The article describes the conduct of land reform by the communist regime of People’s Poland. The land reform fitted into the wave of analogous reforms carried out in the other communist countries of Eastern Europe. It was based on the Decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) of 6th September 1944, which provided for subdividing landowners’ estates exceeding fifty hectares among peasants, such as small farmers, landless people and fornals. The article discusses problems faced by the founders of the reform and institutional measures applied in order to execute the Decree. Despite numerous obstacles, the reform was carried out quite efficiently and its effects were marked (6,070,100 hectares of landowners’ property was subdivided among 1,068,400 farms). However, those results were to a great extent possible due to the application of regime measures towards landowners (expropriation without compensation, arrests, and even capital punishment). Regarded as a crime and an atrocity by the landowners, for peasants the land reform was a blessing, which can be concluded from the recollections of both groups concerned, which are cited in the article. Despite its efficiency, the land reform did not manage to improve the agrarian structure in Poland, for it caused land dispersion and an increase of the number and the landed share of small farms.

This issue of Rural History has greater thematic coherence than previous numbers, with all the papers having some relation to the study of ‘popular culture’, while coming from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Each of the articles develops a key area of analysis, but their juxtaposition helps to raise further questions – about the kinds of sources that can be used to redress the bias towards the elite that has tended to dominate the study of culture, and about the problems involved in the handling of such sources. How do concepts of class, sectional, or gender interest relate to the sense of place and local identity? How can we detect such ideas within the historical record? How should we proceed in attempting to reconstruct popular and regional consciousness?

This article explores the visual culture of rural improvement in Germany, manifested in agricultural exhibitions, model farms and test plots. It argues that, following the English example, nineteenth-century experts increasingly believed that such material sites were the most effective way to persuade small farmers to embrace change and increase productivity. The presumption was that farmers were habitually keen observers who preferred to learn by seeing and that visual displays would alleviate their characteristic mistrust and build confidence in scientific advisers. The fact that these efforts coincided with the professionalisation of agronomy, the increased influence of scientists in rural policymaking and the rise of elite agricultural institutions revises the existing narrative of the spread of agricultural knowledge in Germany. Based on archival evidence from north-western Prussia, it is clear that many small cultivators responded enthusiastically to these sites, defying stereotypes of ‘dull-wittedness’ and ingrained suspicion of the new.

The economic success of the intensive poultry and pork sectors is a milestone in the Spanish economic history of the past seven decades. This work analyses the boom in the chicken and pork businesses in Spain, verifying the strengths and weaknesses of both livestock models, and drawing conclusions in relation to the agribusiness system. The influence of chicken and pork in the booming Spanish meat sector is analysed from the perspectives of livestock farming and agroindustry, followed by the impact of both forms of intensive livestock farming on Spain’s domestic consumption and foreign trade. The similarities and differences in their evolution are identified from the perspective of two food supply models: a predominance of economies of scale until the 1980s, and of so-called economies of scope since that time. While the development of mass production in both intensive livestock businesses followed a similar pattern, the progressive segmentation of the market towards higher quality, more artisanal and sustainable products has greatly favoured the sector more deeply rooted in rural tradition: pork.

Research has emphasised the stability in female landholding between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite demographic shocks and fundamental economic changes. However, in this period, a new type of land exploitation emerges: leasehold. This article wants to introduce a gender perspective into the history of leasehold. It investigates women’s activities on the lease market in late medieval and sixteenth-century Flanders, a region where short-term and competitive leasehold spread early and widely. An analysis of the actual practice, making use of landlords’ manuals and accounts, demonstrates women’s decreasing participation at the lease market. Moreover, their marital status increasingly mattered: from the beginning of the fifteenth century only widows could hold land. This article also demonstrates that, next to marital status, the size of the holding had a marked influence on women’s opportunities. Finally, these results invite us to rethink the grounds of women’s growing participation at the labour market in post-Black Death Europe, since especially single women lost access to land, particularly to land offered on the lease market.

