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FAMILIAR AND HOUSEHOLD STRUCTURES IN THE EMBRYONIC TOWN: LLANFAIR CAEREINION IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY DR. W. T. R. PRYCE, B.SC., M.SC., PH.D., DIP.ED. AND JOHN ARWEL EDWARDS, B.A., M.A., DIP.ED. In the previous volume of these Collections we first described the nature of what we have termed the 'embryonic' urban community with specific reference to Llanfair Caereinion which reached maximum population by the mid-nineteenth century. That earlier paper explored urban functions, layout, property ownership and controls as well as the then existing socio-economic structures within the population in general.1 However, in reality every person dwelt as a member of his or her own family so that day-to-day affairs were conducted within the context and the intimate social milieu of the household. Moreover, to a large extent the way in which each individual person perceived the world around him was influenced strongly by his or her position in that household. The household rather than the individual man, woman or child constituted the primary unit of social structure, then, as it still does today and this realization was fully appreciated by the organizers of the nineteenth- century censuses. The enumerators collected information on the relationship of each person to the household head and it is by drawing on these valuable returns that data can be aggregated to reveal the various elements and components of household composition giving rise to distinctive social structures (Fig. 1). The social status of householders In addition to the need to know how many or what proportion of the occupied population was engaged in particular economic activities, 1W. T. R. Pryce and J. A. Edwards The social structure of the embryonic town in rural Wales: Llanfair Caereinion in the mid-nineteenth century' Mont. Colls., 67 (1979) pp. 45-90.