Historians of the early modern family and of early modern crime have underestimated the relationship between the family and crime. Histories of the family usually limit consideration of crime to two areas: what we would now term domestic violence, especially wife-battering and child abuse, and unlawful sexual activities such as adultery, pre-marital sex and bastardy. Within the social history of crime, one might expect the family to have a higher profile given that the household is acknowledged to have been the very foundation of early modern social order. Yet here too the family takes centre stage only when the household is a site of internal conflict. Violence looms large in such studies: the family is populated by battered wives, petty traitors, infanticidal mothers, and abused servants and apprentices. Crime historians also recognise conflict within the household in the theft of goods by servants and employees and sometimes by husbands or wives during bitter separations. In both historiographies, then, crime is presented overwhelmingly in narrow terms as a disruptive force that damaged the cohesion of an ‘ideal’ family unit. Indeed, for Lawrence Stone in The Family, Sex and Marriage, crime – whether directed against family members or not – demonstrated the absence of close emotional ties. Confronted with evidence that suggested that sixteenth-century people far more frequently used violence outside the family than within it he suggested that ‘familial emotive ties were so weak that they did not generate the passions which lead to intra-familial murder and mayhem’.