ABSTRACT
Catherine Frances The historiography of marriage in England has been shaped by two bold and opposing accounts of the pre-industrial family. Lawrence Stone argued that the English family underwent a process of long-term change from an authoritarian, genealogically expansive ‘open lineage’ structure in the fifteenth century to a nuclear, affectionate and relatively liberal family structure by the eighteenth century. The seventeenth century was, according to Stone, a period of transition in which the family was nuclear but authoritarian and where children’s marital decisions remained heavily proscribed by the ambitions of their parents who identified suitable partners for them and exerted considerable control over their choice.1 In contrast Alan Macfarlane proposed that from the thirteenth century onwards English society was characterised by an ethos of individualism in which extended families were of little importance.2 Macfarlane acknowledged that parents sometimes intervened in their children’s courtships in the early modern period, but argued that because English teenagers usually worked as servants in other people’s households they had the opportunity to escape their parents’ influence and generate the resources necessary to establish their own household, without reference to their parents’ wishes.3
