Friendship and family in early modern England: the sociability of Adam Eyre and Samuel Pepys.

Well, a pox on love and wenching! Women serve but to keep a man from better company. . . . I tell you, 'tis as hard to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of women, as 'tis to be a good fellow, a good friend, and a lover of money. You cannot follow both. . . .

William Wycherley, The Country Wife, I.i.

Wycherley's bluff, tongue-in-cheek misogyny was characteristic of the Restoration stage. The playwrights of seventeenth-century England used it to establish their male characters and to set the stage for plots about courtship and marriage. Misogynist male bonding set up a dichotomy between men's social relations with other men, and men's sexual relations with women. Men confronted a dilemma that forced them to choose between their homosocial and heterosexual desires. The playwrights often suggested that marrying would resolve the dilemma, but they did not show how men, once married, satisfied the demands of friendship on the one hand and conjugality on the other.(1) How did married men balance or integrate family and friendship in seventeenth-century England? In particular, how did men's relations with other men affect their relations with their own wives?

The answers to these questions illuminate issues in recent historiographical debate. Some historians argue that the balance between family and friendship shifted decisively in early modern England.(2) Ties of friendship, including kinship, neighborhood and clientage, suffered significant erosion. The family enjoyed increasing importance and relations between spouses grew more companionate. This shift is considered part of the rise of individualism, Protestantism, and capitalism. It is usually argued that the transformation of the family began in the sixteenth century and was well underway by the seventeenth century, and that it affected a broad spectrum of English society, particularly "the middling sort." Yet the emergence of a modern pattern of family relations, called domesticity, has been demonstrated most convincingly for the landed elite of the eighteenth century.(3) The state of the debate suggests, then, that further study of family relations might profitably be focussed on the middling sort of the seventeenth century. Did the middling sort enjoy marriages that were companionate and largely separate from other relations, as is common in modern urban society? Or were relations within their marriages still largely determined by the broader social structures of the period, and lacking in companionship as a consequence?(4)

Answering these questions requires an approach to early modern English society that is both broadly cultural and more critical of women's roles than the approaches that have thus far formed this debate. Studies taking this new approach have shown that men's and women's private lives, and the public, political structures of English society, shaped each other in complex and fundamental ways.(5) Further essential connections between men's public and private relations are to be found in the history of sociability.(6) Seventeenth-century commentators and reformers suggested that different institutions of sociability, namely, hospitality and public houses, organized men's relations with their friends and wives in very different ways. They associated hospitality with high status and good marital relations, and associated public houses with low status and bad marital relations. Through these institutions, men's relations with each other affected the courses of their marriages on a daily and continuing basis.

This article will use the diaries of two men of "the middling sort," Adam Eyre and Samuel Pepys,(7) to examine how they participated in these alternative forms of sociability. It argues that they participated in both institutions and manipulated their participation to enhance their statuses within their social networks. At the same time, the quality and development of each man's marriage hinged on his efforts to improve his status, and particularly on how well he manipulated his participation in sociability. Adam Eyre shifted his sociability from public houses to his own home, improving both his status and his marriage. Samuel Pepys shifted his sociability away from public houses, but manipulated hospitality less successfully, with ambiguous results for both his status and marriage. The two men faced similar social conventions and personal choices, but in very different communities. They balanced their families and friends in different ways, in large part because Eyre's Yorkshire parish was rural and relatively homogeneous socially, while Pepys' London was urban and steeply hierarchical. Pepys' marriage was shaped not only by the spirit of capitalism, as Alice Clark suggested long ago,(8) but also by Pepys' experience of paternalism.

I

Many seventeenth-century Englishmen saw in sociability an important key to the good ordering of both family and society. They, like some modern social scientists, perceived men's relations with their acquaintance to affect their relations with their wives.(9) For better or for worse, relations between spouses were not considered to be walled off from the wider context of social relations. The direct links that sociability established between family and society were especially important to English men in the seventeenth century because they thought of the family as a microcosm of society and accepted a parallel between order inside and outside the family.(10) Indeed, so fundamental was the analogy between family and society that, as Susan Amussen has put it, "the distinction between 'family' and 'society' was absent from early modern thought."(11) Two kinds of sociability, that of hospitality and that of the public house, were perceived to promote distinctly different patterns of familial and social relations. These patterns were central to the crisis of order in seventeenth-century England.

Where the household was the basic economic and political unit, hospitality was the ideal of sociability, as Felicity Heal has demonstrated.(12) The ideal host was the rich, landed gentleman or nobleman who could afford the most generous provision of food and drink for his guests. Hospitality placed the gentleman or nobleman at the "centre of his microcosmic agrarian universe."(13) Those who wrote about hospitality in the early modern period argued that it should be used to reinforce ties of neighborhood, especially to provide charity to those who were less fortunate. Social critics worried that it was too often exchanged only among relations and close friends. They urged England's natural leaders to keep hospitality at their country seats, instead of spending their time and money in London. If they did so, the nation's ills would be speedily remedied; their neighbors would love them, the poor would not want, their reputations would be enhanced, and the entire kingdom would be restored to its former harmonious order.

Hospitality seemed to provide a way not only to promote social harmony and social order, but also to harmonize relations between husband and wife. In a large book on "Domesticall Duties," William Gouge, a London minister, emphasized the social responsibilities and pleasures of that activity.(14) Gouge hoped that entertaining guests together "will be an especial means, as to manifest their mutuall affection, so to hold the hearts of man and wife firme and close together, and make them the better like and love one another." The primary reason for husbands to take a share in the duties of hospitality with their wives was to assure their guests that "they are welcome both to the husband and to the wife, that so they may be the more cheerfull." The husband would know better than his wife whom to invite, because he got out of the house more than she did, but they "ought each of them to esteem of the others friends as of their own."

