The farm unit we take to be indicated by the three-fold formula was based on the labour of the household family. Outside labour was rare, partly no doubt because of the nature of settlement and the dispersion of population resulting from it for much of the area and the period with which we are dealing. There seem also to have been cultural factors involved; the family in Russia had certain characteristic features. We must now ask what the nature of this family was.

Basically, the family seems to have been the nuclear family of the married couple and their young children. The term dvor indicated the ‘household’ in the sense both of a physical complex of land and buildings and also of a group of persons. To a great extent this term probably carried much of the meaning of ‘family’, at least at peasant level. Terms such as semiya, etymologically the closest to the modern Russian for ‘family’, or rod ‘kin group’, do not seem to have been closely relevant. The former is found in documents issued by princes; the latter has a more extended meaning, something like ‘relatives’. Perhaps of greater help to us is the terminology relating to those family members who were not connected by blood or marriage. Such terms are priimak, vlazen' and prikhodets. All indicated new arrivals, though it seems possible to go a little further than this and to suggest that the first indicated full acceptance into the household, while the other two may not necessarily have done so.