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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Many crafts in premodern Europe depended on migratory journeymen. Little is known about these workers, or how craft guilds and urban authorities affected their movement. By employing novel data on thousands of journeymen from different crafts and cities in Holland, we provide the first systematic overview of journeymen migration and settlement patterns in The Dutch Republic. We find that migration and settlement patterns differed significantly by occupational sector, marital status, and skill level. The stance of urban authorities towards migrants significantly affected settlement patterns as well. This interrelation of group-level characteristics, craft guilds, and urban regulation demonstrates the significance of examining these elements in tandem.

We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Several studies assume that Calvinist Christianity severely undermined or even persecuted the practice of polyandry in the Sri Lankan areas under Dutch control. We analyze Dutch colonial policy and Church activities toward polyandry by combining ecclesiastical and legal sources. Moreover, we use the Dutch colonial administration of the Sinhalese population to estimate the prevalence of polyandry. We conclude that polyandry was far from extinct by the end of the Dutch period and we argue that the colonial government was simply not knowledgeable, interested and effective enough to persecute the practice in the rural areas under its control.

This article considers how the capitalist practices and organisation of hand papermaking framed the coming of mechanised paper production during the Age of Revolutions. The lived experience of making paper by hand had been as tightly wrapped as the synchronised toil of its workers and the trade's wage system. Neither the ’industrial Enlightenment’ nor an ‘industrious revolution’ had transformed paper production. Instead, the papermaking machine drew on and unravelled a durable web of skilled toil, custom, compensation, worktime, and shopfloor relationships. In doing so, the inventor of this device, Nicolas-Louis Robert, imagined that it would offer the manufacturers unfettered sway over their shops; indeed, he privileged this purpose above efficiency and productivity. That mastery remained incomplete, however, as paper producers still required men who had mastered the trade's tacit knowledge about such matters as pulp, finish, and the proper weather for production.