While hospitality seemed generally to promote good order and harmony, many saw public houses as breeding grounds of all the disorders that they believed were threatening society. Alehouses, in particular, were prime targets of the Puritan campaign for religious reformation in the first half of the seventeenth century.(15) These establishments seemed to godly reformers to sanction idleness and drunkenness; to foment irreligion, disrespect and sedition. The struggle for religious reformation of society as a whole took the form of an attack on traditional popular culture by new, emerging local elites. As they tried to impose their own values on their neighbors, "the better sort" withdrew from participation in the public sociability of their communities and tried to consolidate control of local political and economic life in their own hands. As Keith Wrightson put it, "the struggle over the alehouses was one of the most significant social dramas of the age."(16)

While hospitality harmonized men's relations with their wives and friends, the public house polarized these two sets of relations. Gouge believed that many men spent too much time away from home, "mealing and lodging where their wives shall not know," and "put off all government |of the household~ to the wife." Concern that paternal authority within the family was collapsing was central to the perception of a general crisis of social order, as David Underdown has shown.(17) Many reformers directly connected strife between husband and wife to public house sociability. In sermons, in pamphlets, and in the courts, they accused alehouses of encouraging ". . . poor men to live Idlely, dissolutely, neglecting their calling, while their poore wives and children sit crying at home."(18) For some of England's ministers and magistrates, eradicating alehouses was the surest way to reinforce the family.(19) Others told wives to be obedient to their husbands if they wished to keep them at home and away from the dangers of the alehouse. "How many men are there," asked one, "that to avoid the noise of a froward wife, have fallen to company keeping, & by that to drunkenness, poverty, and a multitude of mischiefs?"(20)

II

Seventeenth-century Englishmen were well aware, of course, that their stereotypes of the ideal host and the typical alehouse patron did not reflect the complexities of social and familial relations, or firm connections between sociability and social status. Adam Eyre was a man of middling status and modest means who participated extensively in both forms of sociability during the two years, from January 1647 to January 1649, in which he kept his diary.(21) Eyre was a yeoman who lived in relatively homogeneous community. There were no members of the knighthood or the nobility among his acquaintance to command deference or keep good old fashioned hospitality. Nor was it easy for Eyre and his wife, Susan, to keep the upper hand in relations with a "sawcy" and "froward" tenant.(22) Nevertheless, distinctions of status were important. Like some of his neighbors, Eyre styled himself "gent." He took an active role in the affairs of the parish, such as choosing ministers and providing for the poor. He had served as an officer in the parliamentary army. He maintained connections in London and Sheffield. He twice represented the interest of the parish in the capital.(23) His credit was good. The gap was certainly great between this member of the parish elite and many of his neighbors.

While Adam Eyre occupied a respectable position in his community, his participation in public house sociability made his marriage as disorderly as those decried by reformers. Going out for the day and coming in late at night after drinking formed a pattern of behavior that undermined his credibility with his wife and jeopardized the viability of their relationship. A quarrel broke out between them one night when he returned home from a neighboring parish where he had attended a burial and "where I spend 6 d. and stayd till night, but came home in tyme." "|N~evertheless," he added, "my wife was farr out of |humor~. . . ." This reception provoked him, in turn, to anger, and in his rage he broke his wife's spinning wheel. While this quarrel was remarkable for its bitterness and violence, tensions burst out on the threshold on many other occasions as well. Eyre came home "very angry" one night "and caryed myselfe unsivilly." His wife took the brunt of her husband's mood, which was again made worse by having drunk a shilling's worth at the alehouse with his friends. Another night "after I came at home I broke a pott and a glasse." Susan Eyre did not always wait to find out whether her husband had been drinking, or whether he could account for his whereabouts. She once locked him out of the house, "and sayd shee would be master of the house for that night," when he returned home "after a whole day's drinking with the soldiers and others. . . ."(24)

Neighborly sociability did not always keep Eyre drinking late into the night, but it ordinarily took him away from his home and his wife. In the two year period of his diary, Eyre and his male friends specifically "appointed to meete . . . with our wives" on only one occasion, which they arranged two weeks in advance. When Susan Eyre accompanied her husband, she did so because of unusual circumstances, including a burial, and a trip to London. Only once did she accompany her husband to a neighbor's house for a meal. Moreover, accompanying her husband did not necessarily mean that she would spend time in his company. After one trip to church together, when she received the sacrament, her husband spent the afternoon at the alehouse. On another of Eyre's trips to London, he dropped his wife off at another house nearby where she was to stay while he was away.(25)

A combination of social conventions undoubtedly inhibited women from participating in the public sociability of their husbands. Eyre's diary illuminates the difficulties posed by so basic a matter as transportation.(26) Eyre and his male neighbors facilitated each others' peripatetic sociability, but seem to have discouraged couples from going abroad together. Men regularly lent each other their horses, a custom on which Eyre relied heavily, but they seldom lent horses to women.(27) Only once in two years did Eyre lend a horse for the use of a married woman,(28) and he encountered difficulties on the occasions on which he tried to borrow a horse so that his wife could ride with him. Two neighbors flatly refused him on one occasion, and he lied about his intentions on another.(29) When her husband could not get a horse for her, Susan Eyre had to ride "double" behind him on a pillion. This practice was not only inconvenient, but also so hard on the horse that Eyre once feared that they would not make it home.(30) It may be significant that the only occasion when Eyre had no trouble borrowing a horse for his wife was the day that he and several friends set aside in advance for a rendezvous with their wives.

Conflict over transportation spread the conflict generated by men's sociability throughout the community as a whole, and added to the tensions between Eyre and his wife. The neighborly cooperation that facilitated men's mobility sometimes clashed with the needs of their families.(31) When Eyre asked to borrow a neighbor's horse from the man's wife--something he tried only once--she not only refused his request but gave him a scolding as well. "This day Rich wife abused mee about the lone of an horse very basely. . . ." Women appear to have resented the neighborliness of their husbands from which they were excluded, guarding jealously what access they had to transportation. Eyre, for his part, resented their interference. When he "could not have |one neighbor's horse one day~ . . . for the wife was rid on her today," Eyre took offence. He blamed his neighbor's wife for using her husband's horse, "so thankless and disrespective hath shee ever beene to mee." Nor did Eyre take any better the interference of his own wife. She once forced him to buy a new horse by selling his old one, a deal on which she kept twenty shillings for herself and he lost three pounds. It was this incident that sparked Eyre's first display of violent behavior.(32)

Eyre's public, peripatetic sociability began to trouble him well before his confrontations with his wife reached their violent peak. It did so in part because of the expenses that steadily drained his purse. The shillings and pence he spent at the alehouse on drink and gambling at bowls added up to considerable sums in short order.(33) He could not afford such outlays of cash because he lived on credit, and had large debts coming due. Summing up his situation at the end of the first year of his diary, Eyre wrote:

This day I rested at home all day, and cast up the accounts of my expences for this yere; and I find them to be nere hand |pounds~100, whereas I have not past |pounds~30. per ann. to live on; wherfore I am resolved herafter never to pay for any body in the alehouse, nor never to entangle myselfe in company so much again as I have done; . . .

