If we look back over the campaign to reform the family in the sixteenth century, this basic process was at work: The religious and moral ideals of the family were slowly made to fit the social conditions in the countryside. In the late Middle Ages, many laymen considered the church's ideals of marriage and the family to be a threat to social order, corrosive of marital discipline and morals in the society as a whole. With the Reformation, that began to change. The order that came to family life by the early seventeenth century – the firm rule of peasant elders over village youths – came about once the church and state embraced the ideal of the patriarchal family and then imposed, with the cooperation and help of village elders, as strict a marital discipline as the society would bear. Without this alliance, without solid social support for the patriarchal family in the countryside, any new marital discipline would have been difficult to establish.

A similar pattern is evident when we turn to a second, but equally important, aspect of family reform: the effort to grasp the patriarchal family as a set of property relationships. For the state this effort marked a departure from past practice. It grew out of the state's new pastoral mission and its rapidly rising fiscal needs in the middle of the sixteenth century.