In February 1897, villagers in the small Kentish town of Eynsford celebrated their first Arbor Day by planting a row of trees in acrostic form to spell out the proverb MY SON, BE WISE. By 1910 Arbor Day had featured in the discussions of a Parliamentary Select Committee and the House of Commons, and was enjoying national press coverage as the event spread under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Garden City Movement. Proponents positioned the ceremony as a prism through which to address the pressing social and economic concerns of rural depopulation, unemployment and deforestation, and by promoting the event as part of the educational experience of children, offered it up as a contribution towards the amelioration of these ills. Although the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919 ushered in the increasingly inflexible belief that the state rather than individuals was the only competent custodian of English woodland, Arbor Day can tell us much about how humankind's affective response to nature was conditioned, shored up and survived this increasingly scientific approach from the late nineteenth century.

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 study considers the economics of the oil palm (Elaeis guinensis) to rural farmers in a rural community in south-eastern Nigeria. It compares the economic benefits of all products of the oil palm industry – palm oil, palm kernel, timber, palm wine and brooms. It posits that the most important product of the oil palm to the Enugu Ezike farmer is oil palm wine. This contrasts with the view that holds palm oil and palm kernel as the chief products of the oil palm. In a study conducted in Enugu Ezike, findings reveal that annual revenue from palm wine surpasses the six-yearly income from palm oil, palm kernel and brooms together. The study employs an eclectic framework of data collection, involving oral interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and the use of secondary sources. The oil palm is by every standard the most economically important tree crop and proceeds from it have positively influenced the socio-economic life of the rural communities, and as a result it has improved their living conditions.

Among the global transformations that have involved rural women, few have been as historically significant as the removal of dairy processing from individual farms to central plants. In most cases, as butter and cheese manufacture left the farm, the workforce also changed: men replaced women. This ‘defeminization’ of dairying took place at varying paces and in different ways, but the ultimate result was the same throughout the West: women's participation in dairying was dramatically reduced.

It is something of an irony that in many ways the rural tradition in English life was studied more intensively and systematically a century ago than is the case today. The burgeoning of scholarly interest in language, history, tradition and society at both local and national level in the late nineteenth century provided a wealth of data for modern researchers across a wide range of disciplines. While some of this material inevitably appears dated and indeed at times inaccurate or erroneous, there is a great deal of value in the records of rural life painstakingly set down by those pioneering chroniclers, notably in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and up to the time of the First World War. It has been fashionable in recent years to denigrate the work of these early writers and collectors, or indeed to dismiss them altogether. The label ‘antiquarian’, so glibly attached to several generations of nineteenth-century scholars, has become a pejorative, redolent of the amateur, the dilettante and the pedant. While it cannot be denied that a proportion of antiquarian writing is trivial, mundane or self-indulgent, it is manifestly incorrect to treat all such work with contempt. Indeed we are greatly indebted to these individuals, and especially to those whose methods and observations were as rigorous and scholarly as possible, given the criteria and standards of their day. Nor did they confine themselves within the constricting limits of our modern academic disciplines. Their interests were wide-ranging, and they closely observed the rural scene from many different perspectives, thus building up a much fuller picture of life and society in a given locality than would usually be the case today.

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between agencies of government and crofting tenantry in the Highlands of Scotland, as manifested in events of popular protest after 1914. These events seem to have received little attention when compared to disturbance of earlier periods, which have been extensively documented, and the period after 1918 in particular has been under represented in the literature. Furthermore the actions of agencies of government were significantly different in this later period. Where before the Great War government actions were wholly reactive, this paper will demonstrate that during the war and after, the Board of Agriculture made significant attempts to be proactive in the face of incipient protest. Yet, conflict, and the resultant acts of protest, continued to be a characteristic element of social relations in the Highlands in the post-war period. This paper seeks to show that whilst the actions of the land-working population were of central significance, this conflict was not solely between the tenantry and landowners or agencies of government but was also within those various groupings. Consequently, it is argued that protest attests to a complex nexus of conflict on both regional and national levels.

What is common in community is … the fact that the members of a community are engaged in the same argument … the same discourse … in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out.

The legal process of gaining an enclosure could be long, complicated and expensive …. It could take up to six years, during which time a farmer did not know what was happening or how to farm. (S. Wade Martins, Farms and Fields (1995), p. 81).

The impact of parliamentary enclosure in England has been a subject for debate since at least the 1870s. A series of issues has been identified and discussed including the costs of enclosure; the effect of enclosure on small farmers, small owners, and cottagers; the role of the commissioners; the implications for farm sizes; the impact on agricultural productivity and rents; and the significance for the landscape. Yet the quotation with which we open this paper suggests that there is a subject which has slipped through the historical net, the impact of enclosure on farming. In their work published early in the twentieth century the Hammonds noted of the enclosure of Stanwell in Middlesex (Act 1789) that the nominated commissioners were empowered to direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with respect to the stocking as to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping, Sowing, and Laying down the same’. W.H.R. Curtler, in 1920, quoted the main substance of the clauses from the Cold Aston (Gloucestershire) enclosure act of 1795: ‘from the passing of the Act until the Award the Commissioners were to direct the course of husbandry in the open fields’. He noted also that earlier acts had stated that the existing course of husbandry should be retained until the award was completed. W.E. Tate wrote as recently as 1967 that during enclosure ‘the general course of agriculture in all the open fields was being carried out under directions laid down by the commissioners’.

This article examines two opposing views on the role and presence of painters in post-Reformation rural England. The art historian William Gaunt concluded that painters simply ‘vanished’ from the local scene in their flight to London; the historical geographer John Patten saw non-agricultural workers in general flocking to the rural scene in the same era. Drawing on a database of over 2,600 working painters, the article explores the presence and role of the painters’ occupation in rural England between 1500 and 1640. It emphasises the painters’ accommodation to changing consumer demands; it offers a revised view of their geographic distribution over time; it shows that painters continued to serve the rural scene, albeit in somewhat different ways and from different locales than before.

