This article presents two models of Polish peasant budgets. The first is a theoretical budget of a medieval peasant family and the second is a similar model for the early modern period, confirming some of the characteristic features of the transitional period in the Polish economy in this period. Variables taken into account in the construction of the budgets include the average size of a peasant farm, its productivity, the distribution of crops, family size, rents and taxes paid to the state, Church and feudal lords. The two factors that appear to have had the greatest impact on peasant budgets during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the decrease in farm size and the sharp rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century. As a result, although comparison of the two models indicates a decrease in the level of commercialization of the average Polish peasant farm, the financial resources of Polish peasants actually grew.

In pre-industrial Sweden (and other parts of northwestern Europe) retirement arrangements were used by peasants to keep their property intact and to transfer it to one of the children while the other children were compensated with, for example, movable property or plots of land. In this article we study the frequency and form of this strategy in pre-industrial rural Sweden. While the literature on retirement arrangements mainly concentrates on the functionality of this system, the focus of this study is on what happened to the institution of peasant retirement in the nineteenth century when an active land market developed and the relative price of land rose. In this study, we use two different sources of land transmission: poll-tax registers, indicating the management of farms, and records of land certificates, showing changes in ownership. The results clearly show that peasant retirement remained an important strategy of intergenerational land transmission at least until the mid-nineteenth century, but the way it was carried out changed profoundly from being mainly an intra-family affair to being channelled through the market.

This article analyses the economic activities of urban Flemish women in actual practice, using contracts and court judgements from the mid-fourteenth-century registers of the aldermen of Ghent. These ‘acts’ show that women routinely invested and managed their own property without male representatives and that distinctions of marital status were often far less significant in medieval Ghent than elsewhere in northern Europe. Another conceptualization of the scope of women's economic activity also existed at the time, in which men acted for women, but it was not the dominant norm in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.

In this article the ages at marriage and remarriage of Tansoˇng men and women are examined through an analysis of census registers (hojoˇk) from between 1678 and 1789. It was discovered that the average age of Tansoˇng women at first marriage was 17.5, and that most women married between the ages of 15 and 20, much earlier than women in Europe in this period and slightly earlier than those in Japan, but at similar ages to Chinese women. Husbands were on average around 18 when they married. Roughly half of widowers remarried, with remarriage more likely for those of lower and middle status than for upper-status widowers. Many middle- and low-status widowers had probably also married widows despite the fact that there was a legal prohibition on the remarriage of widows.

In Catalonia the hereditary system envisaged that the eldest son in the family would inherit. When there was no male heir, the oldest daughter would inherit, and was then called the pubilla. This circumstance allowed the possibility of an heir and an heiress marrying, which would result in the unification of their patrimonies. According to traditional historiography, this was one explanation of the concentration of rural patrimonies. This article demonstrates that the heir–heiress wedding was not the most often chosen scenario, however, and looks again at the options that families had to consider, according to their circumstances, when a daughter was the heir, and at the results of their choices.

This article examines the relative incidence of poverty among the elderly in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire with special reference to gender. Both national and local sources are employed to highlight the particular difficulties experienced by the elderly, male poor under the New Poor Law, and the short and long term problems they faced as a result of seasonal unemployment and an overstocked labour market. For elderly women, the extent to which their poverty was relieved by employment in cottage industry, almshouse accommodation, the continuing receipt of out-relief and a higher incidence of family support are examined to provide an assessment of the manner in which poverty was gendered in the nineteenth century.

This article evaluates the extent of child farm labour in Spain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The first part of the article examines child labour in rural areas. Because under-registration of farm child labour was common in both national and local censuses, the writer examines other evidence, including surveys of child labour on farms and school-enrolment registers listing seasonal and as well as full-time labour. The second part of the article considers the relationship between employment and school absenteeism by age and gender. School attendance is compared by season and by geographic area, and its relation to farming is apparent. All the evidence in the registers demonstrates extensive employment of children over the age of ten in rural Spain.

This article deals with the high mobility of servants in preindustrial northwestern Europe. By combining both a qualitative and a quantitative approach we analyse the determinants of servant migration in the province of Scania, in southern Sweden, during the nineteenth century. The analysis shows that about half of the moves were connected to the structure of working-life organization, servant hierarchy and marriage. The rest depended on a range of other factors such as the type and structure of the master's household, variations in the demand for labour caused by fluctuations in harvest yields, conflicts within households, or a wish to gain additional training.

It has been claimed that in the late eighteenth century sixty per cent of couples in the Welsh village of Llansantffraid Glyn Ceiriog married by jumping over a broomstick, and a number of commentators have inferred that informal marriage was widespread in this period. Yet an examination of the primary and secondary sources shows that both the initial claim and subsequent speculations are based on ‘Chinese whispers’ rather than evidence. This casts a new light on the way in which people reacted to the 1753 Marriage Act, and illustrates how myths may be created through uncritical reliance on secondary sources.

