This article addresses how long tenant farmers in the Russian Baltic Provinces of Estland and Livland managed to occupy the farms and whether they transferred them within the family in the early phase of agricultural transformation (1841–1889). It contributes to the long-standing debate over the relative power of manorial lords and tenants in the (East Elbian) manorial system. Looking at individual-level data on the changes in tenantship on more than 1,000 farmsteads across 5 parishes, the article demonstrates the relative instability of tenant holdings and lack of independence in land transfers on noble manors.

This article makes use of the rich deposits of pre-trial documents in the court archives of early modern Wales, focusing on the county of Denbighshire, to investigate attitudes and responses to theft. Qualitative research on this subject tends to emphasize or privilege actively law-enforcing behaviour that led to trials; while that is the inevitable emphasis of court records, I argue that we need to examine witness testimonies more closely in order to understand responses that did not match up to the ideals of vigilance and communal responsibility. Drawing on modern criminological research, I explore ‘suspicion’ and the decision-making processes leading to various outcomes: non-action; investigation and prosecution; alternative resolutions that bypassed the courts. Finally, I explore the everyday ‘world of stolen goods’ and its social and economic rewards in local networks of reciprocal favours, gifts and alliances.

In the second half of the nineteenth century in the remote farming district of Dungog in the colony of New South Wales on the Australian continent, widows faced harsh economic realities. Using civil registration records, census data, newspaper reports, statistical returns, family histories and other sources, we have, where possible, reconstructed the lives of these widows, particularly those with dependent children. This paper discusses the range of survival strategies used. It presents statistical evidence from official records, and adds vignettes of the lives of a handful of widows whose strategies can be explored more completely using additional historical sources.

This article examines the rate and causes of divorce among the elite households of late fifteenth-century Cairo. By using a unique contemporary chronicle, it is possible to estimate that a third of all marriages ended in divorce. Wives initiated divorces at least as often as their husbands. They did so by reaching a divorce settlement with their husbands for a financial compensation, or, in the case of desertion, by using the courts to impose a judicial divorce. In the vast majority of the cases, the causes for the divorce were grounded in marital relations. In spite of the importance of marriage alliances for the elite household, these marriages did eventually hinge on the mutual consent of the two individuals concerned.

Despite the recent expansion in studies of medieval women, uncertainty surrounds their married lives due to the social and legal constraints that existed at that time. Here it is argued that feet of fines provide a lens, albeit partial, on the activities of married women who were effectively managing the disposal and inheritance of their landed estates. At the same time the importance to the purchaser of ensuring the lawful acquisition of the property is also observed. As a result, greater insights into married women and their property in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are obtained.

The author studies patterns of income-earning activities of Soviet urban households from the end of 1930s to the end of 1960s. The analysis focuses on the dynamic of and reasons for the increases in the labour participation rate of the Soviet urban population, and in the proportion of households in which two members were employed by the state, and the consequences. The period saw two mass drives to recruit into the state sector adults who had previously been unemployed, the bulk of whom consisted of former housewives, the first drive occurring during the Second World War and the second in the late 1950s and the 1960s. The combined pressures exerted by the law and by material hardship account for the wartime increase in participation in the labour market. On the other hand, the second period of major expansion was much more voluntary and was accompanied by improved living standards. Despite the increase in remunerated employment there were no significant changes in the way tasks within the household were allocated on the basis of gender. This put an increasing strain on women, called the ‘double burden’ (household duties and paid work). The consequences were twofold: a decrease in fertility, and further encouragement for the formation of the many extended and multiple family households present in the urban society of the USSR.

This study focuses on two closely related exclusionary guild policies implemented in Germany towards the latter part of the sixteenth century: the barring of illegitimates and women. The article addresses the reasons for and, more importantly, the repercussions of these exclusions, which affected many cultural and mentality patterns and led to the social and psychological scarring of illegitimates and their unwed mothers for centuries to come.

Recent scholarship has suggested that villagers participated in the general proliferation of goods that seems to have occurred in late medieval Europe. How and why they did so is far from clear. This article addresses this issue through a case study of pottery consumption (with particular attention to earthenware) in late medieval rural Valencia. A quantitative analysis of 251 probate inventories (1280s–1450s) supports the argument that not only did medieval villagers acquire more of these goods, but also that the reasons behind such a process challenge many of the traditional interpretations of changes in consumption patterns.

