The basic structure of English households in the pre-industrial era is now well known. Households were small. The majority contained fewer than five persons, and membership was customarily confined to parents and their unmarried children. If the family was sufficiently wealthy, or involved in farming or trade, then the household might well contain servants, but there were remarkably few complex households containing grandparents, parents, and grandchildren. Untimely death in the older generation and average age at marriage in the mid- to late 20s for both sexes naturally curtailed the number of three-generational households that it was possible to form. But the number that were formed never came anywhere near the potential number.2 It was not because children married late while their parents died early that few households spanned three generations, but because the vast majority of children who had not already left the parental home to become servants in the households of others would establish separate households on marrying.

The implication of the link between marriage and the formation of a household is that English households must have varied in structure over time. Nationally, the crude marriage rate fell steadily to reach a low point in the late seventeenth century, from which it rose to a high plateau between 1771 and 1796 before falling again.