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.

H. J. Massingham was one of a group of writers flourishing between the wars who were concerned with recording the disappearing cultural traditions of an older rural world, describing the English countryside, and setting into motion a move to revitalise and regenerate that countryside from the desuetude and depression into which it had declined. Distrustful of reductionist science and mechanistic economics, Massingham championed what he perceived as the virtues of localism, organicism, the crafts and the culture of ‘peasant’ farming. In offering biographical details and in considering a range of his work, this article seeks to locate Massingham within the context of his times. Moreover, despite the criticism of his contemporary detractors who regarded his preaching of traditional values in husbandry, craft and land as escapist and antiquarian, the article concludes that many of Massingham's writings foreshadow twenty-first century concerns for organic holism, sustainability, food quality and environmental issues.

This article suggests that there has been a tendency to understate the degree to which officeholding during the early modern period was embedded within the community, moulded by local influences and fulfilling a range of different functions in the parish. An over-emphasis upon national processes of social and cultural change has resulted in a failure to appreciate the complexity of the politics of officeholding. There has been only limited recognition of both the presence of constraints upon the actions of parochial elites and the mechanisms through which particular groups established and maintained control over parochial institutions. A detailed analysis of officeholding within seven parishes lying on the north Norfolk coast stresses the extent to which ‘parochial traditions’ determined the way in which things were done. It is argued that the effective linkage of officeholding to these shared understandings and to ideals of participation and inclusion created a powerful rhetoric through which the exclusion of a large minority of the populace and uneven distributions of officeholding were justified.

United Kingdom (UK) accession into the European Economic Community (EEC), which became a political likelihood in 1970 and an actuality in 1973, led to a major change in agricultural policy away from a deficiency payments system supporting farmers' incomes towards the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) method of assistance through farm prices above the market level. Such a basic alteration in government activity not only imposed well-known and thoroughly researched costs on the British economy in the form of higher food prices and an additional burden of protection, it also undermined dominant post-1945 historical trends.

Firstly, it reversed a thirty year old process towards greater British self-sufficiency Between 1938 and 1946 UK agricultural production rose in value from 42% to 52% of the country's food imports, while under the deficiency payments scheme, permanently established in peacetime by the 1947 Agriculture Act, the proportion of UK food consumption supplied by domestic producers grew steadily until it reached a level of just under 72% in 1972. EEC membership, involving compulsory adoption of the CAP, initially reversed this movement; British agricultural self-sufficiency fell to 66% in 1977, the year when the Common External Tariff (CET) was first applied in full. The higher import bill that inevitably resulted imposed a severe strain on the UK balance of payments, estimated by the pro-market. Heath government in 1970 at a net annual deterioration in the range of 18% to 26%.

More bad history has been written about sex than any other subject. Our ignorance about the sexual attitudes and behaviour of people in the past is compounded by a desire to rush to rash generalisation. This is unfortunate, for (consciously or not) our perceptions of the present are shaped by our assumptions about the past. Britain's current preoccupation with ‘Victorian values’ is but a politically visible example of a more general phenomenon. And, more specifically, we do not know a great deal about lower-class sexuality in nineteenth-century England. There are studies of bourgeois desires and sensibilities, but little on the mores of the vast bulk of the population.

As Jean Robin has demonstrated recently, one of the most fruitful approaches to the subject is the detailed local study – the micro-study. It may not appeal to those with a penchant for the broad sweep, but such an approach can provide a useful entry into the sexual habits of the people of the past. This article is intended as a follow-up to Robin's work. It deals with a part of rural Kent and, like Robin's work, it covers an aspect of nineteenth-century sexuality – in this case, the social context of illegitimacy. More particularly, this study (and here I differ from Robin) will question the usefulness of the concept of a ‘bastardy-prone sub-society’ (more of which later), a term still favoured by many historical sociologists. The experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.

In the early twentieth century, Australians strove to create a rural civilisation through state legislation to encourage rural closer settlement. The fantasy that Australia might one day support a rural population of perhaps hundreds of millions endured despite the overwhelmingly urbanised character of the nation and the harsh realities of its environment. This rural dream was present not merely in the discourse surrounding the rural settlement imperative, but also inflected the language and modes of urban reform, as planners sought to ‘ruralise’ the urban environment to reflect something distinctive about Australian life. Previous scholarship addressing the rural ideal in Australian history, as well as urban history, has failed to interrogate these links. This article illuminates the power and ideological reach of rurality in the Australian nation-building project and pushes the boundaries of ‘rural history’ by considering the ways in which reformers sought to extend a projected Australian ‘rural civilisation’ into the cities.

