This book is an attempt to recover the different familial systems and compare them with one another.

Richard Wall grew up in a small market town in rural Herefordshire in the 1960s before joining the Royal Navy and travelling the world. Now a full-time writer, this is his second novel after the highly acclaimed Fat Man Blues, which has been adapted to screenplay for a feature film, and storyboarded for a 10-episode TV series.

1. Introduction Richard Wall; 2. Two kinds of pre-industrial household formation system J. Hajnal; 3. 'A large family: the peasant's greatest wealth': serf households in Mishino, Russia, 1814-1858 Peter Czap, Jr; 4. The peasant family as an economic unit in the Polish feudal economy of the eighteenth century Jacek Kochanowicz; 5. The familial contexts of early childhood in Baltic serf society Andrejs Plakans; 6. Estonian households in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries H. Palli; 7. Family and familia in early-medieval Bavaria Carl I. Hammer, Jr.; 8. The property and kin relationships of retired farmers in northern and central Europe David Gaunt; 9. Pre-industrial household structure in Hungary Rudolf Andorka and Tamas Farago; 10. The reconstruction of the family life course: theoretical problems and empirical results Reinhard Sieder and Michael Mitterauer; 11. The changing household: Austrian household structure from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century P. Schmidtbauer; 12. Does owning real property influence the form of the household? An example from rural West Flanders Richard Wall; 13. The evolving household: the case of Lampernisse, West Flanders Luc Danhieux; 14. The composition of households in a population of 6 men to 10 women: south-east Bruges in 1814 Richard Wall; 15. The importance of women in an urban environment: the example of the Rheims household at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux; 16. The household: demographic and economic change in England, 1650-1970 Richard Wall; 17. Family and household as work group and kin group: areas of traditional Europe compared Peter Laslett.