This article considers how depictions of the migrant poor in English landscape art changed between 1740 and 1900. A painting by Edward Haytley (1744) is used to illustrate some prevailing themes and representations of the rural poor in the early eighteenth century, with the labouring poor being shown ‘in their place’ socially and spatially. This is then contrasted with the signs of a restless and migrant poor which appear in a few of Gainsborough's paintings, culminating in the poverty-stricken roadside, mobile, vagrant and sometimes gypsy poor who are so salient and sympathetically depicted in George Morland's work between 1790 and 1804. While there were clearly British and European precedents for such imagery long before this period, it is argued here that English landscape art after about 1750, and especially from c. 1790, witnessed a marked upsurge of such restless and migrant imagery, which was related to institutional and demographic transformations in agrarian societies. By George Morland's death in 1804, ‘social realism’ had become firmly established in his imagery of the migrant poor, and this long predated the 1860s and 1870s which are normally associated with such a movement in British painting.

As the armed forces continued to siphon away labour from the land following the outbreak of the war, the Ministry of Agriculture's County War Agricultural Executive Committees were hard put to meet the demand for labour to sustain the plough-up campaign. While schoolchildren made a major contribution, there were few prisoners-of-war before the North African campaign and volunteers from all walks of life were sought to attend harvest camps, weekend farm clubs and other land-based activities. At the end of the war the Ministry of Agriculture turned to mainland Europe for volunteers to work towards the solution of the British and pan-European food shortages. They were supplemented by members of the Polish Resettlement Corps, German prisoners who had opted to defer repatriation and volunteers from the British zones of Austria and Germany. The article raises the issue of how far the enterprise promoted international understanding as was assumed at the time or, indeed, whether the home volunteer experience narrowed the so-called rural-urban divide as opposed to reinforcing entrenched prejudices.

Enclosure disputes have long attracted attention given their perceived political motivations, the importance of custom and customary practices in legitimising action and various forms of protest. Based on research undertaken at local and national record offices and the study of both written records and maps, this paper explores a series of disputes over common land in the wood-pasture countryside of Shropshire, placing them within the wider historiography concerning enclosure riots and popular protest. It complements the existing body of local and regional studies which have provided insight into the national historical context of the enclosure process. Historians need to examine economic and social developments at a local level to ascertain the causation of enclosure protest and the motivation of those involved. This evidence suggests that disputes arose between lords and tenants over the loss of customary rights and also neighbouring manorial lords as a result of ownership or boundary disputes.

It is now roughly a quarter of a century since the proponents of a new social history of early modern England offered students of the period a novel agenda and an unprecedented opportunity. Prior to the 1960s social history had been variously understood as the history of everyday life, of the lower classes and popular movements, or as a junior partner in the relatively recently-established firm of economic and social history (occupied in the main with the study of social institutions and social policy). As such, it had produced more than a few pioneering works of outstanding quality and lasting value (some of them about to enjoy a revived recognition after decades of relative neglect). But it was not a field close to the centre of historical preoccupation. It was at best contextual, at worst residual.

From the early 1960s, however, came a call for a social history of a new type, one conceived as the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them and gives them meaning. The new agenda was deeply influenced by the social sciences and envisaged an ever closer relationship with sociology, social anthropology and demography. Peter Laslett wrote of ‘sociological history’ or ‘historical sociology’ and Keith Thomas of the need for a ‘more systematic indoctrination’ in the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences. As applied to history, all this was both radical and liberating. In the face of an established curriculum which appeared in many respects restrictive and in some dessicated, it proposed a massive and necessary broadening and deepening of historical concern: the creation of a range of historical enquiry appropriate to the preoccupations and understandings of the late twentieth century.

