This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. The findings include rare evidence about rates of stillbirth and maternal mortality, and suggest some adjustments to the assumptions made for conducting parish reconstitutions.

The present ageing of the population in western countries, and the related problems this development poses for contemporary social policy, provide especially compelling reasons for historians to think about old age in the past. A fundamental question is whether solitariness, or residential isolation, in this phase of the life-cycle is an inherent product of industrialization and urbanization or whether past societies confronted similar problems.

Despite the growth in studies of the history of the family over recent years – studies which have considered family structure, family demography, household strategies, kinship networks, and the like – a great gap in the literature remains regarding the role and status of family members in different phases of the life-cycle in Spain, particularly with respect to age and sex. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is an absence of information on old age and our elders' life-styles in the past, or on the extent to which the aged led lives of poverty and marginalization.

This article attempts to tackle some of the issues relating to the elderly in a particular place, Bilbao, and in a historical period, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This article explores aspects of employment on the Durham Priory estates in the years 1494–1519. From a perspective of prices and wages, this period belongs at the tail end of a Golden Age for labour. Employment opportunities for the priory workforce should, therefore, have been relatively plentiful and remuneratively rewarding. However, as an analysis of the priory's accounts reveals, whilst wage rates remained stable, the waged employment offered was irregular and piecemeal for all but a small, predominantly skilled elite, with the majority of the workforce enjoying little in the way of fixed employment patterns or identifiable career structures.

Trials held in Anatolia around the mid-nineteenth century suggest that labour migrants became ‘the usual suspects’ in felony cases. Since the 1980s, a significant body of work on migration has emerged. Uncovering the voices of individual migrants has been a major endeavour of these studies. By following a legal case concerning one labour immigrant, and applying the methods of microhistory, this article aims to show how a socio-legal reading of migration is useful in reconstructing the history of immigrants, especially in the nineteenth century, when migration became a legal issue. Second, the article aims to demonstrate the potential of diaspora theory for analysing and explaining the experience of labour immigrants from the Balkans and the Aegean Islands during the nineteenth century, among them the protagonist of this paper.

The Horta of Valencia is a large irrigated area managed by eight communities of landowners. Traditionally, it was considered that these communities were composed of peasants, that they were self-managed and self-governed, and that they had remained immutable over time. However, the historical evidence shows that this is not true for pre-modern times. This article examines a possible Islamic origin of these institutions, the rupture caused by the Christian conquest of Valencia in the thirteenth century, the structure of the communities, and the social diversity of their members within the framework of feudalism. We conclude that irrigation communities cannot be used as examples of institutional continuity or of self-regulated and autonomous social organisations.

This article charts the vicissitudes of an economic experiment that aimed to eradicate distress in early-nineteenth-century Ireland. The London Committee for Irish Relief was formed in 1822 and was the first large-scale, charitable response in Britain to famine conditions in Ireland. The Committee believed that poverty was the cause rather than the effect of ‘the Irish problem’ and tried to initiate change by providing the poor with financial resources. Despite some initial successes, allegations over misappropriation of funds created a climate of distrust about the Committee's policies. These allegations mounted over the decade, and when Ireland once again faced extreme distress, in 1831, they caused a rift in London's charitable circles, producing two organizations: the Irish Distress Committee, which argued that poverty was the causal factor, and the Western Committee for Irish Relief, which identified Catholicism as the source of Ireland's problems. This division reflected a more general loss of confidence in plans to solve Ireland's endemic poverty through the promotion of economic activity. These events coincided with hardening attitudes towards Catholics and the poor throughout the British Isles and played an important role in the development of policies on Irish relief in the nineteenth century.

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.

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

This article studies the commemoration and ceremonial culture surrounding the inauguration of new waterworks in British municipalities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It analyses how new waterworks could be seen as a symbol of a progressive civic government, and how the commemoration of their opening could be used to enhance a city's image. The article also studies the ways in which ideas concerning the purity of new water supplies were constructed. An examination is made of how ceremonial culture and publications reflected the particular politics of waterworks in individual localities, and how such commemoration could serve as a vehicle for the promotion of civic unity.

This article examines the incidence of moneylending and the supply of cash in four rural communities and one small urban centre in Cheshire through the seventeenth century. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from wills and inventories, supplemented by such probate accounts and depositions as are available. It considers the questions of who lent money and to whom, for what purposes and in what amounts. It also examines the incidence of cash holdings in inventories and the effect that the Civil War and its aftermath had upon the availability of cash.

