The nuclear-family pattern that was found across the home countries was not exclusive to this region: it was also common in parts of Spain, Portugal and Italy. The difference was that in home countries, the nuclear family was rarely encroached on, and only a minority of households had other relatives living with them – as few as 3 per cent of families in Rhode Island, barely more even in densely populated seventeenth-century Dutch cities. Over more than two centuries, barely 10 per cent of English households had non-nuclear kin permanently in residence. In house countries with nuclear-family structures, this was unimaginable: more than half of all households in one region of Italy had non-nuclear kin resident.
Those are the broadest outlines of family living patterns. And just as ‘family’ meant many different things at different times, so too did the notion of marriage. And while the changes have been great, they have been as invisible to subsequent observers as spittoons have become to ours. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen’s pompous clergyman, Mr Collins, lists his reasons for wanting to marry: first, he says, it is ‘a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony … Secondly … I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly – which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier … it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness.’
The modern reader can still take pleasure in the bathos of dashed expectations, having assumed, together with his appalled would-be fiancée, that what ‘perhaps’ Mr Collins ought to have mentioned earlier is, if not his love, then at least his admiration and affection for the woman he is proposing to. Instead, his position in the world and relative wealth are first in his thoughts, the pleasure marriage will give him comes next, and then, comically, his hopes for the social and professional advancement it will bring by pleasing his ‘patroness’. In addition, early-nineteenth-century readers would have found enjoyment in a further layer of meaning, which today has become obscured. Jane Austen was mocking the pomposity of her fictional character, but, churchman’s daughter though she was, she was also parodying the Book of Common Prayer, which enumerates the reasons for marrying much as Mr Collins does: ‘First, It was ordained for the procreation of children … Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication … Thirdly, It was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.’ To Austen, writing at the start of the nineteenth century, the fact that the church placed companionship – companionate marriage – last, giving precedence instead to children and the avoidance of sin, was ripe for comedy. To her, and the society around her, the ‘Thirdly’ should obviously have been first: indeed, all of Austen’s novels are, in the most reductionist reading, explorations of the ways to identify those who will make good life companions.
Her parody makes clear how completely ideas of marriage had altered in northwestern Europe in the previous two centuries. For most people, in most periods of history, survival, or, for the more prosperous, property, was the purpose of marriage. For most, marriage enabled the transmission of work and social skills while creating a basic labour force for the maintenance of the family unit; among the nobility and the merely rich, marriage was a social construct that ensured the safe transmission of property, or even its increase, from one generation to the next. By the time Martin Luther’s 95 Theses appeared in 1517, feudalism in most of northwestern Europe was entering its terminal stages, and new structures of authority, and new attitudes to them, were emerging. Images that depicted the Holy Family had, in the previous century, become widespread in churches for the first time, an indication of the increasing importance of secular families in society, at least to those who commissioned the paintings. The Catholic church continued to consider marriage a second-best solution, for those who could not manage the ideal of celibacy, citing Corinthians: ‘It is better to marry than to burn’. Protestantism, by contrast, placed the married partnership at the heart of spiritual government, citing Genesis: ‘It is not good that man should be alone’. A man’s partnership with his wife was beginning to be seen as the primary social unit. This new view, from the new religion, took root in precisely those northwestern European territories where the late-marriage pattern prevailed, where two relatively equal partners chose each other as consenting adults, rather than as subordinate members of a kin-group that made a communal decision.
A modern historian of sexuality has suggested that the pre-modern marriage began ‘as a property arrangement, was in its middle mostly about raising children, and ended about love’, whereas, he continued, twentieth-century marriage ‘begins about love, in its middle is still mostly about raising children … and ends – often – [in being] about property’. In early-marriage societies, the married couple had no need, or opportunity, to plan, or make a place for themselves in the world. They moved into a place both literally and figuratively provided by their elders, following arrangements and traditions that had long existed. By contrast, in late-marriage-pattern countries, women as well as men worked outside the home before they married. Up to 40 per cent of the population worked in domestic service for a time, and by the nineteenth century in many home countries, the number of women who worked as servants at some point in their lives, but usually starting aged thirteen or fourteen, reached 90 per cent. Boys were apprenticed at a similar age; in earlier periods they lived with the master’s family; later, they lived on their own, and were required to become self-sufficient. These adolescents were exposed to strangers, to new ways of doing things; they saw how different ranks of society lived, with different technology and household arrangements. They travelled the country, formed contractual obligations with employers and renegotiated them where necessary, or broke them if they decided that that was better, and learned to deal commercially and emotionally with strangers. They were, in short, responsible for their own financial and personal wellbeing.
