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 examines the incidence of moneylending and the supply of cash in four rural communities and one small urban centre in Cheshire through the seventeenth century. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from wills and inventories, supplemented by such probate accounts and depositions as are available. It considers the questions of who lent money and to whom, for what purposes and in what amounts. It also examines the incidence of cash holdings in inventories and the effect that the Civil War and its aftermath had upon the availability of cash.

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.

Based on the processing of statistical data concerning population and the major cultural infrastructures in the Italian regions from 1863 on, this article aims to demonstrate that the inhabitants of the ‘Mezzogiorno’ have had not only lesser incomes than those of the inhabitants of the Central and Northern regions, but also smaller chances to make use of Italy's cultural assets, considered in a broad sense. In the long run these disadvantages have strengthened the already high social disparities between the Centre, North and South of Italy and help to explain the roots of the dualism between the two parts of the country.

Boarding out and fostering poor children was a favoured method of poor relief in many rural areas in northern Europe. This article discusses children who were boarded out to foster-parents by public auction in a rural parish in northern nineteenth-century Sweden. Poverty was the main reason why children were boarded out, frequently associated with loss of parents and difficulties in providing for a large household. It is suggested that the Swedish system of boarding out poor children must be understood in the context of a welfare system where cost efficiency was important. The auction method was used in spite of the risks involved because it was considered to be the best way to provide poor children with food, clothes, shelter and care, while keeping the compensation to the foster-parents at a reasonably low level.

In this paper, an attempt will be made to discuss the likely context for pre-plague indications of expropriation and its limits. There is plentiful evidence of an active land market in medieval villages by the end of the thirteenth century, and most likely for some time earlier. Fluctuation in the rate of buying and selling coincided with difficult harvest years and suggests a link between impecunious peasant sellers and wealthier peasant buyers. There is also some association between the selling of land and pre-existing indebtedness. In a period of partial commercial and market development, the extent to which exchange of land or of moveables proceeded to a significant structural redistribution of land and resources was constrained, and even in those parts of the country where an early peasant land market was well-established, significant adjustment is not evident. Instead, impediments to expropriation, such as seigneurial control of peasant land and limited capacity for extensive capital accumulation, acted as constraints on significant accumulation and redistribution. That said, there is limited suggestion in our sources of a redistribution of property rights associable with inequality of dealing and the advantage of wealthier landholders and creditors. In exploring this last point, particular use is made of the court records for the Welsh marcher lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd.

This article reconstructs the size and organisation of the rural market in hired labour in fourteenth-century England, providing a comparative reference point for arrangements elsewhere in medieval Europe. Quantitative assessment of 1,445 manorial court sessions from six manors casts new light on the English labour market, which was larger and less regulated than previously assumed and the government's wide-ranging labour legislation in the wake of the Black Death was novel in its scale and provisions. Contrary to received wisdom, manorial authorities made few efforts to regulate labour. The older view had placed an over-reliance on the early work of W.O. Ault and had ignored the significance of nil returns. The reasons for the lack of regulation, and its implications for our understanding of the complex interaction between pandemics, labour markets, and legal responses are explored. Finally, the study illustrates how legal responses to pandemics can have inadvertent yet profound consequences.

The author studies patterns of income-earning activities of Soviet urban households from the end of 1930s to the end of 1960s. The analysis focuses on the dynamic of and reasons for the increases in the labour participation rate of the Soviet urban population, and in the proportion of households in which two members were employed by the state, and the consequences. The period saw two mass drives to recruit into the state sector adults who had previously been unemployed, the bulk of whom consisted of former housewives, the first drive occurring during the Second World War and the second in the late 1950s and the 1960s. The combined pressures exerted by the law and by material hardship account for the wartime increase in participation in the labour market. On the other hand, the second period of major expansion was much more voluntary and was accompanied by improved living standards. Despite the increase in remunerated employment there were no significant changes in the way tasks within the household were allocated on the basis of gender. This put an increasing strain on women, called the ‘double burden’ (household duties and paid work). The consequences were twofold: a decrease in fertility, and further encouragement for the formation of the many extended and multiple family households present in the urban society of the USSR.

The historiography of epidemics and crime suggests that we might find effects of plague on criminal behaviour in the years of the Black Death and its aftermath, yet this question has not been systematically investigated by late medieval historians. For the first time, a continuous series of trial records covering the 1340s – for the city of Bologna – is here analysed, and the issue of a ‘breakdown in law and order’ is addressed. The particular patterns of criminal prosecution are revealed and explained, including unusual and unexpected features of continuity in 1348, and surprising developments in the years following, with changes in political context and judicial procedures outweighing any ongoing effects of plague.

