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.

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.

First meeting in September 1941, the Kinship in Husbandry was a group of twelve men concerned for the future of English rural life in the post-war world and determined to communicate their vision of a revitalised countryside. Central to this vision were an agriculture based on organic principles and a rural culture which would encourage craftsmanship while drawing spiritual sustenance from a Christianity reconnected with nature. This paper traces the Kinship's origins in the pre-war activities of Gerard Wallop (Viscount Lymington) and Rolf Gardiner, and examines the names of those considered by the original twelve as possible associates. Archival evidence indicates tensions between Kinsmen over the group's strategy and the extent to which it should cooperate with other bodies. In particular, correspondance shows that H. J. Massingham was deeply unhappy about Gardiner's pro-German sympathies and mistrusted the influence within the Kinship of Gardiner and his fellow landowners Wallop and Lord Northbourne, who appear to have formed an inner circle. The article concludes by considering briefly the extent to which the Kinship succeeded in spreading its ideas, and suggests that, despite its failure to influence post-war developments, its longer-term impact can be seen in the current public interest in organic food and farming.

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.

On 22nd October 1830 Sir Edward Knatchbull passed sentence on seven men for threshing-machine breaking in the Elham Valley area of East Kent. The four day sentence enraged both local farmers and Home Secretary Peel alike, and was seized upon by other labourers and artisans hostile to threshing-machines who believed that Knatchbull had legitimised such acts of rural Luddism. The trial sparked an intensification of ‘Swing’ in East Kent and for the first time acts of overt protest beyond. Knatchbull, upon being pressed by George Maule, the Treasury Solicitor, admitted that the sentences could not have been otherwise under circumstances he was not at liberty to disclose. This paper examines these circumstances and uncovers a bizarre chain of events which shed new light on both the genesis of ‘Swing’ and also upon local-central government relations regarding policy implementation and creation.

Although historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a ‘long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease’ in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment.

The Access to Mountains Act of 1939 has been ridiculed for the most part as a capitulation to landed interests. Closer reconstruction of the circumstances in which such a legislative attempt was made to extend the public recreational-use of uncultivated countryside emphasises the severe limitations of a Private Members’ Bill. Even greater skills were called for in securing sufficient consensus among the various parliamentary lobbies to convince ministers that there was sufficient accord to merit the use of legislative time and resources to expedite enactment. The Act's achievement was to ratchet forward both ramblers’ expectations and a greater preparedness on the part of landed interests to provide the recreational opportunity anticipated by a post-war, largely urban population.

This article investigates the changing administrative context of drainage in south-west Lancashire from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. Successive schemes managed by Commissions of Sewers, piecemeal reclamation and private agreement were characterised by primitive technology, under-investment and poor management. Consequently, their achievements were limited. Large scale drainage schemes under the control of single individuals or powerful syndicates enjoyed greater success, but to coordinate drainage across an ecosystem that went beyond estate boundaries required state intervention in the form of an Act of Parliament of 1779. After some initial success the drainage commissioners found themselves immersed in legal wranglings with landowners and maintenance of the drainage system largely fell into abeyance. It was not until the landlords provided the administrative and financial resources to invest in technological solutions in the 1840s that the land achieved its full potential. It is argued that drainage of this land, resulting in its transformation from some of the worst land in the country to some of the best, was a major contributor not only to the agricultural success of the region, but also to Lancashire's industrial success.

State intervention in the United Kingdom's farming industry was necessitated by the problems of the interwar depression and the lead up to World War Two and the emergency wartime food programme. This brought the need for greater bureaucratic machinery which would connect individual farmers and their communities with central government. Crucial from 1939 in this respect was the formation of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, which became the channels through which English farming was propelled into postwar productivism. Using relatively newly-available documentary material, this article demonstrates the role the committees played in the transmission of national policies down to the local level, their composition and membership. In so doing it also places the economic changes within farming into the vital but under-researched context of their rural social relations during the Second World War.

