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.

Although the contours of fidei laesio (pleas for debt in ecclesiastical courts) were established by Helmholz and suggestions about the wider impact on credit relationships were offered by Briggs, there still remains scope for a detailed examination of the causes in an ecclesiastical court to establish precisely the extent of the litigation in those fora, the composition of the litigants, the character of the debts, and the incentives and impediments to actions (although Helmholz broadly indicated these issues). Accordingly, an examination has been undertaken of two extant registers of the Lichfield consistory court (1464–1478) which survive for the period of maximum referral to these courts by lay (and clerical) creditors and debtors. The information allows a new perspective on the character of the credit relationships prosecuted in the consistory court.

This article uses the early records of the Old Bailey to examine how the court handled cases involving children and juveniles, whether as offenders, victims or witnesses. It argues that though juvenile courts belong to a later age, the early modern court was already applying different criteria in trying young offenders. It demonstrates how juries used age, gender and related considerations to justify the ‘pious perjury’ that sheltered many from the full rigour of the law. Previous work on children as victims has focused on child-rape and infanticide. This article explores other categories. It argues that in cases of death following a severe beating the court's sympathies lay firmly with the defendants, determined to uphold the authority of employers and parents. Lastly, the article explores cases involving children as witnesses, which raised difficult questions about the admissibility of evidence. Judges had to decide if the youngster was sufficiently mature to give evidence on oath.

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.

Late medievalists have shown that retaining was central to English political society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They have also debunked the myth that Henry VII sought to end noble retaining and shown that such practices continued into the sixteenth century. Despite this, there has been no focused examination of licenses that Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I granted to select individuals permitting them to retain beyond those categories of servants specified in early acts. These licenses are a unique and underexplored source base that allows questions normally posed by medievalists to be posed for the early modern period. This article examines 138 licenses between 1541 and 1585, identifying the patterns of such grants and their role in understanding the crown's use of noble and gentry retaining in the mid sixteenth century. The reason for each grant differed but all recipients were deemed useful to the crown for various reasons, illustrating the continued collaboration between crown and nobility into the sixteenth century. Throughout, this article emphasises the implications of licenses to retain for understanding the attitude of the English crown to the private power of nobles and gentry over the longue durée.

The narrative of technological conquest, modernisation and sanitary improvements has been influential in shaping the historiography of nineteenth-century water infrastructures. Although technological and scientific changes were important elements, however, the transition from the early modern system of water provision to an industrial one also involved resistance, conflict, and competition between different social groups. This article focuses on the issues of drinking water accessibility and related conflicts. It examines archival records of the daily water management, infrastructure projects, and municipal minutes of nineteenth-century Milan, Naples and Venice, as well as documents produced by local communities. Contrary to the consolidated narrative of decline and decay succeeded by innovation, the article contends that the early modern water infrastructure was complex, composed of many elements assembled into a whole, and that differences between these and modern water systems should be sought not in the assumed degree of systematicity. Instead, the division between the two types of systems was manifested in the latter type's scale and its driving concepts, derived from a view of the future for which modern water infrastructures were planned. Simultaneously, the creation of new social boundaries and the increase in inequalities in water access were among the products of modern infrastructure.

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.

Migration was common in medieval England. Serfdom, however, in theory severely restricted the mobility of villeins. This article explores servile migration through a close study of the manorial court rolls of the manors of Great Waltham and High Easter (Essex). By doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates over the nature and decline of serfdom in medieval England and over the role of towns as destinations for migration, which has been seen as contributing to the ‘Little Divergence’. Firstly, the article establishes the extent of servile migration as recorded in the manorial court rolls. In keeping with recent studies, almost half of recorded servile migrants stayed within ten miles of their home manor and, significantly, a sizeable majority (around two thirds) opted for rural destinations. The article then explores some dynamics of servile migration in detail. It suggests that enforcement of restrictions on the movement of villeins was attempted in the 1350s but that, in practice, the lord's coercive capacity was distinctly limited and ineffective.