Few people lived alone, or, indeed, had any desire to do so. Everyone looked to membership of a group for mutual help in bad times and support in old age. Even the state in medieval England required people to be linked in small groups or tithings, so that each could vouch for the others' good behaviour. It is not that man is a particularly sociable animal: association has been forced upon him by the physical conditions in which he lived. Almost everyone is, by the accident of birth, a member of a family, of a more extended kinship group and also of a local or village community. One might leave the latter, and, perhaps with difficulty, gain acceptance in another, but family and kinship could not be replaced. Members of a family and families within a community were bound together by ties of mutual dependence. Although no family or community was ever without its internal frictions and disputes – the records are full of them – as a general rule they were never pursued to the point at which they interfered with the operation of community institutions and the performance of the agricultural routine.