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.

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.

This article aims to explain how the market for land functioned in medieval south-west Finland. The data show that in medieval times land was increasingly treated as something to be transferred in return for ready money, albeit within the limits set by the interests of the family. The land market was open to large segments of society, suggesting that barriers to entry were low. It was characterised by strong vertical integration, although asymmetric, as the majority of the transactions took place between participants from different social groups. The article will also consider the high degree of geographical integration in the land market.

A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to his holdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriage or fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. In this case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 per cent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did so consistently over three centuries. The persistence of this pattern indicates that widows as tenants were common and capable of cultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complex interconnections of gender with local social and economic structures, which include marriage, migration, and household formation.

This article demonstrates, using evidence from church court depositions, that women's experience of service in early modern England was more varied than scholarship suggests. Moving beyond its conception as a life-cycle annual occupation, the article situates service within individual life-stories. It argues firstly, that service extended across the whole of women's working lives and secondly, that employment arrangements took a wide range of forms. Service for women is shown to have been flexible, varied and contingent, employing a diversity of individuals under a variety of different employment agreements.

Although ownership of real property was crucial to the economic opportunities of medieval urban women, few studies systematically investigate the gender distribution of medieval real property over time. Using censiers (rarely used sources), this article approaches this question through a socio-geographical analysis of Brussels. The study finds that, despite the region's egalitarian inheritance laws, female ownership of real property was relatively limited, and it declined during the late Middle Ages. This decrease accelerated during economic crises, and especially affected the property of non-elite women. Further research on the changing economic opportunities of medieval women would benefit from a more explicit discussion of non-labour income sources and social status.

This study utilises several sources of male occupational data to track the decline of the Norwich worsted industry, c. 1700–1820. The data show that the industry began to fall away during the second half of the eighteenth century, if not sooner, and earlier than has been previously realised. The transfer of the industry to the north of England began before the introduction of steam-powered spinning or weaving. Market competition, notably from Lancashire printed fustians and cottons, and the loss of export trade through war, were the likely causal factors.

According to the literature inspired by the ideas of Robert Brenner, leaseholders, small farmers and craftsmen did not participate in the local administration of those districts in the Dutch Republic where the majority of land was owned by large landowners. However, in this article we show that, at least in the Dutch river clay area, where water management was an essential part of the population's struggle to survive the annual floods, the battle against the elements induced people, regardless of their property relations and social distinctions, to share power in order to overcome the challenges they all faced. The study also contributes to the growing literature about the effects of water management on political culture in the North Sea area.

New Poor Law scandals have usually been examined either to demonstrate the cruelty of the workhouse regime or to illustrate the failings or brutality of union staff. Recent research has used these and similar moments of crisis to explore the relationship between local and central levels of welfare administration (the Boards of Guardians in unions across England and Wales and the Poor Law Commission in Somerset House in London) and how scandals in particular were pivotal in the development of further policies. This article examines both the inter-local and local-centre tensions and policy consequences of the Droxford Union and Fareham Union scandal (1836–1837), which exposed the severity of workhouse punishments towards three young children. The article illustrates the complexities of union cooperation and, as a result of the escalation of public knowledge into the cruelties and investigations thereafter, how the vested interests of individuals within a system manifested themselves in particular (in)actions and viewpoints. While the Commission was a reactive and flexible welfare authority, producing new policies and procedures in the aftermath of crises, the policies developed after this particular scandal made union staff, rather than the welfare system as a whole, individually responsible for the maltreatment and neglect of the poor.

During the eighteenth century, Germans from the Hessian county of Hanau-Münzenberg emigrated westward to the American colonies, and east to Hungary, Russia, and other parts of Europe. Using new emigrant data, I examine their age, occupation, and emigration strategies. Those who settled in Pennsylvania were the richest of these emigrants, more likely to travel as intact families and the most networked. The poorest were the Hessians who went to Russia, mostly in 1766. A large percentage of the Hanau-Hessians settled in Pennsylvania, suggesting that eighteenth-century German emigration to Hungary and Russia has possibly been overestimated.

This article produces the first findings on changes in household and family structure in England and Wales during 1851–1911, using the recently available Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) – a complete count database of individual-level data extending to some 188 million records. As such, it extends and updates the important overview article published in Continuity and Change by Michael Anderson in 1988. The I-CeM data shed new light on transitions in household structure and family life during this period, illustrating both continuities and change in a number of key areas: family composition; single parent families; living alone; extended households; childhood; leaving home and marriage patterns.

Galicia is a region located in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, where, historically, illegitimacy was often high compared with levels elsewhere in Europe. At the same time, Galicia's coastal and inland areas have always differed greatly in terms of farming structure, population growth, migration patterns, family types and inheritance systems. The aim of this article is to establish to what extent the trends in and levels of illegitimacy between 1570 and 1899 were influenced by these different historical contexts. It also offers an in-depth examination of unmarried mothers, showing that the trend towards bearing more than one illegitimate child rose over time. Ultimately, the article argues that illegitimacy is best studied at a local or regional level, rather than at the macro level that historians have often employed elsewhere in Europe.

After the Second World War, Dutch authorities allowed 8,000 displaced persons (DPs) to come to the Netherlands, but only 3,904 came, and 25 per cent of them returned to camp life in Germany. This article seeks to explain why debates on the DP issue changed so rapidly within a short period of time. In earlier publications, it has been claimed that ‘selling’ DPs as workers helped to solve the DP issue. This strategy did not work for the Netherlands. This article analyses how the DP issue was framed by organisations, the Dutch government, civil servants, the Dutch Homeland Security Department, newspapers and employers.

This article investigates the demographic history of the Grand Sable sugar estate on nineteenth-century St Vincent. Exceptionally for a Caribbean plantation, Grand Sable's enslaved population achieved natural increase (a surplus of births over deaths). Pro-slavery campaigners seized on this achievement to support the cause of gradualist amelioration and to oppose metropolitan regulation of slavery, especially emancipation. Explanations of demographic success advanced by opponents of abolition are found wanting and alternatives proposed that are more consistent with the surviving evidence. The role played by anomalies in shaping discourse on both sides of the slavery debate is highlighted.

This study uses data on income and distribution of relief payments from local poor relief tables for 512 rural parishes in Flanders (present-day Belgium) in 1807 to examine spatial variation in poor relief practices in a region characterised by well-established local poor relief institutions and marked socio-economic differences. By combining data on poor relief with local data on population, landholding and occupational structure, we map out the relative importance of regional economies and local variation in producing distinct poor relief regimes. The results show that although local variation was considerable, the nature and extent of this variation interacted with structural socio-economic characteristics to produce regional patterns, signalling that local variation did not so much contradict as constitute regional patterns in poor relief regimes. The importance of socio-economic characteristics in determining both regional patterns and local variation supports our more general contention that local and regional levels of analysis represent a more fruitful avenue for understanding variations in poor relief practices than national differences in legislation, and therefore has implications for the comparative study of poor relief practices in a wider international context.