Eyre's sociability provoked his wife's anger in large part because he stubbornly resisted changing wasteful, expensive habits, while at the same time he sought to keep his finances in order by securing new loans or selling property. His father-in-law firmly resolved not to help him "in anything, though I sold all I had." Eyre would have sold the house in which he and his wife lived in order to support his habits, had she not refused to "join with |him~ . . . in sale."(34)

Eyre had, however, already begun to change the pattern of his sociability earlier that year. The consideration that most influenced these changes was the progress of his finances. Brighter prospects began to appear in the summer of 1647. In July, Eyre succeeded in getting a neighbor to promise him a generous long-term loan. While seeking this loan, Eyre reduced greatly his involvement in company. The number of people with whom he interacted at this time was much less than it had been the previous winter. Eyre had not yet, however, fully discerned the pitfalls of public house sociability. His fresh supply of cash at first encouraged him to continue his ruinous fraternizing. The day after he received the first installment of his new loan he cast up his accounts, only to discover that he would still have to cut his spending in order to break even. He would have gone out bowling the very next day anyway, had his wife not prevented him. She managed to keep him from leaving the house at all that day, a strategy that eliminated the need to lock him out at night.(35) Eyre continued to improve his behavior in the fall. As he received further loans, he began to use them to pay off old debts, including a sister's dowry.(36) By the winter, Eyre reached a more stable financial plateau. Although Eyre found this a trying period, having pressed his credit and resources hard, he weathered it successfully. This not only allowed him to reassess his sociability, but also removed a major point of conflict with his wife. On New Year's day, 1648, he asked his wife to forget their past differences, and promised to become a better husband to her. Later he promised her that he would not ask her again to sell the house.(37)

That winter, Eyre turned to hospitality and the respectable role of host to satisfy the desire for, and obligations of, both good fellowship and conjugality. Eyre expanded his hospitality, instead of reducing his sociability. Eyre did not abstain from company, as he resolved he would, and as he had in fact done in the summer. Eyre was more sociable now than he had been then. Eyre interacted with almost as many persons after he made his resolutions and reconciled with his wife as he had done the year before.

But many more of these acquaintances visited him at home than had ever done so previously. At the time that violence first erupted in the Eyre household, in February 1647, he had nine in ten of his social contacts exclusively outside his home. That is, only one in ten of the people he saw that month came to his home. At the time of Eyre's last violent confrontation with his wife, twelve months later, almost half of his acquaintances paid him visits at home.(38) The expansion of Eyre's hospitality reflected his financial progress and assisted his reconciliation with his wife. It may even be that Eyre could not have shifted more of his sociability to his home unless he first made peace with his wife.

Table 1

Participants in sociability with Adam Eyre, in given months, 1647-1648

                   Total        At home(*)
                 #    Index      #     %

February 1647   58     100       6    10
July 1647       37      64       9    24
February 1648   47      81      22    47

* To better gauge Eyre's hospitality, his wife has been omitted from the
number of participants in it.

As he changed his sociability, he became more confident in his interaction with his friends and neighbors. Most importantly, he took an increasingly dim view of alehouse company. His resolution not "to pay for any body in the alehouse" reflected his wish to economize, but also suggests less concern to win popularity. Although he had depended on his social connections to obtain credit, Eyre came to attribute his difficulties to the "allurements of company," which included living "very vainely in idle company, and feasting and ryott." Indeed, when he reflected on the part he had formerly taken at the alehouse with his acquaintance, he felt that he had "playd the fool." He took as signs of divine favor several safe deliveries from falls and bad weather while riding home, and "thereupon I resolved never hereafter to stay out in the night again." Staying home allowed him to contrast himself favorably to his quarrelsome tenant, who had "been at the alehouse all night" and "the night before also." The fact that Eyre abandoned the isolationist strategy he had employed when his financial prospects were most bleak suggests that social retrenchment was not the main goal of his decision to mend his ways. The hospitality that now played a much more important part in his sociability reflected Eyre's renewed confidence and respectability.(39)

Eyre's diary furnishes a striking example of a marriage disrupted by the husband's participation in public house sociability, and strengthened by the expansion of hospitality in his own home. It suggests that basic cultural, technological and geographical features of rural England in the seventeenth century severely restricted the possibilities for companionship between spouses while promoting public, peripatetic male sociability. Eyre's social and financial integrity both suffered, however, from his participation in public house sociability, so that it became necessary for him to shift his sociability away from public houses to improve his personal footing in his community. Eyre's decision to do so sprang from brightening prospects for financial stability and renewed confidence in his interactions with his neighbors. It was not the result of his wife's insistence, which had long been ineffective. Though it is not clear that either partner desired a greater degree of companionship from their marriage, his strategy seemed to promise them peaceful coexistence.(40) Hospitality extended more freely to his acquaintance was a necessary part of the foundation on which Eyre built a better relationship with his wife.

III

While Adam Eyre's progress in the world was in some ways an impressive one, far greater worldly success and more complex challenges awaited Samuel Pepys when he began his famous diary in January of 1660.(41) By the summer of that year, Pepys had, with the help of his patron, Lord Sandwich, secured appointment to the board of the Royal Navy as Clerk of the Acts. Office in the king's service greatly increased his status and opened up prospects of great wealth and power. Pepys considered himself an equal member of the board, but his new colleagues, who had already won wealth and honor in royal service, preferred to consider him a subordinate. Although Pepys got along very well with them, especially with Sir William Batten and Sir William Penn, who lived in official residences adjoining his own, the matter of his rank began to alarm him in December 1661. Pepys suddenly perceived his colleagues to be leveraging him into official subordination by way of sociability and personal status. Both Sir Williams made it clear, he thought, that they wished "that I should be a little out of the way" in order to garner more business and profit for themselves.(42) Pepys naturally took this "in some dudgeon." He did "see clearly that I must keep myself at a little distance with them and not Crouch, or else I shall never keep myself up even with them." Pepys saw that his colleagues' challenge to his official rank and authority arose from his failure to establish a corresponding degree of personal respect or status among them through his sociability. Like Adam Eyre, Pepys saw that improving his economic position hinged on managing his sociability in ways that would enhance his personal status.

