This article presents two models of Polish peasant budgets. The first is a theoretical budget of a medieval peasant family and the second is a similar model for the early modern period, confirming some of the characteristic features of the transitional period in the Polish economy in this period. Variables taken into account in the construction of the budgets include the average size of a peasant farm, its productivity, the distribution of crops, family size, rents and taxes paid to the state, Church and feudal lords. The two factors that appear to have had the greatest impact on peasant budgets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the decrease in farm size and the sharp rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century. As a result, although comparison of the two models indicates a decrease in the level of commercialization of the average Polish peasant farm, the financial resources of Polish peasants actually grew.

In Catalonia the hereditary system envisaged that the eldest son in the family would inherit. When there was no male heir, the oldest daughter would inherit, and was then called the pubilla. This circumstance allowed the possibility of an heir and an heiress marrying, which would result in the unification of their patrimonies. According to traditional historiography, this was one explanation of the concentration of rural patrimonies. This article demonstrates that the heir–heiress wedding was not the most often chosen scenario, however, and looks again at the options that families had to consider, according to their circumstances, when a daughter was the heir, and at the results of their choices.

This article deals with the high mobility of servants in preindustrial northwestern Europe. By combining both a qualitative and a quantitative approach we analyse the determinants of servant migration in the province of Scania, in southern Sweden, during the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that about half of the moves were connected to the structure of working-life organization, servant hierarchy and marriage. The rest depended on a range of other factors such as the type and structure of the master's household, variations in the demand for labour caused by fluctuations in harvest yields, conflicts within households, or a wish to gain additional training.

In the past a couple had the choice of a day from Monday through Sunday on which to baptise their child, or to get married, or to have their burials registered. The day chosen would reflect the parents' own preferences for days of leisure. As each date was converted by computer during the process of family reconstitution to a number of days that had elapsed since the first of January, 1 AD, all that it was necessary to do was to divide the number corresponding to the date by 7 to get the day of the week. Three graphs reveal, with some surprises, the relative popularity of the days of the days of the week chosen for baptisms, burials and marriages, from 1542 to 1847.

One of the most powerful influences on modern peasant studies has been Chayanov's notion that the peasant farm household balanced the labour efforts of a household and its consumer demands. As a result, peasant households have been seen as autarchic units of production and consumption, and peasant strategies were held to be designed to preserve the common enterprise in which everyone was expected to work and pool resources, and to maintain the integrity of the original holding, of which all family members were expected to receive an equal share. This article focuses on familial strategies of Lithuanian peasants after the abolition of serfdom in the second half of the nineteenth century and argues that the strategies of different generations were shaped by a multiplicity of dependencies, a constant reshuffle of resources and the maximum utilization of land and labour. Examination of the pattern of generational turnover and of the working arrangements between parents and adult children suggests that relationships between the generations were built on reciprocity and that co-operation or some other mutual help was essential in the post-emancipation village.