In 1348 a group of villein tenants of the manor of Badbury of the Abbey of Glastonbury in Wiltshire attempted to go to court in order to prove that their manor was of ancient demesne status. Although the peasants were unsuccessful in their claim, they tried again in 1377. Their case is entered and explained in unusual detail in the court records of the manor, and therefore allows us valuable insights in this particular, and far from uncommon, form of peasant resistance. This paper explores the motives and aims of the peasants who planned the action, the organisation of their revolt, and the individuals involved, whose background and histories can be traced through the court records.

While there has been some research on the parliamentary enclosure of upland waste in England and Wales during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this topic still receives little attention in some recent accounts of parliamentary enclosure. Many aspects of the processes involved, and their impact on the landscape, are also poorly understood. Much research has proceeded either at a very general level or on the basis of detailed individual case studies. This paper adopts an intermediate scale, focusing on the old county of Westmorland to examine the geographical and chronological patterns of enclosure before looking more closely at some of the problems involved in creating a new landscape.

This paper enlarges our understanding about the Primitive Methodist Connexion by examining the denomination in a part of the country where it enjoyed considerable success during the nineteenth century. It takes as its starting point the relative lack of historical research on the Methodist circuit, which was an important innovation in religious provision. The circuit system gave Wesleyan Methodism and its break-away denominations considerable flexibility to co-ordinate their work in a highly effective way. The developing geography of Primitive Methodist circuits in the English-Welsh borderland is explored, as the denomination moved from enthusiastic evangelism towards consolidation. Particular attention is paid to the way in which changing missionary tactics, chapel building, local dissension, and the trend towards circuit sub-division shaped the geography and internal work of these circuits during the nineteenth century.

This article draws on a number of documents – mainly rent books, diaries, letters, and contracts – to investigate landlords whose estates came in at the lower end of the ‘Great Landowner’ category; a hitherto neglected area of investigation because most studies like those of David Howell and R. J. Moore-Colyer focus on larger estates. The materials examined allow tentative judgements about a group which has been vilified in the historiography of the subject. The three topics dealt with in the piece – touch on issues which transcend regional/national boundaries and encompass problems of wider economic and social significance, thus contributing to the broader historiography of landlord-tenant relations.

In 1950 Iran and the United States signed the first Point Four agreement, establishing a program now known as USAID. It fulfilled President Harry S. Truman's desire to control the Soviet bloc and to share technology with third world countries. Utah State University contracted with the U.S. Point Four program to provide technicians in agriculture from 1951 to 1954. This paper examines the successes and the frustrations that the Utahns felt in transporting technology to Iran. While there were some successes, the cultural and economic difficulties were hard to overcome. As a result, the technicians in the 1960s experienced the same problems faced by those in the 1950s. These included a negative reaction to farm machinery in a land with many laborers, problems training machinery operators, and language barriers.