Throughout the nineteenth century one of the main issues that preoccupied central government policy-makers was how poverty should be dealt with, in order to reduce poor relief expenditure. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, as Karel Williams argues, aimed to introduce a general rule against out-door relief by substituting instead a workhouse test that sought to deter paupers with its axiom of ‘less eligibility’. In practice, as Williams explains, regulations only stipulated that a workhouse test was to be strictly applied in the case of able-bodied male applicants and this gave unions the discretion to award out-door relief to other types of pauper. For example a number of unions continued to grant small out-door relief allowances to the aged, widows and infirm on medical out-door relief orders. Others found that it was not possible to follow poor relief guide-lines because they did not have the workhouse capacity to relieve all pauper applicants before the 1860s. This was because a comprehensive administrative infrastructure was not put in place in most unions until after the passing of the Union Chargeability Act of 1865. Once workhouse capacity had been improved with the creation of dispensaries and new medical wards, central government expected out-door poor relief expenditure to decrease. Consequently, in 1870 concern was expressed when they calculated that only 15 per cent of paupers were relieved within workhouses. A new discourse on the causes of poverty, as outlined by organisations such as the Charity Organisation Society, demanded that stricter poor relief regulations should be implemented.

Otter hunting was a minor field sport in Britain but in the early years of the twentieth century a lively campaign to ban it was orchestrated by several individuals and anti-hunting societies. The sport became increasingly popular in the late nineteenth century and the Edwardian period. This paper examines the arguments and methods used in different anti-otter hunting campaigns 1900–1939 by organisations such as the Humanitarian League, the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports and the National Association for the Abolition of Cruel Sports.

For rural Americans, the debate over establishing a parcel post evoked all the hopes and anxieties associated with the expansion of mass society at the turn of the century. Parcel post, today an accepted and seemingly inconsequential government service, was originally seen as a linchpin in the emerging industry of mass culture. The media of mass communication advertised products and ran stories acclimating readers to a consumer society, thereby encouraging demand for mass-produced goods that were distributed, finally, by parcel post. Opponents of parcel post foresaw a decline of small towns, a centralization of production and distribution, a disruption of the ‘natural’ relations among labor, retailers, and consumers, and the aggrandizement of urban culture. At the other extreme, proponents claimed that parcel post would increase consumer choice, reduce the cost of living, and bridge the widening chasm between urban and rural life. Thus, the simple act of carrying a parcel from Chicago to a farmer's lane became freighted with a panoply of issues agitating the nation.

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.

The traditional idea of a landowner is inextricably bound up with concepts of maleness. The most frequently used word for a landowner is simply ‘landlord’, with the corresponding feminine form ‘landlady’ carrying quite different connotations. The law with regard to inheritance and marriage lends weight to this interpretation, since common law, until the mid-nineteenth century, decreed that married women could not own property or make contracts as individuals, in theory leaving only spinsters and widows as potential landowners. Yet scrutiny of manorial, enclosure, tithe and land tax documentation reveals that women commonly held land either as owners or occupiers.

The aim of this article is to broaden our knowledge of the metrological system of the Morisco period in the kingdom of Granada and, more specifically, in the rural area of the Alpujarra. The sources used in the analysis are two inventories of ecclesiastical goods from Islamic origin, drawn up in 1527 and 1530, four decades after the culmination of the Christian conquest of al-Andalus. The article explores the agrarian units of measurement used by the Morisco community of the Alpujarra in their daily lives (measures of surface area and length, weight or mass, volume or capacity, and of water used for irrigation). As far as possible, equivalences are presented for the units discussed. Attempts are made to establish whether these measures were inherited from the Andalusi period or whether, on the contrary, they were the result of the implementation of Castilian legislation on the matter. The data gathered have revealed the existence of a hybrid measurement system, which shows that the ordinances to modify the system of weights and measures of the Muslims and to seek a correspondence with the Castilian system had little effect in the Alpujarra, where, in many cases, the Islamic system of measurement continued in use. This circumstance indicates that the changes and transformations in the daily life of this rural community after the Christian conquest were not as imminent as might have been expected.

The article addresses the issue of wealth accumulation by peasant farmers in the post-emancipation era in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia. The Baltic emancipation schemes stand out as the least beneficial for peasants as they set neither time limits nor land price levels, and the state government did not provide any credit to the purchasers of farms. However, in northern Livonia the nominal value of peasant farmers’ wealth grew as much as tenfold from 1850 to 1913. The study reveals that the advantages and disadvantages of high farm purchase prices should be considered in combination with other factors affecting agricultural growth. In the Baltic context, the large size of the farms, land consolidation, well-developed infrastructure, and the commercialisation of production helped the farm owners amass a relatively large amount of wealth within a generation. Technological improvement also contributed to the rise in productivity and wealth.