When Poland was re-established as an independent state one hundred years ago, one of its political priorities was to implement a land reform, as the ‘agrarian question’ was an extremely sensitive socio-economic problem. In Poland at that time, two thirds of its inhabitants made their living by working in the agricultural sector. A ‘land craving’ phenomenon was notorious, as was rural poverty, especially among smallholders. On the other hand, almost half of the total area of farmland in the Second Polish Republic was held by huge landowners. The situation led to ever louder political calls for land redistribution to peasant smallholders. The Land Reform Implementation Act of 1920, and its amendment of 1925, laid legal foundations for land redistribution. By the Second World War, 2,654,800 hectares of land had undergone redistribution, as a result of which 734,100 new farms were established. However, this land reform did not achieve its goal, namely the empowering of efficient smaller farms, as quantitative analysis showed a continuing process of agricultural land fragmentation.

This article looks at a small English rural estate, and at the role of its squire, in the early twentieth century. It describes the estate, parish and village of Holton-le-Moor as inherited by the Reverend T.G. Dixon in 1906, and assesses his impact on all three areas of local society during the following thirty years. Although he was a conscientious landlord and a devoted churchman, his most lasting influence was on the life of the village. Both conservative and progressive in his views, his inconsistencies reflected a rural society in transition; but, especially in providing a village hall in 1910, he anticipated and facilitated post-First World War developments in the structure of village life. Relations between the rural aristocracy and its dependents have often been described in terms of paternalism on the one hand and deference on the other. This article suggests that ideas of community may sometimes be more useful when considering the dealings of a small squire with his villagers.

This paper examines the growth of peasant/farmer cooperatives in the German state of Bavaria in the years circa 1880–1914. The remarkable increase in the number of cooperative ventures in rural Germany, seen most clearly in the proliferation of credit cooperatives (Raiffeisenvereine), has attracted scant attention from historians. This study of the phenomenon in Bavaria suggests that the longer-term structural problems of peasant agriculture, compounded by seasonal crises and the absence of adequate structures of credit for small producers, all helped to make peasant farmers more receptive to cooperative innovation. In addition, however, state encouragement, galvanised in no small measure by the marked and, for the Bavarian state, discomfiting politicisation of agrarian interests in the early 1890s, was also instrumental in the extension of the cooperative idea. Certainly the more demagogic agrarian lobbies of the period, whether in Bavaria or in Germany as a whole, protested loudly that self-help measures such as cooperative credit, purchase and sales counted for relatively little, and that the only sure protection for farmers in the face of rapidly changing market conditions was large-scale state subvention, above all in the form of higher tariffs. However, the evidence presented here suggests that political demands to insulate the peasantry from change in fact formed part of a critical interplay between agrarian mobilisation, state intervention and cooperative initiatives whose effects, even if difficult to calculate exactly, undoubtedly contributed to the improvements in peasant farming in this period.

The role of land agents in the management and improvement of English landed estates between 1770 and 1850 is examined in this paper. The focus is on the responsibilities of land agents, their contribution to agricultural improvement, and in particular the validity of a thesis of the professionalisation of agents during this period. The Petworth House archives are used to compare the work of two legal agents at Petworth in Sussex with that of a professional land agency firm in Yorkshire, both employed by the third Earl of Egremont (1751–1837). This study suggests that the role of land agents in agricultural improvement at Petworth was limited to the financial, legal and political aspects of these developments rather than practical management. It proposes that legal agents remained more influential than has been supposed, even on estates renowned for agricultural improvement, and despite contemporary criticism that emphasised the importance of applied agricultural expertise. The belated professionalisation of the Petworth agents and the significant differences in their roles when compared with contemporary and historical accounts suggests that estate management was therefore far more diverse than is suggested in some recent literature.

This article challenges the interpretations by Viviana Zelizer and Clark Nardinelli of bound labour by farmed-out parish pauper children. Using the case of Finland, supported by the example of Sweden, it is argued that the exploitation of parish pauper children may have increased in the nineteenth century due to increasing adoption of a monetary economy in the countryside. As the productivity of a growing child fell short of his or her consumption, while the poor relief authorities strove to keep the compensation for this as low as possible, peasant farmers solved the discrepancy by over-exploiting farmed-out children. In both countries a system of auctioning-out paupers was applied, with no principal difference made between children and adults. The Finnish and Swedish cases suggest that industrial child labour and bound labour by parish pauper children many have reflected a similar attitude to the children of both the poor and the labouring classes.

