Academic folklorists today define their subject matter in a way which runs counter to popular conceptions of the field, both as regards the ‘lore’ and the ‘folk’ part of this old composite term. They see the ‘lore’ as a body of beliefs, activities, ways of making, saying and doing things and interacting with others that are acquired through informal, unofficial channels by the processes of socialising in family, occupational, or activity-related groups. The ‘folk’ in the old sense of a group of people distinguishable by class, education or location therefore disappears from the modern equation, for it follows that we are all folk. As academic folklorists use the term nowadays, ‘folklore’ is best seen as a ‘cultural register’ – on the analogy of a linguistic register – one of several options available to members of a cultural grouping for thought, activity and interaction. It follows that ‘folklore’ can be found anywhere and among any group of people, urban as well as rural, professional as well as ‘peasant’.

Social commentators in the early decades of the nineteenth century considered the ‘poor classes’ to be a homogenous sub-group of society dependent on parish poor relief. Whilst in recent decades studies of the Old Poor Law have added much to our understandings of the complexity of poor relief practices, the concept of dependency has proved remarkably durable. This article challenges this central assumption by focusing upon the very individuals who constituted this supposedly homogenous dependent group. The relief histories of eight individuals from two cohorts who resided in the Dorset parish of Motcombe are (re)constructed and linked to demographic data to produce detailed biographies. On the basis of these biographies it is argued that even in north Dorset, where opportunities for employment and alternative forms of subsistence were few, ‘the poor’ experienced complex fluctuations of dependence on, and independence from, poor relief. It is also shown that traditional assumptions about the factors prompting relief, including the expansion of the family, did not have a uniform impact on all individuals. Such a methodology also makes it possible to explore how the parish managed to respond to the differing and similar needs of individuals. It is thus stressed that instead of following one policy for all, parish officials applied and tailored relief to suit each individual.

Markets are ubiquitous, dominant, integrating all production nationally: that is interlocking markets in a national purchase and sale network at money price, organised on an economy-wide basis, a market network essential to all industrial and agricultural lines of production… Practically all farm output was sold for cash. All factors of production, land, labour, tools, transport, artificial fertilisers, were available on national markets for purchase at money price… Here we have total market dependence, for livelihood and the ubiquitous use of cash.

On basis of the argument ‘Better milk – increased consumption’ the Swedish association, ‘The Milk Propaganda’, managed to frame a milk marketing project in which economic interests were intertwined with references to public health and the survival of the Swedish countryside. The very idea of marketing milk, building on its quality and health, was presented as mutually beneficial for producers and consumers, and for the entire Swedish society. In the 1920s and 30s the project was visible through posters, a journal, milk restaurants and school campaigns. The story includes fascinating encounters between rurality and urbanity, materialised through milk. During the economic crisis around 1930 milk marketing became aggressive and consumers were urged to consume as much dairy produce as possible in order to fulfil their national duty to help save farmers and the countryside.

It is increasingly recognised by those engaged in the debate concerning the standard of living of workers during industrialisation that all forms of household income need to be assessed, not just male waged work. A more holistic approach also considers women and children's earnings, poor relief, and the wide range of self-provisioning activities and resources available through the ‘economy of makeshifts’. Over one hundred household budgets of agricultural labourers and their families have been analysed from the Ampthill Union, Bedfordshire, just before and during the implementation of the new poor law in order to further explore and quantify all components to the household income of labouring families in this key transition decade. The article finds that poor relief to families was cut in the wake of the Poor Law Amendment Act. It also finds that the low incomes of families necessitated supplementation through making shift. When the makeshift economy is quantified, it becomes clear that such activities could significantly supplement incomes.

This essay considers W.G. Hoskins's work as a key part of the post-war English culture of landscape. To paraphrase his most well-known book, Hoskins made a distinctive English landscape. His work, though, has received remarkably little critical attention in terms of English cultural history. D.W. Meinig, in the only essay to treat Hoskins’ work at any length, focusses on his contribution to the genre of landscape studies and the impact of his work in the 1970s through television (Meinig, 1979). This essay seeks to complement Meinig's generic focus, by considering Hoskins in relation to the wider culture of landscape in England after 1945.

This article focuses on the property relations in Belgian and Flemish agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main question is: what was the relationship between land use, land ownership and land rents? By analysing the position of the (small) farmers and of the (small) landlords we could confirm that the dominance of small-scale farming coincided with a specific pattern of property distribution and surplus extraction. The high and increasing returns of the land were almost entirely pruned away by private landowners. The extreme fragmentation of the land, the large proportion of leaseholds and the high rents grew to a maximum in the second half of the nineteenth century due to competition both on the property market and on the leasehold market. This put the Flemish farmer in the worst possible situation, with a sad contrast between brilliant harvests and the miserable existence of those who generated them.

