Peasant Marriage and Household Formation: Issues and Influences

Abstract

Important in our consideration of household formation, sense of family, and the strength of family and kinship bonds is the isolation of factors which will have affected these aspects of peasant life. A central issue here is the degree to which household formation and an individual’s association with her or his family were influenced more by simple biological processes than by a range of other demographic and ‘non-demographic’ processes. Thus, the distinction is really between, on the one hand, the family cycle in which families naturally increase and decrease over time and where that rise and fall is explicable simply in terms of births and deaths, and, on the other, by a range of factors independent of these natural cycles. In this latter category we should therefore include factors which interfere with or disturb a process of family formation determined solely by vital events. Thus, a series of institutional, economic, social, political, religious and personal factors might have acted upon and helped determine household formation in the late Middle Ages. Importantly, also, the degree to which the peasantry relied upon family ties above other associations will have been influenced by the relative effect of such factors.