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

This article examines the local economy of a parish in south-east Essex during a period when economic, social and technological factors were transforming rural Britain. Record linkages are used to construct a microhistory of Hockley to analyse the exploitation of the landscape and rural livelihoods. Agricultural and occupational change reflected many national economic and social influences, but there are also counter examples to regional patterns of farming practice and large scale agrarian capitalist landownership. The agricultural depression of c.1875–96 effected a shift from arable to livestock farming and the development of market gardening facilitated by the railway. A reduction in agricultural employment opportunities, and the absence of a cottage industry for women, led to a significant out-migration of working-age people. The microhistory demonstrates that local factors, such as access to a tidal river, the timing of the arrival of the railway, the availability of brick-making clay and new trades provided livelihood opportunities and influenced the structure and operation of the rural economy.

Madness has been a social problem from time immemorial. Wealthy lunatics were made royal wards so that their estates would be looked after, and the common law very early admitted madness and idiocy as conditions justifying the exemption of the sufferer from punishments for crime. But the vast majority of lunatics have never been either criminal or wealthy, and many wandered about begging, unwelcome in any settled community. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the law made some attempt to determine a course of action which would protect the public and theoretically also the lunatic. This legislation and its application in practice to protect the public, contain the lunatic, and deal with the nuisance caused by those ‘disordered in their senses’, form the subject of this article. Much has been written about the development of psychiatry, mainly from contemporary medical texts, and about the treatment of lunatics in institutions, chiefly from nineteenth-century sources, but much remains to be discovered from archival sources about the practicalities of dealing with lunatics at parish level, particularly how they were defined as lunatics, who made such decisions, and how they were treated in homes and workhouses.

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’.

In a recent issue of Rural History, Malcolm Chase wrote a somewhat frustrated commentary, ‘Can history be green?’ Against a general intellectual background that was increasingly preoccupied with environmental issues, historical scholarship remained largely impervious to ‘green’ issues. His timely commentary set out the consequences of this neglect for both the environmental movement and the historian.

R. G. Stapledon was one of the most profound of twentieth-century thinkers on rural and landscape issues. Scientist, philosopher and teacher, he was an unconventional figure who, with a dedicated team of loyal colleagues, established the basic biology and breeding systems of the Graminae at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the 1920s and 1930s. They subsequently bred a range of grass and clover varieties which were to transform grazing lands throughout the British Empire. To Stapledon the grasslands of an island nation were of vital strategic importance and if Britain were to prepare for a future war, her grasslands would require dramatic improvement if they were to provide a reserve of fertility. In proposing and implementing a vast scheme of renovation of the uplands of Wales, against the fervent opposition of the economists, as a means of both improving agricultural output and stemming the haemorrhage of depopulation, he demonstrated the practical feasibility of land improvement. In so doing he provided a template for the massively subsidised post-war programme of land improvement which was so dramatically to change the face of Britain. This article describes the evolution and conduct of the Cahn Hill Improvement Scheme which was not only one of the most ambitious outdoor ‘experiments’ of the last century, but in a sense, a metaphor for nation-building itself.

This article outlines the changing character of vagrant removal from the City of London during the 1780s, suggesting that the City largely abandoned its duty to ‘punish’ the vagrant poor in favour of a policy of simply moving them on as quickly and cheaply as possible. After describing the impact of the destruction of Newgate and the resulting overcrowding in London's other prisons, it provides evidence for a dramatic increase in vagrant numbers. The article suggests that this change was both a direct result of the crises of imprisonment, transportation and punishment that followed the Gordon Riots and American war; and a result of growing demand for the transportation provided to vagrants, on the part of the migratory poor. Having established the existence of a changing pattern of vagrant removal, it suggests that the poor increasingly made use of the City of London, and the system of removal, to access transportation in pursuit of seasonal migration, and more significantly, medical care in the hospitals of the capital as part of a wider ‘economy of makeshift’.

Claims that rural communities and rural authorities in Wales were backwards conceal not only growing sensitivity to industrial river pollution, but also their active efforts to regulate the region's rivers. This article uses evidence from South Wales to explore rural responses to industrial river pollution and to provide the micro-contextualisation essential for understanding how environmental nuisances were tackled around sites of pollution. Efforts to limit industrial effluent at both local and regional levels highlight strategies of control, the difficulties of intervention at the boundaries of authorities, and how rural authorities were not always peripheral to an urban metropole. This lack of passivity challenges the idea that river pollution interventions merely displaced rather than confronted the problem of pollution, providing insights into how rural authorities worked, and into how those living in rural communities turned to them to clean up their environment.

This article surveys a range of work on the later medieval English countryside published since 2000, and offers some predictions and suggestions about future research. It shows that the field of ‘rural history’ has rarely been closely defined, and indeed has tended to be treated as a broad church that can accommodate many different kinds of approach, themselves drawing on a variety of disciplinary traditions. The article identifies and discusses recent and current innovation and creativity in research within two such broad approaches, one mainly ‘economic’, the other ‘cultural’. It concludes by arguing for the gains that can be enjoyed through the combination of elements of the two approaches, and especially through a renewed emphasis on the illumination of the general through an intensive focus on the local.

One of the most important systems of sheep transhumance since the Middle Ages in Spain occurred between the mountains of northern Leon and the Extremadura Meadow lands – a 500-kilometre journey on foot. We analyse here an interesting collection of thirty letters, written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and sent by the shepherds responsible for the flock from the wintering land to the owner of the animals. The only connection with the owner for seven long months but also with their villages and families, were these letters.