Nearly two decades ago, four historians (Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Wall, Larry Poos and Robert Lee) met with officials of the Cambridge University Press to attempt to persuade them that the profession, and the Cambridge University Press, urgently required a new journal of demographic, social and legal history. This was no mean task, for our plea occurred some years before the veritable boom in journal-building that has marked the closing years of the last millennium. The risk was taken; the proposal was approved by the Syndics; and Continuity and Change was spawned.

The popular image of a traditional Chinese household is one of a large kin group composed of multiple-family units. However, reports on family size in China's past suggest that the average household size was not large in ancient times. Using population registers for Dunhuang and Turfan from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ad), this article is the first serious attempt to analyze household structures in ancient China. While a high proportion of simple-family households were recorded in the registers, a significant number of complex households suggests that the distribution of Chinese households was bimodal. This pattern fits neither the model considered as typical for Western families nor that for Eastern families. Other issues covered include the frequency of living alone, the presence of slaves, the distribution of household heads by age and sex, and women's marriage patterns.

This article explores aspects of employment on the Durham Priory estates in the years 1494–1519. From a perspective of prices and wages, this period belongs at the tail end of a Golden Age for labour. Employment opportunities for the priory workforce should, therefore, have been relatively plentiful and remuneratively rewarding. However, as an analysis of the priory's accounts reveals, whilst wage rates remained stable, the waged employment offered was irregular and piecemeal for all but a small, predominantly skilled elite, with the majority of the workforce enjoying little in the way of fixed employment patterns or identifiable career structures.

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.

The conflict between work and taking care of infants can be solved in many ways. Less than 100 years ago, one of the solutions was the wet-nursing system. This system came to an end at the beginning of the twentieth century. Previous research has connected the cessation to decreasing demand. Here it is argued that to understand the wet-nursing system and to explain its coming to an end, the labour market for women has to be considered. It is necessary to study the supply side of the system: to discover why women became wet-nurses.

This article investigates the impact of industrialization and urbanization on the migration patterns of elderly Swedish men and women in the town of Sundsvall during the nineteenth century. The geographical mobility of old men and women increased as industrialization proceeded. Social ties were important factors in the decision to migrate, and the study investigates in particular the significance of social networks for childless old persons. This analysis also examines migration patterns among elderly men and women of different social groups. Very few childless men seem to have moved to live with a relative, whereas a higher proportion of migrating women in this category had some kinship network. A similar pattern was found among widowers and widows. There was also a class dimension: relatives seem to have been most important for the group of women belonging to the petty bourgeoisie.