In a poem written at Dean Prior in Devonshire sometime between 1630 and 1648, and addressed to the Earl of Westmoreland, Robert Herrick invites the Earl to watch a procession of harvesters bringing in the last load:

Come forth, my Lord, and see the Cart

Drest up with all the Country Art.

See, here a Maukin, there a sheet,

As spotless pure as it is sweet:

The Horses, Mares, and frisking Fillies

(Clad, all, in Linnen, white as Lillies.)

The Harvest Swaines, and Wenches, bound

For joy, to see the Hock-cart crown'd.

On the 25th June 1789, Jean Louis Varey, of the village of St Ferreole near Faverges in Haute Savoie, met Jean Burdet in the local inn to discuss the future of a field the latter had rented from Varey's father. After the conclusion of this business they took a glass of wine specifically with four others: Jean Baptiste Prevost, the son of the notary, and three local peasant householders Jean Roderigue, Pierre Raucaz and Aime Guignon. Many others were also in attendance. Varey had recently returned to his home after a period of time trading in France, and he clearly fancied himself as something of an enterpreneur. The others thought him a bit above himself.

One of the legacies of the great landed estates in England is the large number of distinctive estate cottages which are scattered throughout the countryside. These are, of course, more in evidence in some counties than others, particularly in those where a considerable proportion of land was owned by the elite. Estate cottages survive in some numbers from the eighteenth century, but the greatest number was built in the nineteenth. Research on estate buildings has tended to highlight the model village, built largely during the first half of the nineteenth century and created for aesthetic reasons. A well-known example is Somerleyton in Suffolk, designed in the 1840s for the then owner of Somerleyton Hall. Here, the cottages, built in a variety of styles – some with mock timber-framing, others with thatched roofs – surround the village green. Ilam in Staffordshire is another example, where cottages which were designed by G.G. Scott in 1854 display a range of styles and materials, many alien to the local area. A third example is Edensor on the Duke of Devonshire's Derbyshire estate, where the stone buildings exhibit distinctive Italianate features. The list could be extended, but these examples were clearly designed to impress, to provide aesthetic pleasure for the owners and, in the case of Ilam, to create a picturesque image of idyllic contentment among the labouring population as much as to provide good, spacious, sanitary accommodation for employees. In each of these examples, the cottages are generally of individual design and thus expensive to build.

In 1868, when the Meiji emperor had his powers ‘restored’ by the political revolution that destroyed the old feudal system of the Tokugawa shoguns, Japan was a predominantly agricultural economy. By the time of the emperor's death in 1912 Japan had achieved significant industrialisation and in 1920, after a further boom during the First World War, she was well advanced along the road to a distinctive type of industrial development based on textile goods for export, heavy industry for domestic civilian and military capital investment, and considerable state intervention in economic and social organisation. In the mid 1880s, about 70% of the gainfully-employed population were engaged in agriculture, producing well over 40% of the gross national product. Farmers derived about three-quarters of their total income from agricultural activities, although agriculture probably absorbed only about 60% of total work hours for the labour force as a whole, with another 2% each for fishing and construction, and a further 16% or so for traditional mining and manufacturing. By 1920, the GDP of the Japanese economy had grown almost three-fold, but the share supplied by agriculture was under 30%, while just over 50% of workers were employed there.1.

‘I am persuaded that the Memorial Crosses, in the Churchyards, on the village greens, where the roads meet, will for many years to come cry eloquent but silent protest against all that divides and degrades village life.’ The Bishop of Hereford, 1920.

On May 12th, 1926 Stanley Baldwin announced the end of the General Strike in a radio broadcast to the nation. The announcement was followed by a choir singing Parry's now familiar Jerusalem with its resounding climactic affirmation of ‘England's green and pleasant Land’.1 It is hard to resist the speculation that this was Baldwin's choice as much as Reith's, since the Conservative Prime Minister had from the outset of his political career been identified as an ordinary man rooted deeply in the English countryside.2 Baldwin's private correspondence demonstrates that his attachment to ‘our eternal hills’ was entirely genuine, but there can be little doubt that this was also an image that he consciously cultivated, and which – via his mastery of the new instruments of mass communication – he was able to convey to a wide and popular audience. To this extent he might be thought of as a Tory populist: as J.C. Squire noted in the Observer review of Baldwin's 1926 collection of his speeches, entitled On England (released just before the General Strike), ‘this is the work of a thoroughly representative Englishman: not the common man, but one expressing what the common man feels and cannot say for himself’. These ‘common’ themes and sentiments ranged across a number of issues from Shakespeare to the topical ‘Peace in Industry’, but pride of place in the volume was granted to his definitive statement on national identity, given in May 1924 ‘to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint’ at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, and entitled plainly and unambiguously ‘England’.

When Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, evades captivity by disappearing into the Paris sewers, the author relaxes the narrative tension for nearly twenty pages in order to reflect on the harm caused by that city's waste-disposal methods. In doing so, he identifies what were to become, several decades later, central issues of concern for the British organic husbandry movement. With an artist's insight Hugo recognised that the Parisian sewage system was doubly wasteful: ‘the land impoverished and the water infected’ (Hugo, 1909: 532). A ‘restitution of the mire to the land’ (Hugo, 1909: 548) was required, and he suggested the creation of a tubular arrangement, ‘a system of elementary drainage, as simple as the lungs of man’, which would ‘bring into our cities the pure water of the fields and send back into our fields the rich water of the cities’ (Hugo, 1909: 532). The alternative – the road being taken – was to squander potentially precious fertility and emaciate the population.