FAMILY, HOUSEHOLD, AND OCCUPATION IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND: SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN KING'S LYNN, 1689-1702 (GENDER, ELITE, WEALTH, SEAPORT)

Family, household, and occupation in pre-industrial England have emerged as major historical fields in the last few decades, to a large extent because of the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure as well as the use of the computer in processing rather prosaic records. Series of records covering the same population are limited for pre-industrial England. The Cambridge Group's work, notably that of Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, necessarily depends largely on occasional, not serial, listings of relatively small populations. These listings provide valuable information about households at given points, but they are often limited in their information about the life-cycle of the household or of its members as they aged, moved, and changed occupation. Employing computer analysis, this study follows many of the citizens of King's Lynn, an important English seaport, especially changes in their household and family structure as well as their occupations between 1689 and 1702.; Examination of tax, freeman's, probate, and other records permits us to compare the distribution of household type and family structure to earlier work and to assess the accuracy--for this time and place--of Lutz Berkner's critique of Peter Laslett's cross-sectional analysis. These records also allow analyses of household both by gender of head (which is relatively common) and by marital status (most uncommon), thus shedding new light on the early modern household.; The study also explores household heads' occupational, gender, and marital-status differences in the hiring of servants, the taking of apprentices, and the presence of relatives and non-relatives in the household. A chapter on servants and apprentices looks at patterns of youthful movement and employment, indicating that most children left their homes in the early teenage years. A pro-parenting model explores the phenomenon more closely.; John Patten has published occupational analyses of East Anglia, the area in which King's Lynn is located. But this study questions his high correlation between urban population size and diversity of occupation, as it also questions the ubiquitousness of Gabriel Sjoberg's model of the preindustrial city. Networks and alliances formed on vertical basis, e.g., dissenting sects, suggest the need to augment a horizontal socio-economic class analysis.