Private contracts of many different kinds were at the heart of the rural economy in medieval and early modern Europe. This article considers some of the key issues involved in the study of those contracts, and of the institutions that facilitated their registration and enforcement. Drawing on examples from medieval England as well as the articles in this special issue of the journal, it is argued that complex and effective ‘public-order’ structures for contract registration and enforcement – principally various kinds of law court – were ubiquitous in European villages and small towns in this era.

Early modern Portuguese women had the legal right to engage in a number of official transactions, including granting and receiving sureties and powers of attorney. This was not the case for women in many other parts of western Europe, making the Portuguese example worthy of scrutiny for comparative purposes. This article looks at the unique position of women in early modern Portugal, and shows that upon close examination of the archival sources, the evidence points to a significant gap between women's legal rights and the cultural limitations that were imposed on women.

In late imperial China, as many as 10 per cent of all peasants were unfree. The most common form of unfree labour was state populations organized under the Eight Banners, an elite military organization. This article discusses household succession and household division in three such banner populations organized under the imperial household agency (neiwufu).

The banner household, called hu in Han Chinese or boigon in Manchu Chinese, was defined by common residence and common consumption. Household members lived together, ate together, and farmed together. They did so, however, on state land as hereditary state peasants, albeit elite peasants. Provided with ample land, their principal functions were to provide the state with agricultural goods, as well as with labour and military service.

The Qing state organized the banner household according to two contradictory principles. On the one hand, by encouraging late household division many banner households evolved into large joint households. On the other hand, by enforcing a system of primogenitary household headship and by granting household heads considerable power over the persons and property of all household members, banner households also resembled stem households. This combination of exclusionary headship and inclusionary membership was a source of tension and potential conflict within banner households. The purpose of this article is to compare Daoyi to two other banner populations, Dami and Gaizhou, in order to ascertain if household behaviour in Daoyi was common elsewhere in northeast China. This is of particular interest since our previous reconstruction of social organization in Daoyi, Fate and fortune in rural China: social organization and population behavior in Liaoning, 1774–1873 (1997), revealed a society dominated by multiple-family households sharply stratified by generation, seniority within generation, and gender.

Specifically, we compare headship succession and household formation rules among these three populations between 1789 and 1909. The article is divided into three sections. In Section I, we describe the three populations and the household registration system that provides most of our information on them. In Section II, we analyze household structure and the patterns of household transition. Finally, in Section III, we contrast two different rules of headship succession among these populations and discuss the consequent patterns of household division.

This article contributes to debates over the ‘land–family bond’ in Early Modern England, in which social historians have engaged periodically during the past decade. It examines the work of Jane Whittle, Govind Sreenivasen and Alan Macfarlane and adds new archival evidence from my own study of three East Sussex villages, circa 1580–1770. Its focus is on the factors that influenced the land–family bond over time. It argues that a more nuanced understanding of individual tenant behaviour during this period cannot be reached without also charting the social, economic and demographic context in which such behaviour operated.

In the early 1370s, when serfdom had all but disappeared in Flanders, Count Louis II resumed the collection of mortmain, a death fee usually paid only by those of servile status. In a region with a sophisticated financial system it is striking that rather than accepting payment in cash the Count's bailiffs secured personal items. In this paper it is argued that the Count was thereby taking advantage of a population dazed by the ravages of plague and by the on-going civil war between himself and a number of the towns within his territory. Traditional local bonds such as mortmain, extended and reinterpreted within a new constellation of power, enabled Flemish counts to turn a fee into a tax, highlighting their authority.

This article represents an exercise in microhistory applied to early modern London. Deploying prosopographical methods, it reconstructs the life history of one John Bedford (1601–1667) from his birth in Huntingdon to his death in the West End of London. Much of his adult life was spent in the London parish of St Dionis Backchurch, with an interlude in the Irish town of Londonderry. Bedford fled from Ulster at the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641. His unusually detailed will provides the bedrock of this narrative, and his reconstructed life sheds important light on ties between London and Ulster, on debt and credit relations and on the methodological strengths and limitations of community studies that focus on a specific place.

In nineteenth-century Europe, local and regional marriage markets turned into national marriage markets as a result of modernisation. However, the question is whether this applied also to Belgium, a nation that became increasingly divided over a language dispute between French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings. To answer this question, this study examines trends and determinants of mixed marriages in municipalities in which Flemings and Walloons lived in close proximity of each other. The results show that marriages between Flemings and Walloons had always been rare and became even rarer over time, suggesting a strong and growing divide in the marriage market.