more profound, although less easily demonstrable, effects
on the family of the change from pre-Reformation Catholicism to Anglican
Protestantism. Sometimes slowly, more often quickly and violently, the
Reformation destroyed the social and psychological supports upon which
both the community and the individual had depended for comfort and to
give symbolic meaning to their existence. Miracle-working images and
relics were defaced and destroyed, chantries endowed for masses for
the dead were suppressed, the priests dispersed and the property nationalized.
Purgatory was declared inoperative. Confession to priests was forbidden,
and their power to remit sins declared a pious fraud. May Day festivities,
church-ales, religious processions, the celebration of saints' days
were all denounced as mere relics of pagan superstition, to be suppressed
along with the physical cult objects -the maypole or the sacred images
-around w'hich they had been, organized. Man now stood alone before
his Maker, with nothing but his conscience,
[104]
the Bible and the preachers to guide him, deprived of all the old psychological
props, collective rituals, and opportunities for blowing off steam.
There were only two beneficiaries of this drastic elimination of sacred
ritual by the Protestant zealots. The first was the nation state which
now laid claim to those loyalties which had hitherto gone to the community,
the city, the parish or the confraternity. The second was the household
and its head, which filled the vacuum left by the decline of the Church
and its priests as the central institution for moral and religious instruction.
Attendance at service
in church remained a formal Sunday obligation, but devotional piety
shifted to the daily attendance at family prayers; moral control by
the priest was partially replaced by moral direction by the head of
the household; and Church catechisms were partially replaced by catechisms
for the household, about a hundred of which were published between 1550
and 1600 alone. Edward Dering's popular Catechism was described by its
author as 'very needful to be known to all householders whereby they
may better teach and instruct their families in such points of Christian
religion as is most meet'. John Stalham, a Puritan minister, urged the
readers of his Catechism for Children, in 1644, to make 'all your households
as so many little churches'. Marriage sermons stressed the need for
the bridal couple 'never to neglect family prayer'. In the more pious
households, husbands and wives would confess their sins to each other
at home, instead of to the priest in church. In many other cases the
private diary was the substitute for the confessional, although the
forgiveness of the latter is much easier on human frailty than the self-torture
of the former. In towns in southern England by the early seventeenth
century, the Bible was available in most upper and middle and even lower-middle-class
homes, and daily public readings from it by the head of the household,
fortified by a rousing sermon in the church on Sunday, replaced the
ritual of the sacrament as the main vehicle of religious expression.
Whether in Anglican or Puritan households, there was, in varying degrees,
a new emphasis on the home and on domestic virtues, and this was perhaps
the most far-reaching consequence of the Reformation in England. The
household was the inheritor of many of the responsibilities of the parish
and the Church; the family head was the inheritor 'of much of the authority
and many of the powers of the priest. Thus the Word of God was to some
degree removed from
[105]
the parish church and transferred to the private home: the Holy Spirit
was partly domesticated.
5. PEASANTS, ARTISANS AND THE POOR: THE DECLINE OF COMMUNITY
Although the evidence is fragmentary in the extreme, it is fairly clear
that neither kinship nor clientage had played anything like the same
role among peasants, artisans and poor as they did among their betters.
At this social level, it was the community of neighbours whose influence
on and control over family life had been of the greatest importance.
This influence and control increased or became more institutionalized
in some areas, weakened and all but disappeared In others. One in which
there was a positive intensification of public interference in family
life was the field of morals. The steady advance of Christianity throughout
the century, and the growing censoriousness about sin which accompanied
it, led to growing interference by Church authorities, supported by
neighbours and parish officials, to make all inhabitants conform to
the new community norms. Domestic life in the village was conducted
in a blaze of publicity.
The clergy struggled to persuade the lower classes to abandon altogether
the traditional habit of consensual unions unblessed by the church.
There was an earnest effort to ensure that all sexual unions, whether
of clergy and their pre-Reformation 'housekeepers' or of the poor, should
now be recognized and sanctified by a formal Christian sacrament. Some
tentative evidence of the success of this pressure upon the lower classes
is the apparent decline in illegitimacy rates in the backward north
and north-west from about four per cent in the 1590s, before educated
Protestant .ministers first became available in large numbers in these
areas, to about one and a half per cent in the mid-seventeenth century
when the Puritan supremacy was at its height.
A powerful means of enforcing public standards of morality on family
life was through denunciations to the archdeacons' courts, however ineffectual
the latter may have been in punishing transgressors. Neither fornication
nor adultery was easy in so public an arena as a village, although of
course there was plenty of both.
