Mortgage markets in developing economies, both past and present, are often confined to social networks between private individuals. The inadequate registration of ownership of and encumbrances on borrowers’ real estate has been offered as a reason for this, but it is questionable whether such registration provides either a simple or a complete explanation. This paper analyses mortgage markets between 1300 and 1800 in the Low Countries, where such registration was organised well, and England, where such registration was poorly organised. These historical cases show that registration was important for the emergence of broad mortgage markets but in the historical context successful markets took considerable time to appear. The rise of such markets also required changes in the mortgage laws and often depended on intermediaries for matching borrowers and lenders.

Proceeding from an in-depth analysis of the Liberty of Bruges, an important rural district in the late medieval Low Countries, this contribution frames rural elite formation by means of two debates which are seldom used in combination, namely, the debates on state building and on the commercialisation of rural society. We challenge the thesis, inspired by modernisation theory, that socio-economic transformation engendered political change in pre-modern Europe as newly emerging rural bourgeoisies are alleged to have become an important political factor, shifting their allegiances between lords and peasants as they saw fit. The evidence discussed shows instead a trend towards oligarchy from the fifteenth century onwards, in which an increasingly exclusive social network came to combine hitherto separated forms of political power, largely at the expense of the growing number of wealthy rural bourgeois. It is argued that this transformation of the rural political elites is closely tied to changes in the established relations between the central government and the regional elites of the Low Countries.

This article is the first to use a combination of three different types of inventories from Dorset to examine the material lives of paupers inside and outside Beaminster workhouse. It argues that life was materially better for paupers on outdoor relief, compared with workhouse inmates and with paupers in the moments before they entered the workhouse. The article also examines how the poor used admission into the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts. The evidence demonstrates that the able-bodied poor used the workhouse as a short-term survival strategy, whereas more vulnerable inmates struggled to use this tactic. This article therefore furthers our understanding of the nature of poor relief and adds further weight to recent historical work that has emphasised pauper agency.

This article presents a historical examination of employment amongst men aged 60 years or more in Spain. We aim to explore the characteristics of this segment of the labour force and to analyse the key transformations affecting it during the first seven decades of the twentieth century, such as structural change and, most notably, the rise of public pensions. We then move on to identify specific problems faced by older workers during the study period. It has been hypothesised that one of these was the ‘life-cycle deskilling process’, the effects of which have previously been demonstrated in case studies of certain nations other than Spain. We explore whether life-cycle deskilling also occurred in Spain. We take a quantitative perspective, basing our analysis on the age by occupation tables published from the Spanish censuses from 1900 to 1970.