This article examines the many ways that stolen goods were sold and circulated in late eighteenth-century Bristol. It argues that while historians have been correct to identify the contemporary importance of second-hand markets and the ‘informal economy’ to the sale of stolen property, some of the ways that stolen goods markets have been described and conceptualised are not fully supported by the evidence from Bristol. This raises questions about the extent to which models of crime based on London can be applied to cities in provincial England. The article also examines the influence that timing, appearance and location had on the way that stolen goods were sold.

In this article we analyse the changes in the age of voting and eligibility for office in Sweden during the twentieth century. We scrutinise arguments, actors, and contexts. Age proved to be an important yardstick for political citizenship and a source of political conflicts of importance for the development of democratic institutions which is largely neglected in earlier research on universal suffrage. Democratisation processes not only have led to the inclusion of new groups of citizens, but also exclusions. Our study demonstrates the importance of shifting understanding of young people, family formation, demographic shifts, intergenerational power balances and constitutional dilemmas.

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.

In many early modern towns of the southern Low Countries, beguinages gave adult single women of all ages the possibility to lead a religious life of contemplation in a secure setting, retaining rights to their property and not having to take permanent vows. This paper re-examines the family networks of these women by means of a micro-study of the wills left by beguines who lived in the Great Beguinage of St Catherine in sixteenth-century Mechelen, a middle-sized city in the Low Countries. By doing so, this research seeks to add nuance to a historiography that has tended to consider beguinages as artificial families, presumably during a period associated with the increasing dominance of the nuclear family and the unravelling ties of extended family.

This paper aims to show the relevance that institutions governing common-pool resources (CPRs) play in peasant resilience. It outlines nine variables for resilience taken from socio-economic and ecological anthropological theories focusing on subsistence and minimax strategies and used for the comparative historical analysis of African case studies. These include drylands (Morocco, Ghana), semi-arid areas (Sierra Leone, Malawi, Tanzania) and wetlands (Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia). The variables could be found under pre-colonial common property but were no longer operating during colonial and postcolonial institutional change from common to state property and privatisation via land grabbing, leading to commons and resilience grabbing.

This article makes use of linkage of many different sources – official population censuses, wage books, interviews, the correspondence of many canning companies, notarial records, documents from canning unions – in order to investigate labour market segmentation between 1880 and 1960 in the Spanish fish-canning industry, a sector that employed mainly female labour. I explore some social and economic factors that explain why women were placed in the ‘secondary’ segment of the labour market in the fish-canning sector. The study also considers the earning differentials between men and women and the different types of contracts offered to male and female workers.

In this article I discuss the dilemma between coercion and respect for civil liberties that characterized policies for the prevention of venereal diseases during the nineteenth century. Placing Danish legislation in an international perspective, the gradual change from control of prostitution to the so-called Scandinavian Sonderweg is analysed. Special emphasis is given to parliamentary discussions on the law of 1906, with a view to disentangling the survival of traditional attitudes to sexual morality from burgeoning conceptions of universal welfare policies.

The popular image, if any, related to lodging in industrial and urban society is one of young male lodgers and female landladies. The aim of this article is to discuss the identity of lodgers and landlords/ladies in gender, age and social perspective. Can we find evidence for proximity in origin, gender and social class between those who looked for and those who provided lodgings? While the middle classes saw lodging as a social evil, were their fears of moral and hygienic degradation realistic? Was keeping lodgers a way of fleecing vulnerable migrants and forcing them into a life of squalor? Or is it possible that the people who acquired an extra room, for a bit of income, or squeezed in an extra bed, were at the mercy of builders and slum landlords with multiple houses? We should perhaps remind ourselves that the ultimate power of control of building quality and flat size lay in the hands of the social class that was pointing its finger at those at the bottom of the social ladder. Through the combination of surveys and census data with oral history collections from early twentieth-century Finland a narrative is constructed of the life as a lodger or landlord/landlady of the working class, demonstrating networks of friendship and mutual support, as well as systems of lodging that were simple economic arrangements for the survival of both parties.

This article addresses the question of the effectiveness of court litigation over private contracts. Through a case study of fourteenth-century Caldes de Malavella, in northeastern Catalonia, it provides an instructive example of contract registration and enforcement. A large peasant clientele made use of the institutional framework provided by a compact jurisdictional estate. We also explore the ways in which the court system within this barony was affected by the demands of external jurisdictions. The article concludes that the whole system was efficient in prosecuting breach of contract, in serving broader mercantile strategies, and even in softening tensions among parties.

