In July 1991, thirty-five scholars met at the fourteenth-century Certosa of Pontignano in Siena for a three-day colloquium (jointly sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique and the Università degli Studi di Siena) on the topic of relationships between cadets et aînés, or younger and elder siblings. The geographical interests of the participants ranged from the frontier of the North American continent to the whole of the European, while their collective temporal expertise extended from biblical times to the present. The structure of the thematic sessions and the specific issues addressed in the course of the colloquium had been set out in countless early meetings of a ‘scientific committee’, comprising Georges Ravis-Giordani, Pier Giorgio Solinas, Martine Segalen, Lloyd Bonfield and Richard Wall. In large measure, the membership of that committee with respect to discipline and the scholarly agenda that it produced resembled the articulated goals of Continuity and Change. It therefore seemed appropriate that a selection of papers read at the meeting, and subsequently revised in light of the lively dialogue that followed the formal presentations, should provide the basis for the fifth special issue to grace the pages of this journal.

This study uses data on income and distribution of relief payments from local poor relief tables for 512 rural parishes in Flanders (present-day Belgium) in 1807 to examine spatial variation in poor relief practices in a region characterised by well-established local poor relief institutions and marked socio-economic differences. By combining data on poor relief with local data on population, landholding and occupational structure, we map out the relative importance of regional economies and local variation in producing distinct poor relief regimes. The results show that although local variation was considerable, the nature and extent of this variation interacted with structural socio-economic characteristics to produce regional patterns, signalling that local variation did not so much contradict as constitute regional patterns in poor relief regimes. The importance of socio-economic characteristics in determining both regional patterns and local variation supports our more general contention that local and regional levels of analysis represent a more fruitful avenue for understanding variations in poor relief practices than national differences in legislation, and therefore has implications for the comparative study of poor relief practices in a wider international context.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, thousands of Londoners (and people from the rest of England) married clandestinely at the Fleet Prison. More weddings were celebrated there than any other location in England. This article will examine quantitatively who was marrying there, detailing their premarital status, origin and occupation. It will show that Londoners who married at the Fleet were broadly representative of London's population topography and occupational structure. The article also examines the non-Londoners who married at the Fleet, and shows that by c. 1750 the Fleet was hosting at least 10 per cent of all marriages in England.

Under the Ancien Régime in Spain local granaries (in Spanish, pósitos) acted as welfare institutions designed to help small farmers in times of crisis. During the first third of the twentieth century they were subject to an intense reorganisation in Spain and this transformed them into the only microfinance institution to which a significant part of the country's rural population had access. However, as the granaries were beginning to get their finances in order, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the ensuing change in political regime meant that from 1950 onwards they found themselves relegated to the financial margins. The longevity of the granaries makes them an interesting example of a type of financial institution that was able to adapt to different political regimes by changing the way they operated while maintaining their core objective of supporting small farmers.

‘The most important principle of all our inheritance and family law is the preservation of the patrimony.’

—Josep Faus i Condomines, 1907

Marriage strategies leading to the biological and social reproduction of the family were the main goal of stem family households in Catalonia. This goal was closely linked to the maintenance or increase of the family inheritance, mostly in terms of arable land. The ‘house’, which in Catalonia connotes the family household, lay at the centre of this system. The aim of this article is to analyse some Catalan marriage strategies, together with inheritance and social customs. This will be carried out through an analysis of the matrimonial behaviour of a stem family living in the village of Sant Pere de Riudebitlles over 300 years, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. We will show how this family achieved its main biological and social reproduction goals. Our inquiries use the techniques of L. Ferrer-Alòs and A. Fauve-Chamoux. As D. S. Reher has remarked, ‘The only way to flesh this out adequately is to look at the system from inside out, in terms of the way individual families sorted out their destinies within the context they had inherited…it would also be most interesting to be able to observe succession strategies of families according to their concrete demographic constraints such as number, age, and gender distribution of their offspring surviving past early childhood.’

P. Laslett – first in 1972 and later in 1983 – coined a typology for the analysis of the household. He defined a household as a domestic coresident group, wherein people with or without family ties live together, sharing the main meals. The Laslett household classification scheme has been widely used by researchers. However, Laslett's scheme has had some critics, who object to its static approach to family and household analysis. Our view is that domestic coresident group analysis should be dynamic; that is to say, we should study the household by observing its different stages, and considering the social, economic and historical framework of its geographical area. This framework helps us to determine the logic of family behaviour and the various strategies which a family might pursue in order to achieve a particular goal. We believe that these aims do not stand in contradiction to the Laslett typology.

Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, the elderly in the distant past could not always rely on voluntary care. Therefore, some of them had to develop strategies to secure assistance during old age. We focus on towns in the Low Countries, where family ties were weak, and ageing individuals likely had to plan for old age. We show how members of the middling layers of society could use wills and retirement contracts to ensure care provided by both kin and non-kin, and also to secure living standards during their final years. By recording such contracts, the elderly remained in control of their lives, despite their advancing years.

This article studies the development of poor relief in the rural areas of the diocese of Tortona in the eighteenth century, through the analysis of the parish reports written for the pastoral visits of bishops Giulio Resta and Giuseppe Lodovico Andujar in 1741 and 1743. The reports record the most important assistance activities organised by different social actors: dowries for poor girls; bread, money and clothing to distribute to the poor; but also formal support in the form of hospitals providing shelter and care for pilgrims and the sick; the monti di pietà, which loaned money and the grain stores, which provided essential loans of grain. The diocese of Tortona in the eighteenth century represents a privileged point of view for understanding how the development of poor relief in the ancien régime was influenced by the political and institutional, geographical, landowning and socio-ecomomic context. Here, a complex institutional situation, combined with a diverse geographical and socio-economic context, gave rise to a variety of poor relief systems.

Today as in the past, most often crises take people by surprise. This fact has recently provoked strong criticism of the ability of an economic theory to predict crises, to understand their course and to establish solutions to mitigate their effects. History can thus serve as a reservoir of facts and experiences, and the use of a broad chronological perspective has been recently highlighted as essential to providing a wider, comparative knowledge of past crises. Recent economic historiography has highlighted the importance of studying financial and commercial crises alongside agrarian and demographic crises, as well as questioning specific aspects of these shocks. Another important dimension stressed by recent historical studies is the importance of recognising that crises in the past occurred against a background in which uncertainty was the norm. In societies that experienced various forms of ordinary uncertainty (linked for example to the ‘dead’ season in food or textile production), crises constitute peaks of exceptional uncertainty.

This article makes use of autobiographies and oral interviews in order to explore the lifestyles of the first generation of immigrants within one particular provincial Jewish community – the Gorbals in Glasgow – between 1890 and 1945. The experience of this generation of immigrants was characterised by diversity to an extent that was not true of the second generation. Thus, the community cannot be described in terms of either ‘assimilation’ or ‘separation’. Instead, an alternative description has been coined: ‘variegated acculturation’ in order to encompass the complexity of the lives of the immigrants.

Although ownership of real property was crucial to the economic opportunities of medieval urban women, few studies systematically investigate the gender distribution of medieval real property over time. Using censiers (rarely used sources), this article approaches this question through a socio-geographical analysis of Brussels. The study finds that, despite the region's egalitarian inheritance laws, female ownership of real property was relatively limited, and it declined during the late Middle Ages. This decrease accelerated during economic crises, and especially affected the property of non-elite women. Further research on the changing economic opportunities of medieval women would benefit from a more explicit discussion of non-labour income sources and social status.

This paper explores the problems that hampered the effective functioning of charitable activities for the English poor during the later medieval years and sixteenth century and examines how the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 addressed those issues. It considers four types of challenges stemming from individual negligence or greed as well as the systemic legal obstacles that underlay them. The solutions provided by the Elizabethan Poor Laws placed charitable projects on a more solid legal and administrative footing, facilitating their expansion in the following centuries.

‘A woman who has had an illegitimate child is looked on with contempt, and would not be associated with. But the young women have a great deal of discretion, and few of them go astray in that way.’

Parish of St. Mary's, Cork, 1835

While the claim may seem surprising, Irish society enjoys no mean place in the history of sexuality. Malthus may be said to have re-focused attention on the folly of giving free rein to the passion between the sexes, and some historians, as well as contemporary commentators, viewed the state of pre-Famine Ireland as a confirmation of the dangers of runaway population growth. Post-Famine Irish society, by contrast, gave the appearance of being fashioned according to the principles of Malthusian population policy: an older age at marriage for men and women, a rising incidence of permanent celibacy and a relative absence of ‘vice’. Indeed, long before the end of the Victorian era Irish people were renowned for their prudential approach to matters sexual. This extended to sex outside marriage. Irish illegitimacy rates were amongst the lowest in the Western world. Ideologues protested the virtue and purity of Irish women, and of the Irish race more generally.

Although the Catholic Church claimed to control marriage, in late-eighteenth-century Malta the faithful still considered matrimony to be a personal affair. The study is based upon episcopal court records and parish registers, which reveal substantial numbers of clandestine marriages, contravening the Council of Trent's directives concerning entry into marriage. Couples separated from each other at will, without the Church's consent. A few took other partners, despite the inquisitors' nets. Couples viewed sexual relations as matters for themselves to regulate, and sex outside marriage as not something into which the Church was to intrude. Especially noteworthy in this respect were relations between betrothed, since a man would not marry a woman who could not bear children.