On a tour of the Chiltern hills upon the eve of the Second World War the rural commentator Henry Massingham came across a Buckinghamshire farmer. As rural ‘characters’ are wont to do in Massingham's books, the farmer was able to recite a piece of rustic wisdom, on this occasion concerning the type of country worker that he always sought to employ, saying ‘A man as can't do more'n one thing baint good for anything’. As an employer of men the farmer simply meant that all his charges should be of sufficient calibre to prove themselves versatile within an industry that called on them to change tasks by the hour, day, week and season. In short, in the eyes of the farmer an adaptable labourer was an efficient labourer. However, there was another side to this equation, as the aphorism also held resonance with workmen across a wide range of trades and not simply agriculture. For it was the man who was able to vary his work patterns, switching between employment sources, going beyond his central occupation if necessary, that was best able to ride-out the vagaries of the rural labour market.

The article analyses the evolution in both the forms and changing social content of British Sheepdog trials, from the first recorded event at Bala, Wales in 1873 to the advent of their revival following the Second World War (during which they had been suspended). Contrary to popular myth, early trials were gentry sponsored and therefore heavily freighted with elite values concerning the nature of the shepherds' craft. Early trials accented speed, agility and obedience in the dog, as well as sheer entertainment value, arising often from debacles that might ensue in any given run. The trials, too, remained adjuncts to elite, Kennel-club style dog-shows, with their focus on conformation and the physical beauty of the animal. As the social prominence of the aristocracy and gentry receded after 1880, so too did their role in defining the nature of the sheepdog trial. With the founding of the International Sheepdog Society in 1906 by shepherds and farmers, the rules for such trials became transformed, reflecting more the actual work of the shepherd, and indirectly the larger shift within agriculture toward more specialised sheep production. These new rules gave the trial a rigorous aspect at once more modern than earlier prototypes, yet rooted in the craft traditions of rural artisans. At the same time, the shepherds and farmers, who made practical use of sheepdogs, assumed direction of the sport. The founding of the ISDS thus coincided with the new self-assertiveness of labour occurring nationally, reflected in the founding of the Labour party the very same year. Elements of the elite show-ring, however, would linger residually in ISDS trials, reflecting a degree of continuity, but these would gradually atrophy. ISDS trials would accent both the independent work of the dog and its ability to function as a working partner to the shepherd. The article thus deconstructs the complicated social evolution in the nature of a rural sport, which reflected in turn changes in the larger socio-economic environment, through a detailed analysis of the changing patterns of the trials themselves.

In the study of folktales, both in Britain and internationally, the privileged genre has always been the fairytale, the märchen or ‘Wonder Tale’. These complex, picturesque stories, such as ‘Snow White’ or ‘Cinderella’, have attracted innumerable scholarly collectors and interpreters. There is, however, another kind of oral folk narrative, equally widespread but less glamorous, which has far more to offer to the student of popular rural culture. I refer to the kind of story technically known to English-speaking folklorists as a ‘legend’ (German Sage). This centres upon some specific place, person or object which really exists or has existed within the knowledge of those telling and hearing the story. It reflects the beliefs, moral judgements and everyday preoccupations of the social group, and is in many cases, though not invariably, told ‘as true’. Its aim is to hand on accounts of significant events alleged to have occurred in a particular community or area and it has no truck with ‘once.upon a time’ and the ‘never-never land’. While the fairytale is long and is told for its entertainment value, the legend is almost always brief, for its normal context is casual conversation, where it is recounted in order to inform, explain, warn or educate. Its style is sober and realistic, for though it may contain supernatural and fantastic elements, these are given maximum plausibility by being brought into close association with the physical localisation of the tale.