Pepys made great changes in his sociability, adopting some of the same tactics that Adam Eyre had used. Like Eyre, Pepys drew back temporarily from social relations, cutting by half the number of acquaintances with whom he conversed. Most importantly, Pepys reduced permanently the significance of the public house as a context for his sociability.

While Pepys met over half his male acquaintances in pubs in February, 1660, he met less than one fifth of them there in 1662. These changes reflected, in part, a decision to work harder to improve his long-term prospects. Pepys had already realized that drinking "unfit me to look after business" and now set about performing a greater share of Navy office business and taking home greater profits from fees.(43) In part, these changes were designed to increase his status directly and presently. Pepys saw that low status attached to public house sociability. He associated "young men," including himself in his youth, with the custom of "clubbing," and noted that "great" men did not participate on such "even terms."(44) The public house was also a place where ambitious men just starting their careers could treat or pay for their companions to cultivate connections. Pepys treated several groups of fellow career administrators when he came into his new office, not only to celebrate his good fortune but also to ensure their future respect and cooperation.(45) While Pepys continued to participate occasionally in public house sociability, he seems to have considered regular participation no longer worth the money. He chose to spend more money on his clothes instead.(46)

Table 2

Participants in sociability with Samuel Pepys, in given months, 1660-1664

           1660           1661             1662          1663         1664
        Feb.   July   Feb.   Nov.(*)   Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July

#       103    112     91     95        47      51    61      94     89     78
Index   100    109     88     92        46      50    59      91     86     76

* November chosen to highlight the change in Pepys' sociability over the
winter of 1661-62.
Table 3

Men participating in sociability with Samuel Pepys in public houses in given
months, 1660-1664

            1660          1661             1662          1663         1664
        Feb.   July   Feb.   Nov.(*)   Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July

#        43     41     31     28         7      7     6       9     12     6
%(**)    52     44     41     39        19     15    11      13     16    12

* November chosen to highlight the change in Pepys' sociability over the
winter of 1661-62.

** Percentage of all men participating in Pepys' sociability.

Despite such fundamental similarities, Pepys' sociability differed significantly from Eyre's, especially in the ways it affected relations with his wife. Some of these differences reflect the influence of the metropolis. London furnished Pepys a much larger set of acquaintances than rural Yorkshire afforded Eyre. At times when each was fairly sociable, Pepys met nearly twice as many persons a month as Eyre did (Tables 1 and 2). London also offered a greater variety of public venues than did the country, most notably playhouses and business offices. The metropolis gave Pepys' wife, Elizabeth, relatively easy access to sociability outside their home. The Pepys' went about the metropolis together easily and often, either on foot or by coach, though they sometimes separated and rendezvoused later.(47) Playhouses, unlike public houses, allowed women to participate regularly in public sociability. Elizabeth Pepys enjoyed playgoing so much that she made her husband promise to take her with him whenever he went.(48) Business offices, on the other hand, tended to exclude women, much as public houses did. The Navy office was one of several where Pepys regularly conducted business. Elizabeth rarely joined her husband at the Navy office, even though it adjoined their official residence. Indeed, he sometimes used departing for his office as a way to cut off discussion with her.(49)

By changing his use of these specifically urban venues in the winter of 1661-62, Pepys diminished rather than expanded opportunities for companionship with his wife. As Pepys withdrew from public house sociability, and attended more diligently to his official duties, he spent more of his time at the Navy Office. At the same time, he spent less time and money at the playhouse as well, as he had earlier vowed to do.(50) As Cecil Emden observed, Elizabeth saw no more of her husband "As he began to give his whole attention to his work, . . . than she had done when he was largely intent on his own pleasures."(51) Pepys hardly considered how these changes in his sociability would affect his marriage. It was not until March that he told his wife of the course he had already "resolved" to follow. He sought her cooperation by "proposing to her what I could and would do if I were worth |pounds~2000; that is, be a Knight and keep my coach, which pleased her." He noted several months later that his wife missed his company, but persuaded her to be "contented therewith since she sees how I spend my time."(52) If Elizabeth did, in fact, imagine that her husband's present labors promised future pleasures together, she was to be disappointed. He became notoriously stingy when it came to spending money to please her, and she died while enjoying her first trip abroad with him.(53)

While the metropolis itself clearly affected the way Pepys balanced his social and marital relations, by far the greatest factor in this equation was the use of hospitality in the hierarchy of royal administration. Pepys' combined role of client and deputy was doubled by that of caller and houseguest. The visits he paid to men greater than himself signaled both his subordination to them and the favor and greatness they conferred on him. Pepys learned much about hospitality from his patron, Lord Sandwich. Sandwich did most of his business with Pepys through hospitality, making Pepys' regular, frequent attendance central to Pepys' duty and loyalty to him.(54) Pepys learned of his own growing importance in part by the expansion of his role in such hospitality. Pepys slipped easily into a similar pattern of conversation with Sir William Batten, who lived "like a prince" when in the country and added Pepys to a constellation of gentlemen, merchants, and "others of good Quality" who visited him regularly in London.(55) Sandwich showed Pepys a new regard for him as one of the "Principall officers of the Navy" by eating with him "together in the great dining-room by ourselfs, the first time that ever I did it in London."(56) Pepys took a more exact measure of his new status at court, where he found himself a larger fish, but also swimming in the largest pond. At Whitehall, Pepys successfully "got in |to the chapel~ with ease by going before the Lord Chancellor with Mr. Kipps," but failed despite "great endeavoring to get into the Inward park" by himself two weeks later. On his first visit to Hampton Court palace, Pepys forlornly found himself "not invited any whither to dinner" but then someone "carried me to Mr. Marriott's the house-keeper," at whose table the famous painter, Lely, dined as well.(57)

