This paper seeks to place the seventeenth-century enclosure riots at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in both their local and national contexts and to consider the Crown's changing attitudes towards enclosure during the period under consideration. The surviving local records are such that it is not only possible to trace the economic and social backgrounds of many of the rioters, but also to ascertain the eventual outcome of the unrest and the factors that contributed to it: an investigation that many historians of enclosure riots, in their reliance on central records, have been reluctant to undertake. As a manor of the Duchy of Cornwall, Berkhamsted was, in the early decades, subject to the attention of a powerful landlord, with a great deal of legal muscle. In 1640, however, the tables were turned, partly due to opposition to the Crown in other royal manors and in government. It appears that having the Crown as landlord ultimately ensured the rioters' success. A local landlord would have been able to concentrate his energies on the enclosure. Berkhamsted Common was preserved for posterity.

The focus of postmodernist historians on language and representation clashes with the more traditional approach of the social historian to material structures and processes. This article adopts the suggestion of Wahrman that a ‘space of possibilities’ exists where these apparently competing perspectives might be connected. The concept of a ‘space of possibilities’ is pursued through a case study of a marginal group, the fishing communities of west Cornwall in the late nineteenth century. The article explores points of contact and contrast between the artistic and the fishing communities, between the painterly gaze and the subjects of that gaze. It is proposed that, while the artistic colonies and their representations might be explained as a result of discourses reproduced in the centre, their specific choice of location in Cornwall can also be related to the local economic and social history that granted them a space of possibilities.

In the 1980s two vigorous debates commanded the attention of economic and feminist historians alike, and they played a key part in shaping the historiography concerning rural women in Australia. One debate revolved around the use of the nineteenth-century census in determining women's occupations, including those of farming women. The other debate, part of a wider feminist conversation about women's agency, focused on the question of the nature of white women's lives within colonial families and society. Despite the centrality of rural women to these debates, and the role colonial women's histories played in shaping the historiography, these debates did not impact upon the writing of rural history in Australia. This article revisits these debates in the light of new research into the lives of never-married women on Australia's family farms and uses their histories to question the conclusions arrived at by feminist and economic historians. It also questions the continuing invisibility of rural women in histories of rural Australia and hopes to provoke more discussion between rural and feminist historians.

The literature concerning recreational landscapes is substantial, but its contents are heavily biased towards the parks and gardens of the aristocratic and land-owning classes. Surprisingly, very little of a landscape historical nature has been published on the countrysides created and maintained for the purpose of grouse shooting, even though the areas concerned are some of the most admired and most ecologically sensitive parts of Britain. The pursuit of grouse shooting has been followed in the Yorkshire Dales for more than 250 years and the activity (in this context ‘sport’ is an emotive term) and its varied impacts upon the landscape have been conditioned by a variety of factors. Some are social, and relate to perceptions of what constitute acceptable forms of upper class recreation and association; some are technological and involve the development of firearms; some are logistical and pertain to improvements in access to the upland grouse moors, while some are ecological and concern the improvement and deterioration of the habitat and fluctuations in the grouse population. All these factors found expression in the landscape, on the grand scale, by the systematic burning, swaling or swiddening of the moors and at the local level, for example, by constructing butts in relation to topography, prevailing wind direction and the flight paths favoured by the game.

This essay uses the film A Canterbury Tale (The Archers, 1944) to consider the relationship between the countryside and modernity in English culture during the 1930s and 1940s. While previous analyses have argued that A Canterbury Tale film is unambiguously conservative, this paper adopts a Gramscian framework to suggest that its conservatism is intimately bound up with an emergent, modernising structure of feeling. The paper therefore studies those scenes in which the serene rurality of the narrative engages in a visual and aural dialogue with the modern world. The paper argues that three motifs in the film are particularly meaningful: the development of unexpected class and gender inflections in the concept of pilgrimage, the detachment of America from its status as a signifier of ‘bad’ modernity in the English countryside, and the incorporation of the cinematic into the rural.