This article examines the role of manorial courts in early modern Lancashire in the regulation of mobility through order making in relation to inmates. The period under consideration is c. 1550–c. 1660. Four aspects of their operation are considered: the volume of court business dealing with issues of mobility, the quality of court orders regulating it, the place of the manor court in the topography of local governance and aspects of continuity and change in the courts’ functioning in the period. Manorial courts are shown to be active and innovative constituents of the local administrative landscape, exercising a role wider than merely the imposition of seigneurial interest and control.

In the agricultural township of Rigton, ten miles north of Leeds, three-quarters of labouring households had recourse to poor relief at some stage between 1815 and 1861. The chronology of this microhistory straddles the end of the French Wars, the Sturges Bourne reforms, and, due to the existence of the country's largest Gilbert Unions, the region's laggardly application of the Poor Law Amendment Act. It seeks, by source linkage, to establish the contexts of labour, welfare and the life cycle within a northern community, and place the poor and their experiences of, and strategies against, poverty within that community. A demographic overview introduces the contexts of labouring families' lives, whilst a commentary on expositions of biographical reconstitutions of two generations of a labouring family, forms a major part of this exploration. This argues that whilst relationships with, and mitigation against, poverty were fluid and complex, as the century progressed labouring families had a decreasing interface with the Poor Law, and adopted and developed new economic strategies to add to their portfolio of makeshifts.1

The research presented in this article concerns common rights to cattle grazing on common lands and manorial properties in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia. The findings – obtained by analysing sources from archives and libraries in what is now Ukraine – shed light on the right of peasants and townspeople to graze cattle, along with the circumstances and sources of mass social antagonisms. The rich archival resources permitted a representative group of sources concerning each type of existing conflict to be chosen. The key research problems addressed in this article are the sources for a variety of disputes and their impact on relations between the main social groups and people’s standard of living, the processes of pauperisation and modernisation, and the consequences of abolishing these common rights.

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.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

In 1846 a story entitled ‘Derevnia’ (The Village) appeared in the Russian press. It was the account of the life of a young peasant woman, from her birth, through her upbringing as an unwanted orphan, her unsuitable marriage staged to satisfy the whim of the landowner's wife, her sufferings at the hands of her husband's family, to her decline and early death. The story aroused the ire of Slavophil critics: ‘In it is assembled all the coarseness, outrage and harshness, that can be found in peasant customs. But what is striking is not specific details, but the profound lack of feeling and complete lack of moral sense in the whole way of life.’ It was praised by the radical Westernist critic V.G. Belinsky no less profusely than it was attacked by the Slavophil Yu. S. Samarin, not for its literary merits but for its truth to life: ‘[Grigorovich] displayed here much observation and knowledge of real life and succeeded in demonstrating both the former and the latter in simple, honest, true images, with remarkable talent.’

Helensburgh is a Scottish town whose quiet streets lead uphill away from the North Clyde Estuary. A short walk from the waterfront esplanade, almost hidden behind a naval housing estate (1957), an observant tourist can contemplate the stone remains of Ardencaple Castle, parts of which might date to the thirteenth century but more of which dates to the eighteenth century. Walking near the stone wall which runs parallel to the small street, it is difficult to imagine that a large, imposing, perhaps intimidating, building once stood upon vast grounds, housing the chief of the Clan MacAuley (or Macaulay). Recently, I stood with a friend in the warm September sun looking at the grey wall, trying to imagine the visage and the determination of nineteenth-century watercolourist Kate Macaulay as she might have gazed, sketchbook in hand, at the then extant house, once the property of her dispersed clan. She may have turned her eyes and her pencil away from the house toward the river or toward the rolling, treed and rocky terrain that stretched beyond the castle walls toward Loch Lomond. She, after all, preferred to draw and paint land and water more than the buildings sprouting from the stone and the soil. But she did paint ‘MacAuley’ land, recording numbers of scenes in and around Loch Lomond, Gare Loch and Loch Long, sometimes moving beyond clan boundaries to Oban and Skye or to the area around her own ‘Ardencaple House’ in North Wales.

