This article re-examines the late medieval market in freehold land, the extent to which it was governed by market forces as opposed to political or social constraints, and how this contributed to the commercialisation of the late medieval English economy. We employ a valuable new resource for study of this topic in the form of an extensive dataset on late medieval English freehold property transactions. Through analysis of this data, we examine how the level of market activity (the number of sales) and the nature of the properties (the relative proportions of different types of asset) varied across regions and over time. In particular, we consider the impact of exogenous factors and the effects of growing commercialisation. We argue that peaks of activity following periods of crisis (Great Famine and Black Death) indicate that property ownership became open to market speculation. In so doing, we present an important new perspective on the long-term evolution of the medieval English property market.

The quality of the statistical archives of the Don Army Territory for the period 1867–1916 offers a unique opportunity to compare the denominations present (Orthodox, Old Believers and Coreligionists, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Armenian-Gregorians, Lamaist Buddhists and Muslims) in a context of urbanisation, secularisation and industrialisation. The observance of religious interdicts varied between and within denominations depending on levels of urbanisation and the district considered. These contrasts reveal the segmentation of Don society, the constraints imposed by agrarian imperatives and military obligations, the differences in the economy and between town and country, and the advance of secularisation or persistence of tradition.

When large parts of the south-western Netherlands flooded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the main cause was insufficient maintenance of the sea defences. The subsequent re-embankment of the polders resulted in changes to both soil conditions and property relations in the region. The Church and the local peasants lost land and members of the urban bourgeoisie became the most important landowners. Unlike their risk-averse predecessors, these capitalist landlords were prepared to invest in drainage. They were also able to organise state support for those polders that were at risk of flooding. Tenant and yeomen farmers had an equally important role as they maintained the fertility of the soil and were prepared to invest in the upkeep of the flood defences.

This article questions whether indoor medical care for the elderly provided under the poor law and by voluntary hospitals during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century was rationed on the basis of age and, given that the elderly were discriminated against compared with other age groups, how their ability to secure medical care changed over time and between providers.

The research was motivated by the current debate on the allocation of scarce health care resources in the British National Health Service. This debate has contrasted the traditional approach of doctors who ration care on the basis of medical need, that is through clinical assessment of a patient's state of health, with new solutions developed by health economists and medical ethicists who seek to maximize the health care outputs society can buy or the welfare individuals can achieve over their lifetime.

I use admission and discharge registers from two case studies – a voluntary hospital in Bristol and a workhouse infirmary in East London – to test the following hypothesis: that during the period medical resources, as defined by admissions and hospital days, were allocated according to the medical need of age groups. Differential access to medical and nursing staff, to remedies or interventions, and standards of hygiene or diet are not considered. Although these care components were clearly important, and some aggregate indicators may be calculated for the two providers, the available sources do not allow comparison of the allocation of these components between age groups.

Section II outlines the theoretical framework underpinning this article and Section III introduces the historical context. The sources of data are described in Section IV and the evidence is presented in Section V. The final section contributes to the historiography of old age for nineteenth-century England by suggesting ways in which to interpret the findings.

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 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 argues that naming can reveal personal ideologies, family connections, social interactions and changes in the concerns of the inhabitants of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ethnic and religious differences are indicated by the differing naming practices used by the Gaelic Irish, Old English and New English, Scots and Welsh inhabitants of Ireland. Much can be divined about the symbolism underlying naming practice when the names given to children are compared with those of their parents, godparents, family members and other significant individuals. The associated importance of nicknames and by-names, wordplay about names, and the circumstances under which people might change their names are also considered.

The study documents fluctuations of proto-industrial income, of occupation, debt and presence on land markets across the life course for rural households in a major proto-industrial region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These fluctuations are interpreted on the basis that a major objective of households is to equalize their income across different stages of their development. The permanent income hypothesis is then extended to take into account land purchases and debt-contracting that result from the need to adjust land and capital to fluctuations in the size of the family labour force across the family cycle and from endeavours to improve the family's welfare by increasing the labour to land ratio. The empirical material presented shows marked fluctuations of income from proto-industrial work across the life course and suggests the existence of permanent income-cum-accumulation strategies to cope with these fluctuations.

Changing established systems of government entitlement is a thorny proposition, even for popular states with sturdy holds on the reigns of power. The Russian Federation, in the throes of a severe economic downturn, extreme political instability and social crisis, has nonetheless altered the official stance toward forms of entitlement from the previous regime. Benefits cut from the ‘social contract’ have included guaranteed employment, free post-secondary education and access to state-subsidized apartments, in attempts to redefine the lines of authority and responsibility between citizens and the state. Other lines of responsibility appear sacrosanct. The Soviet pension system, more specifically the old age and service pensions, remains in place, but with extreme delays in payment, poor indexing to the cost of living and high levels of tax evasion.

In this article I examine the ways in which both the legacy of Soviet pension policies and post-1991 economic and social trends have constrained policy options concerning pension reform, particularly in reference to old age pensions, and prevented a serious re-evaluation of pension provision. The Russian Federation government inherited a pension system ill-equipped to cope with its aging population. However, the previous pension system did deliver payments on a regular basis to nearly one in five citizens before 1991. Unlike other areas of often unfulfillable social services guarantees (housing for families, quality health care and free access to higher education), the pension system represented a Soviet social programme that provided consistent direct assistance to a large proportion of the population. Pension payments were an expected entitlement.

