This is the first of two articles examining a highly distinctive but overlooked system for organizing child and youth labour in rural England. It reveals how parishes used their powers under the 1601 Poor Law to allocate children as unpaid indentured farm servants (for up to 17 years) to local landholders occupying properties of a certain value. As both apprentice and master could be compelled by law, parish authorities were able to implement centralized rotation schemes. This article (Part I) addresses the initial questions of when, where, why and how compulsory apprenticeship schemes were introduced, based primarily on a survey of the South West before 1750. It presents new evidence of how they emerged as local experiments from the 1670s in a context of overlapping crises and became widespread by the mid-eighteenth century. The consequence was a labour system that bound children to local soil, and thus had peculiar parallels to serfdom, leading nineteenth-century authorities to condemn it for distorting the ‘free’ labour market.

This article aims to analyse how the intertwining of politics and religion, economic transformation due to industrialisation, and family influence each contributed to the abandonment of the traditional, religious marriage calendar during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Barcelona Area or the Oficialitat de Barcelona, the most populated deanery among the four that comprised the Diocese of Barcelona. We make use of the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database, covering the period 1715–1880, to calculate descriptive statistics and linear probability models. Our main findings indicate a progressive change in marriage seasonality; with an increasing number of marriages taking place during Lent across the nineteenth century, as well as the emergence of a December peak in marriages in the first third of that century. Although the primary occupational sector was declining, farmers tended to adhere to the traditional marriage calendar, while the upper classes and artisans were increasingly likely to marry during Lent. During periods of Liberal political influence, which were marked by steps toward secularization, the proportion of marriages taking place during Lent increased. However, independent of the political period, Lenten marriages tended to be passed from one generation to the next, confirming the continuing influence of the family on the timing of marriages in Spain.

Litigation was on the rise across late-medieval Europe, and historians have long argued that the result was widespread law-mindedness. Seeking a more individual perspective on these trends, this article looks outside of the formal legal records that have been the cornerstone of social and legal histories. It assesses two first-person narratives which describe life-long efforts to resolve disputes at law, written by ageing members of the rural gentry in late-fifteenth-century England. The article first outlines the stories of disputing told in these manuscripts, with attention to their structures, tropes, and alignment with contemporary discourses about justice. It then places them in the contexts of the lives and archives that they were designed to interpret. What becomes apparent is that these writers and others of similar status were deeply invested in their disputes, enough to bequeath them to future generations. They crafted stories which emphasised the continuity of legal claims through changeable social and judicial conflicts, even if it meant omitting prior successes at law. These manuscripts therefore remind us that litigation, however ubiquitous it became, was not always taken lightly. They also open the door to an examination of reckonings with law undertaken at home rather than in the courtroom.

Few studies have investigated historical pandemics from a public health perspective. This paper offers new perspectives on how legislation was implemented in Norway during the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic. We argue that despite good intentions, individual interpretations, different knowledge and level of decision-making played an important role in the use of the legislation during this Influenza pandemic. Following the 1918–1920 Influenza pandemic there were significant advancements in public health and the establishment of public health laws in Norway. Given its severity, it was expected an active involvement of health authorities at all levels in decision-making to fight the outbreak through the enforcement of health laws and regulations. This paper explores the implementation of health legislation during this pandemic, offering valuable insights from public health and legislative perspectives. Historical sources reveal a wide array of societal challenges and various levels of medical expertise among health boards across the country. The effectiveness of existing legislation depended heavily on doctors’ knowledge and the abilities of health boards. The article shows that coordinated and well established non-pharmaceutical interventions may be necessary to effectively shield the healthy from the sick during a pandemic produced by a novel pathogen.

Understanding population change in late medieval English towns is crucial for interpreting urban development and economic shifts. Traditional estimates, based on taxation records from 1377 to the Tudor period, provide arbitrary population figures at two fixed points and fail to capture short—term fluctuations. This study proposes an alternative methodology that integrates multiple strands of evidence, including court records, tax lists, and archaeological data, offering a more nuanced understanding of demographic change. Using Nottingham as a case study, it challenges prevailing models of urban population decline. The evidence suggests that after sustained population growth into at least the 1330s, approximately 60 per cent of the townspeople died during the Black Death of 1349. However, significant migration by the early 1350s, and again in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, led to periods of population recovery. Archaeological evidence, together with documentary sources, indicates urban expansion from the second half of the fourteenth century, with substantial growth by the early sixteenth century—contradicting traditional narratives of abandonment and decline. The findings demonstrate that demographic change was far more complex than traditional methodologies suggest and that this alternative approach provides deeper insight into population trends. This approach is applicable to towns with comparable source material.