leaving the nest

this from pew popped up on twitter a couple of weeks ago (and again earlier this week)…

…and several people, unprompted by me (and who are not even in my pay — i swear!), noted that it all looks very hajnalliney.

well, yes!

just in case you can’t draw mental hajnal lines automatically yet (and you really ought to work on that if you can’t), here it is:

john hajnal didn’t actually have anything to say about average ages of leaving home in european populations, but his line and when young european adults leave the nest do correlate strongly. this has been studied quite extensively (don’t just take my word on it — see david rehr, for instance), and the pattern extends back pretty far in time. from peter laslett’s Characteristics of the Western European Family:

“This self-deception about the history of the family has particularly affected Western Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen, unless they have come across the work of recent historical sociologists, are likely to believe the following. That the co-resident familial group in the past, at least up to the point of industrialisation, was large and complicated, with several generations living together. Furthermore, that this comfortable, kin-enfolding, welfare-providing family group not only nurtured the young, but took in their spouses when they married, and also provided them with shelter and succour when they became old or suffered other misfortunes. That the family in the sense of extended kin was a further source of welfare. It seems to be supposed that before the days of the Welfare State it was the family and kin which rescued social casualties. Now all this has turned out to be untrue.

“Untrue, that is to say, in a literal sense and for the particular part of Western Europe which first became industrialised and which has given what might be called industrial culture to the rest of the world. By this North-West Europe, especially the British Isles, Northern France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, is meant. In this cultural region family groups had been simple in composition and quite modest in size for many centuries before industrialisation. Married children only seldom lived with their parents, and two couples in one family household were quite unusual. It is true that the family group has become much smaller in the 20th century, servants have disappeared, and solitary living has grown enormously in our own day: but this did not happen during the process of industrialisation as ‘traditional society’ gave way to ‘modern society’ and cannot be called a transition to the ‘nuclear family’. The ‘nuclear family’ was there already.

“The kin composition of the English family group was much as it is today in the 16th century, and had been so since the 1300s, the 1200s or even earlier…”

probably even earlier. the nuclear family was a feature of bipartite manorialism and is documented in carolingian france as early as the 800s [see mitterauer, pgs. 62+]. bipartite manorialism was invented in austrasia in the 500s, but arrived across the channel not long afterwards. throughout the medieval period, manorialism was strongest in the southern and central parts of england, so chances are the nuclear family has been around the longest in those areas of the country, while the extended family remained of greater importance in other, peripheral regions (not to mention wales and scotland). this was definitely the case for east anglia.

back to laslett and average ages for leaving the nest (he’ll get to it eventually):

“…but with one very imortant structural difference. Servants lived in large numbers of families, and the presence of servants made the family groups of the rich large, and the family groups of the poor correspondingly small. In this area of the West, moreover, welfare never flowed along lines of kinship. The casualties of the system, the widows, the orphans, the poverty-stricken, were supported by the collectivity rather than the family.”

“The family structure I have just described was at its most homogeneous in England and the Low Countries, was less so in Germany and in Central Europe, and much less so in Southern Europe. France, indeed, seems to have been divided. Languedoc had larger and more complex households, especially in the mountains, than the rest of France. In spite of this important fact, the development of the Western European family can no longer be seen in the particular way which has been fashionable for the last generation, not even in areas where complicated family households have been common – areas like the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, or, which is very surprising, Tuscany and other parts of Italy.

“It is a mistake to think that the transition in family matters which is now going on in the developing societies of the contemporary world repeats the earlier history of the Western European family. Nevertheless, if we take Europe as a whole, and not simply our Northern and Western area of it, we are faced with the recent discovery that in Russia things were very different. Among the serfs before they were given their freedom in the 1860s, the family was large and complicated, more so than for any other example of complicated families which has yet been found anywhere in the world, in the past or in the present. The fact is that, within the continent of historic Europe as a whole, family forms varied as widely as it is possible to do. This not withstanding the circumstance that in Britain and in other parts of North-Western Europe they were uniformly small and simple….

“Characteristic 6 is the existence of large numbers of life-cycle servants: younger men and women spending the period between puberty and marriage as resident employees and members of the family of other persons, usually more substantial than their parents….”

life-cycle servants are well-documented from the 1300-1400s and onwards in england (and elsewhere in northwestern europe), but, again, this quirky system has its roots back in bipartite manorialism and can be seen in the records of carolingian period manors in northern france. from mitterauer [pgs. 64-65]:

“Life-cycle servants were people in the household who were different from the domestic slaves found in many cultures, and they were sometimes included among members of the family…. As a matter of fact, these domestics were often found in property registers as early as the Carolingian period. We cannot determine whether or not the servants mentioned in these sources were adolescents because no ages were given, but this was probably the case, since they were all single….

