Historians of medieval society tend to emphasise the roles of either individual peasants or the village community. They also debate the importance of the market in the peasant economy. Here the focus is on partnership, defined as two or more people pursuing common objectives in a mutual co-operative relationship. Peasants sometimes held land jointly, and new land might be cleared by two or more people. Pairs of peasants regularly took on paid work. It is argued that a likely explanation for occasional flurries of litigation was a breakdown of partnerships. The multiple legal disputes suggest the range of collaborative activities undertaken by peasants, from domestic bread making to the management of pastures. Partnerships may have contributed to the resilience of peasant holdings, especially in the period 1370–1420. Local courts and communities responded with peace-making measures if former partners lapsed into extreme hostility.

Recent studies of male occupations have used Anglican baptisms as a source. However, in areas where nonconformity was strong, a significant proportion of baptisms were missing from parish registers: in Wales, around a quarter of births were to Nonconformist fathers in the years 1813–1820. This study analyses whether there were significant differences between the occupations of Anglican and nonconformist fathers based on a 14 per cent sample of Welsh baptisms. Revised estimates suggest that Anglican data underestimate employment in mining and industry. These estimates are used to give an overview of the Welsh economy c.1817.

In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.

In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Europe developed a deep interest in both natural resources and agroecosystems. Experts began to explore the rural hinterland and shores of the Mediterranean. These travellers described completely new settings, agroecosystems, and cultures through the lens of their own backgrounds. This article analyses the development of Mediterranean rural societies as an object of study of Western agricultural science. It describes the reports of travellers to rural lands in Spain, Italy and Lebanon, comparing their observations and representations, evaluating if there are common patterns in their reports and what features are still found in rural practices today.

Many crafts in premodern Europe depended on migratory journeymen. Little is known about these workers, or how craft guilds and urban authorities affected their movement. By employing novel data on thousands of journeymen from different crafts and cities in Holland, we provide the first systematic overview of journeymen migration and settlement patterns in The Dutch Republic. We find that migration and settlement patterns differed significantly by occupational sector, marital status, and skill level. The stance of urban authorities towards migrants significantly affected settlement patterns as well. This interrelation of group-level characteristics, craft guilds, and urban regulation demonstrates the significance of examining these elements in tandem.

This article demonstrates the varied and unpredictable nature of earning in the nineteenth century. Using 12,000 fortnightly pay entries from Townley Main Colliery in the north-east of England as a case study, it explores the extent to which the availability of work fluctuated between years, and how workers reacted to this phenomenon. It then considers the frequency with which these individuals undertook the work which was available, and discusses the implications for our understanding of the length of the working year.

England recovered slowly after the Black Death, but countries which debased more saw rising prices and earlier population growth and economic recovery. We examine debasement in England, France, Flanders, and Scotland, emphasising the importance of nominal prices and governments’ role in determining and enforcing monetary policy. Money, as well as demography, strongly influenced the behaviour of prices in later medieval Europe, and price changes had profound economic effects. Population levels depend on mortality and fertility. It is not clear that mortality in England was more severe than elsewhere, but the English economic recession could have affected fertility and nuptiality.

Common land rights are nowadays identified as a pivotal action terrain for building sustainable development and climate resilience. This often leads to an idealisation of these common land systems and the people that manage them. This article presents a research strategy that elaborates on the notion of frontiers to unpack peasant resilience and common land rights as the outcome of a long history of peasant adaptation, resistance and self-reinvention within a globalising world. It presents an empirical comparative analysis of common land rights in European and Andean peasant communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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.

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.

Juries enabled the participation in local governance of those outside national and regional elites in early modern England. Yet their social range is disputed. We investigate coroners’ inquest juries in a range of communities and compare a sample of 148 juries in eleven counties, featuring 2024 jurors, with tax and muster records. These show that while the rural and urban middling sorts were disproportionately represented, the rich and poor were by no means excluded. As militarily able household heads, many jurors matched the wider demands of ‘respectable masculinity’, and this may be reflected in some of the verdicts they reached.

The introduction of rewards for the conviction of serious criminals fundamentally transformed English criminal justice. The prospect of rewards totalling up to £140 encouraged additional prosecutions, more full (as opposed to partial) guilty verdicts, and more death sentences. In the process, in a series of largely unintended consequences, two fundamental pillars of early-modern justice were undermined: reliance on the public to prosecute, and the death penalty to deter crime. Policing agents began to play a much more important role in apprehending criminals, while the high level of executions contributed to growing doubts about the efficacy of capital punishment.

The workhouse was a central facet of the new poor law and the elderly – and aged men in particular – came to dominate workhouse populations. This article is the first to analyse a very large data set of almost 4,000 workhouses from all areas of England and Wales extracted from the I-CeM data set, which reveals the composition of workhouse residents on census night by age, gender, and geography between 1851 and 1911. Factors influencing the proportion of the elderly in the workhouse include the dependency ratio and internal migration, urbanisation and a commitment to institutions in cities, and the availability of outdoor relief and other avenues of support. Destitution, want of work, old age and illness propelled the elderly into the workhouse. The crusade against outrelief of the 1870s contributed to this increase, and, while the introduction of old age pensions reduced those over the age of 70, this did not prevent the ‘younger aged’ (those aged 60–69) from increasing.

We analyse the evolution of birth-baptism intervals between 1830 and 1949 among children born into 815 Spanish families and relate the changes observed to developments in childhood mortality. Our results show that birth-baptism intervals in our study area increased rapidly after 1890, three decades after childhood mortality began to decline and a decade before fertility began to fall. We confirm that the families increasing the intervals between their children's births and baptisms after 1890 were those whose previous children had high rates of survival. We conclude that, in the last years of the nineteenth century, families were aware of the decline in child mortality and adjusted their behaviour in response.