Despite the recent expansion in studies of medieval women, uncertainty surrounds their married lives due to the social and legal constraints that existed at that time. Here it is argued that feet of fines provide a lens, albeit partial, on the activities of married women who were effectively managing the disposal and inheritance of their landed estates. At the same time the importance to the purchaser of ensuring the lawful acquisition of the property is also observed. As a result, greater insights into married women and their property in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are obtained.

In the early 1370s, when serfdom had all but disappeared in Flanders, Count Louis II resumed the collection of mortmain, a death fee usually paid only by those of servile status. In a region with a sophisticated financial system it is striking that rather than accepting payment in cash the Count's bailiffs secured personal items. In this paper it is argued that the Count was thereby taking advantage of a population dazed by the ravages of plague and by the on-going civil war between himself and a number of the towns within his territory. Traditional local bonds such as mortmain, extended and reinterpreted within a new constellation of power, enabled Flemish counts to turn a fee into a tax, highlighting their authority.

Traditionally a large role has been attributed to the spread of clocks and watches in fostering a ‘modern’ awareness of time. Yet, little research is available that empirically enables signs of growing time awareness to be linked to the distribution of time-keeping devices. In this article both these phenomena are brought together using two independent sets of evidence that permit the hypothesis that clocks and watches contributed to a heightened consciousness of time to be tested. While the ownership of clocks and watches was socially skewed, highly gendered and unevenly distributed over time, time awareness – as exemplified throughout numerous court cases – was essentially none of these.

This article examines encounters of women with the criminal justice system in Wales during the century before the Courts of Great Sessions were abolished in 1830. Drawing on evidence from cases of sexual assault and homicide, it argues that women who killed were rarely convicted or punished harshly. A gendered discretion of sorts also acted against rape victims, as trials never resulted in conviction. Using violence as a lens, the paper reveals a distinctively Welsh approach to criminal justice, and offers quantitative evidence on which further comparative studies of the history of law and crime in England and Wales may be based.

This article studies social dynamics in the Catalan region of Girona during the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, using marriage contracts signed before a notary. The analysis of this source reveals the existence of important social and economic changes, especially among the lowest groups of rural society. Among these transformations, the increase in the real value of dowries – especially in the case of treballadors (literally labourers) – stands out particularly, as does the appearance of new labels applied to new social groups. However, these changes occurred without altering the basic aspects of marriage patterns of the different social groups, as indicated by the strong stability of levels of social and geographical endogamy.