The articles in this special issue of Continuity and Change arose from a workshop held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, between 9 and 11 September 1999, hosted by the Universitat de les Illes Balears. The workshop was called to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of another conference, that held in Cambridge at the Faculty of History and at Trinity College in September 1969. It was this conference in 1969 that resulted in the publication of Household and family in past time: comparative studies in the size and structure of the domestic group over the last three centuries in England, France, Serbia, Japan and colonial North America, with further material from Western Europe, which itself has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. Household and family in past time (hereafter abbreviated to HFPT), in part largely due to the ‘analytic introduction on the history of the family’ contributed by Peter Laslett, subsequently became a seminal work in the field. It not only mapped out the methodological groundwork for the quantitative study of the historical co-resident domestic group, but perhaps unwittingly helped define a research agenda into comparative familial and social structural history that was followed for many years by Laslett, his colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, and researchers from around the world. It became in a sense a manifesto, and one with which Peter Laslett personally was inexorably linked. Thus, with the sad death of Peter on 8 November 2001, this special issue of Continuity and Change took on a new double purpose: not only to mark the path-breaking 1969 conference and the subsequent publication of HFPT, but also to pay tribute to the remarkable life and work of Peter Laslett.

The author makes the argument that the presence of a murder law during the Roman monarchy and the absence of such a law during the republic reflects the difference in the nature of authority in these two political institutions. The centralized authority of the monarchy demanded a control over the right to kill. An act of homicide practised by another infringed upon the king's authority and so a murder law was promulgated. When the Romans expelled their kings, authority devolved onto individual patres and this decentralized leadership under the republic meant that the act of homicide was no longer a matter of concern for the state.

Twenty years have passed since Hans Eyvind Næss published what remains the only complete study of Norwegian witchcraft trials. This article considers the work done since that time, and surveys the state of research on witchcraft trials in Norway. Drawing on a recent registration of all known extant witchcraft trial records in Norway as well as recent research, I show how there was a much higher degree of regional differences within Norway than Næss allowed for, as well as a much greater degree of diabolism (the charge that witches took Satan as their lord) in Norwegian trials.

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.

The infants left at the London Foundling Hospital in the first twenty years of its operation have generally been classed as illegitimate. This study examines some of the characteristics of the children who entered the hospital between 1741 and 1760, and points to a far larger component of legitimate infants than has previously been suspected, up to a third being born in wedlock. The backgrounds of the children varied considerably, as did the reasons for their abandonment, with a stress on personal and economic misfortune for both married and single parents. The higher level of legitimacy among the foundlings than has been thought has implications for the illegitimacy ratio of London, pointing to relatively low levels, in common with those found for the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

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.

This article examines the labour market for day labourers in the Southern Low Countries during the eighteenth century from the perspective of reciprocal exchange. In particular I will look at wage payment structures and their economic and social foundations. In contrast with other agricultural regions, wage payments in proto-industrialized inland Flanders were highly diversified. Large farmers and day labourers engaged in a system of reciprocal exchange of labour, goods and services in which monetary payments played only a secondary role. I find that both employers and employees had strong reasons for maintaining this exchange relationship and that they both, in their own ways, benefited from this mutual dependency.

In Household and Family in Past Time (1972) Peter Laslett explicitly differentiated the study of kin relations within the domestic group from the study of those beyond it. Yet in subsequent decades the latter project – the conceptualization of the domestic group within the larger kin group – has not proceeded very far, even though it can easily be pictured as the ‘next step’ in micro-structural research. In part this is due to the inherent difficulties of recreating the larger kinship context precisely on the basis of available evidence. However, it is also because of changing conceptualizations of kinship and because demographic change demonstrably reduced the number of identifiable kin. If this project is to be pursued, its costs and benefits have to be weighed. On the one hand, the larger kin group may not have been important even if it can be identified as a group; also, migration might have dispersed kin groups so that only a few personal kin remained beyond the domestic group. On the other hand, the significance of kin groups is an empirical question which needs to be tested against historical evidence. Individuals also certainly had personal kin communities that were not corporate groups but still could have influenced the behaviors of persons within the domestic group. It is best to assume about the past that the domestic domain and the kinship domain interacted, creating the starting point for an interactive theory consisting of five propositions and their corollaries, outlined in the article.

Improper confinement of those alleged to be mentally troubled was a prominent issue for the literate and propertied classes of eighteenth-century England and one which has fascinated historians too. In contrast, Scots did not perceive wrongful incarceration of the mentally disabled to be a serious social or legal issue. This article seeks to explain the differences between Scotland and England by focusing on a case where the care of a mentally troubled person was fought over. The article explores the familial settings and relationships involved in the care of the mad and idiotic and it shows medical and lay understandings of mental incapacity. Finally, it gives insights into the eclectic medical regime used to treat the mentally troubled and into the relationship between law, medicine and society. The argument is that different legal and medical structures meant that Scots were much less exercised about wrongful confinement. The article concludes that respect for the transparency of Scottish courts, for their cheapness and for their relative speed helped prevent the development of any extensive critique of improper confinement in eighteenth-century Scotland. Coupled with this was the relative power of the family compared with that of medical practitioners in Scotland.

