ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century ideal of family life was really an ideal for household life. The household was viewed as a microcosm of society as a whole, and it had to have its order just as society had its order. Medieval political thought had divided society into three groups, corresponding to three functions in society. The groups were called orders or estates and the social classification corresponded to political representation in political estates. Nevertheless, there were things that defined and separated the three estates. One of the key principles of the social order in the era was the idea of privilege. It was like a kind of inverse affirmative action: if one started out life in a powerful position, they can deserve the additional advantages. Throughout Europe, two social facts determined how an individual fit in this larger world order. The first was kinship, and the second was social status or estate.
