In traditional hierarchical societies — American or European — authority came from above. In Europe, kings and princes owned vast tracts of land, forcibly conscripted men for military service, and lived off the peasantry’s labor. Yet monarchs were far from supreme: local nobles also owned large estates and controlled hundreds of peasant families. Collectively, these nobles challenged royal authority with both their military power and their legislative institutions, such as the French parlements and the English House of Lords.

Just as kings and nobles ruled society, men governed families. These were patriarchies, in which property and social identity descended in male family lines. Rich or poor, the man was the head of the house, his power justified by the teachings of the Christian Church. As one English clergyman put it, “The woman is a weak creature not embued with like strength and constancy of mind”; law and custom “subjected her to the power of man.” Once married, an Englishwoman assumed her husband’s surname, submitted to his orders, and surrendered the right to her property. When he died, she received a dower, usually the use during her lifetime of one-third of the family’s land and goods.

Men also controlled the lives of their children, who usually worked for their father into their middle or late twenties. Then landowning peasants would give land to their sons and dowries to their daughters and choose marriage partners of appropriate wealth and status. In many regions, fathers bestowed all their land on their eldest son — a practice known as primogeniture — forcing many younger children to join the ranks of the roaming poor. Few men and even fewer women had much personal freedom.

Hierarchy and authority prevailed in traditional European society because of the power held by established institutions — nobility, church, and village — and because, in a violent and unpredictable world, they offered ordinary people a measure of security. Carried by migrants to America, these security-conscious institutions would shape the character of family and society well into the eighteenth century.