The mixing of social and family activities that was central to hospitality tended to domesticate or incorporate Pepys into great men's households. Pepys frequented Sandwich's residence even when his lordship was out of town or had no business with him.(58) He often dined downstairs with the children and live-in servants.(59) Sandwich had Pepys visit his daughter, "Mrs. Jem," regularly for a time, playing cards with her often and even dancing with her friends and her maid, much to his embarrassment.(60) Pepys promised to keep Batten's daughter Martha company when Sir William and Lady Batten went out of town, entertaining her at "great expense," and even agreed to call on her for his Valentine.(61) On the night before the King's coronation, Pepys bunked at Sandwich's residence to make sure of getting a good start. He also hid in Batten's house when bailiffs came to his own door to arrest him, and stayed in Sir William Penn's house when his own was being renovated.(62) Lady Sandwich came to expect his company, "(she lying prettily in bed)," and to talk with him privately "of innocent discourse of huswifery and husbands for her daughters, and the luxury and looseness of the times and other such things . . ." while Lady Batten found he had "the way to please her" too.(63) Pepys became intimate to a lesser degree with other men's wives as well: dining at the table of the Lieutenant of the Tower, Pepys found the conversation ably directed by his host's handsome Lady, and while attending the Duke of York on Navy business, Pepys was brought to the Duchess to kiss and admire her hands.(64)

Hospitality tended to domesticate Pepys also because the asymmetrical relation between host and guest was seldom reciprocated. Sandwich did not pay Pepys a visit until the last year of the diary, when his lordship acknowledged the success and importance that his former servant had achieved by giving him the great honor of entertaining his former master to dinner.(65) Batten visited Pepys only three times between their first meeting, in September 1660, and New Year's day in the critical winter of 1661-62. When Batten visited Pepys because he was ill, Pepys knew that Batten had "kindly" done him a courtesy thereby.(66)

Also largely unreciprocated was the respect that Pepys displayed toward these men's families. The hospitality of these and other men served to exclude Pepys' own wife from his social relations because she did not usually join him to make a couple.(67) Sandwich did not even acknowledge Elizabeth as Pepys' wife until a year after Pepys took up royal office, when Pepys took it as an honor that his patron "did this day take notice of her as my wife."(68) For their parts, Penn, Batten and Lady Sandwich all presumed to give Pepys unsolicited advice on how to treat his own wife, and Pepys followed it.(69) Pepys' relations with these families sometimes undermined his position in his own. Drinking at Batten's left Pepys too drunk and embarrassed to lead his own household in prayers one night. When Pepys agreed for "complacency" to entertain Batten's daughter as his Valentine, Batten enjoyed the opportunity to flirt with Pepys' wife, hardly a fair trade.(70) Sandwich and his son each attempted to seduce Elizabeth, and this did not appear strange or offensive to Pepys.(71) Pepys intervened in Sandwich's private affairs only once, to warn him that his keeping a "common whore" was hurting him at court. Acting with such temerity, even in loyalty, caused Pepys to break down into tears and to worry for months that he had irreversibly alienated his patron.(72)

Pepys tried manipulating his own hospitality in a variety of ways to enhance his own status. Pepys celebrated getting his new office by dining with all his relations at his parents' house on some venison given him by Sandwich, and further enhanced his status by showing "much coldness" toward one cousin so that "all the table took notice of it."(73) Pepys looked forward to entertaining in his new house, taking pride in having it redocorated, acquiring more expensive table settings, and serving his guests good food well prepared.(74) Pepys tried hard to "get" Penn and Batten and their families to his house, and became annoyed if his efforts failed.(75) Conversation with Sir William Penn was a clear sign of Pepys' success because Penn was willing to converse with him on a basis of greater reciprocity than any other gentleman permitted. Penn did not expect Pepys to entertain his daughter, Margaret, or Lady Penn, who was in Ireland. Instead, Penn good-naturedly escorted Pepys and his wife about town and to the theater in his coach. Most importantly, Penn took to dining and drinking at Pepys' house often.(76) Penn became one of a small group of men with whom Pepys reciprocated hospitality. As Pepys became more confident of his rising status, he began to decline the hospitality of men of common social rank, visiting only half as many such men as he had done before he joined the Navy board, because "my pride would not suffer me" and to "confirm . . . an opinion that I am grown proud."(78) Pepys occasionally enjoyed playing the role of honored guest, and began to use it to obtain sexual favors from the wives of his hosts, noting that men sometimes seemed to look the other way. Pepys even grew annoyed if they did not cooperate.(79)

Pepys found it difficult, however, to decline the hospitality of men higher than himself in social or administrative rank, and these experiences put a ceiling on his personal status. In the winter of 1661-62, Pepys decided that he had to stop visiting Batten's home, where "on purpose I have not been . . . to avoyd the contempt which otherwise I must fall into. . . . "In particular, Pepys chose to "shun to be seen at Sir W. Battens" on Valentine's day, "because I would not have his daughter to be my Valentine. . . . "(80) Similarly, Pepys faced the question whether to continue visiting Sandwich after their confrontation. Another of Sandwich's clients urged Pepys to "keep off |from Sandwich~ and now and then give him a visit and no more" to avoid making himself "cheap" and "contemptible."(81) Pepys escaped Batten's hospitality for only two weeks, took part in the Battens' wedding anniversary celebration, and backed down when Batten demanded to "know the reason of" his "strangeness," making himself "merry" at Batten's table and "very friendly" to his host.(82) Pepys shrank from even trying such a strategy with his patron, choosing instead to save himself by behaving normally toward Sandwich while treating his household coldly.(83) The court also taught Pepys to accept unpleasant aspects of hospitality. The Lord Chancellor kept Pepys dancing attendance in excruciating fear of his lordship's displeasure, purely to make Pepys sensible of his dependence, and to "bring me to his side by scaring me." At Hampton Court palace, his colleagues "all |went~ to dinner and sat down to the King saving myself," so that "I was sorry I was there, that Sir W. Batten should say that he could sit down where I could not." But the honor of being at court so filled Pepys that he suppressed his "pride and folly" and his desire for courtesies that he "could not in modesty expect."(84)

Unable, and unwilling, to extricate himself from it, Pepys grew cynical about hospitality and gave up trying to use it to enhance his status. Pepys' disappointment in his colleagues was especially bitter in the case of Penn because Penn "hath played the knave with me" by betraying the promises of mutual friendship that their exchange of hospitality represented, especially by divulging confidences to Batten in an unfavorable light.(85) No other gentleman ever became a regular visitor with whom Pepys regularly exchanged hospitality as he had done with Penn. Pepys chose to sneer at the parish minister for partaking of Batten's hospitality, writing that "he is a cunning fellow and knows where the good victuals is, and good drink," partly to console himself for having done so himself, but, more importantly, to explain to himself why the minister paid such respect to his colleagues "every day almost" while "but rarely" to himself.(86) It was not his home but rather the office that provided his most satisfying social interactions, the one place in which he could regularly "talk with persons of Quality and . . . be in command" over subordinates at the same time.(87) Pepys did not encourage people to frequent his house so freely as he himself did the houses of gentlemen. He was surprised when two of his acquaintance wished to conduct business at his home in order to gain reputation for themselves, and when another stood waiting on his doorstep for him to arrive home.(88) When Lord Anglesy offered to visit Pepys at home, Pepys took his overture as mere courtesy, which he acknowledged graciously but declined nonetheless, telling his lordship "I would wait upon him, which I will do."(89)

