ABSTRACT
As widely held as the assumption about child marriage, and certainly more deeply rooted in belief and in opinion, about the self as well as about society, is the supposition that our ancestors lived in large familial units. Child marriage of this kind may well have been commoner in the sixteenth century than in the seventeenth. And the famous stem family household, where the heir, the eldest or perhaps the youngest son, stays at home, marries and has children whilst the rest either leave or go unmarried, is conspicuous by its absence too. There were far too few households in traditional England with this constitution to allow such a thing to be taken as a usual practice, but English family households could change enormously in their membership during the family cycle, a cycle which occurred only once of course in every individual case in the simple family system.
