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.

In 1836 under the auspices of section 62 of the New Poor Law, 3,069 poor people from Norfolk were assisted to emigrate to North America. Their passages, and various other requirements including spending money, travel to the port, equipment for the voyage and settling of debts, were paid for out of the poor rates. The rationale for this outflow of people revolved around the issue of surplus labour, which was believed to have a corrosive and unsettling effect upon the state of rural society. Emigration had long been seen as a potential safety valve for surplus labour. Clause 62 can be traced back to the vigorous debate about assisted emigration associated with Robert Wilmot Horton. For one emigration season, it looked as if parochial government were capable of rising to the challenge of solving its surplus labour problems and simultaneously satisfying the needs of the labour-hungry British colonies. This paper examines the Norfolk emigration fever by using a previously unused data set of nineteenth-century emigration (Ministry of Health files held at the Public Record Office). It argues that assisted emigration was the result of a concerted rational policy, applied by the parish officers aimed to benefit emigrants and those left behind. The policy was neither haphazard nor accidental and, though inspired by fear of the consequences of implementing the New Poor Law, was not a panicked response. It argues that the arrangements for assisted emigration resulted in a process of interchange and interaction between rich and poor which makes a mockery of the term ‘shovelling out paupers’. The poor emigrants who were targeted were assisted because they were good labourers, not useless indigents incapable of providing for themselves. The findings shed further light on the nature of emigrating populations, the emigratory process and the mindset of both rich and poor at the time of the introduction of the New Poor Law.

Agricultural output per man had risen substantially in the early nineteenth century, partly as a result of greater specialisation. This, in turn, stimulated demand for those trades which served the entire rural community, such as the tailor, bootmaker, baker, butcher and shopkeeper, as craftsmen and tradesmen were increasingly called upon for goods and services, which were formerly provided by members of the household. Demand for traditional services to agriculture, from figures such as the wheelwright and the blacksmith, was also sustained. But in contrast to the situation in agriculture, there appears to have been no increase in productivity in the rural crafts and trades. As a result of growing demand for these services, rural craftsmen and tradesmen increased in numbers and became more specialised in occupation during the first part of the nineteenth century.

On two cool mid-summer nights in 1884 the small west Kent market town of Sevenoaks was disturbed by what one of the County newspapers, echoing the Chief Constable's words, called ‘riotous and tumultuous proceedings’. During the evening of Thursday 18th June a large crowd of townspeople broke down obstacles blocking the entrance to Knole Park and ceremoniously and noisily dumped them in front of the main door of Lord Sackville's large Tudor mansion. On the next night an even larger crowd, reported as numbering 1,500 or more, also invaded the park and besieged the house. A dispute over rights to use a bridle way across the Park which had dragged on for many months united many of the people of Sevenoaks and neighbouring villages against what was seen as the obstructive, illegal and high-handed behaviour of a wealthy and arrogant aristocrat. Attempts by the Local Board to find a resolution to the dispute had been rebuffed by Sackville and in the end the people of Sevenoaks took the law into their own hands.

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.

On paper the forestry service of Old Regime France looked impressive. Backed by wide-ranging legislation, officers of the Eaux et Forêts enjoyed extensive powers; like other public officials of the time, they exercised both judicial and administrative functions. Their rich records of offences and disputes have attracted the attention of forest historians, although we know much less about their other role, as overseers of a national plan for woodland management. This article seeks to remedy that neglect by focusing on the effectiveness of the forest administration in south-western France, where most of the woodlands were private property. Evidence is drawn from the forms used by landowners to notify the Eaux et Forêts of an intention to cut mature timber. Various details suggest that the forestry officials' information was far from complete, especially given the problems of distance and a lack of standardised units for measurement. Examination of marginal comments provides a closer insight into landowners' attitudes. Overall, increasing numbers of woodland proprietors may have complied with the foresters' reporting regime, but many relied on misinformation to prevent the central state and its agents from interfering in the exploitation of their timber.

This article discusses the research potential of rubbish dumps for the study of rural household market access during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By investigating the global commodity networks associated with four rubbish dumps excavated by the authors in the East Anglian region, at Hempstead (Norfolk), Kirton and Falkenham (Suffolk) and Holme Hale (Norfolk), the article will show how these archives can be used to locate individual rural households within the international capitalist system. This article also discusses the potential challenges faced when analysing the historic rubbish dump archives.