The poacher has been closely studied by historians of crime and protest in England. While much has been done to reveal the complex nature of poaching, this work has tended to concentrate on the nineteenth century and been largely concerned with practice. By shifting attention to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and by focusing instead on representation, this article explores the place of the Edwardian poacher in a rapidly expanding cultural landscape. Pointing to an inverse relationship between physical presence and representational weight and throw, the article shows how the idea of the poacher was not just a by-product of Edwardian ruralism, but was integral to a deeply felt ruralist sensibility that strongly informed contemporary debates on the control and use of land and related matters of national identity and wellbeing. In considering how this ostensibly marginal figure became so embedded in the popular imagination, the full extent of the poacher’s cultural usability is revealed. Like ruralism itself, the representational poacher had many facets and served many needs.

Neoliberals are known to oppose agricultural protectionism. In Switzerland, however, a member of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society was responsible for pushing forward the highly protectionist agricultural policy of the postwar years. Drawing on newly available archival sources, this article illustrates the endeavours of the director of the Swiss Business Federation Gerhard Winterberger (1922–93) in favour of agricultural protectionism. Winterberger, in his public talks or in his correspondence with Friedrich August von Hayek, selectively used neoliberal theory to justify his commitment to agriculture.

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.

This article draws on a number of documents – mainly rent books, diaries, letters, and contracts – to investigate landlords whose estates came in at the lower end of the ‘Great Landowner’ category; a hitherto neglected area of investigation because most studies like those of David Howell and R. J. Moore-Colyer focus on larger estates. The materials examined allow tentative judgements about a group which has been vilified in the historiography of the subject. The three topics dealt with in the piece – touch on issues which transcend regional/national boundaries and encompass problems of wider economic and social significance, thus contributing to the broader historiography of landlord-tenant relations.

A frequent complaint among English historians is that the farm workers were a ‘secret people’ who seldom interacted with the written or recorded word. If vaguely discernible in this or that statistic, or anonymous act of physical protest, the labourer's cultural and political consciousness was entombed (it is sometimes inferred) in that drudging physical pantomime which many nineteenth-century commentators assumed to be the primary attribute of ‘Hodge’. Even the labourers' contemporary friends harboured a ‘Hodge’ stereotype in their assumption that the labourers' aspirations, or ‘cottage charter’, were best represented and publicised by ‘articulate’ outsiders. William Cobbett, who for three decades argued that farm workers were capable of profound thought and articulation, implied as much in his observation that ‘Nobody (excepting himself) tells the tale of the labourer.’ In 1848, as a better known Charter was re-stated to the nation from the mass radical platform of the metropolis, Sidney Godolphin Osborne lamented that the labourer ‘has few to speak for him, few who care to face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him’. Five years later, with reference to the ‘peasant’ worker, Karl Marx made a similar assumption: ‘they must be represented’, he argued, and their representative ‘must appear as their master, as an authority over them.’ Even as late as 1880, shortly after the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, Richard Jefferies confidently proclaimed that ‘the country labourer possessed no clearly defined ‘Cottage Charter’ and no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not for him’.

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human history. A major problem for landscape archaeologists – and indeed for prehistorians – is that as soon as they stray beyond routine archaeological description and analysis, they face the scepticism of anthropologists, historians and human geographers. I argue that we can learn from scholars from these other disciplines but should not try to ape them. We need to define more clearly our own field of operation. It has become fashionable to consider past landscapes as texts; comparisons between the contexts of ‘messages’ conveyed by documents and by landscapes lead me to suggest that ignorance of the nature of oral tradition and its articulation within material culture is one of the prehistorian's greatest blind spots. In choosing the most useful scale for analysis, the prehistorian should develop the concept of the small community, rather than the ‘site’ or the region, and consider the modification of such a community's ‘mental map’ of the landscape as a critical indicator of social process.

This paper draws on data collected for the author's doctoral thesis (Maclean, 1997), which examined migration and social change in remote rural areas. The research took place mainly in 1995–6, and consisted of tape-recorded interviews and 18 months' ethnographic fieldwork in a parish in the Scottish Highlands, and the use of data including the Census Small Area Statistics and Register of Sasines. Although informed by the research as a whole, the central focus of this paper is data drawn from twenty interviews with members of fifteen families, most of whom were born in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A further ten people provided supplementary data in interviews in which family migration patterns were not the main focus (see table 1 for details). Places and people involved in the research have been given pseudonyms to protect anonymity, privacy and confidentiality, in accordance with the British Sociological Association's Ethical Guidelines.