Since Vinogradoff described merchet payments as ‘the most odious’ of the numerous manorial exactions for which villein tenants were liable, the fine for marriage, classically defined as a levy due from the villein upon the marriage of his daughter, has received a good deal of attention from historians. Although the issue of marriage licences has accordingly been tackled from various perspectives, in recent years the subject at the heart of a number of contributions to the topic was the question of seigneurial control. In tackling this matter, one has to ask what kind of control a manorial lord could or would want to exercise over the matters of matrimony of his social inferiors.

An important contribution to the debate was provided in 1979 by Eleanor Searle. A key element in her argument was that marriage licences essentially constituted a tax on the chattels taken as dowry by the bride into her marriage, and as such were not universally enforced. Further, in her view merchet did not so much constitute a test of the status of the individual as one of tenure. At the same time she argued that merchets could be used by the lord to vet prospective marriage partners and thus control the transfers of tenant property lest the latter should slip into freehold tenure. By imposing financial disincentives, merchets, it was argued, also encouraged endogenous marriages. Richard Smith, while arguing that the rates of licences to marry were unlikely to reflect a proportional tax on dowries, nevertheless showed that merchets were not universally exacted and tended to fall predominantly upon richer tenants. Thus he took issue with R. Faith, who in a rejoinder to Searle's contribution suggested that the marriage licence constituted a tax on the marriage itself and was as such universally exacted.

In order to consider these problems and test some of the propositions that have been made, this study aims to examine the practice of seigneurial exaction and hence the function of marriage licences, on the one hand, and the relevance and nature of tenant evasion of merchet payments on the other, on one manor from 1330 to 1377. Changes in seigneurial policy towards merchet payments will be analysed and placed in the wider context of the demographic and socio-economic changes affecting manorial life in this period. Within this framework three intertwined aspects of the licence to marry will be examined. First, focusing on the question of which tenants were liable to pay merchets and what constituted the criteria for this liability, the theory and practice of merchet exaction will be considered. Secondly the reasons for the lord's interest in the marriages of his tenants in conjunction with the routes open to him to influence villein marriages to his advantage will be explored. Thirdly the extent and consequences of tenant evasion of merchet fines will be assessed, whilst the clash between lord and tenant over marriage fines will be viewed in the wider context of lord–tenant friction, especially in the post-Black Death period. Central to this discussion, the role and importance of women in this particular act of non-compliance will be examined.

Mortality change has traditionally been considered a necessary prerequisite to any long-term reduction in fertility. In Frank Notestein's original statement of the demographic transition theory, societies went from high to low levels of fertility and mortality by means of a path in which mortality declined first and was followed at a shorter or longer lag by fertility. Subsequently Abdel Omran outlined a number of scenarios of demographic transition, all of which reflected simultaneous or prior declines of mortality as a major factor stimulating fertility reduction. While Omran's view of the epidemiological transition goes on to emphasize many other aspects of mortality decline, his view of it as an agent for fertility decline is similar to Notestein's.

This understanding of the mortality–fertility synergy is based on two very general conceptions of historical reality which both Omran and Notestein share with many people working in the field of historical demography. For one, there has never been a society known to historians in which fertility was high and mortality low, or mortality high and fertility low, except in moments of epidemic or economic or political stress, for relatively brief periods of time, or among very specific historic sub-populations. Normally mortality and fertility have ended up adjusting to each other more or less efficiently so as to ensure moderate rates of population growth. Moreover, high levels of fertility and mortality invariably were replaced by moderate ones during the demographic transition. Secondly, one of the reasons that the demographic transition holds such an allure for most historians is that it was a period of history in which societal traditions appear to have succumbed to the weight of rational choices made by families in order to ensure their best welfare in the face of changing circumstances. The initial instigator of the change, one would reasonably suspect, had to have been a decline in mortality with increasing numbers of children surviving beyond infancy. Faced with this reality, families made the decision to give individual choice priority over social norms and ended up curtailing their fertility. The entire context of social, economic and cultural modernization contributed to people's willingness to adopt new strategies when faced with new realities, but intuitively the point of departure would seem to have been incipient mortality transformation.