Increasing attention has recently been given by historians to the many informal ways in which women made economic contributions to rural labouring households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jane Humphries and Peter King have shown how important the exploitation of common rights, by gleaning for example, could be to the family economy. This is not to overlook the fact that certain types of women's and children's employment, such as lace-making and straw-plaiting were formally established in some rural communities. The research which has been carried out into straw-plaiting the hand twisting of straw for use in hat making – in certain agricultural counties of southern England, has shown that the plait work of wives and children could provide a substantial financial boost to the household income of poorly paid agricultural labourers. Indeed there were times when their combined earnings could far outstrip those of the man. Single plaiters were also reputed to be able to collect something of a dowry to put towards their marriages out of their plait earnings. Industries such as straw-plaiting, which employed mainly women and children are, not before time, beginning to be considered as sources of the gain in productivity potential of Britain in the Industrial Revolution era. It seems likely that the income earned in these industries will, at last, be included in measurements of labouring family budgets and standards of living.

The Victorian open space movement is accounted for variously by nostalgia, progress, and a changed conception of national identity, but explanatory factors are generally understood in secular ways which take little account of the pervasive influence of contemporary Christianity. These explanations overlap with discussions of nineteenth-century leisure which stress its links with secularisation. Christianity however was a significant motivation for some open space campaigners whose theology explained how nature was to uplift those who experienced it. This paper considers the Commons Preservation Society, founded in 1865; the preservation of Epping Forest for recreation between 1865 and 1880; and the forest's management in the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that although histories of the Commons Preservation Society and the Epping Forest campaign describe them in secular, rational terms, many prominent campaigners were motivated by religion, in the sense of orthodox Christianity. Practical religion significantly affected the development of mass recreation for the poor in the forest. Explanations of the open space movement which ignore religion thus seem inadequate.

This paper considers the effects of blood sports on the landscape, wildlife and farming, and assesses the implications of the topic for some matters of historical interpretation. Histories of individual sports written by practitioners are rarely candid about the environmental costs and even descriptions by professional historians tend to neglect the dynamic ecological consequences. Ritualised foxhunting supplanted more effective control and encouraged pests. Any benign consequences were incidental. Thanks to commercial money, shooting intensities held up well even during agricultural depressions. Game preservation, notably of pheasants, meant heavy pressure on birds of prey and other wild species; planting woodland was the main benign effect, although this simultaneously fostered so-called pests. Killing species that competed with game eliminated some wildlife but often proved self-defeating in the long term. Angling had mixed implications for waterside wildlife, although riverine habitats were lastingly modified when sport-fishing replaced fishing for food. Hunting and shooting meant some withdrawal of land from farming and interference with rotations: these activities reduced productivity. That the national economy could ‘afford’ to divert so many resources to elite sports contradicts the dominant view that England came up against a resources barrier.

The purpose of this study is to examine the changing proportions of bequests made by the inhabitants of eight Lincolnshire parishes to various categories of heirs between 1567 and 1800. Six of the parishes are located in the clay vale of western Lincolnshire, the other two are on the fen edge in the south of the county. There are 1,442 wills from these parishes which made 10,763 bequests. These bequests can be divided into three categories, those made to the immediate family, those made to kin and those made to unrelated people who must represent the community in which the deceased had lived. The share each of these categories enjoyed changed significantly in the period. By the eighteenth century the immediate family had become predominant and, apparently, the community occupied a less important place in the social environment of the will makers.

As a tenurial solution, sharecropping has been a source of constant fascination and controversy for centuries. It is as old as written history. Furthermore, it has existed and to a certain extent still exists, in very different institutional frameworks, and it constitutes one of the most common tenurial solutions in the history of agriculture.

Sharecropping dominated the agricultural scene in central Italy from the late Middle Ages until the early 1960s. An especially exploitative form was the backbone of Rumanian agriculture before the First World War. In Asian agriculture, sharecropping has been and still is highly dispersed, not only in wet rice production but also in non-irrigated crops such as wheat, or industrial crops like jute. The postbellum American South consituted the sharecropping region par excellence in the USA, although it was not unknown in other parts of the country. In the 1970s share tenancy reappeared in Californian strawberry production. Even if service tenancy dominated the Andean and Mexican hacienda, it was frequently supplemented with sharecropping on specific crops. In late nineteenth-century Mexico share tenancy expanded significantly in maize production. The cases mentioned above represent only a brief and highly incomplete list of economic, social and institutional frameworks where various forms of share tenancy are found.

