This article addresses the subject of the first well-attested outbreak of bubonic plague in the history of the Mediterranean world – the so-called ‘Justinianic Plague’ of the sixth century. The African origin of the disease is examined and contextualized, whilst recent revisionist arguments in relation to the scale of the depopulation caused by the plague are responded to with reference to the numismatic, legal, and papyrological sources. The numismatic evidence in particular points to a major crisis in imperial finances for which large-scale depopulation would be the most likely cause. The legal and papyrological sources record how both landowners and the imperial authorities responded to this situation.

This article approaches the medieval law of theft from a ‘functional’ perspective. It seeks, that is, to consider the rules of law principally in relation to the social circumstances which give rise to them and upon which they, in turn, have an impact. Concentrating primarily upon material from England and Wales, the essay considers general issues of definition, jurisdiction and proof in the law of the middle ages before concentrating specifically upon the rules respecting theft. The ideas of manifest and non-manifest theft are explored in an attempt to discover why the law distinguished between them. Potential difficulties concerning the bringing of theft actions and the defences which might be offered to them are also examined and related to the practical world in which perpetrators and victims of theft found themselves. Finally, the possible tension between the satisfaction of the demands of the individual victim and the wider desire to maintain public order is investigated.

Population developments in the western European countryside not only show strong fluctuations during the later Middle Ages, but they also exhibit sharp regional differences. By investigating and comparing developments in three parts of the Low Countries this study tries to shed more light on the causes underlying these regional diversities. In this connection, particular attention will be paid to differences in the social distribution of landownership. Examination of the data at regional level indicates that property structures were indeed an important factor in late-medieval population trends. Later sections of the article investigate the various factors which shaped the interrelationships between population growth, density and property structures, thus contributing to a clearer comprehension of the different demographic histories of the three regions and a better understanding of regional diversities in late-medieval population developments in general.

This article examines a series of disputes that developed among villagers in the Duchy of Württemberg in south-west Germany during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, disputes that were appealed to higher courts and became a matter for decision by the Duchy's ruling council. The disputes concerned the allocation of free wood from communally owned woodlands, and the size of shares permitted to particular groups, but developed into arguments over the nature of communal government and the authority of custom. They provide avenues to the understanding of the development of intra-village tensions, and to how disputes over resource allocation could erupt at particular instances, drawing higher echelons of state authority into the resolution of essentially local problems. In doing so the article seeks to provide a corrective to simplistic explanations of why resource regulation occurs at particular junctures, and contributes to a history of state formation, the village commune and legal change, giving proper place to pressures ‘from below’ as well as government intervention.

The aim of this paper is to combine two types of source that are usually kept apart in the study of the Italian later Middle Ages: direct tax assessments and local court records. The purpose of putting these two sources together is to discover more about the operation of the local vicariate courts (another neglected element of Italian states) and about wealth distribution and litigation in the Italian countryside. The tax assessments are first analysed for what they reveal of agriculture, migration and wealth, then the court records for the identity of plaintiffs and defendants, and the nature of pleas. To interpret the resulting pattern of debts and credit, cooperation and conflict, concepts from English medieval historiography are used to explore the relationship between debtors and creditors.

The confinement of married women by their husbands in their homes or in private madhouses was an issue which caused much concern in eighteenth-century England, but which has been little explored by historians. This article uses the records of the court of King's Bench, a source which has been previously neglected by historians of marriage, to explore the circumstances of this form of marital abuse. It shows that within eighteenth-century English law there was much uncertainty about the ‘right’ of husbands to confine their wives, and that this allowed some men to test the limits of their authority. It argues that although some women were able to adopt legal and extra-legal strategies in response to confinement, changing notions of ideal femininity shaped the ways in which women were able to respond to marital abuse, and left genteel women peculiarly vulnerable to accusations of madness and to subsequent confinement in a madhouse.

This article deals with merchants in international trade from the seventeenth and into the nineteenth century, most of them of immigrant background. Based on a discussion of the work of the household in gender terms the main point is to show how the merchants were eager to construct working network relations. Family and kinship relations are discussed as a crucial element in the merchants' networks, and throughout their world of household, regional contact networks and international networks run structures of hierarchical and patriarchal authority and at the same time non-hierarchical relations of equality.

In the eighteenth century, the condition of English wives under ‘coverture’ was both defended as one of privilege and attacked as worse than slavery. This article suggests that married women were not in reality confined within coverture's regulations on credit and property ownership. Their economic activities were fairly broad and flexible and they had an instinctive sense of possession over some goods during wedlock, perceiving their contributions to marriage as a pooling of resources for familial benefit. It will be suggested that wives did not necessarily think that their conduct in acting as if some marital property was legally theirs was illegitimate, because it was facilitated by coverture and the legal devices that allowed it to function.

