This article uses court records, overseers' accounts, pauper examinations and other records from several counties, including Huntingdonshire and Staffordshire, to look at the experiences of poor relief in early modern England. It shows the varied circumstances under which the poor ‘encountered’ the poor law in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting the often contradictory attitudes that poor people encountered. More than this, it argues that there were many sorts of ‘poor’ people with very different capacities to negotiate about relief and to help themselves and each other. These features compounded enduring regional differences in the nature and extent of relief to generate a complex patchwork of experiences for the poor in early modern England.

The pollarding and shredding of trees were widespread and common practices in Britain until the eighteenth century. Trees were an important source of fodder and their branches were regularly lopped so that sheep and cattle could eat their twigs and leaves. The branches could be used for firewood and other purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the practice of pollarding was becoming increasingly rare, and it had virtually died out by the mid-twentieth century. In Europe, by contrast, pollarding remains common in several Mediterranean, Balkan and Scandinavian countries. Pollarding is still practised in many tropical areas for the production of fuel and fodder. In this paper we trace the development of ideas about pollarding in British agricultural, estate management and forestry literature c1600–1900. We examine how pollarding, which was a traditional management practice of long standing at the start of our period, was increasingly vilified so that by the end of the eighteenth century, many foresters and agriculturists saw it as a symbol of the profligate use of resources.

This paper examines aspects of the social meaning of the parish boundary in Hanoverian England. The parish touched most people's lives through its role as a form of local government and as a significant landscape feature which defined a circuit of territory to which local people may have felt an allegiance. Evidence for the social meaning of boundaries is found in acts of boundary marking and related perambulation ceremonies and through written records, sometimes involving maps. The paper draws on a contrasting range of cases from a variety of counties with different landscape and settlement types in the century or so before the local government and administrative reforms of the 1830s – a time of significant change in central-local government relations. The paper evaluates the significance of the parish as principal repository of detailed information on its own boundaries in our period, with a premium placed on local knowledge, especially of the older parishioners. It is also suggested that acts of boundary recording could enhance a sense of parish consciousness and community.

This article examines aspects of the relationship between the Norfolk poor and the Norfolk clergy between 1815 and 1914. It considers the potential impact clergymen could have upon a number of areas of secular life, especially with regard to the extirpation of popular culture and custom, the social and moral management inherent in charity and Poor Law administration, and the development of ‘power networks’ in the countryside that confronted the challenge posed by religious Nonconformity and political radicalism. The article is principally concerned with the importance of the Church of England as an instrument of secular authority in nineteenth-century rural life. Rival social structures and conflicting economic interests are subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analysis, while keys to cultural tension are sought in such iconic areas as the pageantry of parish entertainments; the re-casting of law to act against custom; the rise of the clergyman as antiquarian historian and amateur archaeologist; the symbolism and architecture of the restored church. In so doing an attempt is made to address questions that are at once broadly political and narrowly human in their scope. What did the Oxbridge scholar – perhaps having spent the preceding three years conversing in Greek and Latin with his peers – find to ‘say’ to the agricultural labourers now in his pastoral care? And why, when the clergyman (often justifiably) thought of himself as working unstintingly in his parishioners' interests, was he so often heartily despised by them?

This article seeks to explore cinematic representations of rural life during the Occupation and the immediate post-war period. Films about the countryside were not new as France had long enjoyed what could be called a ‘rural cinema’ largely through the highly successful film versions of Marcel Pagnol's novels and plays. During the Occupation, rural films continued to celebrate pastoral life despite considerable conflict between urban and rural. Film historians have argued that in doing so, they simply endorsed Vichy's ideology of le retour à la terre and its adulation of le paysan. Yet, as I will argue, in the context of a divided nation, these films were far more significant than existing research has acknowledged and indeed conveyed a profound longing for a unified France in their suggestion that there was an inextricable link between countryside and city. Post-war films with rural themes still articulated the tensions and contrasts between the two but more intensely, by presenting the city as eternally seductive but ultimately dangerous for the rural émigré. By this deliberate juxtaposition of conflicting images, these films sought to reunite a dispersed population by ‘relocating’ rural and urban dwellers in their natural and appropriate spheres.