“Working as a servant was correlated with marriage at an advanced age. Until you could marry, you were kept in a dependent position that was essentially a child’s role — if not at your parents’ house then living as a farmhand or maid with a family unrelated to you.””

so kids in northwestern europe have been leaving home at an earlier age on average than those in southern or eastern europe for probably something like one thousand years. and this difference is tied to the historical distribution of bipartite manorialism in medieval europe.
_____

“But the Western European institution of life-cycle service has its surprises and its puzzles too. An outstanding feature of these very large numbers of young people in service was that they moved from one household to another almost every year. The faithful and trusty retainer is one more of the literary myths about European family structure – myths in the sense of substituting the entirely exceptional circumstance for the wholly normal, as in the case of Juliet’s marriage.”

previously: viscous populations and the selection for altruistic behaviors and big summary post on the hajnal line

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the american revolutions

one of the neatest things i learned from Albion’s Seed is that there wasn’t one american revolution, there were four! they never teach you this sort of exciting history in middle school — at least they didn’t in the working-class, roman catholic middle school that i went to — which wasn’t a middle school at all but just the seventh and eighth grades. i was sooo deprived as a child… [kindle locations 13525-13555]:

“The Revolution was not a single struggle, but a series of four separate Wars of Independence, waged in very different ways by the major cultures of British America. The first American Revolution (1775-76) was a massive popular insurrection in New England. An army of British regulars was defeated by a Yankee militia which was much like the Puritan train bands from which they were descended. These citizen soldiers were urged into battle by New England’s ‘black regiment’ of Calvinist clergy. The purpose of New England’s War for Independence, as stated both by ministers and by laymen such as John and Samuel Adams, was not to secure the rights of man in any universal sense. Most New Englanders showed little interest in John Locke or Cato’s letters. They sought mainly to defend their accustomed ways against what the town of Malden called ‘the contagion of venality and dissipation’ which was spreading from London to America.

“Many years later, historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke? The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke. Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine. Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? The veteran thought not. When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.

“In 1775, these Yankee soldiers were angry and determined men, in no mood for halfway measures. Their revolution was not merely a mind game. Most able-bodied males served in the war, and the fighting was cruel and bitter. So powerful was the resistance of this people-in-arms that after 1776 a British army was never again able to remain in force on the New England mainland.

“The second American War for Independence (1776-81) was a more protracted conflict in the middle states and the coastal south. This was a gentlemen’s war. On one side was a professional army of regulars and mercenaries commanded by English gentry. On the other side was an increasingly professional American army led by a member of the Virginia gentry. The principles of this second American Revolution were given their Aristotelian statement in the Declaration of Independence by another Virginia gentleman, Thomas Jefferson, who believed that he was fighting for the ancient liberties of his ‘Saxon ancestors.’

“The third American Revolution reached its climax in the years from 1779 to 1781. This was a rising of British borderers in the southern backcountry against American loyalists and British regulars who invaded the region. The result was a savage struggle which resembled many earlier conflicts in North Britain, with much family feuding and terrible atrocities committed on both sides. Prisoners were slaughtered, homes were burned, women were raped and even small children were put to the sword.

“The fourth American Revolution continued in the years from 1781 to 1783. This was a non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle, in which the elites of the Delaware Valley played a leading part. The economic war was organized by Robert Morris of Philadelphia. The genius of American diplomacy was Benjamin Franklin. The Delaware culture contributed comparatively little to the fighting, but much to other forms of struggle.

“The loyalists who opposed the revolution tended to be groups who were not part of the four leading cultures. They included the new imperial elites who had begun to multiply rapidly in many colonial capitals, and also various ethnic groups who lived on the margins of the major cultures: notably the polyglot population of lower New York, the Highland Scots of Carolina and African slaves who inclined against their Whiggish masters.”

pretty sure most of you are familiar with fischer’s four american folkways and their origins. i’ve written a handful of posts on the histories of the original populations of these folkways — when they were still back in england that is.