There has in recent years been a considerable focus on migration by historians. We now know far more about rural/urban migration patterns within Britain, both short term and long term. This is particularly so for the period since the mid nineteenth-century censuses. But evidence suggests that mobility, notably among the young and single, was very high from the seventeenth century. Long before the first censuses a steady flow of population from rural areas to towns and cities had begun. ‘Rural depopulation’, we are told, ‘is common to most mature industrial societies of the twentieth century’. In fact, experience of the last half century in the Third World, as well as in pre-industrial England, suggests such movement precedes the development of a ‘mature industrial society’. In parts of England, it was the ‘major urban phenomenon in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’. Many areas of the Third World have experienced very rapid urbanisation particularly since 1950 when the vast majority of the population still lived in rural areas.

During the last two decades interpretations of agrarian modernisation have been the subject of critical debate. In neo-classical tradition, agrarian economists and economic historians have traditionally laid emphasis on the diffusion of technology and on the commercialisation of production. They have customarily been interested in the development of agricultural output and incomes, and basically understood modernisation as an evolutionary process by which commercial, market oriented production was substituted for traditional, subsistence production. During the 1970s and the 1980s agrarian sociologists and historians posed the question in more social and historical terms, seeking to determine which type of producers, large farmers or family farmers, were the bearers of modernisation. The traditional Marxian standpoint, as is well known, was that capitalist farming — in spite of delays and problems inherent in agricultural production — would come to dominate the agrarian sector through technical innovation and large scale production. Opposing this, neo-Marxian/neo-Chayanovian interpretations claimed that family farming, due to the innate characteristics of that particular production form, provided family farmers with a competitive advantage in relation to large scale production. According to this, more ‘social’ historical tradition, the social organisation of family based production was the key to understanding the viability, or even superiority, of family farming in the industrialised and urbanised societies of western Europe and North America.

It is arguable that what has most bedevilled the recent academic practice of history in Britain has been the triumph over integrative history - or that mode of history which seeks to reconstitute and to explain the multi-dimensional nature of past experience - of what might be called the disintegrative historical approach, that is, specialised thematic history. The former mode includes local history, national history (by which here is meant much more than the political or constitutional history of the Nation State), international history - even histories of ‘civilisations’ or of the world - and takes ‘society’ as the central organising principle over time. The latter mode comprises, for example, political history, demographic history, economic history and so on through to such exotic sub-species of the so-called new social history as the histories of class, gender, sex, crime or leisure. Put crudely, if this second type of historical approach concerns itself with particular categories of persons or activities, with pre-selected processes and with highly specific tendencies in the relatively short term, then the first has to do with the fluctuating development of recognisable social entities in the round, and with their changing interrelationships usually over longer time scales. Instructive and fascinating as is undoubtedly the detailed thematic approach, and vital as it continues to be as the indispensable technical preliminary to the accurate reconstruction of the past in a multi-dimensional sense, it is hardly deniable that - as the Victorians recognised - it is the broader interdisciplinary approach which should represent the ultimate aspiration of the historical practitioner, simply because it is that which is most culturally relevant to the education of the citizen. It is equally clear, however, that few professional historians today are seeking either to construct their undergraduate syllabuses on such lines or to write connectedly for a wider public about such matters over periods much longer than a century or two.

The welfare state emerged in 1948 when the National Assistance Act finally abolished the New Poor Law Forty-two years later, as politicians and bureaucrats struggle to keep increasing expenditure within bounds, the existence of the welfare state in its present form is under threat. Just over 150 years ago, the Old Poor Law was presenting parish ratepayers with a similar problem of rising costs, leading in 1834 to a fundamental reorganisation into the New Poor Law It may therefore be profitable to see how effective in practice the New Poor Law was when it replaced a system widely regarded as profligate, and to consider the extent to which benefits payable through the welfare state were available a hundred years or more ago.

This study examines in detail how the New Poor Law, and other forms of relief, affected the whole population of the rural parish of Colyton, in south Devonshire, during the thirty years from 1851 to 1881. It will first describe the sources from which a poor person in Colyton in the mid nineteenth century could look for relief; next discuss how widespread poverty was and who the poor were; then look at what kinds of relief were available, under what conditions; and finally assess the comparative importance to the poor of the different agencies providing assistance.

