The Emergence of Early Modern Europe 21itance and the protection of family property by leading to the appearance
of unanticipated offspring, in an age when contraceptive techniques were
rudimentary and not well known. Still, about a fifth of English brides were
pregnant at the time of their wedding, as sexual relations between couples
expecting to marry were very common.
Kinship and village solidarities defined the lives of ordinary people. In
some places, extended families were common; that is, parents and some
times other relatives lived with couples. In some places, such as England, the
nuclear family (a couple and their children) was the most common house
hold. When children of the lower classes began their working lives—usually
at the age of fourteen or fifteen, or earlier for some apprentices—their oblig
ations to their parents did not end. Often, however, they left home in search
of work, rarely, if ever, to return. The poor turned to family and neighbors
for help in bad times, as well as for help with harvests, if they owned land.
An Expanding Economy
One of the hallmarks of medieval society had been the marked expansion of
trade and manufacture that began in the eleventh century. During the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, merchants greatly increased the amount of
products carried on land routes and in the low galley-ships that hugged the
Mediterranean coastline, more confident than ever before that their goods
would find purchasers. In the markets of Flanders and northern France,
olive oil, fruit, and wine from the Mediterranean region were exchanged for
timber, cereals, and salted herring.
With the expansion in commercial activity, a money economy slowly
developed. Yet trade and barter remained important, particularly for peas
ants, most of whom were part of a subsistence economy. Currency still did
not penetrate some mountainous regions.
Yet overall, the late Middle Ages brought a significant rise in the avail
ability of credit to states and entrepreneurs. Banking families in Venice
and other Italian city-states were already well-established in the thirteenth
century. Some merchants were no longer itinerant travelers, but rather
sedentary entrepreneurs able to raise capital, such as from borrowing from
banking families or other merchants or moneylenders, and extend and
obtain credit. They also developed bills of exchange (see Chapter 5),
which were orders drawn upon an agent to pay another merchant money at
a future date, perhaps in another country and in another currency. Here
and there, merchants began to work on a commission basis, and some spe
cialized in transporting goods. They began to keep registers of profits and
losses, using double-entry bookkeeping. All these changes facilitated a
commercial boom in the sixteenth century, even if the multiplicity of states
and the tolls between and within them hindered commerce.
The sixteenth century also brought a marked increase in basic manufac
turing, which in some regions may have multiplied by 500 percent. The