Family, kin, and community networks

Funerary practices made the links between individuals and their families visible, while marriage brought a husband and wife not only into a relationship with one another and their eventual children, but also into a broader web of family and kin relations. Historians used to describe the early modern era as a time when “traditional” large families embedded in strong kin networks were replaced by “modern” independent nuclear families, but the past several decades of research have indicated there was no uniform pattern of change. Nuclear families predominated as a living arrangement as early as the thirteenth century in many parts of Europe, while kin networks remained important in many matters, such as land transfers and property ownership, far into the nineteenth century, even if kin did not reside in the same household. Economic changes often had the opposite effect on family structure in different parts of Europe. In parts of western continental Europe, for example, the spread of capitalist textile production into rural areas resulted in larger households in which kin lived together, while in England and Switzerland this led to more nuclear households, and larger numbers of unmarried women and widows living on their own.

Inheritance laws, traditions, and patterns were also variable across Europe, and do not seem to have correlated with family structure very well. In general, inheritance was either partible, in which the total estate was divided among all the children or among all the sons, or impartible, in which one child, usually the eldest son, inherited all land and, in the case of aristocrats, the noble title. (Inheritance by the eldest son is termed primogeniture.) In areas with impartible inheritance, younger sons and daughters received a settlement in cash or goods, but this was almost never equal to the value of the eldest son’s patrimony. Impartible inheritance meant that the family property stayed

Intact from generation to generation, but also that the lives and prospects of eldest sons were very different from those of their younger brothers and sisters. Partible inheritance could lead to impoverishment as family holdings became smaller and smaller, and gradually throughout the early modern period many areas with partible inheritance practices changed their laws to adopt impartible systems.