This article explores the impact of parliamentary enclosure on the cultural life of English villages after 1750. It focuses on parish-sponsored vermin control, arguing that the popular ‘hunting’ sanctioned by parish vestries under Tudor legislation, and persisting into the early nineteenth century, created a highly participatory recreational culture which continued to exist under the radar of the game laws. Using a sample of parishes from the heavily enclosed county of Northamptonshire, the article demonstrates that this communal activity survived the reworking of the landscape by parliamentary enclosure, and that, by extension, the level of disruption to village cultural life was less than has been suggested.

Based on archival research in several Italian city-states, this article examines medieval prison life, its attendant pains, and inmate coping strategies by substantially engaging the variety of scholarship on modern incarceration. It demonstrates the limited degree to which current hardships overlap with those of earlier forms of captivity, and underscores the diversity of inmates' social positions in both eras. Medieval prisoners were marginalized, but they avoided social liminality (a major present-day risk) largely thanks to their visibility, accessibility, and frequent interaction with free society.

The quality of the statistical archives of the Don Army Territory for the period 1867–1916 offers a unique opportunity to compare the denominations present (Orthodox, Old Believers and Coreligionists, Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, Armenian-Gregorians, Lamaist Buddhists and Muslims) in a context of urbanisation, secularisation and industrialisation. The observance of religious interdicts varied between and within denominations depending on levels of urbanisation and the district considered. These contrasts reveal the segmentation of Don society, the constraints imposed by agrarian imperatives and military obligations, the differences in the economy and between town and country, and the advance of secularisation or persistence of tradition.

Using marriage banns registers from the Amsterdam City Archives, this study identifies the demographic and spatial behaviour of Norwegian female immigrants to Amsterdam, a city that witnessed rapid economic and population growth during the seventeenth century. The article approaches the topic by making: (1) an ethnic distinction between mixed Norwegian/non-Norwegian unions and homogeneous all-Norwegian unions, as well as (2) a distinction by husband's occupation in these unions, whether at sea or on land. Like all women in Amsterdam, Norwegian women experienced a general pressure in the marriage market around 1675, though a somewhat lower pressure for homogeneous unions with sailors. Occupation may explain the residential pattern, suggesting that work defined neighbourhoods more than ethnicity.

This article examines how civic tensions and the rise to prominence of a new class of businessmen contributed to the evolution of police courts in Scottish towns, c.1800 to 1833. It argues that men of property intertwined civic imperatives with their own moral and economic interests in order to effect reform and defend their position, status and influence. It also contends that police courts were important institutions in reflecting and exposing the divisions and shared interests that existed among ‘public men’ and the private interests they sought to promote and safeguard. In doing so, the article highlights social hierarchies – both between men of property and different classes – as an important force in shaping the development and institutional workings of police courts.

Adolescent experience has been the subject of an intensive interdisciplinary discourse for the last century; a subject whose roots go back to the basic issue of ‘nature versus nurture’. In examining this topic in Jewish medieval society under Islam, an incongruity is revealed between the normative attitudes at the time and the reality. The normative attitudes, as exhibited in religious law (halakha) and in the moral literature represent man's life as a journey which peaks upon reaching full adulthood. The different stages of life along the way are acknowledged but they are perceived as subsidiary, sometimes even dangerous. But the reality does not concur: adolescents were far from invisible during this period. Indeed, their presence was prominent and reflected in the poetry and the prevailing images of youth from the time. Jewish society had developed an efficient system for socializing its adolescents, which included an apprenticeship system, higher education (the beit midrash) and early marriage.

This article revisits an argument that land, labour and credit market transactions in India were restructured by colonialism and globalization, in a manner that left peasants and labourers worse off than before. It shows that the process of change was more diverse than this approach considers, and that it was shaped also by social institutions. I argue further that growth and welfare outcomes of the process cannot be fully understood in terms of market imperfection and state policy. For that purpose, it is necessary to pay more attention to environmental factors and local society.

This article offers a comprehensive examination of the relationship between foreign residents and the criminal law in early modern England, as well as an investigation of trials ‘de medietate lingue’, trials with half-English and half-foreign juries, in theory and practice. Because England witnessed both a series of foreign migrations and a series of geo-political crises in the years between 1674 and 1750, the article charts patterns of foreign prosecutions across the period in order to place them in their proper historical context. The article concludes that the protections offered by English law to foreign residents were real and significant and that these protections were especially important at points of geo-political stress.

