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.

Professional jurists are often inquisitive about the subject matter of their calling and in the course of their careers may well develop fascinating insights into the law and those who interpret it. Their employers, however, be they governments, corporations, firms, or private clients, rarely show similar enthusiasm for such insights unless the hours spent pondering the social or historical significance of this or that legal view have a contemporary value that justifies the lawyer's fee.

Thankfully, other members of society are rewarded for mining the legal records of the past. For legal historians, the search often focuses on the changing legal ideas and how legal doctrine develops over time to meet the changing needs of societies. Yet because the law generally deals with concrete matters – again, because jurists are paid by people who are unlikely to remunerate those who simply while away their hours making up legal cases – it offers a reservoir of information that can be used, albeit with caution, in fields other than just the history of the law.

A partial reconstruction of the law of any given time and place is among the more obvious historical uses of legal documents but statutes, practical decisions, and even theoretical texts can be used to advance other forms of the historical endeavour. Legal works often reflect the values both of jurists and society-at-large, for while the law creates social values it is not immune to changes in these very values.

Monastic charitable provision in the later Middle Ages through to the Dissolution has often been described as inadequate in terms of both quantity and quality. It has been accused of ineffectiveness because of its allegedly indiscriminate nature. This article suggests that in fact the religious houses and hospitals of England were providing a greater amount of poor relief in a more assiduous manner than has previously been allowed. The core of evidence comes from the 1535 national tax assessment of the Church, the Valor Ecclesiasticus. This contains details of the charitable provision carried out by most monasteries and hospitals as recorded by Crown commissions. After allowances have been made for the bias in the survey, a statistical analysis is carried out which indicates that an upward reassessment should be made of the quantity of monastic charity. Qualitative evidence from both the Valor Ecclesiasticus and from other contemporary sources also suggests that the pre-Reformation Church was providing genuinely beneficial poor relief.

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.

A jurisdictional dispute over the burial of suicides in Electoral Saxony in the years 1702–1706 brought into sharp contrast conflicting views of the body in popular belief and Lutheran pastoral theology, and in the secularizing project of the early Enlightenment. The dispute centred on the practical, local implications of territorialism, a theory of church subordination to the state developed in the 1690s by the Saxon jurist Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), the most influential German political philosopher of the early Enlightenment. Considered in its intellectual and institutional contexts, the Saxon dispute illustrates the importance of the body to an understanding of secularization, the early Enlightenment and the history of suicide.

In this essay I reconstruct a dispute that occurred in the middle Maghrib during the first half of the eighth/fourteenth century among members of a wealthy family with strong ties to the state. The pre mortem transfer of shares of a mill to minor children, one male and the other female, carried out ca. 705/1305 became problematic 20 years later, long after the children's father had died. The widowed mother used her position as legal guardian to prevent her daughter – now grown up and married – from exercising effective control over her shares of the mill; eventually, the mother sold her daughter's shares of the mill to her son, a jurist employed by the state. When her attempts to settle the dispute within the family proved unsuccessful, the daughter took her case to a sharī a court judge; the latter solicited the legal advice of a muftī, who called for nullification of the sale. The case sheds light on the operation of the Islamic legal system, points to the willingness of legal actors to uphold the rights of a female against a powerful male relative, and suggests that Muslim judges enjoyed a relatively large measure of judicial autonomy.

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.

This article examines developments in marriage patterns in the Spanish province of Navarre over the last 300 years. The data from Navarrese villages show that the age of both men and women on their first marriage was well past the onset of sexual maturity. However, major differences were noted between the marriage patterns in the different villages. It was also noteworthy that the increasing intensity in marriage patterns observed in other European countries from the late nineteenth century onwards is not reflected in the case of Spain. Spain, and particularly rural Navarre, saw an uninterrupted decline in I′m values from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The possible influence of migratory movements on the I′m values in rural Navarre is analysed. Findings are also reported concerning the age difference between partners offer the last three centuries.

This article examines the rate and causes of divorce among the elite households of late fifteenth-century Cairo. By using a unique contemporary chronicle, it is possible to estimate that a third of all marriages ended in divorce. Wives initiated divorces at least as often as their husbands. They did so by reaching a divorce settlement with their husbands for a financial compensation, or, in the case of desertion, by using the courts to impose a judicial divorce. In the vast majority of the cases, the causes for the divorce were grounded in marital relations. In spite of the importance of marriage alliances for the elite household, these marriages did eventually hinge on the mutual consent of the two individuals concerned.

We compare Montreal's three largest cultural communities – French Canadian, Irish Catholic, and Anglo-Protestant – with respect to infant survival over the forty years 1860–1900. From three birth cohorts we present evidence for a powerful and persistent cultural dimension which outweighs distinctions of social status. The local cultural mix offers insights into mechanisms operating through a chain of cultural practices, property interests, ethnic politics, and spatial segregation.

Through an examination of sixteenth-century Ottoman criminal codes pertaining to sexual crimes and their punishment, the article builds on the work of others who have attempted to streamline Islamic legal discourse and new legislation, mainly in the era of Süleyman the Magnificent. An emerging governing elite, recruited through slavery and attached to the sultan's household through marriage and patronage, attempted to create a legal system that, while committed to the tenets of Islamic law, promoted the new values of a dynamic group of people, which differed in many ways from those envisaged by the sharī a. The new legal codes suggest a change in discourse and outlook regarding various aspects of sexuality, gender differences, and concepts of crime and punishment.

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 suggests that analyses of child labour today should take as their point of comparison poorer nineteenth-century continental European countries, rather than the more commonly cited analogy of industrializing Britain. Two aspects of comparison between the nineteenth-century Finnish experience and today's developing economies are especially relevant. The first is the role of foreign investors in introducing industrial child labour in the early stages of industrialization. The second is labour migration, and particularly that of children. Industrial child labour in nineteenth-century Finland, and labour migration from Finland to St Petersburg, serve as empirical case studies. Finally, the author suggests that new apologies for industrial child labour in the past can be linked with the late-twentieth-century expansion of child labour.

This article is devoted to an analysis of Algerian court cases. It focuses on family law in practice, in order to shed light on the disputed character of this realm of law and the ambiguity involved in its reform. The aim of the article is to question the assumption of an intrinsic opposition between the (traditional/Muslim) family on the one hand, and (modern) state law on the other. It will be argued that the legal regulation of the family, far from being simply imposed by the state, represents a dynamic process in which different actors with different interests and orientations partake. The material used consists mainly of decisions taken by the Algerian Supreme Court covering the period from 1963 (the year of the its creation) to 1990.

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.

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.

In legal texts, women, acting on their own volition, are actually described as individuals in negative terms. This study examines clandestine betrothals and marriages; adultery, especially the treatment of adulterous women; the abused wife and her ability to initiate divorce proceedings against her husband; and testaments left with Christian notaries by Jewish women.

While they were limited by various laws and customs, individuals managed to use laws and social structures for their own advantage, negotiated space for themselves, and devised strategies to fulfil their wishes, which could be described as the pursuit of love, by circumventing obstacles placed in their way by communities, families, and the law. These practices raise questions about familial control, rabbinic authority, and communal power.