Marriage ceremonies in London were easily available at a wide range of locations before Hardwicke's Marriage Act put a stop to clandestine marriages in 1754. Not constrained to their own parish church, many wed at centres of clandestine marriage such as the Fleet, or in other churches by licence. For particular parish populations, focusing mainly on the suburban majority but with comparisons with the mercantile city centre, this paper considers the relationship between demographic, geographic and social factors (age, residential location, and propensity to engage in premarital sex) and choice of marriage location between 1610 and 1753.

This article argues, using evidence from Georgian London, that historical demographers need to revisit the effects of two inter-related phenomena: the effects of burial fees on interment practices and the ebb and flow of a very considerable ‘traffic in corpses’. By the eighteenth century burial space in London was at a premium and there was an active market in the provision of suitable, and affordable, burial grounds. This article is based on the sextons' books of the Westminster parish of St Martin in the Fields. These books are very unusual in recording exported ‘certificate’ and ‘arrears’ burials. The ‘traffic in corpses’ revealed by this source is analysed in some detail and burial fees turn out to be of great importance in understanding local fluctuations in interment practices. A neighbouring parish, St Anne, Soho, was acting as a veritable ‘clandestine burial centre’ which interred non-parishioners for profit on a huge scale for most of the eighteenth century. The ‘commodification’ of burial, driven partly by considerations of cost, thus had a major impact on interment practices in the eighteenth-century metropolis. A key finding is that, due to this postmortem flow of corpses, the total number of recorded burials in any one parish may not necessarily have been driven by fluctuations in local mortality rates.

The acceptance of mapmaking in medieval and early modern Europe was neither a uniform nor a linear process. Comparing two neighbouring regions in the Low Countries, we explain the varying appetite for maps and mapmaking first by unravelling how people dealt with space before the introduction of modern mapmaking and, second, by identifying the actors that actively promoted its adoption. In regions where local elites had already been considering space as a commodity with a preference for clear-cut, geometric forms before the introduction of mapmaking, the latter was enthusiastically accepted and rapidly became instrumental in propagating this ‘modern’ concept of space. Other regions did not develop this appetite for mapmaking and continued to prefer different and more negotiable representations of space.

When large parts of the south-western Netherlands flooded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the main cause was insufficient maintenance of the sea defences. The subsequent re-embankment of the polders resulted in changes to both soil conditions and property relations in the region. The Church and the local peasants lost land and members of the urban bourgeoisie became the most important landowners. Unlike their risk-averse predecessors, these capitalist landlords were prepared to invest in drainage. They were also able to organise state support for those polders that were at risk of flooding. Tenant and yeomen farmers had an equally important role as they maintained the fertility of the soil and were prepared to invest in the upkeep of the flood defences.

From the latter half of the nineteenth century, mixed farming in the Alpine regions of Switzerland underwent a gradual process of specialisation. Cereal crops were phased out in favour of feed crops, livestock, viticulture and fruit farming. This article analyses the way in which the land market was affected by this increasingly specialised primary sector and asks whether this market became more efficient as a result of reduced transaction costs. Surveys have shown that the land market remained bound by the inertia inherent in the nature of landed property in the Alpine area. The connection between agricultural diversification and the land market appears to have been only partial and this suggests that the modernisation of farming did not so much alter the main balance of the market itself, as boost the circulation of plots more directly associated with the process of specialisation.