This article offers the first systematic analysis of the role that violence played in the management of apprentices, and the gendered dynamics of violence in English apprenticeship more broadly. It does so through an examination of 195 petitions that apprentices or their supporters submitted to the Middlesex and Westminster Sessions, which sought the cancellation of their indentures on grounds of ‘immoderate correction’. It offers a quantitative overview of the surviving petitions, examining the proportion that featured allegations of violence, the terms and level of detail in which violence was described, and its relationship to apprentices’ other stated grievances. It moves on to reconstruct the factors that could prompt masters and mistresses to mete out correction (as well as their commentaries on their perceived right to do so) and the tactics that petitioners used in crafting their complaints to legal authorities. Although female apprentices complained about violence at a disproportionate rate to their male peers, the material considered here suggests that their petitions did so in comparatively formulaic and restricted terms. The final section considers what implications this might have for our understandings of violence, gender and apprenticeship, and a genre of document – the petition – that provides access to these issues.

Historians have agreed that the gender division of labour in rural households was broadly similar across the whole of northern and western Europe during the early modern period. Until recently, however, there has been a lack of detailed data about the historical division of labour within European countries with which to test the validity of such cross-cultural generalizations. New research that has collected evidence of work tasks for early modern Sweden and England now makes it possible to undertake a direct comparison of two European countries. In this article, the gender division of labour in agriculture, craft production and commerce in Sweden and England is compared to demonstrate the complexity of historical gender divisions of labour. It presents a detailed picture of the gender division of labour that not only shows differences between the two countries but also demonstrates flexibility and adaptability in the allocation of work between women and men. As a consequence, we argue that neither broad generalizations nor single causes are adequate explanations for the patterns observed.

In this article, I explain how peasant communities were affected by fire disasters in North Ostrobothnia in northern Finland during the seventeenth century. Unlike previous research mainly based on dendrochronological data aimed at dating these fire disasters’ scope and occurrence, I focus on the socio-economic consequences of wildfires from both a bottom-up and a top-down perspective in order to establish different factors of resilience and vulnerability. Through the analysis of local district court protocols, tax records and Swedish legislation, the article explains how and why fires occurred and what role peasant common-pool institutions and the early modern Swedish state played in this development. The results show how peasant communities were able to bounce back from recurrent events of fire disasters thanks to close cooperation between them and Swedish officials, the reinvigorated medieval relief institution of fire support (Swe. brandstod), and owing to the robustness of the peasants’ common-pool institutions.