Since 1972 scholars have been scouring eastern and western Europe for signs of the complex household of the past, a reaction in part to the challenge posed by our null hypothesis that the nuclear family should be considered dominant unless the contrary could be proven. The result is that we now know a good deal more about the role of the household in countries which were unrepresented at the 1969 conference which gave rise to the papers contained in this volume. The debate continues too on the importance to be attached to the complex household when ‘snapshot’, once-only listings of inhabitants reveal that of all households only two or three per cent were ‘multiple’: two distinct nuclei sharing the same living space. To us it seems difficult to see why a short period in an extended family in one's youth must necessarily be treasured for life, or indeed why the peasant-landowner, the complexities of his household still under examination as far as England is concerned, has to provide the ideal for society. But these are difficult propositions to refute with the only witnesses centuries dead and their experience whether of three days', three weeks' or three years' duration buried with them, though microsimulation of household structures following a sixteenth-century English model scarcely suggests that the inhabitants were keen to live in such units.