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.

When writing his final report in 1823 on the current state of affairs in the county of Kopparberg in Sweden, its governor, Hans Järta, made a short digression to ponder upon the differences between England and Sweden. According to Järta, England had been unfortunate in that it had deprived a large proportion of its rural population of the land on which they could otherwise have supported themselves. They had now, Järta remarked, no other choice but to work in the factories, and were the first to suffer when these had to close down. In some parts of Sweden, efforts were at this time being made to organise agricultural production in accordance with similar ideas, that is, through the use of wage labour. Järta was deeply sceptical about these experiments however, claiming that they led to nothing but poverty and social problems.

Since the early 1960s the ‘language question’ in Wales has excited deep and often fractious debate. It is to the pace and pattern of change in the Welsh-speaking population of Wales, and the efforts that have been made to halt the long-standing spiral of linguistic decline that this study addresses itself. Of particular interest is the situation prevailing in rural areas of the north and west of the Principality. These areas have long been regarded as the traditional bastions of the language, and it is here that the forces of anglicisation are currently having such a profound effect on indigenous communities. Together, these communities occupy and define a heartland — a linguistic domain — that is frequently referred to as Y Fro Gymraeg (literally the Welsh-speaking Region). No firm boundaries can be specified, but this core is normally thought to include areas where more than seventy per cent, or even eighty per cent, of the resident population aged three years and over is able to speak Welsh. Beyond this boundary lies Cymru di-Gymraeg (literally non Welsh-speaking Wales); for some, the land from which the language has been disinherited.

This article uses the surviving correspondence between the Marquis of Anglesey and his land agent William Castleman to explore the relationship which existed between landowner, tenant and agent. The aim of this research has been to examine how these affiliations worked in practice through five broad but interconnecting themes which include: an investigation into the men who became agents, a survey of the changing patterns of land tenure, an evaluation of the estate's reaction to economic downturn, a study of the schemes used to alleviate tenant distress and an analysis of how these estate interactions were reflected in the repairs and improvements undertaken. Castleman was already an experienced attorney and land manager when he began to work for the estate and he and the Marquis developed, over time, a deep and trusting business partnership. Consequently their correspondence has created a historical prism which this article has used to illustrate the working partnerships within this West Country locality.

This article comprises the annual Birthday Lecture of the Richard Jefferies Society as it was delivered in October, 2004. The text sketches the economic, social and environmental history of Jefferies' period (the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s), drawing inter alia on his works and referring especially to his home district in north-east Wiltshire. It alludes, firstly, to the fortunes and environmental effects of both intensive and ‘tumbledown’ arable farming. Second, it describes the creation of sporting estates and the letting of sporting rights as swift responses by some landowners to falling cereal prices. Third, the text points to under-investment in education and non-agricultural activities as hampering adjustment to the depression, and shows that Jefferies was a free trader who grasped that rapid and extensive food importation and labour emigration would have been a proper response. A related paper, Eric L. Jones, ‘Richard Jefferies’ Writing Criticised and Defended', is to appear in the Richard Jefferies Society Journal in April, 2005.

Long distance emigration of agriculture workers or farmers is usually associated with seasonal migration. Permanent migration of farmers on the other hand, is considered to be a non-European phenomenon and commonly linked to migration to the New World where capital costs were relatively low and institutional barriers limited. Interestingly, in the early modern period, in the wake of the mass migration from continental north-western Europe to the urban areas of the Dutch Republic, a contingent of German market gardeners and their descendants were slowly able to take over the production of farmed vegetable goods for the nation's capital, Amsterdam. In the middle of one of Europe's most densely populated areas, in a polder called Watergraafsmeer, a parish neighbouring, and subsequently part of, Amsterdam, Germans dominated the agricultural sector for over a century. This article will try to answer the question of how these German migrants were able to control a sector that is usually run by locally born producers, for such a long period of time.