there’s this post: east anglia, kent and manorialism — the puritans who went to new england were mostly from east anglia, or at least the eastern/southeastern part of england. the east anglians seem to have been quite outbred comparatively speaking, but perhaps not quite as much as the populations of southern and central england (i.e. the home counties). they seem to have hung on to extended families — village- or hamlet-based groups of brothers and their families — for longer than other populations in the southern half of britain, although perhaps that was more a side-effect of the lack of manorialism in the region rather than some residual inbreeding. the new englanders had fought their war of independence because they “had always managed their own affairs” — that was pretty true of east anglians, too, since they had (mostly) never been under the yoke of manorialism. interestingly, they had a remarkably (for the time) low homicide rate in the thirteenth century.

i’ve got a couple of posts related to those rambunctious folks from the backcountry whose ancestors came from the borderlands between england and scotland. libertarian crackers takes a quick look at why this group tends to love being independent and is distrustful of big gubmint — to make a long story short, the border folks married closely for much longer than the southern english — and they didn’t experience much manorialism, either (the lowland scots did, but not so much the border groups). did i mention that they’re a bit hot-headed? (not that there’s anything wrong with that! (~_^) ) see also: hatfields and mccoys. not surprising that this group’s war of independence involved “much family feuding.”

i wrote a whole series of posts on the north midlands/mid-atlantic quakers, because i knew the least about them. you might want to start with the last one first — quaker individualism — since it sorta sums up everything i found out about them. the other posts are (in chronological order): geographical origin of the quakers, on the topographical origins of the quakers, and the myddle people. what i reckoned about the midlanders/quakers is that they are some of my inbetweeners — they are some of the outbreeders of europe, but they came to The Outbreeding Project a bit late since they’re right on the edge of “core” europe (i.e. roughly the area circled in green on this map). so they don’t have the extended family orientation of the more recently inbreeding border reivers who were even further away from the “core” (to the north), but they had a very strong orientation toward the nuclear family — almost kinda freakish (not to be rude). the midlanders/quakers lean towards a strong individualism, too, reminiscent of the backcountry folk, but without the strong familism. that’s why i dubbed them inbetweeners. (the east anglians might be inbetweeners, too. not sure. Further Research is Required^TM!) colin woodard said of the quakers [reference in this post]: “Quakers were also by nature inclined to challenge authority and convention at every juncture.” so, not surprising that they, too, rebelled against the english king!

unfortunately, i haven’t got a single post on the virginians from the south of england — fischer’s distressed cavaliers and indentured servants. they ought to be some of the most outbred of the english, which, perhaps, was why they fought for lofty ideals like life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the belief that all men are equal…except for (*ahem*) the slaves. the different origins of the settlers of the tidewater versus the deep south (per colin woodard) perhaps make a difference here — the landowners of the deep south were a self-sorted group of the second sons and grandsons of plantation owners in places like barbados (just like benedict cumberbatch’s ancestors!) — they might not have been big on universalistic ideas. need to find out more about the origins of both of these groups.

if you haven’t read Albion’s Seed, you really ought to! colin woodard’s American Nations, too, which divides up the u.s.’s folkways in a slightly different manner plus adds a whole bunch of others not considered by fischer (like french and spanish north america). and jayman has written approximately eleventeen gaZILLion posts on the american nations which you should definitely check out! i don’t even know where they all are, but you can start with one of the most recent ones, if you haven’t seen it already. (^_^)

that there were four american revolutions is a result of the fact that four (five?) somewhat different english populations settled in different regions of north america. the cultural and attitudinal differences between these regions persist to this day because, undoubtedly, there are genetic variations between the populations — probably average genetic differences in the frequencies of genes related to behaviors, personality, and even intelligence. these regional differences also persist because, since the very founding of the united states, like-minded people have been self-sorting themselves within the country so that they group together — and that sorting process has not been slowing down.

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east anglia, kent and manorialism

here are a few excerpts related to east anglia and kent in the medieval period from from Sentiments & Activities: Essays in Social Science by george c. homans.

homans has a few interesting things to say about the east anglians and kentish people of the middle ages:

– that they had little to no manners manors in these regions versus central england which did
– that extended-families ruled the day in these areas versus nuclear families
– and he concludes that the germanic peoples that settled east anglia during the migration period had probably been frisians

east anglia is interesting because that’s where the puritan settlers in new england came from. here’s a little map from Albion’s Seed on the origins of new england’s placenames — i.e. they came mostly from east anglia:

anyway, here from homans [pgs. 147-49, 154, 162, 169]:

“[The] two main types of English social organization in the Middle Ages and their historical consequences, the two being the social organization of East Anglia and Kent, on the one side, and, on the other, that of central or open-field England….

