Few studies have investigated historical pandemics from a public health perspective. This paper offers new perspectives on how legislation was implemented in Norway during the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic. We argue that despite good intentions, individual interpretations, different knowledge and level of decision-making played an important role in the use of the legislation during this Influenza pandemic. Following the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic there were significant advancements in public health and the establishment of public health laws in Norway. Given its severity, it was expected an active involvement of health authorities at all levels in decision-making to fight the outbreak through the enforcement of health laws and regulations. This paper explores the implementation of health legislation during this pandemic, offering valuable insights from public health and legislative perspectives. Historical sources reveal a wide array of societal challenges and various levels of medical expertise among health boards across the country. The effectiveness of existing legislation depended heavily on doctors’ knowledge and the abilities of health boards. The article shows that coordinated and well established non-pharmaceutical interventions may be necessary to effectively shield the healthy from the sick during a pandemic produced by a novel pathogen.

Litigation was on the rise across late-medieval Europe, and historians have long argued that the result was widespread law-mindedness. Seeking a more individual perspective on these trends, this article looks outside of the formal legal records that have been the cornerstone of social and legal histories. It assesses two first-person narratives which describe life-long efforts to resolve disputes at law, written by ageing members of the rural gentry in late-fifteenth-century England. The article first outlines the stories of disputing told in these manuscripts, with attention to their structures, tropes, and alignment with contemporary discourses about justice. It then places them in the contexts of the lives and archives that they were designed to interpret. What becomes apparent is that these writers and others of similar status were deeply invested in their disputes, enough to bequeath them to future generations. They crafted stories which emphasised the continuity of legal claims through changeable social and judicial conflicts, even if it meant omitting prior successes at law. These manuscripts therefore remind us that litigation, however ubiquitous it became, was not always taken lightly. They also open the door to an examination of reckonings with law undertaken at home rather than in the courtroom.

The narrative of technological conquest, modernisation and sanitary improvements has been influential in shaping the historiography of nineteenth-century water infrastructures. Although technological and scientific changes were important elements, however, the transition from the early modern system of water provision to an industrial one also involved resistance, conflict, and competition between different social groups. This article focuses on the issues of drinking water accessibility and related conflicts. It examines archival records of the daily water management, infrastructure projects, and municipal minutes of nineteenth-century Milan, Naples and Venice, as well as documents produced by local communities. Contrary to the consolidated narrative of decline and decay succeeded by innovation, the article contends that the early modern water infrastructure was complex, composed of many elements assembled into a whole, and that differences between these and modern water systems should be sought not in the assumed degree of systematicity. Instead, the division between the two types of systems was manifested in the latter type's scale and its driving concepts, derived from a view of the future for which modern water infrastructures were planned. Simultaneously, the creation of new social boundaries and the increase in inequalities in water access were among the products of modern infrastructure.

Late medievalists have shown that retaining was central to English political society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They have also debunked the myth that Henry VII sought to end noble retaining and shown that such practices continued into the sixteenth century. Despite this, there has been no focused examination of licenses that Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I granted to select individuals permitting them to retain beyond those categories of servants specified in early acts. These licenses are a unique and underexplored source base that allows questions normally posed by medievalists to be posed for the early modern period. This article examines 138 licenses between 1541 and 1585, identifying the patterns of such grants and their role in understanding the crown's use of noble and gentry retaining in the mid sixteenth century. The reason for each grant differed but all recipients were deemed useful to the crown for various reasons, illustrating the continued collaboration between crown and nobility into the sixteenth century. Throughout, this article emphasises the implications of licenses to retain for understanding the attitude of the English crown to the private power of nobles and gentry over the longue durée.

This article uses the early records of the Old Bailey to examine how the court handled cases involving children and juveniles, whether as offenders, victims or witnesses. It argues that though juvenile courts belong to a later age, the early modern court was already applying different criteria in trying young offenders. It demonstrates how juries used age, gender and related considerations to justify the ‘pious perjury’ that sheltered many from the full rigour of the law. Previous work on children as victims has focused on child-rape and infanticide. This article explores other categories. It argues that in cases of death following a severe beating the court's sympathies lay firmly with the defendants, determined to uphold the authority of employers and parents. Lastly, the article explores cases involving children as witnesses, which raised difficult questions about the admissibility of evidence. Judges had to decide if the youngster was sufficiently mature to give evidence on oath.

Historians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

This article firstly advances a methodological critique of Hans-Joachim Voth's influential study of labour input during the English industrial revolution, arguing that Voth's ingenious and potentially widely applicable method of inferring time-use from court testimony has flaws such that at least the absolute figures yielded are likely unreliable. Secondly, with the method's deficiencies in mind, this article applies a version of it to the Old Bailey court records in order to examine change in women's working time in London between the 1750s and 1830. Results include that women in London did not observe Saint Monday even in the 1750s, and that the time that women in London spent in paid work increased only slightly between the 1750s and 1830.

This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

This article analyses a significant sample of theft cases tried in the appellate courts of the parlements of Paris and Toulouse from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. Despite some historians’ claims that theft was typically overlooked or settled informally, and that property crime only became a major social problem because of the rise of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century, this article argues that French subjects did take theft seriously in this period, even if that meant subjecting it to ridicule in cultural productions such as Molière’s celebrated play The Miser.