The following articles by myself and by Andrei Markevich are the first in a series of four analysing income-earning strategies of urban households in twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union. The articles deal with a similar set of issues for four subsequent periods. In this issue of Continuity and Change my article covers the early Soviet period from the revolution of 1917 to the start of the Second World War and Andrei Markevich focuses on the war, the post-war Stalin period and the Khruschev years, taking his analysis into the latter half of the 1960s. In the next issue, Victoria Tyazhelnikova will examine the Brezhnev period and Sergei Afontsev the years of reform under Gorbachev and in post-Soviet Russia.

In the past a couple had the choice of a day from Monday through Sunday on which to baptise their child, or to get married, or to have their burials registered. The day chosen would reflect the parents' own preferences for days of leisure. As each date was converted by computer during the process of family reconstitution to a number of days that had elapsed since the first of January, 1 AD, all that it was necessary to do was to divide the number corresponding to the date by 7 to get the day of the week. Three graphs reveal, with some surprises, the relative popularity of the days of the days of the week chosen for baptisms, burials and marriages, from 1542 to 1847.

The profusion of small trades and services that characterized the nineteenth-century London labour market makes it extremely difficult to arrive at any general understanding of the work of children and juveniles. This brief study employs published statistical materials and compares children's occupations in the metropolis with the national picture. It argues that London contained exceptionally low levels of children's employment compared with the rest of England and Wales. The preoccupation of metropolitan social observers with working children may have resulted from the fact that child employment in mid-nineteenth-century London was a marginal activity associated chiefly with the very poor.

One of the most powerful influences on modern peasant studies has been Chayanov's notion that the peasant farm household balanced the labour efforts of a household and its consumer demands. As a result, peasant households have been seen as autarchic units of production and consumption, and peasant strategies were held to be designed to preserve the common enterprise in which everyone was expected to work and pool resources, and to maintain the integrity of the original holding, of which all family members were expected to receive an equal share. This article focuses on familial strategies of Lithuanian peasants after the abolition of serfdom in the second half of the nineteenth century and argues that the strategies of different generations were shaped by a multiplicity of dependencies, a constant reshuffle of resources and the maximum utilization of land and labour. Examination of the pattern of generational turnover and of the working arrangements between parents and adult children suggests that relationships between the generations were built on reciprocity and that co-operation or some other mutual help was essential in the post-emancipation village.

The article examines patterns of work and employment in urban households of the inter-war Soviet Union. Drawing on population censuses and time-budget surveys, it analyses trends in labour participation and gainful employment for men, women and different age-groups from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Particular attention is devoted to the division of labour within the household. The single most important change over this period was a substantial increase in labour participation rates, in particular among women. This was a direct result of the state-led industrialization drive of the 1930s, which simultaneously caused a booming demand for labour and a rapid decline of real wages. Households reacted to this challenge by increasing the number of working members per household. Self-employment, targeted by state repression from the late 1920s, practically disappeared, leaving paid employment as the only viable form of gainful employment. Within the household, the increase in female labour participation rates put a heavy strain on women, who came to face a double burden of employment and household duties, including child-care. In three-generation extended households, which were the norm at the time, this resulted in a division of labour between the generations, with the household members of working age concentrating on paid employment and the elderly members of the household on child-care and subsidiary agriculture.

This contribution investigates how religion retarded the Dutch fertility transition by looking at how denominations were associated with the timing of first births (starting), the length of birth intervals (spacing), and the timing of last births (stopping). First, we apply a simple descriptive model of starting, spacing, and stopping to life-course data from the province of Utrecht. Then, we apply multivariate regression to assess the independent effects of religious denominations, net of socio-economic status, on stopping behaviour. The results indicate that liberal Protestants were more prone to adopt stopping behaviour than orthodox Protestants and Catholics.

In this article I discuss the dilemma between coercion and respect for civil liberties that characterized policies for the prevention of venereal diseases during the nineteenth century. Placing Danish legislation in an international perspective, the gradual change from control of prostitution to the so-called Scandinavian Sonderweg is analysed. Special emphasis is given to parliamentary discussions on the law of 1906, with a view to disentangling the survival of traditional attitudes to sexual morality from burgeoning conceptions of universal welfare policies.

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 article offers an approach through administrative and cultural history to the problems associated with gathering and processing data for the Spanish national census of 1920, and by implication for earlier Spanish censuses. It focuses on the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, making use of correspondence between the central statistical office in Madrid, the provincial jefe de estadística and the localities, and of reports on three problematic towns within the province. The issues that emerge regarding ‘undercounting’, the definition of administrative boundaries and the classification of demographic characteristics are set in the wider context of census-taking practices and problems elsewhere in Spain and in other cultures.