Studies of modern famines have found disproportionately high mortality amongst adult men. The most commonly suggested root of this ‘female mortality advantage’ is biological, and it seems to be strongest when starvation is the main cause of death. The present study is the first to investigate the phenomenon in an early-modern society. Looking at the famines of 1597 and 1623 in northwest England, it finds some evidence for a female mortality advantage in 1623, but that this was concentrated in the first 12 months of the crisis (after the 1622 harvest). The female advantage was also much greater in north Lancashire and Westmorland than it was in the wealthier western Lancashire plain. Together this supports the idea that there was actual starvation during the 1623 crisis, at least in these areas at these times. There are, however, some reasons to suppose that the most mortal phase of the crisis, around the winter of 1623–1624, took place at a time when food was becoming more widely available, and hence should be attributed to diseases that followed the famine.

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.

Despite the volume of research on the Old Poor Law, only in the last two decades have detailed local studies begun to assess the impact of relief payments across the life-courses of individuals. Their conclusions have been mixed. While many have found that the rural labouring poor of southern England were increasingly frequent recipients of poor relief after the 1780s, recent studies have indicated that ‘dependence’ on relief was generally intermittent, not permanent. Based on a new dataset for the Essex village of Terling, this study sets individual life-histories within the broader chronology of change to show how young, able-bodied men and women became relief recipients much more often after 1795 than they had before.

Trials held in Anatolia around the mid-nineteenth century suggest that labour migrants became ‘the usual suspects’ in felony cases. Since the 1980s, a significant body of work on migration has emerged. Uncovering the voices of individual migrants has been a major endeavour of these studies. By following a legal case concerning one labour immigrant, and applying the methods of microhistory, this article aims to show how a socio-legal reading of migration is useful in reconstructing the history of immigrants, especially in the nineteenth century, when migration became a legal issue. Second, the article aims to demonstrate the potential of diaspora theory for analysing and explaining the experience of labour immigrants from the Balkans and the Aegean Islands during the nineteenth century, among them the protagonist of this paper.

Mortgage markets in developing economies, both past and present, are often confined to social networks between private individuals. The inadequate registration of ownership of and encumbrances on borrowers’ real estate has been offered as a reason for this, but it is questionable whether such registration provides either a simple or a complete explanation. This paper analyses mortgage markets between 1300 and 1800 in the Low Countries, where such registration was organised well, and England, where such registration was poorly organised. These historical cases show that registration was important for the emergence of broad mortgage markets but in the historical context successful markets took considerable time to appear. The rise of such markets also required changes in the mortgage laws and often depended on intermediaries for matching borrowers and lenders.

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’.

Proceeding from an in-depth analysis of the Liberty of Bruges, an important rural district in the late medieval Low Countries, this contribution frames rural elite formation by means of two debates which are seldom used in combination, namely, the debates on state building and on the commercialisation of rural society. We challenge the thesis, inspired by modernisation theory, that socio-economic transformation engendered political change in pre-modern Europe as newly emerging rural bourgeoisies are alleged to have become an important political factor, shifting their allegiances between lords and peasants as they saw fit. The evidence discussed shows instead a trend towards oligarchy from the fifteenth century onwards, in which an increasingly exclusive social network came to combine hitherto separated forms of political power, largely at the expense of the growing number of wealthy rural bourgeois. It is argued that this transformation of the rural political elites is closely tied to changes in the established relations between the central government and the regional elites of the Low Countries.

Under the Ancien Régime in Spain local granaries (in Spanish, pósitos) acted as welfare institutions designed to help small farmers in times of crisis. During the first third of the twentieth century they were subject to an intense reorganisation in Spain and this transformed them into the only microfinance institution to which a significant part of the country's rural population had access. However, as the granaries were beginning to get their finances in order, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the ensuing change in political regime meant that from 1950 onwards they found themselves relegated to the financial margins. The longevity of the granaries makes them an interesting example of a type of financial institution that was able to adapt to different political regimes by changing the way they operated while maintaining their core objective of supporting small farmers.

This article is the first to use a combination of three different types of inventories from Dorset to examine the material lives of paupers inside and outside Beaminster workhouse. It argues that life was materially better for paupers on outdoor relief, compared with workhouse inmates and with paupers in the moments before they entered the workhouse. The article also examines how the poor used admission into the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts. The evidence demonstrates that the able-bodied poor used the workhouse as a short-term survival strategy, whereas more vulnerable inmates struggled to use this tactic. This article therefore furthers our understanding of the nature of poor relief and adds further weight to recent historical work that has emphasised pauper agency.

The growing percentage of never-married elderly people led to increasing demographic pressure on Swedish local communities in the beginning of the twentieth century. This article deals with never-married elderly women's income strategies when the idea of self-help dominated social policy. The study uses a prosopographical approach, based on micro-level data. The findings indicate that pooling income sources was of utmost importance for this vulnerable group of elderly women. Furthermore, as a consequence of this demographic change, there was an expansion of charitable organisations specifically aimed at elderly care.

This article presents a historical examination of employment amongst men aged 60 years or more in Spain. We aim to explore the characteristics of this segment of the labour force and to analyse the key transformations affecting it during the first seven decades of the twentieth century, such as structural change and, most notably, the rise of public pensions. We then move on to identify specific problems faced by older workers during the study period. It has been hypothesised that one of these was the ‘life-cycle deskilling process’, the effects of which have previously been demonstrated in case studies of certain nations other than Spain. We explore whether life-cycle deskilling also occurred in Spain. We take a quantitative perspective, basing our analysis on the age by occupation tables published from the Spanish censuses from 1900 to 1970.