This study argues that women's ownership of land – an important component of their status – changed little, if at all, after the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century. Using rentals and obit data from court rolls, a new formula for measuring female inheritance is devised which shows that daughters received even less of their expected due during the plague years. While high death rates might predict that brotherless daughters would be more likely to inherit land, inheritance practices shifted so that women continued to hold much the same total area as before. The article considers several reasons for this continuity, concluding that women found it especially hard to compete in an era of acute labour shortage.

In many early modern towns of the southern Low Countries, beguinages gave adult single women of all ages the possibility to lead a religious life of contemplation in a secure setting, retaining rights to their property and not having to take permanent vows. This paper re-examines the family networks of these women by means of a micro-study of the wills left by beguines who lived in the Great Beguinage of St Catherine in sixteenth-century Mechelen, a middle-sized city in the Low Countries. By doing so, this research seeks to add nuance to a historiography that has tended to consider beguinages as artificial families, presumably during a period associated with the increasing dominance of the nuclear family and the unravelling ties of extended family.

This article offers a comprehensive examination of the relationship between foreign residents and the criminal law in early modern England, as well as an investigation of trials ‘de medietate lingue’, trials with half-English and half-foreign juries, in theory and practice. Because England witnessed both a series of foreign migrations and a series of geo-political crises in the years between 1674 and 1750, the article charts patterns of foreign prosecutions across the period in order to place them in their proper historical context. The article concludes that the protections offered by English law to foreign residents were real and significant and that these protections were especially important at points of geo-political stress.

This study of St Scholastica's Retreat offers an opportunity to examine a charity for the middle classes and the horizontal relationship between middle-class benefactors and recipients that did not appear to stigmatise middle-class recipients of charity. Middle-class inhabitants accessed a mix of resources, from personal resources, kinship relationships, friendship and charitable networks, as part of a ‘mixed economy of welfare’ so often discussed by welfare historians in Britain. Their ‘choices’ were limited but their personal networks enabled them to maintain their middle-class identities. This research not also demonstrates the flexibility of almshouse accommodation but also the meanings inherent in the domestic space that emphasised middle-class respectability.

This paper analyses the interactions amongst family, household and extended kin through an examination of two ‘circulations’ of children within rural Irish communities during the first half of the twentieth century: (1) the daily journey from home to school; (2) going to live with relatives other than parents. Drawing on life-history narratives, the article develops a new perspective on the stem-family system in Ireland by showing how ‘incomplete’ family households formed integral parts of local kinship circles and were deeply engaged in the everyday lives of ‘complete’ family households, including the promotion of extended family survival and social mobility.