This article examines the development of formal poor-relief provision across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in rural Germany, through a case study of a district of the Duchy of Württemberg. It presents a detailed picture of practices to support the poor, whether through payments and alms from the poor chest, institutions providing credit, common rights or village and town granaries. In building up a picture of institutional practice, it also presents extensive information on the recipients of relief. It is argued that both the institutional framework and new trends in its development during the period ante-dated the Reformation, and that this society enjoyed a wide and varied capacity to support the poor that bears comparison with the English Old Poor Law. However, in a differing socio-economic context, demand for support remained more limited, and the demographic catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War arrested trends towards increasingly formalized collections, pensions and doles.

This article investigates the empirical backing for the claim that poor law officials needed legal authority to refuse poor parents’ right to the custody of their children in order to stabilise children's welfare institutions during the nineteenth century. Although workhouses were capable of accommodating children, Victorian lawmakers feared children would model themselves on adult paupers to become permanent burdens on the state. To tackle this problem, a system of children's welfare institutions called ‘district schools’ was introduced to train children to become industrious adult labourers. Children were usually classified as orphans or deserted so they could be sent to district schools without fear of family intervention. However, children with ambiguous parental circumstances were labelled as ‘other’ and considered a problematic class because they were perceived to be at risk of having on-going contact with their birth families. Lawmakers feared parents of ‘other’ children would undermine reformation efforts by asserting their custody rights, and passed the first laws in English history to allow the state to restrict parental rights on this basis. This article explores the claim of unwanted parental involvement, and in doing so, seeks to contextualise the origins of public law interference in the family sphere within a narrative of imposed citizenship rather than protection.

This article takes as a point of departure the paucity of scholarship on Scottish poor relief, which has been predominantly depicted as an inferior and underdeveloped version of its southern counterpart. We adopt a case study approach looking at two examples of Lowland and Highland urban infrastructures of poor relief to illustrate the application of the ideology of ‘improvement’ philosophy onto the treatment of the poor between c.1720 and 1790. Situating the study within the context of Scottish ‘improvement’, we explore the ways theoretical and practical approaches towards the poor were shaped by the combination of commercial and evangelical attitudes to human capital investment and long-term reform, echoing similar developments across Europe. At the close of the eighteenth century, the Scottish system transitioned from a community based, localised system of reciprocal hierarchy operated by the parish and kirk structures to a system increasingly rooted in legalism and the concept of rights based social provision.

This article presents the results of a study of social mobility in Portugal from the 1860s to the 1960s. Four distinct social contexts were examined by reference to selected criteria, and marriage records were used as the source for data collection and analysis. The HISCO coding scheme was followed to allow comparisons of intergenerational mobility, stratification, and social change. We present the methodological and operative issues inherent in the hermeneutics of the sources used, identifying difficulties in the process of coding arising from the use of a common language to locate individuals in society. We shall offer an opinion on the pace of Portuguese social mobility during the period.

Stories of transported criminals were exchanged in the print culture of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, creating images of the incorrigibility of transported criminals and of the failures of transportation, with many either re-offending in America or returning to do so in England. This discourse also framed images that each side of the Atlantic had of the other. The British learnt that the plantations were a place of slavery, the Americans that the British viewed them as a ‘race of convicts’. This process, involving many layers of discourse in the criminal Atlantic, formed one of the earliest examples of international debates on crime and national identity.

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.

A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to his holdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriage or fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. In this case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 per cent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did so consistently over three centuries. The persistence of this pattern indicates that widows as tenants were common and capable of cultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complex interconnections of gender with local social and economic structures, which include marriage, migration, and household formation.

This article presents the results of the family reconstitution carried out in three villages in the Spanish province of Navarre, covering a period from the late seventeenth century to 1994. This set of data from over 300 years comprises one of the longest family reconstitution projects in Spain, and means that the present study is based on a major database consisting of over 110,000 entries which can be used to explore various aspects of the demography. In this study I present the evolution of several indicators of fertility, all of which are aspects that can help us to reflect on a phenomenon that has long been known, but which is still not fully understood: the demographic transition. The microfocus of family reconstitution has enabled us to question numerous assumptions about the time when the fall in the birth rate began, the irrational or unconscious nature of reproduction in the pretransitional phase and the strategies employed by couples to have smaller families.