Historiographical debates on the causes and implications of early modern and early industrial settlement legislation, which determined the locality where one could apply for poor relief, have so far focused mainly on England and Wales. These regions are deemed exceptional for the national character and universality of their Poor Laws (1601), associated Act of Settlement (1662) and later amendments. However, if the focus is shifted from the national legislative framework to actual practice, several continental regions had relief and settlement arrangements that bore many resemblances to those in England and Wales. This article draws on existing literature and archival research to explore the evolution of settlement law and practice in the Southern Netherlands, i.e. present-day Belgium, from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, and compares its main features with the situation in England and Wales. This comparative exercise brings to the fore a number of striking resemblances and remarkable differences, which question the precise nature of the British exception. While further research is needed to gauge fully the causes and consequences of the observed similarities and differences, this article aims to demonstrate how a comparative approach towards issues of settlement and relief not only elucidates our understanding of the particularities and generalities of the English/Welsh case, but also widens our insight into the social, economic, and cultural implications of settlement arrangements in general.

The focus of postmodernist historians on language and representation clashes with the more traditional approach of the social historian to material structures and processes. This article adopts the suggestion of Wahrman that a ‘space of possibilities’ exists where these apparently competing perspectives might be connected. The concept of a ‘space of possibilities’ is pursued through a case study of a marginal group, the fishing communities of west Cornwall in the late nineteenth century. The article explores points of contact and contrast between the artistic and the fishing communities, between the painterly gaze and the subjects of that gaze. It is proposed that, while the artistic colonies and their representations might be explained as a result of discourses reproduced in the centre, their specific choice of location in Cornwall can also be related to the local economic and social history that granted them a space of possibilities.

In 1899 the Victoria County History (VCH) was established as a ‘National Survey’ of England which was intended to show the present day condition of the country and trace the ‘domestic history’ of all English counties to the ‘earliest times’. Natural history was seen as a key component to be included in the first volume for every county. In this paper we examine the reasons for the prominence given to natural history and demonstrate how the expert knowledge of natural historians was marshalled and edited. We use the contrasting counties of Herefordshire and Nottinghamshire to examine key intellectual debates about the role of the amateur and the expert and concern about nomenclature, classification and the state of knowledge about different groups of species. We emphasize the importance of the geography of the natural history and the way in which the VCH charted concerns about species loss and extinction. We examine the reasons why the VCH later abandoned natural history and finally we assess the value of its published output for modern historical geographers, historical ecologists and environmental historians.

This article examines three linked assumptions relating to English agriculture between 1850 and 1914. First, that the north devoted its energies to industrialisation. Second, that mechanisation made steady progress, based largely on southern initiatives. Third, that this took farming towards large, capital-intensive and steam-powered operations. This conventional wisdom is inherently weak given the high reputation of Northumbrian farming in 1850, its tight, expensive labour markets and easy access to coal, iron and engineering expertise, which contrasts with the south's cheap, plentiful labour, no coal and few engineering firms. A database of all implements advertised in a thousand farm sales from the relevant period in Northumberland, Durham and northern North Yorkshire reveals a regional agriculture that prospered by developing the traditional and highly effective mix of carts, harrows and ploughs. Mechanisation occurred very unevenly across departments, with harvesting very atypical. Large farms were neither more inherently machine-oriented than small ones, nor better users of machinery. Farmers are revealed as pragmatic about mechanisation, and not conservative when it paid. Steam played little part, whereas horses remained an ideal power source for the farming that suited these times.

Using the 1881 census, we have tracked 1172 individuals who left their birthplaces in the villages of Billingsley, Chelmarsh, Highley and Kinlet in south-east Shropshire. This has allowed us to investigate the destinations and motivations for rural migrants in the second half of the nineteenth century. Half the migrants (fifty-two per cent) remained in rural environments; a further eighteen per cent moved to rural market towns. Thus only thirty per cent of the sample moved to truly urban destinations. Furthermore fifty per cent of the adult male migrants remained as agricultural labourers or in closely related occupations; even in the urban cohort twenty-one per cent followed agricultural-related occupations. Using the Armstrong classification of social status, it was not possible to measure any significant increase in status following rural to urban movement. Thus most rural migrants in this sample did not move to urban locations; instead rural to rural movement, making use of traditional skills, was apparently perceived as the most beneficial strategy.

The literature concerning recreational landscapes is substantial, but its contents are heavily biased towards the parks and gardens of the aristocratic and land-owning classes. Surprisingly, very little of a landscape historical nature has been published on the countrysides created and maintained for the purpose of grouse shooting, even though the areas concerned are some of the most admired and most ecologically sensitive parts of Britain. The pursuit of grouse shooting has been followed in the Yorkshire Dales for more than 250 years and the activity (in this context ‘sport’ is an emotive term) and its varied impacts upon the landscape have been conditioned by a variety of factors. Some are social, and relate to perceptions of what constitute acceptable forms of upper class recreation and association; some are technological and involve the development of firearms; some are logistical and pertain to improvements in access to the upland grouse moors, while some are ecological and concern the improvement and deterioration of the habitat and fluctuations in the grouse population. All these factors found expression in the landscape, on the grand scale, by the systematic burning, swaling or swiddening of the moors and at the local level, for example, by constructing butts in relation to topography, prevailing wind direction and the flight paths favoured by the game.

