Lacking the glamour of poaching or the undertones of protest associated with incendiarism or animal maiming, the more petty rural crimes have been largely ignored. This paper examines the motivation, nature and criminal administration of two under-researched crimes, wood and crop theft. It will be suggested that while the theft of wood and crops was almost wholly the crime of the rural poor, it may have been committed within a wider realm of social protest.

The analyses and interpretations that the social sciences have been making in recent decades on the theme of common property call for a fresh look at the history of the commons. Such a vision no longer considers them as resources necessarily destined to disappear, but rather attempts to discover what forces have acted on their historical trajectory. From this perspective, this paper analyses the evolution of common lands in Spain over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To that end, it rests on an interpretative proposal that, over time, common lands in Spain have experienced an alteration in their economic usefulness and have had to transform themselves in order to adapt to changing situations. In this context, the various agricultural and, indeed, general economic conjunctures, the evolution of social forces, as well as the make-up of the political system, have all played a major part in the greater or lesser persistence of the commons, in their forms of use and in their more or less successful adaptation to new situations.

During the nineteenth century newly invented clayworking machinery offered potential solutions to production problems in the British brickmaking industry. Three different mechanical brickmaking processes were available, but a combination of design imperfections and restrictions imposed by the excise duties on bricks discouraged their adoption in ordinary brickyards for many decades. This posed a serious dilemma for machine inventors. Without an opportunity to test machinery in brickmaking situations, they were unable to correct defects and produce implements that were clearly superior to hand brickmaking methods. For as long as brickmakers rejected mechanisation, the technical development of machinery was effectively halted. A breakthrough occurred in the 1840s when a lucrative new market emerged for machines capable of manufacturing large quantities of drainage pipes and tiles in rural locations. The exhibitions and implement trials at meetings of the Royal Agricultural Society of England were a decisive factor in the continuing technical development of clayworking machinery. Agricultural consumers, through debate, evaluation and negotiation with machine makers, ultimately determined the success of one mechanical clayworking process over others, and established the direction of future technological change in the brickmaking industry.

A previous article in Rural History entitled ‘“Rustic and Rude”: Hiring Fairs and their Critics in East Yorkshire c. 1850–75’, examined a critique of hiring fairs and farm service mounted by the Church of England in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the mid-Victorian period. This discussion builds upon that article by offering a more detailed examination of the actual attempts to reform and abolish hiring fairs that emanated from that critique. The article examines three stages of reform and abolition stretching over the mid-Victorian period: a first stage that centred upon imposing a system of hiring based upon written characters; a second stage that focussed upon imposing segregated hiring for male and female servants, and a final abolitionist stage. The campaign's tactics and the various measures deployed against hiring fairs during each stage are detailed and their level of success evaluated and explained. The broader motivations of the campaign and the manner in which they signified deeper Church anxieties about the nature of the rural social order are also discussed in a concluding evaluation of the campaign's impact.

By the outbreak of the Second World War the ‘Land Question’ had lost its power to generate acute political controversy. Yet the issue of land reform did not disappear with the failure of the 1929–31 Labour Government to reintroduce Lloyd George's land taxes. Land reform after 1914 needs to be rescued from an over-identification with the decline of Radical Liberalism. This article will trace the way Labour Party policy developed after 1914. By 1939 it had adopted a set of policies based on the economic protection of agriculture, increased domestic production and marketing. At the same time it argued for the preservation of the countryside through land-use planning. After 1918 a long-term commitment to land nationalisation began to occupy a more important position in its land reform policies, particularly after 1931. In addition, new measures appeared on the party's political agenda for the first time, including the preservation of the countryside against urban intrusion, access to mountain and moorland, and the creation of national parks.