This article focuses on a little scrutinised aspect of the regulation of markets for food in the central middle ages, using a case study, the town of Liège, in addition to other examples from the southern Low Countries. It aims to demonstrate how regulations concerning the timing of the marketing of foodstuffs operated in order to guarantee privileged access to some categories of urban inhabitants. This institutional management of time in the market was a function of a specific balance of power which in turn shaped economic, social and political outcomes.

The feudal colonisation of the Island of Majorca, traditionally considered part of the Spanish ‘Reconquista’, must be included in the greater process of European feudal expansion. The island was inhabited by people living in a Muslim society, not a feudal one. The conquest by Catalan lords meant the imposition of a new feudal class structure and a new use of natural resources on the conquered land. We summarise the composition and evolution of the three main components of this top-down imposed feudalism: the Muslim populations conquered and enslaved, the Catalan settlers and the entirely new agricultural landscape they created.

The historiography of epidemics and crime suggests that we might find effects of plague on criminal behaviour in the years of the Black Death and its aftermath, yet this question has not been systematically investigated by late medieval historians. For the first time, a continuous series of trial records covering the 1340s – for the city of Bologna – is here analysed, and the issue of a ‘breakdown in law and order’ is addressed. The particular patterns of criminal prosecution are revealed and explained, including unusual and unexpected features of continuity in 1348, and surprising developments in the years following, with changes in political context and judicial procedures outweighing any ongoing effects of plague.

This paper analyses the consequences of urban environmental degradation on the well-being of Spanish miners. It is based on analyses of differences in mortality and height. The first part of the paper examines new hypotheses regarding the urban penalty. We take into consideration existing works in economic theory that address market failures when analysing the higher urban death rate. We explain the reduction in height using the model recently created by Floud, Fogel, Harris and Hong for British cities. The second part of the paper presents information demonstrating that the urban areas in the two largest mining areas in Spain (Bilbao and the Cartagena-La Unión mountain range) experienced a higher death rate relative to rural areas as a consequence of market failures derived from what we term an ‘anarchic urbanisation’.