Over recent years much attention has been given to temporal trends between 1550 and 1900 in the proportions within English rural society of living-in servants in husbandry on the one hand and, on the other, cottage labourers. According to Ann Kussmaul there were two periods when the balance shifted towards labourers and away from servants: one took in the latter half of the sixteenth century and the first part of seventeenth; the other began in the latter part of the eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth. These were both periods when population was rising rapidly and when labour was not in short supply. Between the mid seventeenth century and the mid eighteenth, by contrast, there was a quite dramatic shift in the balance and a growing tendency among farmer-employers to hire farm servants on yearly terms. A relative shortage of labour as population declined, a shift towards pastoral farming (in which resident labour on the farm was all the more desirable to cope with the constant needs of animals as well as crises of birth and death which could occur at any time of the day and night), the falling costs of providing board: all of these encouraged farmers to begin to bind young people to annual contracts and to keep them on the farm.

The myriad forms of ‘popular culture’ have attracted an increasing amount of attention from historians of early modern and modern England. Students of English social relations are now familiar with several episodes of ‘cultural conflict’ in which there was putative friction between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ (or ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’) notions of acceptable behaviour. As the epigraphs to this article suggest, two particular era of ‘cultural polarisation’ have attracted considerably more attention than any others. On the one hand, historians of the Reformation, and especially of its ‘enforcement’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean local communities, have identified the suppression of traditional, festive culture as one of the ‘cultural reverberations’ of the spread of protestantism. On the other, Edward Thompson has encouraged students of eighteenth-century England to think in terms of a tension between ‘patrician society’ and ‘plebeian culture’, and of the possibilities that this ‘field of force’ raised for ‘class struggle without class’.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changing proportions of bequests made by the inhabitants of eight Lincolnshire parishes to various categories of heirs between 1567 and 1800. Six of the parishes are located in the clay vale of western Lincolnshire, the other two are on the fen edge in the south of the county. There are 1,442 wills from these parishes which made 10,763 bequests. These bequests can be divided into three categories, those made to the immediate family, those made to kin and those made to unrelated people who must represent the community in which the deceased had lived. The share each of these categories enjoyed changed significantly in the period. By the eighteenth century the immediate family had become predominant and, apparently, the community occupied a less important place in the social environment of the will makers.

Agricultural output per man had risen substantially in the early nineteenth century, partly as a result of greater specialisation. This, in turn, stimulated demand for those trades which served the entire rural community, such as the tailor, bootmaker, baker, butcher and shopkeeper, as craftsmen and tradesmen were increasingly called upon for goods and services, which were formerly provided by members of the household. Demand for traditional services to agriculture, from figures such as the wheelwright and the blacksmith, was also sustained. But in contrast to the situation in agriculture, there appears to have been no increase in productivity in the rural crafts and trades. As a result of growing demand for these services, rural craftsmen and tradesmen increased in numbers and became more specialised in occupation during the first part of the nineteenth century.

Few historians have made a more significant contribution to our understanding of social relations in the English countryside in the early nineteenth century than Roger Wells. In a series of publications, he has consistently and persuasively argued that, in the years from 1790 to 1834, the labourers of southern England fell victim to the rise of a new aggressive agrarian capitalism which fractured and destroyed an older complex social system, replacing it with the naked power of class interest and ushering in a new class consciousness among the rural labourers which corresponded to that developing in the towns among the industrial labourers. This class consciousness was the product of an active resistance which sometimes, as in Swing, took the form of overt protest. Swing, Wells believes, marked the clear expression of class conflict in the countryside. The labourers' defeat was compounded by the New Poor Law, by which triumphant agrarian capitalism imposed its new sway. Placing ‘a priceless premium on employment’, the New Poor Law transferred power into the hands of the large capitalist farmers who speedily came to dominate the Union boards. Under its pressure, residual aspects of ‘class collaboration’ between the labourers and the superior social orders dissolved. The labourers were left to develop a defensive class culture which found echoes in Chartism but was seen more extensively in a ‘class war’ which took the form of disorder, arson, poaching, ‘rough’ behaviour or in a parodied or cynical deference. Persuasive as Wells'’ case is, however, one element of rural society is, by and large, missing from it, and indeed from many other studies of rural protest in the nineteenth century: namely the landlords and, in particular, the largest landlords. Wells sees their role from 1815 to 1830 as being essentially niggardly, continuing to demand social discipline but increasingly failing to play their old role of mediator between the poor and the rate paying classes. Their support for the New Poor Law ‘proved to be the final nail in the coffin of rural paternalism’.

After the Civil War, settlers surged into the western two-thirds of Kansas occupying a region which only a few decades previously had been identified as part of the Great American Desert, and therefore too parched for farming. Many of those newly exploiting the virgin soil had learned their farming in a humid climate and were poorly equipped for survival in an arid region. Failure rates were high amongst pioneers who could not withstand the periodic droughts which destroyed not only their crops but also the gardens which were designed to provide vital subsistence foodstuffs. Farms thrived for a few years but then withered in the relentless sun; eventually hard-hit families gave up the struggle and moved on.