On marriage the couple established a new household, which necessitated purchases of new goods; because of their years of earning, together they had the cash to emulate, at least in part, the households they had been exposed to. Women came into marriage as earning equals, and expected, before the Industrial Revolution, to be economically productive in their marriages as well. Even after industrialization had become widespread, this remained true for most women, the working classes always forming the majority of the population. Women often acted as their husbands’ business equals, the men taking on the heavy labour, the women handling commercial transactions for farms, shops or trades – tasks that, in early-marriage societies, were performed instead by male kin living in the parental home. Or male labourers travelled the country following seasonal work, while their wives looked after the family and perhaps a small plot of land, or kept poultry, or ran a dairying business. Or they took in work – doing laundry for other households, or sewing, or carding and spinning wool. Others, especially in rural areas, bartered, trading wool, or dairy produce, or eggs, or honey, for commercial commodities: sugar, or ironmongery, or other items they could not make themselves.
Late-marriage-pattern relationships were ventured into by equals, who went on to function as contributing partners. A religion that endowed individuals with great personal agency, as Protestantism did, was therefore one that meshed well with this family arrangement. As with the causes of the Industrial Revolution, the generally accepted explanation for the origins of the Reform religions is that they grew out of a combination of factors: disgust at church corruption; the decline of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of new nation-states; the drastic Europe-wide fall in population following the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when 35 million people – half the population – may have died; and the development of new technology, most significantly the printing press. All of these were essential. But as important was the way in which the new religion dovetailed with the changing shape of the family. Martin Luther’s Refor
mation took hold almost precisely in the geographical areas where the late-marriage pattern was operational: the northwestern crescent of Europe – the countries that have separate words for ‘house’ and ‘home’.* The economic historian R. H. Tawney showed persuasively how Protestantism grew with, and in consequence of, the rise of capitalism, not vice versa. Since he wrote, however, the concept of the consumer revolution has gained attention, as has domestic life as an area worthy of study. And they, together, suggest a possible extension to his theory: not only that Protestantism grew with, and in consequence of, the rise of capitalism, but that Protestantism may well have grown with, and in consequence of, the practice of the late-marriage pattern, and of the idea of home, which can be suggested as one of the engines of capitalism, creating a demand that drove capitalism’s supply.
How the ‘little commonwealth’ – the metaphor for the nuclear family that was first used by the English divine William Gouge in 1622 – emerged, and how it was perceived, had a different weight for the adherents of the new religion than it did for the old. Theoretically, the Catholic church’s view of marriage was absolute, and absolutely simple: a marriage was contracted when two people exchanged spoken vows. From the eleventh century, if a girl over the age of twelve and a boy over fourteen said aloud the verba de praesenti, ‘I take you as my wife / husband’, or the verba de futuro, ‘I will take you as my wife / husband’, then they were married. Indissolubly. In Protestant Europe, by contrast, secular elements were integral. Banns had to be read before a congregation for a number of weeks prior to the exchange of vows, in effect notifying the community, and the vows were only valid if they were spoken in public, indicating that parental consent had been obtained. Without either the involvement of the community, in the reading of the banns, or the public commitment, a marriage could be annulled.*
Nonetheless, for both Catholics and Protestants, marriage was not, as it is today, a single event, before which a person was single, after which he or she was married. It was, into the eighteenth century in most places, a process, and a person could be a little bit, or not entirely, married. There were most commonly four stages, all of them binding, so while a couple might not proceed to the next stage, they could not undo previous stages. In the broadest outlines, a couple who agreed to marry made a formal commitment, whether in public or private. After this came the consent, when both agreed publicly – sometimes outside the church, sometimes at home with a notary present – that they planned to marry, and a ring or other token might be given. Then came the wedding itself, frequently but not necessarily in the presence of a minister of religion, after which the couple moved in together. The final stage, consummation, sometimes took place after the first stage, sometimes after the third, sometimes – usually among the upper classes if the girl was very young – not for several years. But the sexual act did not make the marriage any more indissoluble than did the other elements.
