ABSTRACT
Young adult singletons, most of who would progress to formal marriage, and more certainly the bereaved were intimately associated with and, for the widow and widower in particular, defined by their proximity to marriage and prescribed conjugal, heterosexual union. It is clear from the demographic picture that single men formed a significant proportion of the population, roughly equivalent to that of unmarried women. Indeed, the security of homosocial institutions like the universities or the Church offered acceptable outlets to men who through personal instance, antipathy towards marriage or same-sex attraction wished to remain formally single. In societies where marriage was habitually delayed to the mid or late twenties and where adult morbidity meant that many women and a few men outlived their partners, the young unmarried and the older widow were estates that most men and women experienced at some stage during the course of their lives.