Agricultural incendiarism was a perennial factor in social relations in some areas of nineteenth-century rural England and is often understood by historians as an expression of ‘covert’ social protest. However, such categorisation risks oversimplifying what may be diverse and locally specific factors. In 1830, the high sheriff of Somerset presided over England's last ever scene of crime execution at the Somerset village of Kenn following the conviction of three labourers for incendiarism. This requires explanation. Crime scene executions were not only anachronistic and rare, but unfashionably brutal and expensive by this time, and were not undertaken lightly; moreover arson was soon to be removed from the list of capital statutes. Yet, oddly, the case was not obviously connected to the agenda of ‘social protest’ characterised by Swing as it emerged just months afterwards; indeed understanding the behaviour of the county authorities here requires an appreciation of a considerably more specific and parochial set of concerns and conditions. The Kenn incendiaries, it is argued here, were put to death at the scene of their crime to protect and uphold the principle of informing in a rural community whose dysfunctional social relations made the practice a judicial necessity.

‘Community’ is ubiquitous in the historiography of early modern England. Although the term is almost universally employed and appealed to, however, its meaning remains controversial, and its use by historians much criticised. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the very concept of ‘community’ is not the creation of modern social scientists: its origins lie in traditional notions of communitas, that quality of oneness claimed by mediaeval associations of various kinds. Consequently, modern historians and sociologists tend to agree only on two issues: first, that ‘community’ implies geographical propinquity, common ties, and focused interaction between and amongst its members; and second, that these characteristics have generally undergone a historical process of decline or disintegration. Rather vaguely-defined as this common ground is, it is sufficiently clear to render modern users of the term vulnerable in turn to two criticisms in particular. It is argued, first, that the mythic status of community begs both historical and sociological questions, relying merely on untested assumptions; and, second, that the strongly emotive overtones and inherent value judgements of such a nostalgic term introduce confusing elements of normative prescription to social-historical analysis. From this perspective, community is not only an elusive concept but also a flawed ideal, and calls for its abandonment have increased.

English and Welsh agrarian society, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was intimately tied to the poor law. That law was extensive in scope, encompassing settlement and removal, apprenticeship, illegitimacy, parochial rating and taxation, as well as welfare and unemployment provision. It continually swayed the rural labour market. It underlay the development of so-called ‘open’ and ‘close’ parishes, or as I would prefer to express it, the maintenance of a number of parishes (or hamlets or townships) as fundamentally estate units. It was an essential element in tenant farmers' judgements on profitability, and was routinely discussed in the General Views of Agriculture. Like the overhang of a George Morland tree, sometimes clutching, sometimes benign, it extended far over the lives of that majority of village inhabitants termed the ‘labouring poor’. Commentators like Arthur Young, John Howlett or Sir Frederick Eden discussed the poor law in the same paragraphs as they wrote about enclosure, agricultural improvement, depression and rural social relations. They paid close attention to poor-relief, making extensive connections between the poor law, rural poverty, rents, and agricultural innovation. To them such matters were closely entwined.

Lacking the glamour of poaching or the undertones of protest associated with incendiarism or animal maiming, the more petty rural crimes have been largely ignored. This paper examines the motivation, nature and criminal administration of two under-researched crimes, wood and crop theft. It will be suggested that while the theft of wood and crops was almost wholly the crime of the rural poor, it may have been committed within a wider realm of social protest.

Today we can already see a regenerated Ireland, living a new and prosperous life, with a peasantry helped and aided, largely by its own co-operative effort, beyond the peasantry of any other country. Tomorrow we trust to see a self-governing Ireland, still a part of the British Commonwealth. (Barker, Ireland in the Last Fifty Years (1919) 147).

Using the evidence of manorial court records, this paper examines in detail the developments in the relationship between the Bishop of Ely and his peasants at the manor of Brandon leading up to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Increasing levels of discontent among the peasantry can be observed across the period. This is expressed in rising reported numbers of various cases in the court rolls, such as non-compliance with the court, labour refusals, trespasses and cases of foot-dragging. This rising level of conflict, some open, some more hidden, can be seen as evidence both for increasing seigniorial concern to assert various jurisdictional rights, and the peasants’ increasing willingness to test the boundaries of seigniorial dominion, leading eventually to their participation in the Rising in East Anglia.

