This paper examines the role of elite women in estate management, enclosure and landscape improvement in eighteenth-century England, a topic which has to date received little in the way of sustained academic consideration. The paper focuses on four women who took control of sizeable Northamptonshire estates in the 1760s and early 1770s, and demonstrates that these women were active as both managers and innovators. In examining the women's involvement in estate management, the paper explores a series of important questions about women's place in the history of parliamentary enclosure and landscape improvement, as well as women's role in eighteenth-century society more generally.

This article describes the development of the reading room, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Reading rooms were originally imposed upon the working classes by the upper classes, mainly the church and local landowners. Their establishment reflected contemporary attitudes to philanthropy, recreation and self-help and confirmed the great class divide. Little research has been carried out on this subject, and this article focuses particularly on rural Norfolk, explaining the distribution of the one hundred and sixty village reading rooms identified, their varying location and architectural styles, membership profile and differing methods of financing, including fund-raising social events. The article uses local and national archives and contemporary Ordnance Survey maps, as well as information from many local people. Reading rooms offered a much needed alternative to the public house for the working classes, although they tended to appeal more to the lower middle classes, and membership was mostly restricted to males. The difference between reading rooms in ‘open’ and ‘closed’ parishes is discussed. In the twentieth century, as other diversions appeared and the countryside became more democratised, reading rooms gradually declined. They were an important part of village life and have left interesting evidence of former lifestyles and attitudes.

The level of rural unrest in the late Weimar Republic was much higher than has previously been assumed and did not simply decline after peaking in 1928. The agricultural crisis and Great Depression triggered a second wave of protest in the northern German countryside that continued from the autumn of 1931 until early 1933. Banding together, farmers established organisations to prevent compulsory tax and debt collection, and thwarted bailiffs and bidders at confiscations and compulsory auctions of farms and farm property with demonstrations, boycott measures and violence. The article focuses on these developments in Germany's northernmost province, Schleswig-Holstein, but also presents evidence revealing that the level of rural unrest has almost certainly been underestimated in other regions as well. The rural protest of this period was particularly significant for the involvement of parties of both political extremes which sought to win farmers' approval. Ultimately it was the Nazi Party that successfully exploited the second wave of rural unrest to promote its dynamic and activist profile and secure support in the countryside.

Since the 1930s turkey production in the United Kingdom has been transformed from a small scale, seasonal activity catering exclusively for the Christmas market, to an intensive mass production sector dominated by all year round producers, of which Bernard Matthews is the best known. This revolution in production methods reflects improved methods of disease control, enhanced nutritional understanding, and the development of more productive strains of turkeys with better conformation. These supply side changes have been accompanied by a succession of very successful marketing campaigns to persuade consumers of the merits of eating turkey throughout the year. This article investigates the reasons for the commercialisation of the turkey industry since the 1930s.

Shortly after the designation of Exmoor National Park in 1954 the moorland that the park was charged with maintaining and enhancing came under threat from agricultural improvement. The ensuing ‘moorland conflict’ eventually led to a pioneering system of moorland management agreements. The moorland management agreements have an important place in the transformation of agricultural policy and the development and social acceptance amongst farmers and landowners of the concept that farmers should be paid for their stewardship of the environment. Drawing on published and unpublished documents, as well as extensive interviews, this paper revisits the origins of the problem of moorland reclamation, assesses the role played by key individuals in publicising the problem and promoting management agreements as a solution, considers the risks taken by those entering into management agreements, and identifies some of the tangible and intangible impacts of the moorland management agreement system.