The article examines the impact of the ‘rise of statistical thinking’ and statistical measurement on elite perceptions of the condition of the Russian Empire's post-emancipation peasant economy. Using archival and published sources, it argues that the increased use of statistical measurement did much to concretize in numerical (‘objective’) terms the idea of rural crisis. In particular, the combination of traditional paternalistic concerns about the sufficiency of peasant resources and the use of cadastre measurement yielded an image of the peasant household economy in which the value (the income-producing capabilities) of post-emancipation peasant allotments nearly always fell short of subsistence requirements and tax/payment obligations. Thus, because of how observers measured peasant well-being, it appeared as if peasants had been over-changed for their post-emancipation land allotments and were doomed to exist in a permanent state of crisis.

This article examines the institution of retirement on some estates in Scania, the southernmost part of Sweden, in the nineteenth century. It is obvious that tenant farmers on the estates were practising the same retirement system as was customary among freeholders, that is they were entering into retirement contracts with their offspring or with a non-relative, making over the farm in exchange for board and lodging for the rest of their lives. The retirement age was about 60 for men and somewhat less for women. In this respect there was no difference between tenant farmers and freeholders. However, due to differences in property conditions and land tenure, there were other differences between these groups. Freeholders were usually able to ensure for themselves considerably better pension rights than could estate tenants. Furthermore, there are clear indications that estate owners, in certain cases, opposed early retirement or intervened in the selection of new tenant farmers as well as in the level of the pension. Possibly as a result, it was more common among estate tenants to agree a retirement contract with a non-relative than it was among freeholders.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the income and expenditure of a stem family household from Bastelica, Corsica, based on information collected in 1867 and 1887 according to the scheme recommended by Frédéric Le Play. The budget indicates the work undertaken by each member of the family and which economic activities were most valuable to the family in terms of the income they generated and the level of profit. The primary resource of the family was its members, as the family used almost no non-family labour. The composition of the household, and the distribution of its members in terms of age and sex, were therefore critical for its economic well-being. Members of the family contributed their labour according to their sex, age and place within the household. Males were better paid than females but each son received more than his father and the daughters were better paid than their mother. Apart from the father, the less well paid the family member, the longer the time they were at work. In addition, the two highly paid sons were unemployed for more than half of the year. This provided a reserve of labour in the event of a rise in the ratio of consumers to workers within the family. The economy of the family was based on the exploitation of its patrimony and on animal husbandry. Food constituted the largest single item of expenditure but the diet of this family did not provide the 2,800 calories of the average diet in France between 1855 and 1874.

None of the recent studies stimulated by debates on the causes of the ‘demographic transition’ since the mid-nineteenth century has yet explained the anomaly that, while all other indices of mortality declined, rates of infant mortality were static or even rising in the last decades of the century. This case study of Preston shows that an explosive growth in the population of horses in expanding towns was probably responsible for sustaining, or even enhancing, levels of infant mortality due to enteric diseases spread by flies which bred in horse manure.

In this study an attempt is made to examine the influence of kinship on a series of individual transitions and behaviours that mark the life course (marriage, leaving home, out-migration and mortality). Moving beyond a ‘traditional’ view, in which kinship is restricted to the cohabitation group, the study tests both the effects of the household and of the family beyond the household in order to observe their independent, opposite, or complementary actions. All these issues must be considered within the more general context of the ‘nuclear hardship hypothesis’: should family links beyond the unit of cohabitation be taken into account? How far can family support isolated people?

This article explores marital fertility on the Aegean island of Paros based on family-reconstitution data from one main town and one village on the island, namely Naoussa and Kostos. By probing the reproductive behaviour of couples who married between 1894 and 1953 it was found that fertility was still ‘natural’ on the island at the beginning of the twentieth century, while a substantial fertility decline made itself visible only in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The way the population switched from natural to controlled fertility is also explored, as well as the contribution of different socio-economic groups to fertility transition. In the end, an effort is made to place the examined population in a wider European and national context.

The ‘nuclear hardship’ hypothesis claims that where nuclear families predominated collective aid prevailed, whereas extended households were co-extensive with kin-based support. This article tests this assumption by considering the relationship between households and the Poor Law in Lowland Scots communities after 1845. While cross-sectional census data are inconclusive, a longitudinal analysis based on case study evidence, including temporary as well as permanent relief patterns, suggests that ‘nuclear hardship’ might be replaced by a model that matches household structure with the varying sources of aid given during critical life situations while focusing upon applicants as negotiators rather than victims.

Using microdata samples from the 1851 and 1881 censuses of England and Wales, this article explores patterns in the employment and retirement of older men in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article argues that male labour-force participation rates were stable over these years, and indicates that the major decrease did not occur until after 1881. Despite this static picture of employment of older men, there were structural changes in the economy, demonstrated here by alterations in occupational profile. Those occupational groups shown to be in decline were more likely to have an ageing workforce. Changing age profiles of certain occupations are reported, giving evidence of deskilling and the marginalisation of older men in the workforce through technological change. This article also suggests that differences in household composition where older men were present may be related to economic activity.