This article investigates the changing administrative context of drainage in south-west Lancashire from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Successive schemes managed by Commissions of Sewers, piecemeal reclamation and private agreement were characterised by primitive technology, under-investment and poor management. Consequently, their achievements were limited. Large scale drainage schemes under the control of single individuals or powerful syndicates enjoyed greater success, but to coordinate drainage across an ecosystem that went beyond estate boundaries required state intervention in the form of an Act of Parliament of 1779. After some initial success the drainage commissioners found themselves immersed in legal wranglings with landowners and maintenance of the drainage system largely fell into abeyance. It was not until the landlords provided the administrative and financial resources to invest in technological solutions in the 1840s that the land achieved its full potential. It is argued that drainage of this land, resulting in its transformation from some of the worst land in the country to some of the best, was a major contributor not only to the agricultural success of the region, but also to Lancashire's industrial success.

Since the publication of Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing our understanding of the role(s) of covert protests in Hanoverian rural England has advanced considerably. Whilst we now know much about the dramatic practices of incendiarism and animal maiming and the voices of resistance in seemingly straightforward acquisitive acts, one major gap remains. Despite the fact that almost thirty years have passed since E. P. Thompson brought to our attention that under the notorious ‘Black Act’ the malicious cutting of trees was a capital offence, no subsequent research has been published. This paper seeks to address this major lacuna by systematically analysing the practices and patterns of malicious attacks on plants (‘plant maiming’) in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southern England. It is shown that not only did plant maiming take many different forms, attacking every conceivable type of flora, but also that it was universally understood and practised. In some communities plant maiming was the protestors' weapon of choice. As a social practice it therefore embodied wider community beliefs regarding the defence of plebeian livelihoods and identities.

Shepherds were a critical component of the early wool industry in colonial Australia and persisted even after fencing was adopted and rapidly spread in the later nineteenth century. Initially shepherds were convicts, but after transportation ceased in the late 1840s, emancipists and free men were employed. Their duty was the same as in England: look after the flock during the day, and pen them nightly in folds made of hurdles. Analysis of wages and flock sizes indicates that pastoralists achieved good productivity gains with larger flocks but inflation of wages reduced the gains to modest levels. The gold rushes and labour shortages of the 1850s played a minor role in increasing both wages and flock sizes. Living conditions in huts were primitive, and the diet monotonous. Shepherds were exposed to a range of diseases, especially in Queensland. Flock-masters employed non-whites, usually at lower wages, and women and children. Fences only replaced shepherds when pastoralists realised that the new technology of fences, combined with other changes, would give them higher profits. The sheep were left to fend for themselves in the open paddocks, a system used to this day.

How to Write the History of a Parish (1905) by John Charles Cox is a famous early modern history of the parish-state. Yet its author had an eclectic and radical political career in Midlands' life long before he became famous as an historian of English rural life. Today, Cox's radical activities are in fact an important historical prism. His neglected career demonstrates how a strong personality could bring about genuine political change in agricultural life. Cox always focused on the need to fight for the socio-economic and political rights of the labouring poor. At the same time, he was committed to historical research and record collecting, especially that of the vestry in which the poor found a voice. In so doing, he personifies how the boundaries between private interest and public service, the domestic and the political, were sometimes navigated with personal intensity in rural England during the later nineteenth century.

Writing in 1960 Margaret Stacey asserted that, ‘Women, compared with men, tend to show group characteristics regardless of other social factors like class. Their training from childhood sets them apart from boys and together as potential wives and mothers.’ This article will question whether Oxfordshire women did indeed believe that there was a commonality in their experiences at this time, irrespective of the locality in which they lived or the class to which they belonged, or whether these differences were more significant than their shared gender. The first objective of this article is therefore to analyse the role class played in determining women's experiences of life in Oxfordshire at this time. Leading on from this, the second objective is to investigate the importance of locality upon lived experience, and to engage, in Charles Phythian-Adams' words, in the process of ‘unravelling localized identities’ (1987). Using Oxfordshire as a case study it is possible to examine a range of communities: rural, urban and suburban. This article will demonstrate how the nature of these different communities affected women's experiences of living within them. The third objective is to discuss the ways in which the women I interviewed expressed their experiences of rural living through the oral history interview, and how their accounts relate to contemporary debates and existing historical interpretations.