ABSTRACT
The demographic structure of a pre-industrial society is arguably more crucial than its social or economic structure, yet until recently most historians of Tudor England gave the topic very cursory treatment. Historians and demographers, led by Louis Henry in France, and in England by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have applied refined demographic techniques to the data available for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Cambridge Group has evolved a careful series of distinctions between families and housefuls, and between different measurements of their size and composition. The normality of the nuclear family is undeniable, with all its consequences for attitudes and childhood influences as well as for demographic structure. The existence of the Court of Wards for the children of royal tenants-in-chief is a well-known testimony to the fact, and the courts of orphans operated by many towns were set up for the same reason.
