This article aims to explain how the market for land functioned inmedieval south-west Finland. The data show that in medieval timesland was increasingly treated as something to be transferred inreturn for ready money, albeit within the limits set by theinterests of the family. The land market was open to large segmentsof society, suggesting that barriers to entry were low. It wascharacterised by strong vertical integration, although asymmetric,as the majority of the transactions took place between participantsfrom different social groups. The article will also consider thehigh degree of geographical integration in the land market.

A customary tenant's widow in County Durham had a right to hisholdings for her life, and did not forfeit the lands for remarriageor fornication in contrast to customs found elsewhere in England. Inthis case study of three neighbouring villages, more than 80 percent of widows with the option exercised this right, and did soconsistently over three centuries. The persistence of this patternindicates that widows as tenants were common and capable ofcultivating or managing holdings. It suggests complexinterconnections of gender with local social and economicstructures, which include marriage, migration, and householdformation.

This study utilises several sources of male occupational data totrack the decline of the Norwich worsted industry, c. 1700–1820. Thedata show that the industry began to fall away during the secondhalf of the eighteenth century, if not sooner, and earlier than hasbeen previously realised. The transfer of the industry to the northof England began before the introduction of steam-powered spinningor weaving. Market competition, notably from Lancashire printedfustians and cottons, and the loss of export trade through war, werethe likely causal factors.

During the eighteenth century, Germans from the Hessian county ofHanau-Münzenberg emigrated westward to the American colonies, andeast to Hungary, Russia, and other parts of Europe. Using newemigrant data, I examine their age, occupation, and emigrationstrategies. Those who settled in Pennsylvania were the richest ofthese emigrants, more likely to travel as intact families and themost networked. The poorest were the Hessians who went to Russia,mostly in 1766. A large percentage of the Hanau-Hessians settled inPennsylvania, suggesting that eighteenth-century German emigrationto Hungary and Russia has possibly been overestimated.

This study uses data on income and distribution of relief paymentsfrom local poor relief tables for 512 rural parishes in Flanders(present-day Belgium) in 1807 to examine spatial variation in poorrelief practices in a region characterised by well-established localpoor relief institutions and marked socio-economic differences. Bycombining data on poor relief with local data on population,landholding and occupational structure, we map out the relativeimportance of regional economies and local variation in producingdistinct poor relief regimes. The results show that although localvariation was considerable, the nature and extent of this variationinteracted with structural socio-economic characteristics to produceregional patterns, signalling that local variation did not so muchcontradict as constitute regional patterns in poor relief regimes.The importance of socio-economic characteristics in determining bothregional patterns and local variation supports our more generalcontention that local and regional levels of analysis represent amore fruitful avenue for understanding variations in poor reliefpractices than national differences in legislation, and thereforehas implications for the comparative study of poor relief practicesin a wider international context.