This is the first book to survey the experience of servants in rural Europe from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

Introduction: Servants in the Economy and Society of Rural Europe - Jane Whittle
The Employment of Servants in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Coastal Flanders: A Case-Study of Scueringhe Farm near Bruges - Lies Vervaet
The Institution of Service in Rural Flanders in the Sixteenth Century: A Regional Perspective - Thijs Lambrecht
A Different Pattern of Employment: Servants in Rural England c.1500-1660 - Jane Whittle
Female Service and the Village Community in South-West England 1550-1650: The Labour Laws Reconsidered - Charmian Mansell
Life-cycle Servant and Servant for Life: Work and Prospects in Rural Sweden c. 1670-1730 - Christina Prytz
Servants in Rural Norway, c.1650-1800 - Hanne Osthus
Rural Servants in Eighteenth-Century Münsterland, Northwestern Germany: Households, Families and Servants in the Countryside - Christine Fertig
Rural Servants in Eastern France 1700-1872: Change and Continuity over Two Centuries - Jeremy Hayhoe
The Servant Institution during the Swedish Agrarian Revolution: The Political Economy of Subservience - Carolina Uppenberg
Farm service and hiring practices in mid nineteenth-century England: The Doncaster Region in the West Riding of Yorkshire - Sarah Holland
Dutch Live-In Farm Servants in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Decline of the Life-Cycle Service System for the Rural Lower Class - Richard Paping
Rural Life-Cycle Service: Established Interpretations and New (Surprising) Data: The Italian Case in Comparative Perspective (Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries) - Raffaella Sarti
Select Bibliography