For Spanish writers of the Golden Age like Juan Costa and Cellorigo, the household was what they called ‘a little commonwealth’, where men were trained for the responsibilities of power – educated to be citizens. The household served a crucial function in a pre-industrial society as a centre for the production and redistribution of wealth: for the care of the dependent poor, now largely taken care of by the state but then integrated into a domestic economy as servants; for the schooling of the young, now the responsibility of institutions but then often left to ‘masters’ who gathered their apprentices or their pupils into their homes; and of course for the care of those who because of sickness or old age could no longer look after themselves in an age when the hospital was still either a refuge for the homeless traveller or the dying pauper. The wealthier the citizen, the larger his household establishment was likely to be, and the ‘big house’ would exert a significant influence over its neighbourhood as a source of employment, charity or patronage.

The right governance of such an enterprise was the science of economics (económica), in the sense in which men understood the term in a pre-industrial society, an enormously responsible task set out in an abundant literature. Whereas economics traditionally focused on the household, what men called politics dealt with the good order of the state.