The history of rural landownership at the village level has been dominated by a series of particular problems. At one end of the spectrum the process of estate-building by gentry and aristocracy, the transition from feudal manorial tenures to compact tenanted estates, and the creation of ‘closed’ or estate villages, has been relatively well documented. At the other the ‘problem’ of the disappearance of the small landowner, prompted a century ago as the rural tradition began to become a minority interest, has shifted away from its original focus on the owner-occupied family farm. It has increasingly concentrated on the fate of the smallholder and cottager and more recently on the interplay of landownership and common rights. This particular emphasis has tended to narrow research to the post-1780 parliamentary enclosure period where sources such as land tax, enclosure awards, and tithe returns make nominal linkages more feasible at a lower wealth level in society, and on a year-to-year basis.

This article concentrates not on the smallholder and cottager, but on the farming community – men (and occasionally women) making a living from holdings of 30 acres, or one to one and a half yardlands and upwards – and the choices and decisions they faced owning or tenanting lands. It examines the literature concerning communities in a broad band of central England south of the Pennines and north of the Thames. Detailed examples will be taken from mid- and northern-Buckinghamshire villages, an area of open fields but early and piecemeal enclosure, in the years between 1620 and 1800.

The quantitative study of English land markets in the three centuries after the close of the middle ages is still in its infancy. The medievalists, exploiting the conveyances of customary tenants recorded in manorial court rolls, have shown how issues such as the devolution of land within families, the frequency with which land was sold and the behaviour of the land market at moments of demographic or economic stress can be addressed by the analysis of such data either aggregatively or by looking at the landholding histories of individual participants in the land market. Early modernists have invariably approached the study of the land market in a non-quantitative fashion, usually as part of an attempt to make observations about some other characteristic of English history. Stone looked at the land market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as part of his campaign to prove that the aristocracy was in decline, Macfarlane to show that the property-holding behaviour of the English was ‘individualistic’, Habbakuk to explore the strategies by which the English aristocracy maintained its supremacy and Mingay and others to settle the debate about the effect of enclosure on the small landowner. The early modern land market has rarely, if ever, been seen as worthy of discussion in its own right.

In his pioneering and now classic 1953 study, Nationalism and social communication, Karl Deutsch laid out a social science agenda for the study of national consciousness in contemporary and historic populations. Central to this agenda was communication, and central to communication was language: ‘If we knew how to compare and measure the ability of groups and cultures to transmit information, we might gain a better understanding of their behaviour and capacities.’ At that time historians were not paying attention to social scientists, as neither historical demography nor social science history had yet been born, and Deutsch's call remained unanswered. It took the study of the secular decline of fertility in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to raise the question again for the European past. When Susan Cotts Watkins concluded that ‘those people who spoke a common language appeared to behave in similar ways with respect to reproduction, but they behaved quite differently from those with whom they could not communicate’, she offered one answer to Deutsch's inquiry about social communication and social behaviour. Apparently the spread of linguistic uniformity in populations living within long-established boundaries helped to disseminate information about controlling marital fertility. Throughout Europe, or more precisely Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, variation in fertility within nations declined and variation between nations rose.

From a different vantage point, historical questions about the process of individuation among European language communities, nationalities, and national cultures, and about communication between and within them, are inevitably questions about borders and borderlands. Nowhere is this more true than in Eastern Europe where, for the past two hundred years, few peoples remained untouched by changing borders. Official borders were alternately drawn around them and through them, separating fragments of language communities from each other, only to reunite them later and to separate them again later still. Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sense of nationality, most often language-centred, became increasingly stronger, bringing with it the emergence of identifiable ‘national cultures’, entities within which, presumably, a single national language dominated and made the flow of information easier than in the past.

In an article which recently appeared in Social History, Craig Muldrew has argued that ‘the culture of the early modern market was explicitly “moral” and not only in “severely dysfunctional years”“. During the sixteenth century, population growth brought with it a shortage of currency and a significant increase in trade through barter; moreover, the scarcity of currency produced an increase in debt or credit relations, which were based mostly on agreements that were verbal rather than written. Both tendencies were possible because the parties to credit agreements knew each other personally, and consequently believed that they could trust each other; thus, the system was held together by confidence and trust. In the course of the century, however, the increasing complexity of the market and the enlargement of exchange areas placed a strain on the ethical foundations of the market. The alteration can be demonstrated by the rapid increase in litigation over contracts and debts. Muldrew argued that markets expanded due to population growth in the sixteenth century, and that ‘increasingly complex networks of credit transactions were created’ with the result that ‘the need to maintain trust … [was] emphasized even more strongly’. But during the period the maintenance of trust occurred more and more through the intervention of a legal tribunal, while the cultural norms that directed creditor–debtor relations altered.