Pepys attempted to present his personal resentment against gentry hospitality as a professional code of ethics that would have separated business from family activities. Penn told Batten that Pepys "was offended with merchants coming to his |Batten's~ house and making contracts there" and "that exceptions were taken at his carrying his wife down to Portsmouth |to greet the Queen~, saying that the king should not pay for it."(90) Pepys denied objecting openly to Lady Batten's accompanying her husband, but he had, in fact, resolved to "make good my oath that my wife should come if any of our wifes came, which my Lady Batten did entend to do with her husband."(91) Pepys wanted his own wife to have the same privileges claimed by his colleague for Lady Batten, and placed his own interest in that regard above the best interests of the king. Similarly, Pepys' professional disapproval of Batten's doing business at home was, as we have seen, preceded by personal resentment of Batten's hospitality. Significantly, Pepys first felt uncomfortable in Batten's house on an occasion at which he perceived quite clearly the parallel between his own behavior and that of merchants who were also present.(92) In sum, Pepys' personal reasons for resenting Batten, which he confided only to his Diary, differed significantly from the principled objections to Batten's behavior that he circulated to Penn and others in conversation. Pepys' professional ethics stemmed, in part, from his primary, personal concern to enhance his status with his colleagues, which he feared he could not do on their terms. The objects of Pepys' protests were precisely those traits that were central to gentry hospitality, namely, combining business and family activities.(93)

While hospitality continued, of course, to provide the context in which the king's servants would do much of their business, the separation between Pepys' own work and family activities remained and grew wider. Pepys did not emulate the domesticated sociability of his social superiors, but rather assigned his own home a more private and limited role in his sociability. Although Pepys did on occasion conduct business at home, over dinner, or even at his bedside,(94) he did not, in fact, expand his hospitality: the number of visitors to his home remained small and fairly constant over the course of the diary, and he neither invited company to dinner more frequently, nor expanded the size of the company he entertained at his table.(95) He did, however, go home for dinner with ever increasing regularity after the winter holidays of 1661-62.

Pepys started dining at home, apparently with his wife, about half the time in 1662, whereas during the first two years of the diary he had dined at home only rarely; by 1666, he ate dinner at home most of the time. Pepys' changing dinner pattern reflects what remained of his expectation that his household would play a greater role in his sociability as he rose in the world; indeed, he began to dine at home regularly even when his wife went away to the country, rather than take advantage of hospitality or public houses as he had done during earlier periods of separation. His dining at home did little to make up for what he lost in companionship with his wife as a result of other changes in his sociability, as his own observation in July 1662 attests.(96) Eventually, however, Elizabeth may have come to expect him home for dinner, for she fell into "a dogged homour for my not dining at home" one day in 1667.(97)

Table 4

Days Samuel Pepys took dinner at home, in given months, 1660-1669

           1660          1661             1662          1663          1664
        Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.(*)   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July

#        12      5     9       4     15        19     17     18     18     19
%(**)    52     16    32      25     54        61     61     58     62     61

           1665           1666          1667         1668          1669
        Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July   Feb.   July

#        18     11     24      24    23      25    20     28     18      NA
%        62     35     86      77    82      83    69     90     86      NA

* The figures for November 1661, are: 9 days, 30%.
** Percentage of total days Pepys was in London.

IV

The evidence examined here suggests that friendship and marriage made competing demands on seventeenth-century English men. Married men balanced them in a variety of ways by manipulating their participation in different institutions of sociability. The most important of these were hospitality and the public house, which organized men's social and marital relations in contrasting ways. Hospitality promoted high status and good marriages, while public house sociability promoted low status and bad marriages.

As the middling sort of men rose to greater prominence in English society, some drew back from public house sociability, sought to expand hospitality in their own homes, and greatly altered their relations with their wives. The home may have become a more convenient center of sociability for most English families as improvement in housing and home furnishing became widespread.(98) Men's personal experiences did, however, vary in significant ways, as differences between the experiences of Adam Eyre and Samuel Pepys illustrate. Participation in public house sociability threatened Eyre's marriage more seriously than it did Pepys', while Eyre manipulated hospitality with greater success than did Pepys. It was Eyre, not Pepys, who made his home the center of his sociability, even though Pepys enjoyed far more wealth and material comfort than did Eyre.

Differences in the ways Eyre and Pepys balanced their social and marital relations expressed fundamental structural differences between their respective communities. Many features of metropolitan London enabled Pepys' wife to participate more fully than Eyre's wife in sociability outside their home, but his office was an important exception. The Navy Office offered Pepys an alternative to hospitality that tended to separate work and family activities, an idea that appealed to him. Pepys did not simply imbibe this idea from the rising spirit of capitalism, as Alice Clark suggested, but rather, developed it in response to personal experience of paternalism. Paternalist hospitality posed as grave a threat to Pepys' status and marriage as public house sociability did to Eyre's, and his resentment of it led him to reject it as a model.

In the Town as well as in the country, the social relations of the middling sort of English men affected the courses of their marriages on a daily and continuing basis. Neither the Eyres nor the Pepyses were locked into marriages predetermined by a monolithic social structure, or uniformly lacking in companionship. These couples did not, however, privately define their roles within their families in mutual and companionate ways. Rather, the impetus of change sprang in each case from the husband, and depended on his reassessment of his position within his social network. These conclusions support, on balance, a view of early modern English society that would see the private lives of men and women as intricately intermeshed with the larger, public structures of society.

Further study of sociability promises to assist the integration of the histories of the public and the private in early modern England. This study of friendship and family suggests several avenues for further research. More work might yet be done to trace the loudly-lamented decline of paternalist hospitality. Hospitality, and relations between the public and the private in general, may have been especially complex in the capital and other urban centers.(99) The study of personal social networks through diaries might be supplemented by other approaches. Neighborly relations might be reconstructed from court records such as defamation depositions. The study of sociability invites early modern English historians to cross disciplinary boundaries. It might consider the drama, rituals or ceremonies, and the literature of manners. The study of sociability seems to promise that the historian may link even the most microsociological of observations to the large-scale structural transformation of early modern English society.