Proceeding from an in-depth analysis of the Liberty of Bruges, an important rural district in the late medieval Low Countries, this contribution frames rural elite formation by means of two debates which are seldom used in combination, namely, the debates on state building and on the commercialisation of rural society. We challenge the thesis, inspired by modernisation theory, that socio-economic transformation engendered political change in pre-modern Europe as newly emerging rural bourgeoisies are alleged to have become an important political factor, shifting their allegiances between lords and peasants as they saw fit. The evidence discussed shows instead a trend towards oligarchy from the fifteenth century onwards, in which an increasingly exclusive social network came to combine hitherto separated forms of political power, largely at the expense of the growing number of wealthy rural bourgeois. It is argued that this transformation of the rural political elites is closely tied to changes in the established relations between the central government and the regional elites of the Low Countries.

Based on the processing of statistical data concerning population and the major cultural infrastructures in the Italian regions from 1863 on, this article aims to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the ‘Mezzogiorno’ have had not only lesser incomes than those of the inhabitants of the Central and Northern regions, but also smaller chances to make use of Italy's cultural assets, considered in a broad sense. In the long run these disadvantages have strengthened the already high social disparities between the Centre, North and South of Italy and help to explain the roots of the dualism between the two parts of the country.

The replacement of rents in kind by payments in money is considered by many historians as a marker of the commercialization of the economy and thus of its modernization. The case of medieval Normandy does not confirm this development, however: the sources testify to a common use of money since the end of the eleventh century, but also to the persistence until the fifteenth century of payment in kind, including in the field of credit. The article examines the case of the Caen region, for which there is abundant evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of annuities purchased with money from peasants in exchange for annual repayments in grain. This system allowed a significant transfer of monetary value to the countryside, while guaranteeing the supply of urban markets and welfare institutions. Although these contracts were usually secured by pledges on plots of land, they did not lead to the expropriation of peasants, but rather promoted the growth of credit markets in the countryside.

The feudal colonisation of the Island of Majorca, traditionally considered part of the Spanish ‘Reconquista’, must be included in the greater process of European feudal expansion. The island was inhabited by people living in a Muslim society, not a feudal one. The conquest by Catalan lords meant the imposition of a new feudal class structure and a new use of natural resources on the conquered land. We summarise the composition and evolution of the three main components of this top-down imposed feudalism: the Muslim populations conquered and enslaved, the Catalan settlers and the entirely new agricultural landscape they created.

Boarding out and fostering poor children was a favoured method of poor relief in many rural areas in northern Europe. This article discusses children who were boarded out to foster-parents by public auction in a rural parish in northern nineteenth-century Sweden. Poverty was the main reason why children were boarded out, frequently associated with loss of parents and difficulties in providing for a large household. It is suggested that the Swedish system of boarding out poor children must be understood in the context of a welfare system where cost efficiency was important. The auction method was used in spite of the risks involved because it was considered to be the best way to provide poor children with food, clothes, shelter and care, while keeping the compensation to the foster-parents at a reasonably low level.

After the Second World War, Dutch authorities allowed 8,000 displaced persons (DPs) to come to the Netherlands, but only 3,904 came, and 25 per cent of them returned to camp life in Germany. This article seeks to explain why debates on the DP issue changed so rapidly within a short period of time. In earlier publications, it has been claimed that ‘selling’ DPs as workers helped to solve the DP issue. This strategy did not work for the Netherlands. This article analyses how the DP issue was framed by organisations, the Dutch government, civil servants, the Dutch Homeland Security Department, newspapers and employers.

The progress of industrialization throughout the nineteenth century had profound effects on health and mortality. One relationship that contemporaries found particularly alarming was the potentially damaging effect that the employment of women in industry outside the home could have on their families' health. The fear expressed by public health officials was that women's employment would lead to neglect of their family duties and subsequently put their children's health at risk. Women were also regarded as more susceptible to industrial hazards, particularly to lead. Hence, women's work was seen to have important consequences for maternal and infant health and was considered incompatible with their traditional duties within the home. The introduction of legislation to restrict women's employment opportunities during the latter half of the nineteenth century was partly in recognition of this conflict between work and home. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the importance of good mothering was increasingly cited by public health reformers, mainly male and middle-class, alarmed at the persistent high level of infant mortality in urban areas. In industrial areas where there were opportunities for women's employment, the extent to which it contributed to high levels of mortality became a prominent public health issue associated with growing concern over standards of motherhood. In response to increasing agitation over the employment of mothers, the 1891 Factory Act prohibited employers from knowingly hiring women within a month of childbirth.