I have discussed elsewhere the role of the British Women's Institute Movement within twentieth-century feminism. This paper will take this argument further by focusing on the way in which the W.I. redefined domestic labour as skilled and thus provided scope for rural women to gain status and validation from their involvement in it. First, however, I want to propose a different perception of the Women's Institute Movement from the more common idea of ‘Jam and Jerusalem’ popular in the 1990s, and describe its activities for those unfamiliar with the Movement.

This paper takes as its starting-point different perspectives on the organic movement's history since the 1940s. It identifies the polarised views of those who see a linear continuity in its development and of others who claim that a new generation of ‘counter-urbanites’ in the 1970s introduced an entirely distinct element. Drawing on recorded interviews with several of the leading figures in the seventies generation, the article argues that this generation was not as independent of its forebears as some of its members have claimed. It also throws light on the experiences of those who were inspired by the ‘self-sufficiency’ philosophy of John Seymour. The Steinerian Bio-Dynamic movement is identified as an important thread of continuity, as is the role played by two long-lived organic farmers, Dinah Williams and Mary Langman. While the seventies generation indeed affected the organic movement's direction from the 1970s onward, particularly through the Organic Growers Association, the case for a complete disjunction between different phases of organic history remains inadequate.

We discuss the extension of corn and potatoes in Galician Atlantic agriculture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an innovation process that facilitated rapid circulation of a new cattle feed from the Americas to Europe. Specifically, we focus on Galicia from 1890 to 1940, a time of significant scientific interest with regard to genetic improvements. This new science made it possible to develop double hybrid corn plants that became widespread after the 1920s. In this article we will describe the conditions accompanying the introduction and spread of these American crops, as recorded by modernist historiography, then analyse the institutional and social framework – knowledge networks, innovation systems and institutional and social tools – that enabled genetic advances in the twentieth century. To accomplish this, we must trace the journey of seeds and knowledge across the Atlantic from places such as the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (1918) to the Galician Biological Mission (1921), among others.

This article examines the role played by village schoolmasters in eighteenth-century rural France. Although schoolmasters were not supported or regulated by the state, as they would be a century later, they were able to navigate successfully the complex network of social relationships that existed within early modern rural society. Using the journal of one schoolmaster, Pierre Delahaye, the article demonstrates that in addition to teaching, schoolmasters also worked as record keepers for village notables, as clerks for the parish, and even cleaned the churches and belfries. The schoolmaster's position afforded him a much greater social position than might be assumed from knowledge of only his income and background, and even allowed him to serve as a mediator between the village and the curé. Thus it can be argued that schoolmasters of the eighteenth century were as important to rural society as their state supported counterparts of the nineteenth century.

The civilian food shortages and accompanying malnutrition that characterised the latter stages of the First World War were instrumental in fundamentally changing the course of European history. In Russia, food shortages were a key underlying factor in precipitating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while in Germany, food shortages led to the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1917, which effectively helped to undermine commitment to the war effort and contribute to the country’s defeat. In spite of Britain’s precarious dependence on imported food, and the shipping losses inflicted by German U-boats, the population was less badly affected. This achievement has been attributed to the work undertaken by Lord Rhondda, the second food controller, whose actions were characterised as the ‘heroic age of food control’. This article uses evidence from official government reports, newspapers and diaries, memoirs and biographies to challenge the prevailing historiography about the success of food control measures in Britain during the First World War. It shows that the Ministry of Food under Lord Rhondda’s period of tenureship was not only indecisive, but that efforts to save the nation from malnutrition, if not actual starvation, were in large part the result of initiatives implemented at the local level.

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.

After the First World War, agricultural work became a subject of intense interdisciplinary scientific inquiry. The shortage of agricultural labour, the nutritional and agricultural crises and the increasing significance of the movement for the rationalisation of work contributed to the creation of new scientific institutions that focused on the study and improvement of agricultural work. This contribution sketches the emergence and development of the science of agricultural work in Europe from the 1920s to the 1960s and explores the intellectual controversies sparked by the attempts to shape farm work along the model of industrial manufacturing. The frictions and tensions between industrial ideals and agricultural idiosyncrasies not only led to a new scientific treatment of agricultural work, but also created a field of contestation between different conceptual approaches to perceiving, analysing and transforming agricultural work in the age of industrial capitalism.

