The article explores the roles of household compositional factors and socio-economic status on widowhood and remarriage. By using micro-level data from a nineteenth-century Italian community for the period 1819–1859, we found evidence of the very predominant role of household structure in the decision to remarry for both widows and widowers. In particular, the interplay between the presence of a supportive family network and the presence of coresiding children from previous marriages stood out as the key factors. The presence of children aged 12 and under promoted the search for a new bride for widowers, whilst the presence of children of any age, especially young ones, decreased the chances of remarriage for widows.

Based on the verb-oriented method and a unique collection of observations from court records, this article shows that both men and women did almost all categories of work in early modern Sweden. On the level of concrete tasks, however, there was both difference and similarity between the genders. Marital status exerted a strong influence on women's sustenance activities, creating a clear distinction between unmarried and ever-married women. These patterns were probably the effect of a labour legislation that forced young people without independent means to offer their bodies and time to masters and mistresses.

Historians of sharecropping in France have usually emphasized its negative effects on growth and on the workers' welfare. However, from about 1840 the regions of central and western France, regions where sharecroppers were especially numerous, were also areas that saw great improvements and the specialization in commercial livestock. As the author shows, landowners from these areas used sharecropping contracts in order both to seize the opportunities given by the potential scale economies in livestock rearing and to take advantage of family labour at a time of increasing wages. After presenting some basic data regarding sharecropping contracts, the second section is intended to describe the improvements in livestock farming in the area under sharecropping after 1840 and the contribution of landowners. Section III offers an explanation of why landowners preferred sharecropping to fixed-rent contracts. Three causes in particular are identified: (i) a lack of physical and human capital sufficient to allow potential farmers to engage in large scale farming; (ii) the contribution of landlord managerial expertise; and (iii) the fact that the complexity of mixed farming required a quality of work that would have been too expensive with wage labour. In a final section the ways in which the success of sharecropping minimized transaction costs are discussed.

In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Poland, village courts facilitated the registration of a variety of private transactions among peasants. This article uses the surviving court books of this period to explore the courts' development and functions, and to analyse the numerous peasant credit contracts found in their records. The aim of the article is to show that in late medieval and early modern Poland the village courts provided a well-established system for registering peasant transactions, and that this played an important role in the development of credit and land markets.

In many localities in the Dutch Republic, charitable collections were the single largest source of income for relief institutions for the outdoor poor. This article takes into account both the role of the authorities organising collections and the role of the city-dwellers making charitable donations. It is demonstrated that people from almost all layers of urban society contributed to the collections. By means of thorough planning and exerting social pressure, religious and secular administrators of poor relief tried to maximise Dutch generosity. They presented making charitable donations as a duty of the rich as well as of the less well-off. In the Dutch Republic, not only the elites, but also the middling groups of society, who approximately constituted almost half of the urban population, were of vital importance in financing poor relief.

This article analyses the mechanisms of conflict resolution in apprenticeship contracts using a large database of disputes from early modern Italy. It finds that the guild court under investigation (the Padua Woollen Guild court) did not enforce training contracts, but rather sought to improve on incomplete contracts by adding clauses, thereby helping individuals renegotiate and redefine the contractual arrangements into which they had decided to enter. However, power relations within the court operated largely in favour of employers, both merchants and master craftsmen. The article concludes that alternative contract enforcement systems, such as municipal or state courts, were probably better suited than corporative systems for resolving disputes surrounding apprenticeship.

A survey of working-class women's activity as savers offers a new insight into their economic activity, opening questions about the sources inside and outside the family of the money saved by single and married women. It is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family. A study of investment patterns within two savings banks, one in Huddersfield and one in Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that working-class women may have been more active as savers than has been reported by earlier studies.

Although the importance of New Institutional Economics and the institutional approach for understanding pre-industrial economic development and the early growth of markets are widely accepted, it has proven to be difficult to assess more directly the effects of institutions on the functioning of markets. This paper uses empirical research on the rise of markets in late medieval Holland to illuminate some of the factors behind the development of the specific institutional framework of markets for land, labour, capital and goods, and some effects of these institutions on the actual functioning of the markets. The findings are corroborated by a tentative comparison with the functioning of markets in Flanders and eastern England.

Marriage ceremonies in London were easily available at a wide range of locations before Hardwicke's Marriage Act put a stop to clandestine marriages in 1754. Not constrained to their own parish church, many wed at centres of clandestine marriage such as the Fleet, or in other churches by licence. For particular parish populations, focusing mainly on the suburban majority but with comparisons with the mercantile city centre, this paper considers the relationship between demographic, geographic and social factors (age, residential location, and propensity to engage in premarital sex) and choice of marriage location between 1610 and 1753.

The SOCSIM micro-simulation model is used to investigate how kinship and family patterns in Britain changed as people passed through the ‘First Demographic Transition’, starting in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Second Demographic Transition’, from the 1960s. Certain types of kin, such as former partners, became more common, and others, such as ever-born siblings, less so. An ageing of generational relationships is observed: events that formerly occurred early in life, such as the experience of one's parents' deaths, are being postponed. Patterns of re-partnering are leading to more partial relationships involving step- and supplanted parents, half-siblings, former partners and stepchildren.

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.

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.