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Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of all humans who lived in our agrarian past…
Via , a 7th century Byzantine wedding ring now in the Louvre, showing Christ presiding over the marriage ceremony, joining the bridge and groom.My sense is that Saller’s ‘early’ pattern is often thought to be the most common among pre-modern peasant populations and sometimes forms the default assumption of those societies. Nevertheless, this late pattern clearly existed, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands: the early modern period provides significantly more robust evidence to make that assessment, with much of the uncertainty of the previous sections melting away under the weight of detailed records. That doesn’t make average AAFM a meaningless statistic – what was normal or typical in a society matters – but it is important to keep in mind we’re dealing with something like a continuum of practice rather than a clearly distinct set of buckets (arguably with the exception of the late/late outlier pattern).
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