2 The proportion of women who remained single among Andover’s third generation was 7.4%; among Hingham women before 1700 it was 5.3%. Bachelorhood was less common—below 2.6% in Hingham; Greven, Four Generations, 121; Smith, “Population, Family and Society in Hingham,” 12.
3 J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History (London, 1965), 101-46; subsequent research has confirmed the Hajnal thesis for Britain; see E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871 (Cambridge, 1981), 160.
4 O’Malley, “Beloved Wife,” 181-201.
5 Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (1893, Rutland, Vt., 1973), 38; OED, s.v., “thornback.”
6 George Elliott Howard, A History of Matrimonial Institutions (2 vols., Chicago, 1964), I, 364-402. The Anglican position on matrimony was a compromise—complex, inconsistent and unstable; a typical product of the halfway reformation which created the Church of England. Church law declared that marriage was not a true sacrament. But the customs of the church required that it should be solemnized in a sacramental ceremony.