This article addresses the relative dearth of work on courtship and marriage motivations for early nineteenth-century England. Focusing on rural-industrial Lancashire, the article draws on a rare conjunction of sources: an autobiography, a series of love-letters and letters from friends, relating to the nascent textile entrepreneur David Whitehead and his intended wife Betty Wood. Triangulating these sources suggests that some of the seemingly dominant influences on courtship and marriage seen in other studies, such as the economic status of partners, family and kin, had little part in this drama. Rather, issues of love, destiny and, above all, religious suitability dictated the pace, content and outcome of the courtship process. Against this backdrop, it was Betty Wood, rather than David Whitehead, who held the levers of power in the courtship. The article also explores other aspects of courtship, most especially the relationship between courtship intensity/fragility and the spatial dynamics of the marriage market.

Chartism, the first genuinely working-class mass political movement, has attracted numerous general, regional, and local histories. The overwhelming proportion of these works concentrate on Chartism's strongholds in London, provincial urban centres, and the theatres of industrialism — including those in Scotland and Wales. Yet despite these regional characteristics, the common assumption is that Chartism was a national movement. This assumption is implicit in works including J.T. Ward's Chartism, while Dorothy Thompson, the author of the most recent notionally national overview, suggests that countryside Chartism has been underestimated.

There is a common belief that Israeli women have achieved gender equality over and above that attained in America and European countries. Evidence cited to support this is the fact that women routinely serve in the Israeli army and the country elected a woman, Golda Meir, as prime minister. Equality between men and women is claimed to date back to the days at the beginning of the century when both sexes worked shoulder to shoulder in road construction and land reclamation (Bernstein, 1992: 2). The years 1904–14 and 1919–23, known in Zionist history as the Second and Third Aliyah (waves of immigration), were indeed formative times during which the dominant values of the society were shaped and the infrastructure of future organizations was laid (Eisenstadt, 1967; Izraeli, 1981). The immigrants who arrived during this period, known as halutzim (male pioneers) and halutzot (female pioneers) were idealistic nationalists from Eastern Europe. They were young and single, and came with the express purpose of rebuilding Zion and creating a new type of egalitarian and labor-oriented society.

This article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.

The British co-operative movement is associated mainly with industrial areas. Where consumer co-operatives existed in the countryside they were located in market towns and formed by rural trade unions, especially railwaymen, occasionally quarrymen or farmworkers. Yet the Co-operative Union membership encompassed a significant number of small single village societies founded by paternalistic gentry.

This paper draws on examples in Shropshire, East Yorkshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, to offer an account and explanation of the never before studied, paternalistic co-operatives. Recruiting estate workers and farm labourers, individual country squires showed themselves capable of using a co-operative ideology and framework, usually associated with the labour movement, to achieve very different and paternalistic goals. The relationship between these paternalistic village societies and the wider co-operative movement, both locally and nationally, is discussed, including the company paternalism of the Co-operative Wholesale Society's own farming operations. A comparison with the ‘Blue co-ops’ of the Lancashire Conservative dominated cotton spinners’ union is also made. The paper concludes that the failure of paternalistic co-operatives was part of the post Great War revival of rural cultural conservatism, linked to the effects of agricultural depression.

The 1930s saw new research and extended debates over the nature of the countryside in China and its socio-economic and historical role. Those on different sides of these debates, many drawing on historical materialism, tended to recreate modernist assumptions. These included assumptions that history was unilinear, and that what was Western was also modern, universal, urban, and objective, while what was not Western was traditional, local, rural, and subjective. The modern nation state, made up of modern citizens, was the outcome of, and the active subject in, a progressive history.

Yet other approaches, focusing on the role of the countryside in China's development, challenged not only aspects of modernity but the assumptions in which the debates were couched. The philosopher and social activist Liang Shuming (1893–1988) focused on the countryside as the creative field in China. He envisioned a new form of community that, instead of the state, would be the active locus for change. Liang's new, village communities would draw on but not reproduce cultural traditions across a ruptured history and form the basis of a non-capitalist industrialisation. Rather than appropriate the dominant image of modernity, Liang revisited its basic assumptions. In so doing, he generated fresh visions, opening up a different set of possibilities and recasting the relation of the country to the city, the nation and the future.