During the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Sami and the Kvens were classified and categorized in different ways by the Norwegian state authorities in their official censuses. The process whereby various categorization principles were applied was heavily imbued with ideological and political considerations. During the eighteenth century, when main concern was establishing and consolidating the borders of the state, a kind of geographical enclosure and delimitation took place. During the nineteenth century and through to the Second World War, however, the overriding ambition was to depict all the inhabitants within these established borders as being as culturally homogeneous as possible. Today, it has once more become desirable to acknowledge the presence of both the Sami and the Kvens.

This article examines the incidence of moneylending and the supply of cash in four rural communities and one small urban centre in Cheshire through the seventeenth century. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from wills and inventories, supplemented by such probate accounts and depositions as are available. It considers the questions of who lent money and to whom, for what purposes and in what amounts. It also examines the incidence of cash holdings in inventories and the effect that the Civil War and its aftermath had upon the availability of cash.

This article seeks to place second-hand consumption, or the reuse of older objects, into the expanding historical literature on early modern consumer practices. It claims that the study of second-hand consumption remains a much neglected topic of historical interest. Further empirical research of pre-industrial reuse habits is needed to examine essential problems and inconsistencies concerning consumers and their handling of older goods. On the basis of rarely used sources relating to public auctions in the countryside of the southern Netherlands, key questions regarding the current debate will be addressed. These questions concern the products that were handled, the actors involved, and how reuse was (or was not) affected by broader changes in society.

Studies of wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain focus either on establishing aggregate measures or on individual case studies. These do not allow for a comparative analysis of the way that the composition of wealth was influenced by age and gender. This article explores the importance of these factors using both a case-study approach and a more comprehensive analysis of wealth left at death for a sample of 1,444 individuals. By establishing the age at death for 1,274 of these individuals, together with evidence from a series of death duty records, it is possible to determine the composition of assets by age and gender. For both men and women, shares became more important over the life course. Real estate was more important for men of all ages compared to women, for whom safe investments in government securities assumed greater significance with age. These findings confirm that both age and gender influenced the amount and composition of wealth and demonstrate that these factors need to be taken into account in any model that seeks to make generalizations about the pattern of wealth-holding in the population at large. Emphasizing these demand-side factors provides a different perspective on the rise of Britain as a ‘nation of investors’.

Although women accused of murdering their newborn infants were tried under the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children throughout the eighteenth century, their treatment changed significantly, at least in London, between the last quarter of the seventeenth century and 1803. This article charts these changes through an analysis of the accounts of trials held at the Old Bailey. These reflect three interwoven and interdependent strands of change: the development of a range of successful defence strategies, changes in courtroom procedures and the increased participation of lawyers, and a greater use of and reliance on medical witnesses and their evidence.

This article discusses the search for ‘the devil's mark’ as an example of the social embeddedness of evidentiary methods. The belief in early modern England was that the devil branded the bodies of witches with symbolic yet concrete corporeal malformations such as marks and growths. Thus a bodily search for the devil's mark became a common procedure in witch-trials. The analysis here of the fierce debate about the probative value of this allegedly direct physical evidence demonstrates an affinity between the evidential dispositions of the participants and their social position. The meaning of this method of proof emerged in the context of different, sometimes inconsistent or even competing, cultural concepts.