This article considers rusticated memorials in many churchyards and cemeteries in England and Wales, between c. 1850 and the present day, analysing their forms, chronology, and their wider social and artistic significances. These memorials have hitherto been a neglected form among British memorial styles. The discussion here focuses on the English Midlands, Kensal Green Cemetery (London), and Montgomeryshire in Wales. It appraises how such memorial rustication may relate to changing attitudes to rurality, ‘natural’ landscapes, and secularisation over time. As an analysis of shifting memorial tastes, the article assesses the chronology of rustication against the periodisation of two more dominant memorial types: namely Gothic memorials, which prevailed in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Art Deco memorials, which gained popularity from the 1920s. It appraises regional differences in memorial style change, showing little English and Welsh variation in this after the mid-nineteenth century. There is attention to the hitherto little studied decline of the Gothic, and to the wider significance of the more secularised memorial forms that followed it. The role of these Gothic, rusticated, and Art Deco memorials for an understanding of social, attitudinal, religious and secularising change is emphasised.

The coppice and underwood trades in north Hampshire lasted almost unchanged for over one thousand years, yet the conspicuously wooded landscape of today is no more than three hundred years old. The landscape is an outcome of the enclosure of the common fields and replacement of their temporary dead-hedges by permanent living hedges, together with a radical reorganisation of the methods by which both wood and timber were grown, managed and marketed. These processes abolished the old extensive, open landscape, comprised of coppices, underwood, timber and rough grazing: the land-use system now termed wood pasture. It created the closed landscape of intensively managed woodland that prospered between 1750 and 1870. Evidence is drawn from the records of Crown, church, college and lay estates, besides contemporary comment, interpreted in the light of experience in restoring and managing an area of wood pasture.

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 ‘land question’ occupies a central role in the history of Highland Scotland. The system of estate ownership and tenure introduced in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden (1746) commodified the land as private possession. In its wake came mass evictions of tenants in large-scale ‘Clearances’ designed to convert crofting-lands to other agrarian or sporting uses. During the main period of Clearances (1780–1855), protest by the crofters remained spontaneous and sporadic. It was not until the last part of the nineteenth century, especially during the so-called Crofters' War (1881–96), that a resurgent crofting community engaged in sustained protest. The threat of civil unrest prompted some ameliorative measures, most notably the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This stabilised the situation and gave protection from further mass evictions but did not restore lands to the landless population from which their ancestors had been displaced. The demand for restitution, therefore, remained a powerful rallying cry.

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.

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.

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.

This study looks at the role of hiking in the development and the identity of a French region. Both rural and agricultural, Brittany saw a reorganisation of its territory during the 1970s, partly due to activities such as hiking. By becoming a political focus, the activity contributed to making paths, only previously used for field labour, a tool for territorial development. It also rejuvenated Brittany’s regional identity as it explored a forgotten heritage. The course of action adopted aimed to bring new populations, particularly urban ones, to rural areas. Behind the attention focused on paths, as an essential requirement for hiking, lay a concern for environmental and social sustainability with effects on lifestyles, tourism, and the shaping of a region in transition.

This paper has two objectives. The first is to explore the creation of a Highland policy area in the 1880s. Emphasis will be placed on the use of historical arguments by the government in the course of the construction of the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, especially in the attempt to justify confining the operation of that statute to the Highlands. The second theme, explored in the latter parts of the paper, concerns the strategies which succeeding governments have used to justify the perpetuation of a distinct Highland policy area. An element of continuity in Highland history in the twentieth century has been the special treatment of the area by governments. On the occasions when this has caused resentment in other rural areas of Britain, the Scottish Office response has been to argue that the Highlands are a special case because of the existence of the crofting counties with their special code of legislation. Clearly, this is a tautological argument and it is hoped that this paper, by exploring the period from the creation of the crofting legislation in the 1880s, to the late twentieth century, will shed some light on its origins. It will be argued that this has created a climate of fear in the Highlands and particularly the crofting community, but also, on occasion in the Lowlands. Further, there are occasions when the existence of a special Highland policy area has served to marginalise Highland policy. The paper falls into five main sections: the first will briefly review the literature about the Highland/Lowland division in Scotland, the second will look at the origins of the Crofters' Act of 1886, the third will examine the period from 1906 to 1911 when aspects of crofting legislation were extended to the rest of Scotland; the fourth section will identify the inter war period as an era when Highland policy became more diverse and the final section will scrutinise the impact of that more diverse approach in the years after the Second World War.

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.