The article will seek to plot the position of the Labour Party in relation to debates during the Second World War between rural preservationists and agricultural modernisers. It will review the recommendations of the Scott Report into land utilisation in rural areas, and outline recent research into popular attitudes to the countryside. It will then describe the way the Labour Party responded to these developments and draw some longer-term conclusions about their significance in relation to current debates about national identity and the countryside. It will be argued that while the Labour Party supported the need to protect the look of the landscape as part of the nation's heritage and national identity, in line with public opinion at the time, it also sought to encourage the physical planning of both town and country in a way that rejected some of the more anti-metropolitan tendencies of the rural preservationists.

This paper examines aspects of the social meaning of the parish boundary in Hanoverian England. The parish touched most people's lives through its role as a form of local government and as a significant landscape feature which defined a circuit of territory to which local people may have felt an allegiance. Evidence for the social meaning of boundaries is found in acts of boundary marking and related perambulation ceremonies and through written records, sometimes involving maps. The paper draws on a contrasting range of cases from a variety of counties with different landscape and settlement types in the century or so before the local government and administrative reforms of the 1830s – a time of significant change in central-local government relations. The paper evaluates the significance of the parish as principal repository of detailed information on its own boundaries in our period, with a premium placed on local knowledge, especially of the older parishioners. It is also suggested that acts of boundary recording could enhance a sense of parish consciousness and community.

In a recent article Willem de Blécourt highlighted how little we really know about cunning-folk in the context of European witchcraft, and stressed the need for further substantial research. The study of English cunning-folk in the early modern period has been well served by the work of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, but their respective chapters are, nevertheless, tantalising rather than conclusive. Although in the last twenty-five years early-modern historians have continued to take a strong interest in the witch-trials, and the social dynamics of witch-accusations, cunning-folk have, by and large, been neglected. De Blécourt also remarked upon the paucity of relevant research on cunning-folk in the period after the trials. This observation is particularly applicable to British historiography, and it is the purpose of this present paper to begin to redress this imbalance. Most work on cunning-folk has tended to concentrate on what they did, rather than on who they were.

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such as The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

This paper examines the introduction of a novel and modern form of natural history education in Britain in the 1960s, the nature trail. The rise in the number of nature reserves owned by county conservation trusts and the Nature Conservancy after the Second World War raised the issue of how they might best be used by members of the public. Reserves were initially seen by many as places from which the public should be excluded. The American concept of Nature Trails was introduced by a powerful group of nature conservationists to raise the profile of nature conservation and educate people. The role of the two National Nature Weeks of 1963 and 1966 is examined. The paper concludes with a detailed case study of the planning and management of the nature trail at East Wretham Heath, Norfolk.

Georgian landscaping is conventionally studied as an example of high culture, in terms of the history of art, literature and aesthetics. We take a more down to earth view and look at landscaping as an example of estate management, in terms of such topics as farming, planting, leases and rents. We do not pretend that the study of estate management offers a sort of ground-truth for understanding landscaping. Terms like ‘rent’ and ‘estate’ are of course no more eternal, nor less ideological, than terms like ‘picturesque’ and ‘landscape’. We will not neglect high culture, indeed a central theme of the paper is how the aesthetics of painting helped frame estate management. Even a casual reading of the literature on ‘improvement’ in the eighteenth century reveals a complex overlapping of not just economic and aesthetic issues but moral and political ones too. And the point of this paper is to reinsert landscaping and estate management into this complex.

This article examines the role of work camp movements in developing rural critiques of urban living in interwar Britain. A variety of work camp movements flourished in Europe during the interwar years, often partly as a reaction against urbanisation, and this paper explores the ways in which three such movements developed the work camp as a means of countering the socialising influences of city life. Yet while all of the interwar British work camps were located in the countryside, they varied in the extent to which they tried to promote rural values and orientations among their trainees. We can see the work camp as a liminal pedagogic space, designed to lead trainees to particular educational outcomes, using techniques and methods that focused on bodily change as well as cognitive development.