As elsewhere in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, general dissatisfaction among Dutch doctors with their position in society and with overall levels of public health led to an active endeavour to raise their own status and to improve the level of public hygiene. For the most part these sanitary reformers or hygienists were inspired by the ‘Bodentheorie’ (literally ‘soil theory’) of the Munich hygienist Max von Pettenkofer, which postulated a specific relationship between chemical and biological processes in soil and air and in the human body, and by the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, according to whom statistics were an important means to social progress. The hygienists stressed the need for objective measures of health, including empirical research, standardization of data collection, and increased dissemination of data.

Although a national system of death registration had been functioning in the Netherlands for more than thirty years, there was no national registration of causes of death. Only local registration of causes existed and these were considered insufficient and inaccurate.

John Graunt's pioneering study, Natural and Political Observations Made upon on the Bills of Mortality (1662) has been overlooked as a source for ideas about the importance of child mortality in an urban environment. Graunt seems to have been the first to arrive at an infant mortality rate (IMR), but this has been little explored. Graunt helped to define ‘the urban penalty’, but not in terms of the IMR. The article explains Graunt's focus on other aspects of urban mortality in relation to his need to reassure those in government, his methodology, and above all his gender. For context, the article looks at attitudes to childhood among members of the influential Hartlib circle of reformers, with which Graunt was connected. These male writers were greatly concerned about children, but seem to have shared with Graunt the traditional idea that children under the age of about seven were the responsibility of women.

This article is a case study addressing the issues of concubines, legitimacy and inheritance in early modern Japan. Although there was some discussion about the legal status of concubines/mistresses in the late nineteenth century in Meiji Japan, the topic has attracted surprisingly little recent research. The Meiji debate was concerned with how to treat concubines under a system that both outlawed bigamy and recognized common law marriages. The later academic debate refers back to the earlier interpretations of the legal and social status of concubines, with one side claiming they were nearly equal to wives and the other claiming they were little more than servants. In this study I review the above debates and then address the issue with a study of an inheritance case that began in 1819 when Fukui Sakuzaemon adopted an heir from outside the family. Sakuzaemon's concubine Iwa played an important role in the inheritance agreement and in further developments in the suit, including later efforts to disinherit the new head and gain support for her daughters by Sakuzaemon. I use the documents from this complicated case to analyse the social and legal statuses of Iwa and the relationship of her daughters to the Fukui family and its assets.

A study of the parish records of St Peter upon Cornhill in London from 1580 to 1605 revealed that children suffered a greater increase in mortality than adults in the plague years of 1593 and 1603, and servants accounted for the majority of deaths within the 15–24 age group. Some family groups avoided the plague altogether, others suffered a single burial, however in some cases, individuals within the same family household were buried within a short period of each other. The epidemiological pattern is complex and is moderated by social and demographic networks. Comparisons are made with modern epidemics caused by Yersinia pestis.

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.

During the night of 24 May 1524 a fire broke out in the city of Troyes in the French province of Champagne, a fire which was to rage for two days and nights, destroying up to a quarter of the town (including at least 300 houses) and seriously damaging three of the city's churches. A number of fatalities was also reported. In the aftermath of the fire, as an assessment of the damage was made, the city council undertook a review of municipal security and ordered the expulsion of non-natives of Troyes, the safe storage of inflammable materials and the provision of water outside each house. Emergency grain supplies were also organized, as many stores had been destroyed in what had already been a poor yield that year. The extent of the fire reveals the vulnerability of urban communities at a time when fire-fighting methods were still extremely primitive and fire insurance non-existent, but the sources also demonstrate the capacity of these communities to recover from such a setback. For fire was a common enough occurrence in cities in this period, an everyday hazard in narrow streets where houses were huddled together and the primary building material and source of fuel, for both domestic use and manufacturing, was wood. Indeed, there is now a substantial literature on urban fires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which concentrates largely on the physical damage inflicted, the sources of relief available to the victims and the precautions to be taken to prevent a recurrence of such misfortune.

What was the role of the family in individual reproductive decisions during state socialism? Can the family help to understand regional variations in fertility decline? This study provides an in-depth analysis of family relationships and their influences on individual reproductive decisions during the transition from first to second birth in Soviet Ukraine. Life history interviews are used to compare the western and eastern borderland cities of Lviv and Kharkiv, respectively, around 1950–1975. The findings reveal that regional differences in intergenerational ties and spousal cooperation shaped two reproductive strategies of transition to second birth, specifically postponing in Kharkiv and spacing in Lviv.

The Nahua (Aztecs) of ancient Mexico lived in large, extended family households (calli). A fundamental tenet of family history is that in the past high mortality was a major obstacle to household complexity. This was not the case for the Nahua, whose life expectancy was probably worse than any seen in Europe since the Black Death. Nahua populations were characterized by patriarchy, child marriage and greater proportions of complex and more diverse households than in regions of Europe which historians have identified as containing many complex households. Among the Nahua, although relationships within the household could be either uxorilocal or virilocal (relationship through the wife or the husband), subordination of women to male patriarchs was extensive. Most girls were married (cohabiting) well before the age of puberty. Thus, childless couples were common, but males without children rarely attained headship. While neither polygamy nor abandonment was widespread, their significance for gender oppression should not be denied. Widowhood offered new opportunities for companionship, but only for widowers. For widows, remarriage was infrequent and subordination to a male relative was inevitable. In modern Mexico, few remnants of this pre-conquest household system remain. According to the 1990 census, fewer than 10 per cent of Mexicans live as extended kin or as non-relatives in a household, even in rural Morelos where four centuries ago the compound family was the norm. The few modern examples of multiple family households tend to be Hispanic-like virilocal, patrilineal extended families.