Family Business: Profiles of Astons' Society

You need to have a fairly well-developed tenacity to make it through this section, since it goes into quite some detail on the family history of most of the villages' population at this time, in so far as it is traceable from local records.  Nevertheless, the tenacity pays dividends, because we find an amazingly rich picture of the blood linkages that characterised village society at all levels. Social mobility is relatively infrequent.  We find good evidence for whole families controlling specific sections of the economy over and above the two main farming families - Slades, Fullers - who would have provided the hub around which everything rotated.

Out of interest I began to plug people into genealogical software and just kept going without the need to begin a second (or subsequent) family.  Just about everybody had some link with everybody else.  The software can establish linkage at third removed cousin levels, although perhaps nobody could do that in their heads at the time.  We can then graft onto this social structure, built from official sources, what Charlotte and the other correspondents have to say in passing about people and life in the villages.  The Slade letters tell us least about the bulk of the population - agricultural labourers - and most about the top and middle levels of society.  That alone constitutes a finding, albeit not unexpected.  Senatorial Roman historians tended to provide view of history mostly as it related to the Senate and its members.