This essay discusses two exhibitions that romanticised the rural Celtic fringes of Britain for consumption in London, the ‘metropolis of the world’. Alice Hart's reconstructed Donegal Village at the Irish Exhibition (1888), organised under the auspices of the Donegal Industrial Fund, assuaged the reality of poverty in the Congested Districts; the Duchess of Sutherland's faux Highland cottage at the Victorian Era Exhibition (1897), organised by Scottish Home Industries, suggested hunting, fishing and scenic views rather than land reform and emigration. While the differences between the organisations inform the parts they played in exhibitions, they clearly and precisely converge in one respect: both advertised, glorified and sold the rural when existence in Donegal and in the Highlands was financially precarious and disappearing. They also share another characteristic: the female patrons, their associations and the female workers have ironically disappeared from historical writings while still visible are the colonised representations of exhibitions in which they participated. This essay seeks to recollect the historical moment at which the two associations flourished, examine how each group performed its self-appointed task and analyse their places as urban enthusiasts of the rural experience.

This paper on guano stems from research into hop cultivation in Kent. Parliamentary Papers give fascinating accounts of voyages made during the nineteenth century to obtain this ‘wonder’ fertiliser. The efforts made on behalf of the agricultural community by naval officers and seamen were an important extension of rural history, and were considered vital at the time. The paper describes the effort that went into this cooperation between agriculture and the navy, as well as its global scope, at a time when agricultural chemistry was in its infancy. Although developments in chemistry would displace the need for guano within two decades, the desire for guano was then very striking. Naval personnel underwent considerable danger and physical hardship during these explorations to bring farmers the fertilisers that they wanted, and some features of this narrative are explored here.

Despite the demise of many landed estates in the twentieth century, the creation of the Forestry Commission and consequent massive afforestation, over two-thirds of British woodland remained in the hands of private land owners at the end of the century. Little research has been carried out into the changing role of landed estates in forming and maintaining woodland landscapes in this period. This paper examines forestry on the Thoresby estate, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire using a wide range of sources. It demonstrates the dynamic nature of this landscape during the twentieth century. Rather than being a slowly changing woodland landscape, it has been transformed through interventions by land agents and landowners in response to changing social, economic and government policy pressures.

The following paper presents the original tithe series for the province of Guadalajara in central Spain. The new series contribute to recent debates on pre-modern economic growth, thus improving knowledge of a key region of Spain. The study includes analysis of the four main grains, wheat, barley, rye and oats, and the evolution of their production during the eighteenth century. The series complete previous estimates of grain production for New Castile and suggest that this was a period of growth. However, the increase was not a sustained process but one with intense imbalances, with production reaching its peak in the mid 1750s followed by a deep crisis and very weak recovery. Wheat was clearly the most important of the four grains in volume and especially in value. Its predominance was maintained thanks to a demand encouraged by the demographic growth that took place during the eighteenth century. The production of wheat was also the most stable, followed by barley, oats and rye, as might be expected given that the grain was usually cultivated in the most fertile lands. A comparison with other tithe series from the interior of Spain reveals similarities, such as the crisis of the 1760s, but also different recuperation trends. The findings indicate that Guadalajara followed a growth pattern characteristic of a traditional economy in the interior of Spain.

Livestock production has long been important to the Highland economy, before no less than after the clearances for sheep that first spread across the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, key questions about how it may have developed over the century or so immediately prior to the clearances have still to be answered, as well as questions about how the clearances actually changed farm output. Using stocking data primarily for the southern Highlands and Islands, this paper proposes to examine four particular questions. First, by way of an introduction, it will briefly consider the role of stock within the traditional or pre-clearance township economy. Second, it will use detailed data for the closing decades of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century to characterise the broad stocking balance of townships at the point when detailed figures first become available. Third, it will look at stocking figures for the eighteenth century with a view to establishing how livestock production may have altered during the century or so prior to the clearances. Fourth, and finally, it will consider how the clearances changed the character of livestock production.