The history of rural landownership at the village level has been dominated by a series of particular problems. At one end of the spectrum the process of estate-building by gentry and aristocracy, the transition from feudal manorial tenures to compact tenanted estates, and the creation of ‘closed’ or estate villages, has been relatively well documented. At the other the ‘problem’ of the disappearance of the small landowner, prompted a century ago as the rural tradition began to become a minority interest, has shifted away from its original focus on the owner-occupied family farm. It has increasingly concentrated on the fate of the smallholder and cottager and more recently on the interplay of landownership and common rights. This particular emphasis has tended to narrow research to the post-1780 parliamentary enclosure period where sources such as land tax, enclosure awards, and tithe returns make nominal linkages more feasible at a lower wealth level in society, and on a year-to-year basis.

This article concentrates not on the smallholder and cottager, but on the farming community – men (and occasionally women) making a living from holdings of 30 acres, or one to one and a half yardlands and upwards – and the choices and decisions they faced owning or tenanting lands. It examines the literature concerning communities in a broad band of central England south of the Pennines and north of the Thames. Detailed examples will be taken from mid- and northern-Buckinghamshire villages, an area of open fields but early and piecemeal enclosure, in the years between 1620 and 1800.

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the English was ‘individualistic’, Habbakuk to explore the strategies by which the English aristocracy maintained its supremacy and Mingay and others to settle the debate about the effect of enclosure on the small landowner. The early modern land market has rarely, if ever, been seen as worthy of discussion in its own right.

In recent years the analysis of individual communities in England has shed increasing light on their economic, social, demographic, cultural and religious development during the three centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporaneously, and to some extent resulting from these local studies, there has been a growing interest in the family and patterns of inheritance. Similarly, among social anthropologists there has been the development of the concept of ‘strategy’ with writings on marriage, fertility, inheritance and migration strategies, although these may be regarded as components of general family strategies. Whereas in some writings strategies are shown as being pursued by individuals for their own purposes, others focused on family strategies, particularly ones designed to keep a family landholding from being divided. However, whether these studies of social organization in continental Europe and Asia can be applied to the English experience remains to be seen. To begin with they are all concerned with peasant landholding and as such may not be appropriate to the English experience where the debate on whether a peasantry even existed was begun by Macfarlane's The origins of English individualism in 1978.

Secondly, there is no universal agreement on what kind of strategies were being followed, either individualistic or familial. Thirdly, there remains the question as to whether the strategies were intentional and the outcome of rational decision-making, or subconscious and rooted in implicitly accepted and long-established principles. These could have been that a landholding should remain undivided, that men had primacy over women in inheritance, that primogeniture would be practised and that younger brothers would not challenge their eldest brother's inheritance. A refinement of these approaches has been the view that family strategies could be very different. Some may have wished to hold on to the family estate and pass it on to the next generation. Others wanted to enlarge it and may have needed to do so for familial reasons, and yet more families may have wanted to create an estate where none yet existed. But in all cases, it is stated, there were families consciously planning and pursuing a strategy for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, it is said that these strategies could only be pursued by families above the level of the poor and only became possible in western Europe in the sixteenth century as a result of changing attitudes and growing individualistic commercialism.

The structure of nineteenth-century Greek households remains largely unknown. The handful of published articles and books based on quantitative analysis suggest the existence and persistence of many household forms among Greek populations. The most extensive study, and the only one dealing with an urban population, focuses on Athens. In The Making of the modern Greek family, Sant Cassia and Bada argue that an ‘urban model’ had emerged by the 1830s. Adopted from the nikokirei ‘upper-class’ group, households were characterized by equal partibility of parental property among sons and daughters, the generous endowment of daughters at marriage and ‘a tendency towards neolocality’ (the formation of an independent household on marriage). Gradually, this ‘Athenian model’ of property transmission and household organization ‘was legitimized by the church and by popular literature, and eventually became the cultural norm not merely for townspeople but for those in the countryside as well’. The authors are eager to point out that these ‘family forms and patterns of property transmission in Greece, especially in urban areas, are “new” rather than continuations of traditional rural patterns’, implying the ‘export’ of these new forms from the Athenian to other urban and rural populations.

‘A woman who has had an illegitimate child is looked on with contempt, and would not be associated with. But the young women have a great deal of discretion, and few of them go astray in that way.’

Parish of St. Mary's, Cork, 1835

While the claim may seem surprising, Irish society enjoys no mean place in the history of sexuality. Malthus may be said to have re-focused attention on the folly of giving free rein to the passion between the sexes, and some historians, as well as contemporary commentators, viewed the state of pre-Famine Ireland as a confirmation of the dangers of runaway population growth. Post-Famine Irish society, by contrast, gave the appearance of being fashioned according to the principles of Malthusian population policy: an older age at marriage for men and women, a rising incidence of permanent celibacy and a relative absence of ‘vice’. Indeed, long before the end of the Victorian era Irish people were renowned for their prudential approach to matters sexual. This extended to sex outside marriage. Irish illegitimacy rates were amongst the lowest in the Western world. Ideologues protested the virtue and purity of Irish women, and of the Irish race more generally.