This article takes as a point of departure the paucity of scholarship on Scottish poor relief, which has been predominantly depicted as an inferior and underdeveloped version of its southern counterpart. We adopt a case study approach looking at two examples of Lowland and Highland urban infrastructures of poor relief to illustrate the application of the ideology of ‘improvement’ philosophy onto the treatment of the poor between c.1720 and 1790. Situating the study within the context of Scottish ‘improvement’, we explore the ways theoretical and practical approaches towards the poor were shaped by the combination of commercial and evangelical attitudes to human capital investment and long-term reform, echoing similar developments across Europe. At the close of the eighteenth century, the Scottish system transitioned from a community based, localised system of reciprocal hierarchy operated by the parish and kirk structures to a system increasingly rooted in legalism and the concept of rights based social provision.

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.

The timing of textile de-industrialisation in eastern, southern, and western England and the concomitant shift of the woollen manufacture to the West Riding of Yorkshire is examined in temporal detail. The study shows that the manufacture was moving to settlements with cheap coal, low cost of living and running water as early as the sixteenth century. These settlements became key woollen manufacture centres and remained so until the nineteenth century. The industry was located on the West Riding of Yorkshire coal field long before the industrial revolution and the demand for coal to generate steam power.

This article reconstructs the size and organisation of the rural market in hired labour in fourteenth-century England, providing a comparative reference point for arrangements elsewhere in medieval Europe. Quantitative assessment of 1,445 manorial court sessions from six manors casts new light on the English labour market, which was larger and less regulated than previously assumed and the government's wide-ranging labour legislation in the wake of the Black Death was novel in its scale and provisions. Contrary to received wisdom, manorial authorities made few efforts to regulate labour. The older view had placed an over-reliance on the early work of W.O. Ault and had ignored the significance of nil returns. The reasons for the lack of regulation, and its implications for our understanding of the complex interaction between pandemics, labour markets, and legal responses are explored. Finally, the study illustrates how legal responses to pandemics can have inadvertent yet profound consequences.

Historians of medieval society tend to emphasise the roles of either individual peasants or the village community. They also debate the importance of the market in the peasant economy. Here the focus is on partnership, defined as two or more people pursuing common objectives in a mutual co-operative relationship. Peasants sometimes held land jointly, and new land might be cleared by two or more people. Pairs of peasants regularly took on paid work. It is argued that a likely explanation for occasional flurries of litigation was a breakdown of partnerships. The multiple legal disputes suggest the range of collaborative activities undertaken by peasants, from domestic bread making to the management of pastures. Partnerships may have contributed to the resilience of peasant holdings, especially in the period 1370–1420. Local courts and communities responded with peace-making measures if former partners lapsed into extreme hostility.

This article demonstrates the varied and unpredictable nature of earning in the nineteenth century. Using 12,000 fortnightly pay entries from Townley Main Colliery in the north-east of England as a case study, it explores the extent to which the availability of work fluctuated between years, and how workers reacted to this phenomenon. It then considers the frequency with which these individuals undertook the work which was available, and discusses the implications for our understanding of the length of the working year.

Juries enabled the participation in local governance of those outside national and regional elites in early modern England. Yet their social range is disputed. We investigate coroners’ inquest juries in a range of communities and compare a sample of 148 juries in eleven counties, featuring 2024 jurors, with tax and muster records. These show that while the rural and urban middling sorts were disproportionately represented, the rich and poor were by no means excluded. As militarily able household heads, many jurors matched the wider demands of ‘respectable masculinity’, and this may be reflected in some of the verdicts they reached.

The workhouse was a central facet of the new poor law and the elderly – and aged men in particular – came to dominate workhouse populations. This article is the first to analyse a very large data set of almost 4,000 workhouses from all areas of England and Wales extracted from the I-CeM data set, which reveals the composition of workhouse residents on census night by age, gender, and geography between 1851 and 1911. Factors influencing the proportion of the elderly in the workhouse include the dependency ratio and internal migration, urbanisation and a commitment to institutions in cities, and the availability of outdoor relief and other avenues of support. Destitution, want of work, old age and illness propelled the elderly into the workhouse. The crusade against outrelief of the 1870s contributed to this increase, and, while the introduction of old age pensions reduced those over the age of 70, this did not prevent the ‘younger aged’ (those aged 60–69) from increasing.

In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Europe developed a deep interest in both natural resources and agroecosystems. Experts began to explore the rural hinterland and shores of the Mediterranean. These travellers described completely new settings, agroecosystems, and cultures through the lens of their own backgrounds. This article analyses the development of Mediterranean rural societies as an object of study of Western agricultural science. It describes the reports of travellers to rural lands in Spain, Italy and Lebanon, comparing their observations and representations, evaluating if there are common patterns in their reports and what features are still found in rural practices today.

In this article we analyse the changes in the age of voting and eligibility for office in Sweden during the twentieth century. We scrutinise arguments, actors, and contexts. Age proved to be an important yardstick for political citizenship and a source of political conflicts of importance for the development of democratic institutions which is largely neglected in earlier research on universal suffrage. Democratisation processes not only have led to the inclusion of new groups of citizens, but also exclusions. Our study demonstrates the importance of shifting understanding of young people, family formation, demographic shifts, intergenerational power balances and constitutional dilemmas.