While scholars have studied the lives of single women in the early modern period, historians rarely discuss relations between parents and daughters, married and unmarried. Relationships with married daughters have fared particularly badly although specialist monographs on particular families have sometimes considered them. Elizabeth Foyster has argued that parents remained involved in the lives of their adult children. Amy Froide has indicated that single women frequently ‘remained for a good portion, if not all, of their lives’ within their natal family. She has demonstrated, using an impressive variety of sources, that the bond between mother and unmarried daughters was particularly strong although not always amicable. Relations with fathers appear to have been more difficult but this could have been because of the nature of the evidence, deriving as it did from court depositions concerned with conflict over plans for arranged marriages. Most of Froide's examples are drawn from the eighteenth century, which makes a study of such relations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries especially useful.

The archives permit us to explore only certain aspects of Hester and Thomas's interactions with their daughters. Records of various kinds survive regarding life stages such as birth, baptism and marriage. Some letters survive from daughters to their mother. Apart from this there is occasional mention of daughters in correspondence and other documentation such as Sir Thomas Temple's accounts and notebooks. Court papers have proved especially helpful. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters also figure in the archive, albeit less prominently. The archive has permitted consideration of female wards who, in this case, formed part of the family. I have described the cases of Anne Andrewes and of Dorothy and Mary Lee in some detail, and used direct quotation, in these chapters simply because so little is known about the treatment of daughters and female wards, and about the procedures followed in the courts.

The first two chapters in this part proffer an overview. The sources have been supplemented by work on the Temple connection and genealogy, which has revealed a few surprises, and several unanswered questions, which may in time be answered by further research by scholars. The first chapter examines issues surrounding matchmaking, marriage, childbearing and early child care. The second discusses the nature of the relationship between the Temples and individual daughters.