This article deploys a body of remarkably detailed witness statements to interrogate the nature of popular memory and social conflict in Petworth, Sussex. These depositions are located in two specific contexts: a struggle between the tenants of Petworth and the ninth earl of Northumberland (1591 – 1608) and the broader pattern of resistance and negotiation in the village between the ‘commotion time’ of 1549 and the calling of the Short Parliament. The essay presents a micro-history of local struggles over land, rights and resources and the findings open up questions within the recent historiography of early modern social relations, undermining the notion that authority was flexibly negotiated between ruler and ruled. Instead, it locates negotiation within social structures that gave a powerful advantage to the gentry and nobility. In this respect, the essay builds upon the return in social history to questions of economic inequality and imbalances of political agency.

The following paper presents the original tithe series for the province of Guadalajara in central Spain. The new series contribute to recent debates on pre-modern economic growth, thus improving knowledge of a key region of Spain. The study includes analysis of the four main grains, wheat, barley, rye and oats, and the evolution of their production during the eighteenth century. The series complete previous estimates of grain production for New Castile and suggest that this was a period of growth. However, the increase was not a sustained process but one with intense imbalances, with production reaching its peak in the mid 1750s followed by a deep crisis and very weak recovery. Wheat was clearly the most important of the four grains in volume and especially in value. Its predominance was maintained thanks to a demand encouraged by the demographic growth that took place during the eighteenth century. The production of wheat was also the most stable, followed by barley, oats and rye, as might be expected given that the grain was usually cultivated in the most fertile lands. A comparison with other tithe series from the interior of Spain reveals similarities, such as the crisis of the 1760s, but also different recuperation trends. The findings indicate that Guadalajara followed a growth pattern characteristic of a traditional economy in the interior of Spain.

Between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, a large number of new markets were established in the Flemish countryside. The multiplication of rural markets tends to be seen as part of the process of market integration, with rural producers responding to the opportunities provided by increasing external demand, such as that from the growing towns. However, an analysis of the motivation behind new establishments, based on the files treating the requests for new markets, reveals that markets were more often established for entirely different reasons. In this period, markets were expected to permit households to intensify their activities in order to overcome increasing economic difficulties. Developments within rural society, particularly rising population pressure, the need to produce and sell more, and deteriorating informal exchange networks among countrymen, coupled to a decline in demand for rural industrial products, were the main drives behind the multiplication of markets. This contribution shows it is important to pay attention to how new markets and market integration in general fitted within the goals and strategies of the country dwellers themselves.

During the first third of the twentieth century in France, negative and stigmatising stereotypes of rurality, inherited mainly from the previous century, were used as arguments to justify recourse to pedagogical innovations in physical education and sport for people living in the countryside. The invention of rural vulnerability led particularly to the setting up of ‘agricultural athletics’ meetings, ‘rural athletic trail runs’ and ‘rural horse events’ by vocational organisations and associations of educators. These initiatives, carried out mainly by economic and political interests, concerned mostly men and thus contributed to defining weakened rural masculinity.

This analysis is based on evidence from articles in regional, national and specialist press, official texts and physical education manuals dealing with bodily training for country people.

R. G. Stapledon was one of the most profound of twentieth-century thinkers on rural and landscape issues. Scientist, philosopher and teacher, he was an unconventional figure who, with a dedicated team of loyal colleagues, established the basic biology and breeding systems of the Graminae at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the 1920s and 1930s. They subsequently bred a range of grass and clover varieties which were to transform grazing lands throughout the British Empire. To Stapledon the grasslands of an island nation were of vital strategic importance and if Britain were to prepare for a future war, her grasslands would require dramatic improvement if they were to provide a reserve of fertility. In proposing and implementing a vast scheme of renovation of the uplands of Wales, against the fervent opposition of the economists, as a means of both improving agricultural output and stemming the haemorrhage of depopulation, he demonstrated the practical feasibility of land improvement. In so doing he provided a template for the massively subsidised post-war programme of land improvement which was so dramatically to change the face of Britain. This article describes the evolution and conduct of the Cahn Hill Improvement Scheme which was not only one of the most ambitious outdoor ‘experiments’ of the last century, but in a sense, a metaphor for nation-building itself.

The fighting in France and Belgium in May-June 1940 has generated a large literature. Mostly, however, this has concerned itself with military strategy, the triumph of the German operational methods popularly termed ‘Blitzkrieg’, the British evacuation at Dunkirk and the political consequences of defeat for the French. This article re-evaluates the mobilisation of 1939 and the conduct of combat operations in 1940 from a less conventional perspective: that of the animals in France. It explores what happened to the many domestic pets swept up, or left behind, in the flight of Belgian and French civilians southward to escape the invader; the livestock on the farmland of the Somme, Aisne, Oise and Meuse where the battles raged; and the horses which remained central to the transport of men, munitions and supplies on both the French and German sides. It argues that the recovery of the wartime experiences of the fauna of France should be part of a more holistic understanding of war's impact on the natural world and on all, non-humans as well as humans, who inhabit it.