According to Muldrew, without more complex arrangements, credit transactions can spread only in limited social environments in which the participants share some basic moral principles: people know one another, they know who can be trusted and who cannot, and they grant extensions for payments from others because at times they request them for themselves. Credit relationships are thus ‘embedded’ in a moral economy that relies on trust, and which rests on respect for agreements guaranteed by the logic of reciprocity. A growth in the number of transactions and the development of credit networks, together with the fact that these agreements are mostly oral ones, however, tends to undermine the traditional system of trust, forcing the parties to turn to civil justice more and more frequently.

On the basis of the records from Roman archives (where commercial development occurred early but in a milieu in which the papacy influenced the economic culture), this study aims to show that the extension and the very existence of credit networks have to be viewed not only in the context of currency scarcity but also with regard to the peculiarities of the pre-industrial economy. To be more precise, in early pre-consumer societies where transactions were largely unwritten, litigation occurred as a way of establishing the terms of transactions.

Since the late 1980s historians of the family have been interested in the socio-demographic analysis of the role of domestic service in European societies during the Ancien Régime. These scholars have been concerned with the consequences of life-cycle service since it appeared that a significant proportion of Europe's inhabitants were in service at some point in their lives. This proportion was highest in countries of Northwestern Europe, such as England, where between 10 and 12 per cent of the population worked as servants, usually while young, moving readily from one household to another. This process began at an early age, around adolescence, and tended to end with a change in occupation, generally just before entering into marriage, in other words, prior to forming a separate family unit. By relating the mobility of servants to the specific characteristics of the marriage-formation model, historians have been able to highlight the contribution of domestic service to social and familial reproduction. Encouraged by their results, the next step for social historians was to elaborate an explanatory model of this system of family reproduction. Although the model offered was derived from the behaviour of a concrete social and demographic structure which was basically Northern European, it was nonetheless presented as the principal model for all of Western Europe.

For most people in pre-industrial Sweden, the occupation of being a servant was not a lifetime job but a temporary one at which they tried their hand for a limited period during their lives. The Western European marriage pattern with its late age at marriage meant that most individuals spent about 10–15 years preparing for adulthood: saving up, being trained and seeking a partner for life. During this phase of their lives they worked as servants, changed employer frequently and therefore migrated.

Until the late eighteenth century the social structure in the Swedish countryside was quite homogeneous. The nobility possessed large estates which formed an important source of employment. These were, however, few in number, and the dominant social groups were peasants, freeholders (skattebönder) and tenants on crown or noble land (kronobönder, frälsebönder), as well as servants in peasant households or on the estates. There were, of course, people with other occupations, but they did not constitute large social groups. Thus, servants formed a special social category, but, as I mentioned, very few people belonged to the category for life. Let us contrast this homogeneous picture with the diversified social structure in the late nineteenth century.

In recent years the analysis of individual communities in England has shed increasing light on their economic, social, demographic, cultural and religious development during the three centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporaneously, and to some extent resulting from these local studies, there has been a growing interest in the family and patterns of inheritance. Similarly, among social anthropologists there has been the development of the concept of ‘strategy’ with writings on marriage, fertility, inheritance and migration strategies, although these may be regarded as components of general family strategies. Whereas in some writings strategies are shown as being pursued by individuals for their own purposes, others focused on family strategies, particularly ones designed to keep a family landholding from being divided. However, whether these studies of social organization in continental Europe and Asia can be applied to the English experience remains to be seen. To begin with they are all concerned with peasant landholding and as such may not be appropriate to the English experience where the debate on whether a peasantry even existed was begun by Macfarlane's The origins of English individualism in 1978.

Secondly, there is no universal agreement on what kind of strategies were being followed, either individualistic or familial. Thirdly, there remains the question as to whether the strategies were intentional and the outcome of rational decision-making, or subconscious and rooted in implicitly accepted and long-established principles. These could have been that a landholding should remain undivided, that men had primacy over women in inheritance, that primogeniture would be practised and that younger brothers would not challenge their eldest brother's inheritance. A refinement of these approaches has been the view that family strategies could be very different. Some may have wished to hold on to the family estate and pass it on to the next generation. Others wanted to enlarge it and may have needed to do so for familial reasons, and yet more families may have wanted to create an estate where none yet existed. But in all cases, it is stated, there were families consciously planning and pursuing a strategy for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, it is said that these strategies could only be pursued by families above the level of the poor and only became possible in western Europe in the sixteenth century as a result of changing attitudes and growing individualistic commercialism.

