This article re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for study of this topic in the form of an extensive dataset on late medieval English freehold property transactions. Through analysis of this data, we examine how the level of market activity (the number of sales) and the nature of the properties (the relative proportions of different types of asset) varied across regions and over time. In particular, we consider the impact of exogenous factors and the effects of growing commercialisation. We argue that peaks of activity following periods of crisis (Great Famine and Black Death) indicate that property ownership became open to market speculation. In so doing, we present an important new perspective on the long-term evolution of the medieval English property market.

Following on from ‘Married and not: Weston's grown children in 1268–1269’, this article places the Lincolnshire village of Weston within a realm-wide context to demonstrate that, as the rural economy stumbled after c. 1250, many young women and men either delayed marriage or could not marry at all. The European Marriage Pattern (late marriage for some and no marriage for others) can be discerned in England long before the socio-economic adjustments that followed the Black Death, and it grew mainly from poverty, not prosperity.

This article addresses a 250-year episode of human colonisation, community growth and subsequent decline on the small Greek island of Antikythera (ad 1770 to present), focusing on rich documentary sources from four decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. In particular, a series of nominal censuses and accompanying agricultural statistics can be combined with intensive landscape archaeological survey evidence to explore evidence for changing nineteenth-century households, household economies, and how these are manifest across an entire physical landscape. We also contextualise this well-recorded, most recent historical episode within the island's deeper population history stretching back at least seven millennia.

This article investigates how the new welfare bureaucracy impacted on the epistolary relationship between paupers and those who administered it locally and nationally. In particular, it traces the changes in those relationships between the earliest years of the new regime and its maturity in the 1870s. It explores the ways that paupers responded to the New Poor Law, and how they negotiated the structural and sentimental shifts that took place over that period. In particular, it looks in detail at the new uses to which the epistolary relationship was put by outdoor paupers, their advocates and workhouse inmates.

This article investigates the empirical backing for the claim that poor law officials needed legal authority to refuse poor parents’ right to the custody of their children in order to stabilise children's welfare institutions during the nineteenth century. Although workhouses were capable of accommodating children, Victorian lawmakers feared children would model themselves on adult paupers to become permanent burdens on the state. To tackle this problem, a system of children's welfare institutions called ‘district schools’ was introduced to train children to become industrious adult labourers. Children were usually classified as orphans or deserted so they could be sent to district schools without fear of family intervention. However, children with ambiguous parental circumstances were labelled as ‘other’ and considered a problematic class because they were perceived to be at risk of having on-going contact with their birth families. Lawmakers feared parents of ‘other’ children would undermine reformation efforts by asserting their custody rights, and passed the first laws in English history to allow the state to restrict parental rights on this basis. This article explores the claim of unwanted parental involvement, and in doing so, seeks to contextualise the origins of public law interference in the family sphere within a narrative of imposed citizenship rather than protection.