During the later sixteenth century, increasing competition for wood fuel supplies led to rising tension between Wealden cloth manufacturers and ironmasters and to a prolonged but unsuccessful campaign by clothiers seeking parliamentary legislation that would radically curtail iron production in the Cranbrook area. Remarkably revealing files among the papers of Sir John Leveson, one of Kent's late Elizabethan deputy lieutenants, show that during the winter of 1594–5, Cranbrook's frustrated clothiers and their allies among other chief inhabitants of the parish attempted to hijack plebeian distress over low wages and high food and fuel prices for their own ends. It is unlikely that those devising or encouraging industrial sabotage that winter included Cranbrook's richer clothiers, but they were certainly behind plans to mobilise a mass petition to the crown for the suppression of ironworks. In turn, two of Cranbrook's parish officials, deftly exploiting fears of a disorderly march on London, managed to persuade Sir John Leveson to lobby the privy councillor Lord Cobham on the clothiers’ behalf, although to no avail. Thereafter, Cranbrook clothiers vented their frustration against the Bakers of Sissinghurst, who owned the local iron forge and furnace, by frequently raiding the family's deer park, sometimes in conjunction with local gentry pursuing their passion for unlawful hunting.

In a small municipality in the Alentejo region of Portugal, the same group of families, defined by latifundia landownership or tenancy, dominated local political institutions for two centuries during which great changes occurred. Three revolutions resulted in regime transitions: the 1820 Liberal Revolution, the 1910 Republic and the 1926 Dictatorship, which led to Salazar's Estado Novo. Even though a few members of these families offered some resistance to each of these revolutions at an early stage, they all adapted their behaviour and kept local political control within their ranks. Local traditional institutions, such as the local council and mayor, charitable and welfare associations, and corporate institutions created in the 1930s and 1940s to direct economic activities, were all presided over and controlled by members of the same rural elite. This continued until 1974, when the Carnation Revolution and agrarian reform removed and replaced these old elites with new ones. The lords of the land remained lords of the village for as long as control over the main economic resource of the region was the major factor in the maintenance of political power. These land occupations were not permanent. The process was reversed as a result of political factors relating to Portugal's accession to the European Economic Community in 1986. Agrarian elites in Southern Portugal no longer control jobs or the economy and therefore they no longer control local politics as they had for several generations. The Carnation Revolution and agrarian reform removed the old elites and replaced them with new ones. Agriculture is no longer the main economic activity of the countryside. The rural environment has become a hiking ground or an all-terrain vehicles track. The future is elsewhere and the current economic situation and the absence of elites have transformed rural areas into depopulated regions.

Despite the growing significance of the ideology of domesticity and changing farming practices, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish farmwives continued to have an active economic role on the farm. The continuation of their economic role reflected wider cultural beliefs that saw work as central to claims to property ownership, reinforced by the growth in the language of economic and political rights during the nineteenth century, which shaped how men and women understood work, ownership and personal rights.

Based on conventional learning and supported in no small measure by stereotypes, agriculture as a vocation was not considered as part of the occupational profile of Jewish society in Eastern Europe until the Second World War. However, various studies show that in different regions in this area, primarily Lithuania, White Russia, north eastern Poland, and Bessarabia, tens of thousands of Jews made a living from direct engagement in various branches of agriculture, including field crops, orchards, lake fishing, etc. These Jews lived mainly in the rural areas and were a factor, and at times a highly significant one, in the local demographic and economic structure. The first part of this article examines the question whether these Jews, who were part of the general rural society living in the countryside, developed a certain type of rural cultural identity. This question is discussed by examining various aspects of their attitude towards nature. The second part of the article considers the possible influence of the agricultural occupation on the shaping of a unique peasant cultural identity among these rural Jews and the ways they coped with the accompanying religious, social and cultural implications.

This article surveys 226 affiliation cases from South Wales between 1870 and 1900. Detailed study reveals both the reasons why most women did not try to get maintenance, but also why they had high levels of success when they did so. Once a woman got to the hearing, the interests of magistrates and the poor law guardians helped them ‘find fathers’ for their children. The guardians in particular assisted women in bringing cases by the 1890s. The fact that affiliation suits centred on sexuality by definition meant that magistrates did not penalise women for sexual nonconformity any more than the men involved, although both sexes faced limitations on their behaviour. These cases also reveal a great deal about local customs and attitudes towards sexuality. In the end, affiliation suits merely removed the most glaring abuses rather than tackling the larger issue of support for unmarried mothers and their children.

This article considers the ways in which clothing is represented in selected work of Thomas Hardy in the context of wider social and economic change in nineteenth-century English rural society. While taking into account the difficulties of using fictional literature in this way, I suggest that it is precisely Hardy's subjectivity that makes his observations so compelling and that his perception of change lies at the heart of his representation of dress. I endeavour to show how in his writing, the perceived tension between an unchanging, idealised, countryside increasingly subjected to the influence of an urban culture is frequently expressed, either directly or metaphorically, in terms of clothing. The social and economic changes, including agricultural change, of which Hardy was so acutely aware, help to account for the disappearance of traditional features of rural dress, such as the smock-frock and the sun-bonnet. In their place were adopted styles influenced by notions of ‘fashion’ and made available through the process of mass production which Hardy associated primarily with towns. For Hardy, the influence of urban fashions alienated people from that individuality and speciality in dress which formed a link with their environment and ultimately their own past and history.