Department of Humanities Montgomery, AL 36101

ENDNOTES

I am grateful to those who participated in discussions of earlier versions of this paper at the Brown University History Department Seminar and the Institute of Historical Research Graduate Seminar. I am also grateful to Professor Henry Abelove for his helpful comments and criticisms.

1. Compare E. K. Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), pp. 49-56; D. M. Vieth, "Wycherley's The Country Wife: An Anatomy of Masculinity," Papers on Language and Literature 2 (1966): 335-50. Also John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (New York, 1985).

2. Best known is Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York, 1977). See also Edmund Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven, 1986); Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975); Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (1944; new revised edition, New York, 1966).

3. Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth Century England (New York, 1978).

4. For the former view, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984), especially pp. 103-04, 118. For the latter view, see Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800. Reviews critical of Stone's interpretation include E. P. Thompson, New Society (8 September 1977): 499-501.

5. See especially Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988); David Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985).

6. Sociability here means the sum of all the interpersonal interactions which take place throughout a society each day. It does not distinguish between social occasions and business or family occasions. Social scientists have measured sociability in terms of personal social networks. This article presents two case studies based on diaries. Important to their selection was the apparent consistency with which their authors recorded interactions. Sociability is measured as the number of persons with whom the diarist records having interacted in the space of a month.

7. Henry James Morehouse, ed., The Diurnall of Adam Eyre, in Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Surtees Society Publications, LXV, 1875), hereafter cited as Eyre. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 10 vols. (Berkeley, 1970-1983), hereafter cited as Pepys. Eyre and Pepys kept their diaries between 1647 and 1649, and between 1660 and 1669, respectively. Pepys turned twenty-seven years old on 25 February 1660; Eyre turned thirty-three on 25 April 1647. Neither the Eyres nor the Pepyses had children.

8. Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919; reprinted, with an introduction by Miranda Chaytor and Jane Lewis, London, 1982), pp. 38-9, 296.

9. See for example Michael Young and Peter Willmott, The Symmetrical Family: A Study of Work and Leisure in the London Region (London, 1973); Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network: Roles, Norms and External Relationships in Ordinary Urban Families, second edition (New York, 1971).

10. See especially Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England; G. J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1975).

11. Susan D. Amussen, "Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560-1725" in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), p. 196.

12. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990).

13. Felicity Heal, "The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England," Past and Present 102 (1982): 71.

14. William Gouge, Of domesticall duties, 1622, pp. 231-34, 260-65.

15. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1984), ch. 6; Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985), ch. 3.

16. Wrightson, English Society, p. 167.

17. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 48.

18. Arthur Dent, quoted in Wrightson, English Society, p. 169; for another example, see Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 84.

19. See for example Robert Ashton, "Popular Entertainment and Social Control in later Elizabethan and Early Stuart London," London Journal 9:1 (Summer 1983): 10, 12. Ashton notes several instances in the 1620s in which London aldermen imposed restrictions not only on alehouses but on provisioning establishments as well in order to encourage men to eat at home with their families.

20. He answered his own question: ". . . the ill fruits of the wives unquietness are so notorious, that there are few neighbourhoods, but can give some instance of it." Richard Allestree, The practice of christian graces. Or The whole duty of man laid down in a plane and familiar way for the use of all, . . . , 1658, p. 314.

21. Wrightson also uses Eyre's diary; see English Society, pp. 96-98.

22. Eyre, 20 June 1647, 18, 20, 30 August 1647, 14, 20 January 1648.

23. Eyre, 18 March 1647, 14 February 1648.

24. Eyre, 18 February 1648, 20 January 1648, 11 February 1647, 10, 11 August 1647.

25. Eyre, 9, 23 February 1647, 24 August 1647, 6-22 September 1647, 11 May 1647, 26 March 1648, 20 March 1647.

26. See also Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history 1200-1830 (London, 1983), pp. 148, 236.

27. Usually it is not apparent why Eyre chose to borrow a neighbor's horse for personal transportation rather than use his own. Of course, Eyre and his neighbors sent horses, as well as oxen, carts and men, to each others' aid at such important times as bringing in the harvest.

28. He loaned the horse to her husband (20 November 1647). It is interesting to note that he once loaned a horse directly to a widow (12 October 1657), and loaned his wife's pillion seat to a man (16 March 1647).

29. Eyre, 11 May 1647, 6 September 1647.

30. Eyre, 22 September 1647.

31. A neighbor once put off sending Eyre a horse until his wife had been delivered of a baby, leaving Eyre stranded in another parish for two nights (cf. Eyre, 17 January 1647). The five occasions here, all involving women, were the only occasions on which Eyre ran into difficulty about borrowing horses.

32. Eyre, 26 January 1647, 27 September 1647, 11 February 1647.

33. The Diary does not, as Wrightson points out, reveal the origins of Eyre's debts, but Eyre did make notes of his expenses. These notes, even incomplete as they may be, show that he spent money in these ways regularly, that the sums were sizable, and that he was a wretched bowler. The money Eyre records having spent in these ways (1|pound~, 5s, 2d) accounts for more than one third of what he spent beyond his income. On 29 July 1647, Eyre calculated that his total charges for the three months previous at |pounds~10.5.6, "which is more than my allowance will extend to by halfe".

34. Eyre, 22 December 1647, 7 July 1648, 11 October 1648. The Diary gives us little information about Susan Eyre's property rights. Eyre rented and mortgaged parts of the farm, Haslehead, on which he lived with his wife. See Eyre, 20 May 1647, 10, 11 October 1648, 17 January 1649. Compare Wrightson, English Society, p. 96.

35. Eyre, 8, 19, 28, 29, 30 July 1647.

36. For further receipts, see Eyre, 18 October 1647, 10, 19 November 1647; for repayments, see 6 September 1647, 5, 19 October 1647, 24 November 1647.

37. Eyre, 1 January 1648, 11 October 1648.

38. The months of February and July were chosen for measurement principally to counter seasonal variation. Deliberately avoided were the holiday months of December and January. Eyre kept no record from 5 April 1648 through 14 September 1648, and his editor notes that "from the 9th November to the 31st December 1648, inclusive, the Diary is lost." Note that Eyre was more sociable in February than in July even though bad weather made travel impossible or dangerous, for which see Eyre, 31 January 1647, 1 February 1648, and below.