In early-nineteenth-century medical literature, one finds an elegant symmetry between causes of disease and causes of death: both were sufficient causes of particular events. However, as I will argue, by the end of the century physicians no longer sought sufficient causes of individual disease episodes – instead almost all of medical research was organized around the quest for necessary causes that were shared by all the episodes of each particular disease. Such causes carried great practical and theoretical advantages: they enabled physicians to control and to explain disease phenomena.

One might wonder why there has been no parallel change in our thinking about causes of death; to this very day, causes of death are sufficient causes of particular events. In principle there is no apparent reason why we could not identify necessary causes for classes of deaths – indeed, we sometimes do so. But, in the case of death, such causes hold little interest. Because of how they are used, sufficient causes for individual deaths are more interesting and more important to us than are necessary causes of deaths. Thus, the change in thinking about causes of disease – the change that destroyed the symmetry between causes of disease and causes of death – may not reflect simply progress within a fixed system of medical goals and values, but a profound change in the social role of physicians.

Finland urbanised and industrialised slowly. In 1820 Tampere was a tiny inland town in the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants. Although Finland was a latecomer to industrialisation, Tampere took the path of many other small towns in Europe. It grew around a relatively fast-growing cotton mill with the help of foreign, mainly British know-how. In this article I give an analysis of the policies and networks that made Finnish industrialisation possible from 1820 onwards, and of the roles the British industrialists, technicians and cotton industry specialists played in this process.

In 1268–1269 Spalding Priory created an inventory of its male serfs in Weston and the whereabouts of their offspring. Historical demographers have long laboured over this unique document, but their efforts have brought more confusion than consensus. Aiming to revive the historical utility of the Weston inventory, this article provides context for the inventory and access to the text itself. It also reorients analysis of the inventory away from a focus on households and families (both unsatisfactorily reported) and towards the extensive information it contains about how a generation of serf children grew into adulthood.

This article analyses the everyday spending patterns of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh Abbey, Warwickshire, in relation to inheritance, demography and trusteeship. The analysis makes use of a large dataset of receipted bills along with various other types of accounts and legal documents. We show that several factors contributed to the survival and flourishing of the Leigh estates. These included: first, moderate levels of spending by successive owners of the family estates, punctuated by periodic surges in spending following inheritance events; second, demographic factors; and, third, the responsible management of the estate by trustees during periods of minority. This analysis illustrates that careful economic management, rather than conspicuous consumption, was the defining feature of wealthy landed families such as the Leighs.

The characterisation of medieval childbirth as profoundly dangerous is both long-standing and poorly supported by quantitative data. This article, based on a database tracking the reproductive lives of 102 late medieval aristocratic Englishwomen, allows not only for an evaluation of this trope but also an analysis of risk factors, including maternal youth and short birth intervals. Supplemented with evidence from medieval medical tracts and osteoarchaeological data related to pubertal development and nutrition, this study demonstrates that reproduction was hardly the main driver of mortality among elite women.

The image of the nagging woman being ducked as a scold is firmly ensconced among popular images of women in the past, but the historical phenomenon of prosecutions for scolding, though it has been briefly touched on in many studies, has been the subject of only two substantial contributions, those of David Underdown and Martin Ingram. Underdown has maintained that from the 1560s there was increasing concern with scolds, which he links with the rise in witchcraft prosecutions and growing anxiety about domineering and unfaithful wives. Accepting the notion of a ‘crisis of order’ in the decades around 1600, he postulates as an aspect of this a ‘crisis in gender relations’ which he attributes to a decline in neighbourliness and social harmony resulting from the spread of capitalism. He bases his argument partly on literary sources, including plays, sermons and popular pamphlets (though conceding that literary evidence is not conclusive and that the misogynistic tradition in literature is a long one) and partly on a somewhat impressionistic survey of court records from around 1560 to around 1640. This period, he claims, witnessed an intense preoccupation with women perceived as threatening the patriarchal order, manifested by greater numbers of prosecutions of scolds and other disorderly women than in the preceding and subsequent periods, and by more severe punishments, notably the cucking-stool. Women accused as scolds, he maintains, were usually poor, widows, newcomers, social outcasts or ‘those lacking the protection of a family’, and were likely to vent their frustration on local notables as the nearest symbols of authority. He suggests that both the prosecution of scolds and their punishment by ducking were more common in towns and wood-pasture villages than in arable areas (such as that around Fordwich in Kent, the borough we will be looking at); however, he admits that rural records have survived less well than urban, and gives no quantified evidence for the alleged lenience of the authorities in arable villages towards ‘disorderly’ women.