The structure of medieval family life varied immensely according to location, social class, and individual preference. It also varied over time as individual households adjusted to economic change and to the life cycles of their members. As a general rule, wealthier households were larger than those of the poor.

In northern Europe, the nuclear family predominated, at least among peasants. A married couple and their children lived together, rarely sharing their space with other relatives. When children married, they left the home and established a household of their own. Old people tried to maintain their independence as long as they could. The wasting diseases of old age were not prolonged as they are today by the miracles of modern medicine. If someone grew feeble or senile, they sometimes moved in with one of their grown children. That the elderly often preferred to board with another villager is a tribute to the relative weakness of kinship ties. Such an arrangement usually involved the transfer of land or other payments.

The nuclear family was also the most common form of household organization in Mediterranean Europe, but extended families in which adult siblings and grandparents lived under the same roof were not unusual. Many others lived as nuclear units in close proximity to their relatives and acted in common with them when necessary. Such behavior indicates that kinship obligations were more broadly defined than they were in the north. The phenomenon is probably related to the concept of the domus, or house, as a basic component of family identity.

In the north, the idea of family as a lineage group associated with a particular estate was largely restricted to the feudal aristocracy. The continuing presence of allodial land and the relative weakness of feudal ties in Mediterranean society extended the concept to relatively humble folk, though rarely to the very poor. In its extreme forms--the Catalan masia, for example--the name of the family, the stone house in which it lived, and the property upon which it was located were the same. The prevalence of family names among the more prosperous peasants reveals the degree to which domus was associated with family in a given region. In Italy, family names were well established in the twelfth century, while in England they did not become common among ordinary folk until after the Black Death. Those who did not own their own land could have adopted the custom in imitation of their social superiors, and with it the concept of familial obligation that it implies. . .

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