“Central England is marked by large, compact villages, whose fields are managed according to customary rules binding on all villagers — one or another variety of the so-called open-field system or champion husbandry. In these fields, a villager’s holding lies in strips scattered all over the fields, with approximately equal acreage in each one. The holdings tend to be equal, class by class: there may be yardlands and half-yardlands, but each yardland is normally equal to every other one. A holding in villeinage or socage is commonly held by one man and descends to one of his sons. And many of the holdings are villein holdings, subject to heavy labor-services for the lord of the manor.

“Arrangements in Kent and much of East Anglia differ at almost every point from those just described…. Kent is marked by settlements smaller than the open-field villages, settlements I shall call hamlets. The holding does not originally consist of scattered strips. The earlier the date, the more often it appears instead as a compact body of land, the hamlet apparently lying close to the land. The holding is managed as an independent farming unit, not subject to many communal rules, though often following in fact a traditional rotation of crops. The holdings may once have been equal in size, but by the end of the thirteenth century such equality has degenerated, and irregularity is the rule rather than the exception.

“A husbandman’s holding tends to be in the hands of a group of men often called participes, sometimes called heredes, and it is often clear that these men are patrilineal kinsmen. The custom of inheritance in Kent is called gavelkind, and recognized by the lawyers as being different from most of the rest of England. Land descends to a number of heirs jointly…. It looks as if we had to do with joint-family communities like those Le Play described as still existing in the Auvergne in the nineteenth century: groups of men claiming descent from a common patrilineal ancestor, living in one house or a small group of houses, and managing in common a compact body of land, under the leadership of the oldest of ablest male of each successive senior generation….

“Again unlike open-field England, Kent by the end of the thirteenth century holds few villeins. Week-work for the lord of the manor is the badge of villeinage, and week-work is uncommon in Kent.

“The customs of East Anglia, including the villages on the southern shore of the Wash, are mixed, but in many places identical with those of Kent. The fact of gavelkins inheritance is certainly common, though not the name. Holdings seem at one time to have been fairly compact, but they have become much broken up by partible inheritance. The proportion of free socage to villein tenures is higher than in central England, though lower than in Kent. East Anglia differs from Kent chiefly in the fact that settlement seems to be in big villages rather than hamlets, but even here the two districts are alike in lacking strict two- or three-field systems of husbandry.

“We have on the one hand a strong village community linked with what Le Play called in ‘Les ouvriers europeens’ a stem-family, and on the other hand a weak or nonexistent village community linked with a joint-family. Big village, small family or small village, big family — the contrast is oversimple but not fantastically so….

“[A] higher proportion of tenants in free socage to tenants in villeinage [is] obtained in Kent and East Anglia than in central England…. This was true at the time of Domesday, and by the end of the thirteenth century very little villeinage remained in Kent…. Nor was the phenomenon limited to England. One of the greatest of social historians, Marc Bloch, claimed that the full-blown seigneurie appeared in France ‘north of the Loire and on the Burgundian plain,’ that is, in the open-field part of the country. He argued that the feudal system itself developed its classic form only under these conditions….

“In East Anglia as in Kent, the heirs often continued to hold and work it [the land] in common and undivided, forming what anthropologists call a joint-family or minimal lineage. Thus we hear of groups of brothers, of uncles and nephews, and of first cousins holding land jointly....

“Besides holding land in common, did a group of heirs ever keep on living together in one big family house, forming a house-community like those described in the sagas? All we have here are some curious East Anglian references to named ‘houses’ (domus), references that seem unlike any found in the records of other parts of England….

“The final characteristic of East Anglia that sets it off at least from Wessex and Mercia is its weak, or perhaps late, manorialization…. Specifically, weak manorialism meant a large number of free tenants. ‘The free peasantry of East Anglia — that is to say of the two counties of Norfolk and Suffolk alone — formed approximately one half of the total number of freeman and sokemen recorded for the whole of Domesday England….'”

homans makes a long and fairly convincing argument (that i won’t go into here) that frisians settled in east anglia during the migration period and not so much angles. he draws a lot of parallels between medieval east anglian society and frisian society, so he may be right. but the interesting thing is, like east anglia, frisia never experienced manorialism either, so perhaps the similarities of the two regions are related to that (along with general common ethnic origins).

it’s interesting, too, to hear that as recently as the 1300s, east anglia and kent had community families whereas, according to emmanuel todd, they had absolute nuclear families by the modern period (1500s-1800s). the change to nuclear families (perhaps stem families as opposed to absolute nuclear families) probably came much earlier in the manor-regions of england since the manor system generally required nuclear families.

previously: family types and the evolution of behavioral traits

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