In November 1855 the Conservative Party's electoral agent Philip Rose wrote to the Chief Whip Sir William Jolliffe, about a Cornish farmer William Snell:

Snell is one of the adventurers who go about endeavouring to persuade people that he is employed from headquarters. He called upon me the other day and stated that he knew Mr Triscott and had been in communication with him. I heard all he had to say but said as little in return as possible.

This case study focuses on East Riding hiring fairs both as labour markets and popular festivals and considers the vitality of their internal interactions in the mid Victorian years, a time that has been associated with the erosion of traditional practices by urban influences and their reshaping into more orderly and passive forms. The article suggests that mid Victorian rural popular culture proved to be not only adaptive to the forces of urban modernity but robustly dynamic and informed by rural social forces.

During the later sixteenth century, increasing competition for wood fuel supplies led to rising tension between Wealden cloth manufacturers and ironmasters and to a prolonged but unsuccessful campaign by clothiers seeking parliamentary legislation that would radically curtail iron production in the Cranbrook area. Remarkably revealing files among the papers of Sir John Leveson, one of Kent's late Elizabethan deputy lieutenants, show that during the winter of 1594–5, Cranbrook's frustrated clothiers and their allies among other chief inhabitants of the parish attempted to hijack plebeian distress over low wages and high food and fuel prices for their own ends. It is unlikely that those devising or encouraging industrial sabotage that winter included Cranbrook's richer clothiers, but they were certainly behind plans to mobilise a mass petition to the crown for the suppression of ironworks. In turn, two of Cranbrook's parish officials, deftly exploiting fears of a disorderly march on London, managed to persuade Sir John Leveson to lobby the privy councillor Lord Cobham on the clothiers’ behalf, although to no avail. Thereafter, Cranbrook clothiers vented their frustration against the Bakers of Sissinghurst, who owned the local iron forge and furnace, by frequently raiding the family's deer park, sometimes in conjunction with local gentry pursuing their passion for unlawful hunting.

The aim of this article is to investigate how the characteristics of the different types of human settlements explain their demographic dynamics and, therefore, which of these have been affected to a greater extent by depopulation processes. For this purpose, we analyse the evolution of the population of Aragón (north-east Spain) in the period 1900–2001, according to the different types of population settlements that exist. Our results show that access to public services has played an essential role, especially when the construction of the welfare state made the rural population feel that there was a penalty for residing in settlements with problems to access them. The main settlements, headquarters of the municipal administration, have had advantages over the secondary settlements. Finally, the scattered population was the most affected and, therefore, emigrated to a greater extent, until this form of residence practically disappeared.

In the field of cultural studies, it is well established that no history comes to us innocently. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are laden with preferred myths and the gentlest of facts. The challenge facing those operating within the field is to develop critical practices which expose some of the nonsense that disempowers our understanding. This demands the strengthening of those practices which promote new forms of knowledge. The identification of appropriate questions, the constructive use of all forms of evidence, the adoption of relevant, analytical methods, and the formation of coherent conclusions are essential to the health and future of any academic discipline. Within the field of museum studies, such rethinking has been taking place since the early 1980s (for example, Cannizzo, 1987; Hooper-Greenhill, 1988; Jenkins, 1987; Jenkinson, 1988; Kavanagh, 1991; Pearce, 1988; Porter, 1988).

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time when many of the landed classes chose to be absent from their estates. However, this same period also saw the early stages of a so-called ‘revolution’ in agricultural methods and techniques. This article, therefore, evaluates the impact of non-residency on estate management structures and agricultural progress. Specific issues examined here include the role of the steward, leasing policy, the promotion of new farming techniques and estate investment by the landlord. In this context, comparisons will be made between absentee, semi-resident and resident estates for the region of Woodland High Suffolk.