The transition from shepherding to fencing in colonial Australia was a technological revolution replacing labour with capital. Fencing could not be widespread in Australia until an historical conjunction of technological, social and economic changes: open camping of sheep (from about 1810), effective poisoning of dingoes with strychnine (from the mid-1840s), introduction of iron wire (1840s), better land tenure (from 1847), progressive reduction of Aboriginal populations, huge demand for meat (from 1851) and high wages (from 1851). Labour shortages in the gold-rushes of the early 1850s were the final trigger, but all the other changes were essential precursors. Available data are used to test the alleged benefits of fencing: a higher wool cut per head; an increased carrying capacity; savings in wages and the running costs of stations; less disease in flocks; larger sheep; higher lambing percentages, and use of land unsuitable for shepherding. Many of the benefits were real, but some cannot be verified. By the mid-1880s, over ninety-five per cent of sheep in New South Wales were in paddocks, wire fences were spreading rapidly, and the cost of fences was falling. However, shepherding persisted in remote northern areas of Australia until well into the twentieth century.

In the personality of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, undisputed mistress of Whig society in the two closing decades of the eighteenth century, were combined a heady mixture of formidable intellectual qualities and a recklessness and frivolity extraordinary even by the standards of the day. Leaving aside her involvement in high politics, the ambivalence of her personal relationships and her adventures at the card table, she would be memorable alone as a fashion icon whose excesses, particularly where her milliner and coiffeuse were concerned, were legendary. From the moment she appeared in public with a three-foot hair tower created with pads of horsehair and set off with an exotic arrangement of stuffed birds and ostrich feathers, female society high and low began its lengthy love affair with feathers.1 Fashions might ebb and flow, yet feathers, in some form or another, would intermittently adorn women's clothes (and the uniforms of some units of the Army) for the next century or so. This article is largely concerned with the efforts of various individuals and groups to bring an end to the trade in exotic plumage which fed upon the demand for the feathers of birds from tropical and subtropical territories.

This article uses court records, overseers' accounts, pauper examinations and other records from several counties, including Huntingdonshire and Staffordshire, to look at the experiences of poor relief in early modern England. It shows the varied circumstances under which the poor ‘encountered’ the poor law in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting the often contradictory attitudes that poor people encountered. More than this, it argues that there were many sorts of ‘poor’ people with very different capacities to negotiate about relief and to help themselves and each other. These features compounded enduring regional differences in the nature and extent of relief to generate a complex patchwork of experiences for the poor in early modern England.

This paper examines the issue of pauper agency under the old poor law. It relies on an examination of the ‘voice’ of paupers as it appears in a hitherto neglected source, pauper letters. The ‘face-to-face’ nature of poor relief has often been commented upon by historians, yet despite an ongoing historical preoccupation with all aspects of its administration, the question of how paupers actually interacted with, let alone were able to influence, the provision of that relief remains largely unexamined. Concentrating on requests for, or involving the issue of, clothing, this paper argues that paupers not only demonstrated a keen awareness of the imperatives underpinning relief policy in the locality, but also utilised aspects of many long-standing and powerful cultural discourses to strengthen their case for clothing relief.

In 1348 a group of villein tenants of the manor of Badbury of the Abbey of Glastonbury in Wiltshire attempted to go to court in order to prove that their manor was of ancient demesne status. Although the peasants were unsuccessful in their claim, they tried again in 1377. Their case is entered and explained in unusual detail in the court records of the manor, and therefore allows us valuable insights in this particular, and far from uncommon, form of peasant resistance. This paper explores the motives and aims of the peasants who planned the action, the organisation of their revolt, and the individuals involved, whose background and histories can be traced through the court records.

Studies of poaching in the nineteenth century have tended to understate the involvement of women in this archetypal rural crime. This article will suggest that female offending was both more significant and more widespread than previously assumed, but it will also highlight how in a variety of complex ways dominant conceptions of gender shaped perceptions of female poachers and often influenced their treatment before the courts. It will argue that alongside more widely effectual assumptions about appropriate male and female spheres and behaviours, the response of the authorities to female poachers was also shaped by powerful and increasingly culturally embedded notions about the sexually exclusive nature of hunting.

This paper assesses the relationship between state and society in interwar rural England, focusing on the hitherto neglected role of the Rural Community Councils. The rise of statutory social provision in the early twentieth century created new challenges and opportunities for voluntarism, and the rural community movement was in part a response to this. The paper examines the early development of the movement, arguing that a crucial role was played by a close-knit group of academics and local government officials. While largely eschewing party politics, they shared a commitment to citizenship, democracy and the promotion of rural culture. Many of them had been close associates of Sir Horace Plunkett. The Rural Community Councils engaged in a wide range of activities, including advisory work, adult education, local history, village hall provision, support for rural industries and an ambivalent engagement with parish councils. The paper concludes with an assessment of the achievements of the rural community movement, arguing that it was constrained by its financial dependence on voluntary contributions.