It has been more than thirty years since E. A. Wrigley demonstrated, in a still-famous article, that the technique of ‘family reconstitution’, as developed in France by Louis Henry and before then applied only to French parishes and elite groups, could be used in English historical demography. Although English parish registers seldom supply nearly as much detail as found in some French ones, and many registers are incomplete owing to an interruption of registration during the Civil War – or after 1789, 1769, or even 1729 – some English parishes were discovered whose registers allow adequate identification of the participants in all demographic events. Furthermore, English parish registers have one advantage over the French: they often started in the mid-sixteenth century (not the early seventeenth).

The parish Wrigley chose to illustrate the alluring prospects for English historical demographers, as is well known, was Colyton in Devonshire. His article, however, was not merely a programmatic one setting forth the possible benefits – and costs – of family reconstitution. He had also made an unexpected discovery: that there may well have been family limitation in England (as the title of his article proclaimed) or, more specifically, in Colyton in the period from 1647 to 1719.

The structure of nineteenth-century Greek households remains largely unknown. The handful of published articles and books based on quantitative analysis suggest the existence and persistence of many household forms among Greek populations. The most extensive study, and the only one dealing with an urban population, focuses on Athens. In The Making of the modern Greek family, Sant Cassia and Bada argue that an ‘urban model’ had emerged by the 1830s. Adopted from the nikokirei ‘upper-class’ group, households were characterized by equal partibility of parental property among sons and daughters, the generous endowment of daughters at marriage and ‘a tendency towards neolocality’ (the formation of an independent household on marriage). Gradually, this ‘Athenian model’ of property transmission and household organization ‘was legitimized by the church and by popular literature, and eventually became the cultural norm not merely for townspeople but for those in the countryside as well’. The authors are eager to point out that these ‘family forms and patterns of property transmission in Greece, especially in urban areas, are “new” rather than continuations of traditional rural patterns’, implying the ‘export’ of these new forms from the Athenian to other urban and rural populations.

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.

English population history from family reconstitution 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997) is an impressive volume. This ambitious study represents the culmination of a quarter-century of laborious research by four of the most accomplished practitioners of English historical demography, E. A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J. E. Oeppen, and R. S. Schofield. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming; the book contains 121 tables and 73 graphs, and it weighs in at almost 2½ pounds. The study is a landmark in the field of pre-industrial population history. It contributes important new evidence on long-run trends in fertility, mortality, and marriage behaviour. Even more exciting than the refinement of the aggregate results contained in previous work by the Cambridge Group, however, is the new kinds of analyses made possible by the existence of microdata. The book marshals an array of innovative methods to address a remarkable assortment of demographic issues. The authors address dozens of topics previously hidden from view, ranging from an ingenious analysis of the relative mortality of monozygotic and dyzygotic twins, to an important investigation of lifetime fecundity, to an exhaustive analysis of the seasonality of mortality.

J. Robin, From childhood to middle age: cohort analysis in Colyton, 1851–1891. (Cambridge: Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Working Paper Series, no. 1, n.d.). Pages iv+83. £2.50.

H. Cunningham and P. P. Viazzo (eds.), Child labour in historical perspective, 1800–1985: case studies from Europe, Japan and Colombia. (Florence: United Nations Children's Fund, International Child Development Centre, 1996.) Pages 105. US$9.00.

L. Marks, Metropolitan maternity: maternal and infant welfare services in early-twentieth century London. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.) Pages xxii+344.

A. Walker (ed.), The new generational contract: intergenerational relations, old age and welfare. (London: UCL Press, 1996). Pages xiii+241.

These four publications vary significantly in their geographical coverage and general subject matter, but it is still possible to identify a number of common themes. They are particularly important for what they reveal about the links between formal welfare provision, protective legislation, family care, and the standard of living. They also yield many individual insights into such matters as family reconstitution, migration, child labour, working conditions, municipal welfare services, the decline of infant and maternal mortality, and the possible existence of a demographic threat to the viability of modern welfare states.

‘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.