Different sects, or countries, or cities, or even families, had their own requirements: the minimum age at which marriage could take place without parental consent varied with time and place, as did the type and exchange of vows, or even whether or not a ring was obligatory. In some sixteenth-century Swiss cities, despite the legal requirement for public, community involvement – banns, parental consent and a church ceremony – many accepted that any couple who had exchanged vows were legally married. In England the consent of the couple was all that was necessary, and a marriage that dispensed with the remaining formalities was ‘valid but not legitimate’. Those who exchanged vows without parental consent but had not consummated their marriage were not quite married, but neither were they free to marry anyone else. Ever. One historian has estimated that only half of the ‘married’ population in the seventeenth century was properly married according to cannon law. In Britain in 1753, reforms swept away the old three-stage system and these not-quite marriages. Now a marriage had to be performed by a church minister, be registered in church (or synagogue, or Friends’ meeting-house) and for those under twenty-one take place with the consent of their parents; if any one of these elements was omitted, the marriage was void.*
Even so, the state of being married was not, in northwestern Europe, standard for most adults well into the seventeenth century. Low life expectancies meant that couples who married in their mid- to late twenties had an average of less than two decades together before death dissolved their partnership. In home countries, men did not substantially outnumber women, unlike early-marriage societies as a rule. In societies where women are wage earners, they survive into adulthood in larger numbers; where they are seen as a financial drain, useful for a short period as the owner of a womb, fewer reach maturity. In some villages in southwestern France in the fourteenth century, records mention twice as many boys as girls. A sympathetic reading is that, as boys mattered more than girls, their lives were recorded in official documents more frequently, or more regularly; the less attractive reading is that, as the early-marriage pattern made girls a burden, infanticide, or at best passive neglect, was routine. Because of the equal numbers of men and women in late-marriage societies, there were always a large number of people who never married at all – between 20 and 30 per cent was common. In general, married people made up only about a third of the population. (The figure in western Europe today hovers around 50 per cent.)
It might be assumed, therefore, that a side-effect would be a high rate of illegitimate births, and yet, counterintuitively, such high rates were instead found in the house countries of Europe. In Florence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one in ten babies was abandoned; in Toulouse, the rate of abandonment, previously comparable, had risen to nearly two in ten by the end of the century, and sometimes, in particularly harsh economic periods, to a quarter of all babies. In the 1670s in Paris, over three hundred children were abandoned every year, compared to Amsterdam in 1700, where just twenty illegitimate children were recorded in a population half the size of the French capital. Meanwhile, in the sixteenth century in England, the recorded rates were at the lowest level ever seen: a parish in Suffolk recorded no illegitimate births at all in the dozen years leading to 1600, and only one for every 144 recorded births in the next half-century. By the eighteenth century, when urbanization and industrialization had drastically reordered social practices, that figure rose locally to one for every thirty-three registered births, but these figures were still remarkably low when compared to Austria’s one for every five births at the same period. The countries with high rates of abandoned children were France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Poland, what is now the Czech Republic (40 per cent of all babies in Prague in the early nineteenth century), and Austria (half the babies in Vienna were abandoned at the same date).*
The low levels of illegitimacy in home countries might in part be attributable to the more equal number of men and women in the population. (Societies where men outnumber women see far more incidents of sexual assault.) It might also be in part attributable to the relative equality of men and women, with both sexes working from early adolescence.* At some periods, in some areas, safety-valves were built into the system. One was the custom of bundling, where courting couples were permitted ritualized all-night visits, without full sexual relationships, a practice virtually unknown outside home countries. It may also be the case that illegitimate births in home countries were disguised – sudden, or forced, marriages, babies raised by their ‘aunts’, and so on. But in England and in the USA, as in several other home countries, illegitimate births were recorded at local parish level, and therefore such stratagems would be revealed by wild fluctuations from district to district, and these do not appear.
More generally, late marriages ensured that women in northwestern Europe, simply by postponing marriage, significantly reduced the years they spent in childbearing, both by being married for fewer years, and by being single in their most fertile years. This in turn meant that they were not as resolutely tied to child-rearing as is often retrospectively as
sumed, even before the nineteenth century, when women in companionate marriages were also able actively to reduce the number of children they bore, by abstinence or other forms of birth control. At the other end of life, it was the unmarried children who took on the care of their parents as they aged. From the earliest censuses that have survived in England, the majority of elderly couples have unmarried children living with them. The twelfth-century legend on which Shakespeare based King Lear stressed the catastrophic results if elderly parents lived instead with married children. This unnatural situation was clearly a preoccupation of the sixteenth century, as Shakespeare was pre-empted in his use of this story both by the same Edmund Spenser who had dismissed the Irish sense of domesticity, and by John Higgins in his collection of Tudor verse, The Mirror for Magistrates.
These changes to marriage meant that by the time Jane Austen was creating Mr Collins, the state was no longer considered to be primarily for the procreation of children. Marriage now created a household, a home, much as Robinson Crusoe had created one despite his adverse circumstances. Crusoe was, of course, wife-less on his island. But as the central character of England’s first novel, he initiated a genre – fiction – which would find its main subject in romantic love. As the historian of marriage Lawrence Stone noticed, ‘romantic love became a respectable motive for marriage … at the same time [as] there was a rising flood of novels … devoted to the same theme.’ And, as this new genre was developing largely in late-marriage Europe, so it seemed natural for fiction to illustrate the fulfilment of these love matches by portraying the couples moving into their own homes, filled with their newly acquired goods, purchased by their years of young-adult earnings. As early as the 1530s, a woman in Hertfordshire justified breaking off her engagement. She had made the promise, she admitted, ‘but shall we need to marry so soon? It were better for us to forebear and [get] some household stuff to begin withal.’
The Making of Home Page 4