Autobiographies and diaries have furnished many historians, including those who otherwise eschew qualitative data, with an apposite quote with which to launch their papers. Other historians select extracts from such sources to add colour to arguments advanced initially from the analysis of parish registers or court records. As a major source in their own right, diaries, autobiographies and letters provide the historian with valuable insights into the motivations, conscious or unconscious, of the authors. Such sources are less forthcoming on the perspectives and motivations of other persons whose activities feature in the written record as their motivations have to be teased out from the distorted and necessarily partial account of the author. Nor is it always easy to distinguish exceptional events in the life of a diarist from those which might have been experienced by persons of equivalent status or even more widely. The temptation is to overgeneralize on the basis of limited evidence.

Steven King in “Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England”, has chosen to be particularly ambitious, selecting a limited number of diaries and autobiographies to challenge the applicability of the widely held association between the accumulation of economic resources and age at marriage and the claim that couples in deciding to marry assessed the state of their current resources and their future prospects. From this base Dr King launches a further set of hypotheses concerning the involvement of parents in the choice of their child's marriage partner, changes over time in the density and quality of contacts between kin and with neighbours, and the significance of these factors for the decline in the mean age at marriage in England over the course of the eighteenth century.