This study uses data on income and distribution of relief payments from local poor relief tables for 512 rural parishes in Flanders (present-day Belgium) in 1807 to examine spatial variation in poor relief practices in a region characterised by well-established local poor relief institutions and marked socio-economic differences. By combining data on poor relief with local data on population, landholding and occupational structure, we map out the relative importance of regional economies and local variation in producing distinct poor relief regimes. The results show that although local variation was considerable, the nature and extent of this variation interacted with structural socio-economic characteristics to produce regional patterns, signalling that local variation did not so much contradict as constitute regional patterns in poor relief regimes. The importance of socio-economic characteristics in determining both regional patterns and local variation supports our more general contention that local and regional levels of analysis represent a more fruitful avenue for understanding variations in poor relief practices than national differences in legislation, and therefore has implications for the comparative study of poor relief practices in a wider international context.

This article focuses on local agency in two near-famines in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Flanders. Our comparative analysis of the food crises of 1740 and 1845–1847 in Flanders exposes the local mechanisms of coping and protection, both in an informal and a formal way. The main thesis is that the impact of hunger crises in peasant societies is directly related to the level of stress absorption within the local village community. Our findings contradict the traditional vision of a more-or-less straightforward shift in famine crisis management from rural, local and informal to urban, supra-local and formal. The success of surmounting a food crisis has always had local roots.

This article examines the labour market for day labourers in the Southern Low Countries during the eighteenth century from the perspective of reciprocal exchange. In particular I will look at wage payment structures and their economic and social foundations. In contrast with other agricultural regions, wage payments in proto-industrialized inland Flanders were highly diversified. Large farmers and day labourers engaged in a system of reciprocal exchange of labour, goods and services in which monetary payments played only a secondary role. I find that both employers and employees had strong reasons for maintaining this exchange relationship and that they both, in their own ways, benefited from this mutual dependency.