Neighbours gossiped about the most intimate details of family rela-
[106]
tionships, and were quick to complain to the ecclesiastical courts of
anything that violated local mores. Reputed seducers of maidens were
duly reported on the basis of hearsay only. They thought it wrong that
a boy over seventeen should continue to sleep in the same bed as his
mother. They were very suspicious about the household of husband and
wife, one manservant and one maid, which only contained two beds, so
that the husband slept in a bed with both his wife and the maid. They
even knew about, and complained of, unusually enthusiastic or deviant
sexual behaviour between man and wife. They complained when a husband
turned a blind eye to the adultery of his wife, and were quick to denounce
cases of bigamy or trigamy. They lurked about to catch the curate in
bed with a girl. While approving of a husband's power to discipline
an unruly wife, they objected to noisy and excessive brutality or use
of foul language which disturbed the peace of the village, as much as
they objected to the female propensity to scolding and slander.
An alternative to the archdeacons' courts, whose powers were limited
to the more or less voluntary compliance with shame punishments such
as standing in church in a white sheet during a service, was enforcement
of the moral code by the local secular authorities. In the late Elizabethan
period, any constable was empowered to break into any house in which
he suspected fornication or adultery to be in progress and, if his suspicions
were confirmed, to carry the offenders to jail or before a Justice of
the Peace. This was a power that was used up to about 1660, but died
out after the Restoration, although it remained in the standard handbook
on local justice. Convicted offenders were often ordered to be whipped
in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Among the poor the principal area in which the function of peasant kinship
can be shown to have been on the decline in the seventeenth century
is that of aid and welfare for the helpless, the sick and the indigent.
In traditional societies these problems are handled by the conjugal
'family, the kin and the neighbours, with some minor help from the church.
In sixteenth-century England, rapid demographic growth in the villages,
urban immigration, the impoverishment of the towns, and the ravages
of price inflation meant that support from the extended network of the
kin and from neighbours in the community became inadequate for large
numbers of orphans, widows, cripples, sick, and aged, while structural
unemployment of the able-bodied first became a problem. During the
[107]
century, welfare for those unable to support themselves had perforce
to be progressively taken over by public bodies. In the early sixteenth
century, some towns were obliged to organize their own poor relief system,
paid out of taxes, and in the second half of the century the practice
spread to the countryside on a voluntary and emergency basis only. In
about 1600 a nationwide system based on local compulsory taxation and
expenditure was instituted, and during the seventeenth century it became
a fully functioning organization run by the parish, which effectively
relieved the kin, the conjugal family and the neighbours of their previous
sense of obligation to provide relief to the sick and the indigent to
save them from starvation. In addition to these public arrangements,
private legacies from the wealthy built and endowed a significant number
of orphanages, hospitals and almshouses for the old, and set up supplementary
funds for poor relief in a fair number of villages. A rather similar
transfer of responsibility occurred, over a long period of time, in
the socialization of the child, part of which was slowly shifted from
the family to the school.
To sum up, among the plebs the degree of community control over the
family in some respects decreased and in others increased between 1540
and 1640. At the higher level of the social elite, the trend is unambiguous;
there was a clear decline in allegiance to kinship and clientage, with
a corollary growth of loyalty outward to the state and the religion
and inward to the family. The effects on family life of this withdrawal
of the kin may not have been altogether for the good. Wives maltreated
by their husbands were now less able to turn to their kin for support
and defence. Intervention by the (elders of the kin to settle marital
quarrels was now less easy and less welcome. The kin could no longer
so readily serve as mediators between the parents and the children in
the case of a direct clash between the two on the issue of the choice
of a spouse. The partial withd~awal of external support and intervention
thus made family life more liable to explosive conflict between husband
and wife, and parents and children. On the other hand, the partial withdrawal
of the kin was an essential preliminary step to clear the way for the
subsequent development of the domesticated family and the selection
of spouses by the choice of the individuals on the basis of prior affection.
But this would not occur for a long time, until the late seventeenth
and the eighteenth centuries. Kinship ties did not disappear overnight,
but merely slowly, if irregularly, receded over
[108]
several centuries
as they became less desirable and less necessary. Thus, when the gentleman
merchant John Vemey was considering marriage in 1671, one of his options
was a Miss Edwards. Her father took care to tell John that the girl
brought in no kindred with her, neither of great persons to be a charge
by way of entertainment, nor of mean to be a charge by way of charity
and their neediness'. Kinship was clearly now regarded more as a potential
burden than a potential opportunity.
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