The daily lives of many rural workers were intertwined with animals: those they kept, those in the wild, and those they were employed to work with and care for. And yet despite the importance of this connection, work in rural history has tended, with some notable exceptions, to conceive of animals as fleshy capital, game, or pest. In part this is because the archive does not tend to describe the relationships between workers and animals. This paper contends, however, that the archive of animal maiming offers important detail for beginning to understand the connection. While animal maiming was necessarily rooted in violence, with its various forms essentially involving the mutilation and violation of animals, nonetheless episodes of animal maiming can tell us much about the politics of giving care to animals. Examining episodes of animal maiming also allows us to understand how the non-human helped to constitute the relationships between humans, especially the uneven bond between employer and worker, as well as the complex, and often contradictory, attitudes of rural workers to animals.

A considerable amount of research has been undertaken on the decline in women's agricultural employment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but very little has been written about the position of women farmers. During this period, women farmers remained more common throughout Wales than in England. This study explores the part played by women farmers in the agricultural community of Nantconwy, a hundred in the eastern part of Snowdonia, Caernarvonshire, where women comprised up to twenty-two per cent of farmers during the period 1750 to 1900. It examines how and why women became farmers, and the role they played in running the farm. Four factors are suggested to account for the high proportion of women farmers in Snowdonia: a system of virtually hereditary tenancies, the inheritance of farm stock, the traditional nature of Welsh farming, and women's desire to continue farming.

The land question concerned all classes in Ireland in the nineteenth century. A series of grassroots leaders played an important role in local politics that served as a major building block for future generations of politicians and nationalists. Yet the role of these regional personalities has generally been neglected in historiography as attention is paid to a ‘top-down’ approach to the Irish Land War. This article aims to address a lacuna in research by paying attention to one of the more significant regional personalities during the Irish Land War: Matt Harris. It will explore the ideas that he expressed on Land League platforms, pamphlets, newspapers and the Parnell Commission, as he sought a solution to the social malaise that was perpetuated thanks to an imbalance in land legislation that favoured stronger farmers while also giving a voice to the subaltern classes in the west of Ireland.

The nineteenth century saw an explosion in creativity and innovation, often applied to and motivated by an urge to improve, refine and make more efficient industrial and agricultural processes. There were many innovations in the field of agriculture, supported by the sponsorship of societies and associations and, in the 1850s and 1860s, by strong investment under High Farming. This article examines one of these innovations, the steam plough, with reference to its application in the Scottish Highlands in the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, it illuminates the social networks which lay behind the development and utilisation of the steam plough in the rural Highland context, delineating how aristocratic, religious and local networks combined to have a major impact on rural society in Scotland and beyond. It will examine how these networks interacted to promote the contemporary culture for agricultural and rural innovation through the development of the Fowler's steam plough. What makes this example of particular interest is the fact that agriculturally and financially, the Sutherland land reclamations were an unconditional failure. The environment was too challenging for the technology and despite vast financial resources, the landowner, the third Duke of Sutherland, was, after fifteen years, finally convinced by his advisors that further efforts were futile and irresponsible. This article will interrogate why, despite its essential unfeasibility, the project was pursued, and will argue that the momentum created by the dynamic between the three networks involved propelled it forward despite growing evidence of failure. This article therefore uses an inductive approach by examining a particular example of agricultural design innovation and analysing the pertinent social issues in what would have been termed by contemporaries ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.

The 1880s saw the introduction of the half-tone as a means of reproducing photographs on the printed page in books and magazines. No editor could afford to ignore this technology and this article examines how it was introduced into magazines catering for a farming and rural readership. It considers the impact of new illustrated magazines and the demand for photographs for reproduction and gives some thought to how historians might profitably use these photographs as evidence.

This article focuses on the mechanisation of agriculture in central Italy in the thirty years or so after 1945. This provides a particular way of examining the major changes in the rural landscape in this period, especially the end of the sharecropping system. Land in these regions had for centuries been predominantly farmed under sharecropping contracts, but for political, economic, and demographic reasons this system, which had inhibited modernisation, entered a rapid decline. Whereas labour supply had previously exceeded demand, the reverse became the case, allowing sharecropping families more freedom in how they operated. Mechanisation was not a ‘push’ factor, but as the agricultural labour force contracted it was a necessary response. The article uses individual testimony to illustrate how tenant farmers started to work outside the sharecropping contract, some becoming outside contractors with other farms and supplying tractor hire. The mechanisation of agriculture was slow and uneven, but marked an irreversible change in the relationship between farming families and their land.