The history of game shooting since the Second World War might be seen as an enigma. In spite of unprecedented changes to the countryside resulting from the intensification of farming which contributed to a rapid decline in the partridge population, the size of the national game bag increased due to the enhanced popularity of the pheasant as a sporting quarry. This article evaluates the reasons for the expansion of the sport in this period, focusing on the management of the countryside, the evolution of game keeping, the growth of artificial game rearing, and the increasing popularity of game shooting.

Few historians have made a more significant contribution to our understanding of social relations in the English countryside in the early nineteenth century than Roger Wells. In a series of publications, he has consistently and persuasively argued that, in the years from 1790 to 1834, the labourers of southern England fell victim to the rise of a new aggressive agrarian capitalism which fractured and destroyed an older complex social system, replacing it with the naked power of class interest and ushering in a new class consciousness among the rural labourers which corresponded to that developing in the towns among the industrial labourers. This class consciousness was the product of an active resistance which sometimes, as in Swing, took the form of overt protest. Swing, Wells believes, marked the clear expression of class conflict in the countryside. The labourers' defeat was compounded by the New Poor Law, by which triumphant agrarian capitalism imposed its new sway. Placing ‘a priceless premium on employment’, the New Poor Law transferred power into the hands of the large capitalist farmers who speedily came to dominate the Union boards. Under its pressure, residual aspects of ‘class collaboration’ between the labourers and the superior social orders dissolved. The labourers were left to develop a defensive class culture which found echoes in Chartism but was seen more extensively in a ‘class war’ which took the form of disorder, arson, poaching, ‘rough’ behaviour or in a parodied or cynical deference. Persuasive as Wells'’ case is, however, one element of rural society is, by and large, missing from it, and indeed from many other studies of rural protest in the nineteenth century: namely the landlords and, in particular, the largest landlords. Wells sees their role from 1815 to 1830 as being essentially niggardly, continuing to demand social discipline but increasingly failing to play their old role of mediator between the poor and the rate paying classes. Their support for the New Poor Law ‘proved to be the final nail in the coffin of rural paternalism’.

When Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, evades captivity by disappearing into the Paris sewers, the author relaxes the narrative tension for nearly twenty pages in order to reflect on the harm caused by that city's waste-disposal methods. In doing so, he identifies what were to become, several decades later, central issues of concern for the British organic husbandry movement. With an artist's insight Hugo recognised that the Parisian sewage system was doubly wasteful: ‘the land impoverished and the water infected’ (Hugo, 1909: 532). A ‘restitution of the mire to the land’ (Hugo, 1909: 548) was required, and he suggested the creation of a tubular arrangement, ‘a system of elementary drainage, as simple as the lungs of man’, which would ‘bring into our cities the pure water of the fields and send back into our fields the rich water of the cities’ (Hugo, 1909: 532). The alternative – the road being taken – was to squander potentially precious fertility and emaciate the population.

This paper considers the role played by the Commons Preservation Society (CPS) in defending Berkhamsted Common in Hertfordshire from enclosure 1866–1870. The CPS was an organised pressure group, which deployed a series of legal and historical arguments to defend open spaces from development and to encourage anti-enclosure legislation. At Berkhamsted the CPS orchestrated a fence break in March 1866 to oppose forcibly the enclosure of a portion of the common by the trustees of the second Earl Brownlow. The primary purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how material gathered by lawyers working for the CPS in the course of the subsequent legal dispute over the fence break can be used to throw new light upon the uses of common lands in the later nineteenth century. A secondary aim of the paper is to consider the longer-term impact of the CPS on debates about common land and enclosure, and to point to the need for further research into the origins, motivations and activities of the Society.

Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others, as were farmers on fertile plains and, in 1900, those living in coastal areas. Increased market access – in terms of cities and foreign demand – meant that farmers well placed in terms of geography and infrastructure benefited much more than farmers on what became the periphery. The diversity of farmers’ wealth grew, as did their financial sophistication.