In 1584, fearing death, Eleanor Cumpayne, a single woman in the parish of Halesowen (Worcestershire), commended her soul to almighty God and her body to the earth, divided her sheep and money amongst her godchildren, relatives and friends, and placed particular trust in her cousin, Margery Cumpayne, who, amongst other duties, was to bestow the sum of 20s at her funeral. Unlike most testators, Eleanor Cumpayne survived this fearful illness, dying in the summer eight years later. Eleanor is also unusual because the detailed provisions establishing her as a single woman that were made 25 years before her death also survive. In his will her father, George, bequeathed to her for her natural life a chamber next to the fire in his house in Hill, a garden, an acre of land, 3s 4d annually, a cow called Fillpayle, a mare, bedding, the best pot and pan, six sheep which were to be kept with the rest of the family's sheep and also, at the death of her mother, a pasture. The experience of Eleanor Cumpayne, living semi-independently as a single woman with the assistance of her family, suggests that the idea that early modern society expected all women to marry needs closer examination. Such a view can indeed be found in prescriptive literature. The author of The law's resolutions of women's rights (1632) stated without hesitation that all women ‘are understood either married or to be married’. For him women were defined by their marital status, and marriage was the natural expectation for all women.

Contemporary authors based their ideas of the necessity of marriage for women on two main arguments: first, that marriage was natural and demanded by scripture, particularly as a consequence of the Fall, which imposed on women the twin obligations of childbearing and subjection to the authority of a husband; and second, that marriage was an economic necessity, a notion encapsulated in the well-known adage that ‘To thrive one must wive.’ The strength of these arguments in preventing remaining unmarried from seeming to be a viable and attractive option for early modern women is the subject of this article. In particular, I shall concentrate on the second argument, the economic dimension, since it was in this respect, as the experience of Eleanor Cumpayne suggests, that social attitudes did most to encourage the possibility of women remaining unmarried.

In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent – access to property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes, the ‘best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according to statistics, is being in the labour market’.

Labour markets have almost always had gender disparities, with women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's disadvantaged position.

The lunatic asylum remains one of the most remarkable institutional monuments of the modern world, dominating the social landscape of Victorian Britain and exercising a powerful attraction for social historians of medicine, an attraction almost as great as the spectre of the madhouse for contemporary novelists. Our image of the Victorian asylum is still pervaded to a surprising degree by the gloomy spectacle of the total institution presented by Michel Foucault, though it has been modified by a whole range of institutional and philosophical accounts undertaken in the past three decades. Pioneering studies by researchers such as Andrew Scull have illuminated not only the power exercised by the new asylum superintendents, armed with medical discourses of moral treatment and the early promise of curability, but also the continuing dominance of the ‘mad doctors’ in the sombre years of neo-Darwinian pessimism and eugenics doctrines. More recent contributions to the now enormous literature on the social history of insanity have shifted the focus of attention from earlier concerns with charting the rise of the asylum and the elaboration of medical discourses under the psychiatric gaze of physicians to a detailed reconstruction of the social environment of the asylum and especially to the interplay between familial circumstances and the way institutions responded to the insane. Such concerns were also clearly evident in important earlier studies by Walton, Scull, Digby and others, which drew on fundamental work by Anderson on the changing role of the family during industrialization. These scholars drew attention to the importance of family and kinship relations in the negotiation of a lunatic's passage to the Victorian asylum, as well as the role of wider forces of economic change, population growth and migration in shaping the environment in which decisions about the care of the mad were made.

The origins of joint family households in the Balkans remain an issue of interest to many scholars of family history. This article focuses on the joint family household pattern recorded in the 1905 Ottoman census in two communities in Epirus. Related issues will also be discussed, such as the variations in household-formation behaviour within a community regarded as ‘ethnically’ homogeneous, the extent to which joint family households should be viewed as an intrinsic trait of the culture and economy of the Vlachs, and the problems that arise from relying exclusively on quantitative data for understanding household and family life.

The 1905 census, the last one undertaken by the Ottoman authorities, was intended to provide information on the Empire's ethnic composition, in a context of increasing unrest and tension caused by rising nationalist movements. The 1905 population listings of the two villages discussed in this article, the Vlach village of Syrrako and the Greek one of Aristi (or Artsista, the older version of the village's name, used before the trend to ‘Hellenicize’ Slav-sounding place names), are among the few such documents relating to Epirus to have been preserved. A relatively large body of literature on Epirus communities, produced by travellers, local historians, and geographers, furnishes additional information.

In a recent article Frederik Pedersen used the records of matrimonial litigation from the York consistory, the principal Church court of the province, during the fourteenth century to make a number of observations concerning the relationship of these records to the society from which they were generated. He argued that ‘the medieval court documents do not present a random sample illustrating trends in the surrounding society’ and that litigants tended to be disproportionately drawn on the one hand from the upper echelons of society and on the other hand from locations close to York itself. He has further suggested that the age structures of male and female deponents found within the surviving cause papers do not fit the same model life tables and that this raises ‘further doubts about the representativeness of court documents as evidence of changing patterns of lay behaviour’. In this article, I shall show that his analysis is based upon a flawed methodology, is marred by error, and is ultimately mistaken. Pedersen's essential point in ‘Demography in the archives’, as outlined in the Abstract to the article, is that the people who appear in the court records are unrepresentative of society as a whole, and hence ‘that the court records tell us more about the people who used the courts than about trends in the society in which litigation arose’. My argument is that it is the very unrepresentativeness of the people and their cases that provides us with a window into the society from which the cases arise. I shall suggest ways in which the York cause paper evidence can indeed be used to illuminate broader social trends, but also suggest caveats as to the reading of individual causes.

When I wrote ‘Demography in the archives’, it was my hope to open up a methodological discussion of geographical, social, and demographic aspects of legal sources that I believed had not received sufficient attention in the past. The matter was urgent, I felt, because I had found that there was a distinctive pattern to the reception of my work on either side of the Atlantic. When I presented papers in North America, my basic premise – that it was difficult, if not impossible, to use legal sources like the York cause papers as the basis of an analysis of social change in the century after the Black Death – was accepted with little or no comment. However, when I presented the same papers in Britain there seemed to be unease about this conclusion and one of the most frequent questions I was asked was why I did not analyse temporal variations in the material. From this I perceived the need to explain how I arrived at such a position, and after a long period of gestation the eventual outcome was ‘Demography in the archives’. I am delighted that Dr Goldberg has taken the time to go over my arguments in this meticulous fashion (see ‘Fiction in the archives: the York cause papers is a source for later medieval social history’, above in this number). He has found many errors that escaped me during the article's proofreading, and for this work I thank him. In what follows I shall concentrate on what I see as the main points of his article.

It is clear that we differ profoundly in our estimation of the value of these sources to the social historian. However, there is some common ground between us. We agree that an investigation of the categories suggested in ‘Demography in the archives’ will yield important insights into the nature of the medieval litigation material. We are, in other words, agreed that factors such as litigants' social status, their geographical distance to the courts, and the age-composition of witnesses must be examined before we can conclude anything about the usefulness of these sources. Where we differ is in our interpretation of the evidence and in the tools that we suggest are most suited for this analysis.