In the eighteenth century there was no formal category of “domestic law.” The terminology of “domestic relations” emerged in the nineteenth century, and the modern concept of “family law” only in the twentieth. The eminent lawyer William Blackstone, following the Continental model, included the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant, within the “law of persons” in his groundbreaking Commentaries on the Laws of England, but other contemporary writers tended to focus on specific relationships. Nonetheless, the term “domestic law” remains a useful shorthand for the various ways in which the law – whether contained in legislation, or in the decisions of the ecclesiastical, common-law, or criminal courts – regulated family relationships.