39. Eyre, 12 and 7 January 1648, 11 February 1648, 5 November 1647, 21, 24 December 1647, 16 January 1648. For Eyre's spiritual state, see Wrightson.

40. The Diary does not, unfortunately, reveal the extent to which Susan Eyre participated in her husband's social life at home.

41. The principal biographical works consulted here are Richard Ollard, Samuel Pepys (New York, 1974), and Cecil S. Emden, Pepys Himself (London, 1963). Stone also uses Pepys' diary; see especially chapter eleven.

42. Pepys, 21 December 1661. For another discussion of the growing tensions between Pepys and the "two Sir Williams" see Emden, pp. 6-13. The issue was resolved in Pepys' favor on 3 June 1662.

43. Pepys, 26 July 1661.

44. Pepys, 5 July 1665, 26 July 1660, 27 May 1661.

45. Pepys, especially 5, 26, 30, 31 July 1660.

46. Emden, pp. 46-7.

47. For examples, see Pepys, 14 February 1662, 27 February 1667.

48. Pepys, 11 September 1661; Emden, p. 120.

49. Pepys, 12 July 1667, 9 July 1662, 4 February 1665.

50. Pepys, 17, 31 August 1661, 11 September 1661, 7 August 1662; Ollard, p. 109.

51. Emden, p. 121.

52. Pepys, 2 March 1662, 3 July 1662.

53. For discussion of Pepys' stinginess toward his wife, see Ollard, pp. 114-15, and for her death, Ollard, pp. 195-96. Regarding his proposal, Pepys' editors note that "The coach came in 1668 (when he was worth about |pounds~8,000); the knighthood never."

54. See especially Pepys, 14, 17 July 1660.

55. Pepys, 1, 15 November 1660.

56. Pepys, 2 July 1660.

57. Pepys, 8, 22 July 1660, 23 July 1665.

58. In February 1660, Pepys visited his patron's family as frequently as he visited his own close relations: Pepys called at Sandwich's residence three times and visited Sandwich's daughter and father-in-law six times apiece, while he visited his own father eleven times and only twice visited other relations.

59. For example, Pepys, 15 February 1660, 17 February 1661, 16 July 1662.

60. Pepys, 13, 17 January, 4 February, 6 March 1660. Mrs. Jemima was lodged under the care of a doctor.

61. Pepys, 6 October 1661, 11 December 1661, 8 October 1661, 14 February 1661.

62. Pepys, 23 April 1661, 21 February 1663, and Emden, p. 24; Pepys, 19, 31 July 1662.

63. Pepys, 12 July 1665, 21 February 1665, 5 July 1663.

64. Pepys, 28 February 1664, 27 July 1665.

65. Pepys, 23 January 1669. For discussion of the invitation and the dinner, see Ollard, pp. 191-92.

66. Pepys, 13 October 1661.

67. Emden wrongly asserts that the Pepys' dined as a couple at Batten's house about once a week in the spring of 1661; Pepys dined with Batten more than once a week while renovating his house in April, 1661, only once accompanied by Elizabeth, whom he lodged with his father, and dined only once more at Batten's in May and June, again without Elizabeth. Cf. Emden, p. 10.

68. Pepys, 15 November 1660.

69. Pepys, 29 April 1661, 9, 11 November 1661.

70. Pepys, 10 October 1661, 14 February 1661.

71. Pepys, 10 November 1668; cf. Stone, p. 342; Sir Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Man in the Making (New York, 1933), p. 370.

72. Pepys, especially 9, 22 September 1663; also 12, 16, 17, 18, 30 November 1663, 14, 21 December 1663, 10 February 1664, 15 July 1664.

73. Pepys, 18, 20 July 1660.

74. Emden, pp. 44-5, 56; Pepys, 9 September 1660, 4 December 1660, 24 January 1661.

75. For examples, Pepys, 18, 25 February 1661, 29 January 1662.

76. For examples of these friendly exchanges between Penn and the Pepyses, see Pepys, 28, 29 September 1661, 26 October 1661, 17 November 1661, 5, 18 February 1662.

77. These were either family members and friends or other career men like himself, including Mr. Pierce the Navy surgeon and Mr. Creed, a fellow client of Sandwich's. Pepys rarely exchanged visits with more than two or three people in the space of a month, and sometimes with no one at all. They represent only a tiny fraction of the total number of people he visited or who visited him, on average 5% of a total which ranged as high as 53.

78. Pepys, 21 June 1666, 3 March 1665.

79. Pepys, 17 July 1663, 19 February 1667; for sex, Pepys, 20 February 1665, 1 February 1667; for disappointments, Pepys, 13 February 1667, 3 July 1657, 27 July 1668.

80. Pepys, 5 January 1662, 14 February 1662.

81. Pepys, 9 February 1664.

82. Pepys, 5 January 1662, 3 February 1662, 25, 29 July 1662.

83. Pepys, 8, 26 February 1664.

84. Pepys, 14 July 1664, 26 July 1665.

85. Pepys, 5, 25 July 1662.

86. Pepys, 9 July 1662.

87. Pepys, 24 July 1661.

88. Pepys, 10 February 1669, 30 April 1665. Pepys also became too embarassed by his poor relations to invite them to his house; see for example 5 September 1664 and Ollard, pp. 90-1.

89. Pepys, 13 July 1667.

90. Pepys, 25 July 1662.

91. Pepys, 23 April 1662.

92. Pepys, 15 November 1660. For Pepys' inconsistency regarding professional service and personal profit see Emden, pp. 34-42.

93. In the next century, love and deference were combined by John Wesley and his followers in new ways that challenged traditional social ties patterned on the family: see Henry Abelove, The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists (Stanford, 1990).

94. Pepys, 18, 24 February 1663, 17 July 1663, 24 February 1665, 5 February 1667. See especially 17 July 1662.

95. Usually between 10 and 20 per month. The amount of company Pepys had to dinner bore no relation to the number of people who paid him visits or to the number of people he saw in a given month.

96. Pepys, 3 July 1662.

97. Pepys, 12 July 1667.

98. Carole Shammas, "The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America," Journal of Social History 14 (1980): 3-24; Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990), pp. 157-93.

99. See Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, pp. 300-52.