Private contracts of many different kinds were at the heart of the rural economy in medieval and early modern Europe. This article considers some of the key issues involved in the study of those contracts, and of the institutions that facilitated their registration and enforcement. Drawing on examples from medieval England as well as the articles in this special issue of the journal, it is argued that complex and effective ‘public-order’ structures for contract registration and enforcement – principally various kinds of law court – were ubiquitous in European villages and small towns in this era.

The progress of industrialization throughout the nineteenth century had profound effects on health and mortality. One relationship that contemporaries found particularly alarming was the potentially damaging effect that the employment of women in industry outside the home could have on their families' health. The fear expressed by public health officials was that women's employment would lead to neglect of their family duties and subsequently put their children's health at risk. Women were also regarded as more susceptible to industrial hazards, particularly to lead. Hence, women's work was seen to have important consequences for maternal and infant health and was considered incompatible with their traditional duties within the home. The introduction of legislation to restrict women's employment opportunities during the latter half of the nineteenth century was partly in recognition of this conflict between work and home. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the importance of good mothering was increasingly cited by public health reformers, mainly male and middle-class, alarmed at the persistent high level of infant mortality in urban areas. In industrial areas where there were opportunities for women's employment, the extent to which it contributed to high levels of mortality became a prominent public health issue associated with growing concern over standards of motherhood. In response to increasing agitation over the employment of mothers, the 1891 Factory Act prohibited employers from knowingly hiring women within a month of childbirth.

Despite the recent expansion in studies of medieval women, uncertainty surrounds their married lives due to the social and legal constraints that existed at that time. Here it is argued that feet of fines provide a lens, albeit partial, on the activities of married women who were effectively managing the disposal and inheritance of their landed estates. At the same time the importance to the purchaser of ensuring the lawful acquisition of the property is also observed. As a result, greater insights into married women and their property in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are obtained.

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.

In the second half of the nineteenth century in the remote farming district of Dungog in the colony of New South Wales on the Australian continent, widows faced harsh economic realities. Using civil registration records, census data, newspaper reports, statistical returns, family histories and other sources, we have, where possible, reconstructed the lives of these widows, particularly those with dependent children. This paper discusses the range of survival strategies used. It presents statistical evidence from official records, and adds vignettes of the lives of a handful of widows whose strategies can be explored more completely using additional historical sources.

This article makes use of the rich deposits of pre-trial documents in the court archives of early modern Wales, focusing on the county of Denbighshire, to investigate attitudes and responses to theft. Qualitative research on this subject tends to emphasize or privilege actively law-enforcing behaviour that led to trials; while that is the inevitable emphasis of court records, I argue that we need to examine witness testimonies more closely in order to understand responses that did not match up to the ideals of vigilance and communal responsibility. Drawing on modern criminological research, I explore ‘suspicion’ and the decision-making processes leading to various outcomes: non-action; investigation and prosecution; alternative resolutions that bypassed the courts. Finally, I explore the everyday ‘world of stolen goods’ and its social and economic rewards in local networks of reciprocal favours, gifts and alliances.

This article discusses how widows and widowers were provided for in early modern Sweden, focussing in particular on the use of wills. The investigated area is the parish of Undersåker in Jämtland, northern Sweden, and the period c. 1750 to 1915. The point of departure is the fact that Swedish medieval and early modern law did give quite strong property rights to widows and widowers. Therefore, if these rights were respected by family members and enforced by the courts, it was hard to see any good reason for taking extra precautions, like making a will to the benefit of the spouse who lived longest. In view of this, the fact that wills were nevertheless set up, albeit rarely, needs explaining. During the period 475 wills were set up, according to the archives. Of these 240 were mutual wills; approximately 3 per cent of all couples set up a mutual will, with the intention of letting the surviving spouse retain the estate undivided. Often, there was a connection between the decision to set up a will and lack of children and/or remarriage. Will-makers came from all social strata, the affluent as well as the quite poor. Sometimes, a series of wills from the same couple has been preserved, indicating that will-making could be part of a long-term strategy of planning for old age and adapting to new circumstances. The general conclusion is that wills can often be seen as a sign of fear: fear that the legal rights with which widows and widowers were invested would not, after all, be respected. This fear appears to have been particularly strong if the couple lacked offspring.

This study focuses on two closely related exclusionary guild policies implemented in Germany towards the latter part of the sixteenth century: the barring of illegitimates and women. The article addresses the reasons for and, more importantly, the repercussions of these exclusions, which affected many cultural and mentality patterns and led to the social and psychological scarring of illegitimates and their unwed mothers for centuries to come.