In this article, data for the serf estate of Voshchazhnikovo, in Yaroslavl' province, is used to test existing theories about peasant household size and structure in imperial Russia. Empirical evidence from soul revisions, household listings, and estate regulations is brought to bear on the view that large, complex households were predominant throughout Russia in the pre-emancipation period, and that landlords' policies had little effect on the demographic behaviour of serfs. Household size and structure in Voshchazhnikovo, which was located in the Central Industrial region, differed significantly from that found for the estates in the Central Black Earth region studied by P. Czap and S. Hoch. Mean household size in Voshchazhnikovo ranged from 4.5 to 5.2, and roughly half of all households were of the simple-family sort. Age at first marriage was later than in the Central Black Earth region, and a greater proportion of females remained unmarried. There were also substantially more female-headed households on this estate than on the estates studied by Czap and Hoch. Finally, estate records suggest that the landlord at Voshchazhnikovo attempted to influence demographic behaviour through the use of fines and taxes. These attempts were successful, though their effects were unevenly distributed across the Voshchazhnikovo serf population.

German immigrants who came to the Netherlands in the nineteenth century did not concentrate in ‘Little Germanys’ within Dutch towns, as they did in some other countries. Some concentrations amongst German immigrants can, however, be pointed out. Contrary to what perhaps might be expected, it was not a common religion or a shared regional background that explains these concentrations. A shared profession does explain some, but only if the nature of a particular profession allowed or encouraged concentration.

This article examines the impact of landholding and differences in local economies on age at marriage, on frequency of service and on household size and structure in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Particular stress is placed on the role of economic rather than cultural factors as determinants of regional variations in marriage age and household structures. Households were more complex whenever land, the accumulation of capital and multiple occupations were required for economic activity. Conversely, wage work – whether in fishing or agriculture and regardless of geographical location (for example in eastern as well as western Finland) – favoured the formation of small nuclear households. Some aspects of the family system (servanthood and a late age at marriage) fit the characteristics of the north-west European household system as delineated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett better than others (frequency of complex households). It is concluded that there is no inevitable correlation between geographic location and the characteristics of a society's family system and that the model of the north-west European household system does not accommodate those societies where people were in a position to build strategies based on the continuous possession of land.

This article questions the notion that migrant networks provided an incentive to travel by furnishing both contacts upon arrival and continued assistance for those who remained. It focuses on newcomers to Paris from Brittany from 1875 to 1925. Sources include (a) memoirs and interview data from large-scale studies, (b) information on marriage patterns in the XIVe arrondissement and the industrial suburb of Saint-Denis, and (c) information on the witnesses to these marriages. Although each source reveals a different configuration of contacts, together they suggest the importance of ongoing family ties and significant contacts formed from ‘weak ties’ after arrival.

This article discusses the ‘Mediterranean model’ of household formation proposed by Laslett and others in the early 1980s and argues that the notion of a Mediterranean culture area has been used in significantly different ways by family historians and social anthropologists. Drawing its materials mainly from research conducted on Italy, it examines the changing relationships through time between nuptiality and household composition, the extent and structural characteristics of servanthood, and the functions of the family as a welfare agency. It is suggested that some concepts that recent generations of Mediterraneanist anthropologists have tended to question or utterly reject (including female honour) might still prove useful to shed light on a number of perplexing features of family life in Italy and the rest of southern Europe.

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.

The International Lists of Causes of Death and Diseases underwent their Fourth and Fifth Revisions during the years before the First and Second World Wars, the only time that two institutions of different disciplines, the International Statistical Institute and the League of Nations Health Organization, participated in the revision process. This resulted in a mixture of institutional rivalry and cooperation, involving national, ideological and professional interests.

The revisions entailed extensive international discussions. The studies on which they were based revealed a lack of international uniformity in disease classification and thus basic problems regarding the reliability and comparability of vital statistical data.

Revisionist historians maintain that the aged in nineteenth-century America and north-western Europe usually preferred to reside alone or with only their spouse. According to this interpretation, the aged ordinarily resided with their adult children only out of necessity, especially in cases of poverty or infirmity. This article challenges that position, arguing that in mid-nineteenth-century America coresidence of the aged with their children was almost universal, and that the poor and sick aged were the group most likely to live alone. The article suggests that the decline of the multigenerational family in the twentieth century is connected to the rise of wage labour and the diminishing importance of agricultural and occupational inheritance.