This article fills an historiographical and methodological gap in our knowledge of the lived experience of the process of rural industrialisation. It uses a microhistorical study of a rapidly developing parish in the Somerset coalfield to question notions current in the historiography of rural class structures and community identity. It employs a variety of sources, including extracts from a particularly detailed early nineteenth-century journal, to demonstrate that the growing proportion of coal miners in the parish population from the late eighteenth century was well integrated, economically and culturally, into the local community. This argument runs counter to the stereotype that coal miners tended to form a ‘breed apart’ from the wider population. It is further argued that parish-based definitions of community, which have been emphasised in some of the most recent historiography, are less relevant in regions experiencing significant economic growth and structural change.

This article addresses the way in which officials in the last decades of the Old Poor Law thought about and addressed the problems posed to the poor relief process by the migration of paupers. Focusing on the so called out-parish relief system, the article uses rich overseer correspondence and supplementary pauper letters from the northwest of England to explore several key themes in the period 1800–1840: the nature of money transmission where allowances had to be paid at a distance, issues of administrative competence and incompetence, the nature of relationships between parishes and between parishes and their distant poor under the out-parish relief system, and issues of trust and reputation between parishes and between parishes and paupers. The article will show that the out-parish system was vital to the stability of the Old Poor Law and that its apparent fragility and susceptibility to fraud and mistrust is to some extent belied by the fact that robust and long term relationships developed between parishes under the out-parish system.

In November 1855 the Conservative Party's electoral agent Philip Rose wrote to the Chief Whip Sir William Jolliffe, about a Cornish farmer William Snell:

Snell is one of the adventurers who go about endeavouring to persuade people that he is employed from headquarters. He called upon me the other day and stated that he knew Mr Triscott and had been in communication with him. I heard all he had to say but said as little in return as possible.

In Albanian village society, the main characteristic of the social status of women, and their only function that meets social approval, is their aptitude for procreation and motherhood. And the Albanian child is first and foremost a son, who will succeed his father, inherit from him, guarantee the everlastingness of his lineage and honour his ancestors. If the daughter is a future wife and a potential mother, polyvalent images make the boy child the symbol of radical transformation, renewal and regeneration. The beliefs, rites, practices, the multiple symbolic forms and collective representations surrounding birth and socialisation, in addition to their magic, divinatory or propitiatory roles, are also used to confer a symbolic value of recognition on the processes of construction and socialisation of the individual who has just been born.

Following Perkin's suggestion that western European society is increasingly professionalised, and given the emergence of a stratum of large commercial farms in twentieth-century England, this paper examines the contention that, to some extent at least, English agriculture has been professionalised over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It briefly surveys the literature on professionalisation, identifies a list of professional characteristics, and then tests the attributes of twentieth-century English farmers against this list. It also briefly examines the effects of professionalisation, and concludes that, although it would be excessively simplistic to claim that the whole industry has been professionalised, it is possible to identify professional groups.