Revision of the early estimates of the extent of labour shortages in agriculture during the Great War suggest that, for England and Wales, labour was more plentiful than contemporaries asserted. However national averages disguise important regional variations. Using newly discovered material from a District Committee of the Westmorland County Agricultural Executive, supplemented with contemporary commentary and reports, this article investigates farm labour shortages in the uplands. It considers labour supply and shows that assumptions about the level of recruitment of farmers and their families and about the availability of substitutes as used in revisionist estimates cannot be supported here. It then shows that the ‘plough up campaign’ imposed by Government increased labour demand in the uplands to a greater extent than in other regions. This combination of reduced supply and increased demand served to exacerbate existing labour shortages and resulted in labour shortages that were more severe than is suggested by the revisionist figures for England and Wales.

The articles in this special issue of Rural History address aspects of the multifaceted and often very intense relationship between rurality, modernity and national identity in the 1920s and 1930s. They derive from a conference organised in January 2007 by the Interwar Rural History Research Group. The conference, ‘Rethinking the Rural: Land and Nation in the 1920s and 1930s’ brought together forty-nine papers on fifteen different countries and concluded with a plenary session in which it became clear that there were some striking commonalities to the interwar experiences of the countries in question. In particular, the three-way relationship between the countryside, modernisation and national identity seemed to be prominent almost everywhere. Bound up with these was the rise of international trade and its close corollary, the agricultural depression, which affected rural areas on a literally global scale. While there were also some intriguing and unexpected differences between countries, the broad context seemed to be similar enough that it would be fruitful to collect those papers that related most closely to these core themes and publish them together. In this editorial, I will briefly outline the articles that follow, pick out what seem to me the most interesting connections, and then consider some of the wider questions this raises.

This article explores how the land and the agricultural community were made out to be central to the assertion of Welsh national identity between the world wars. Political Nationalism came out of a disillusion with Liberal national sentiment. Liberal nationalists had recognised the significance of the land in Wales and made secure a devolved administrative regime for agriculture, the Welsh Council of Agriculture, originally established before 1914. For the political Nationalists, however, this was far too little. They perceived a cultural and economic crisis which might be overcome only through complete self-government. That crisis originated historically in the annexation of Wales to England which had intruded an alien land system and destroyed a natural, patriarchal rural order; which had foisted an alien commercial, industrial system and had led to the Anglicisation of Welsh society. In its depressed state, inter-war Wales was subjected to a new and reactive form of politics, often influenced by European right wing ideas, which was anti-urban, anti-capitalist, anti-English and anti-modern, all of which had wider repercussions for the future of Welsh identity.

In the hundred years from 1450 to 1550, the great success enjoyed by the English woollen industry in continental markets was a result of clothiers organising the rural cloth industry in the West Country, Suffolk/Essex, the Kentish Weald and Newbury and its surrounds, to produce cloth that London merchants required. To do this they allocated extensive capital to cloth production: buying wools, sorting and dyeing them, organising their carding and spinning, putting the yarn out for weaving, and then in some cases owning the mills that fulled the cloth and finally shearing it in-house. The leading clothiers carried wool and cloth inventories, developed strong buying networks and offered merchants credit. Clothiers' control over production declined after 1550 as the government exercised greater control over cloth quality and clothiers' freedoms, and as price competition intensified from coarser cloths and new draperies.

Shepherds were a critical component of the early wool industry in colonial Australia and persisted even after fencing was adopted and rapidly spread in the later nineteenth century. Initially shepherds were convicts, but after transportation ceased in the late 1840s, emancipists and free men were employed. Their duty was the same as in England: look after the flock during the day, and pen them nightly in folds made of hurdles. Analysis of wages and flock sizes indicates that pastoralists achieved good productivity gains with larger flocks but inflation of wages reduced the gains to modest levels. The gold rushes and labour shortages of the 1850s played a minor role in increasing both wages and flock sizes. Living conditions in huts were primitive, and the diet monotonous. Shepherds were exposed to a range of diseases, especially in Queensland. Flock-masters employed non-whites, usually at lower wages, and women and children. Fences only replaced shepherds when pastoralists realised that the new technology of fences, combined with other changes, would give them higher profits. The sheep were left to fend for themselves in the open paddocks, a system used to this day.

Cuba is a paradigmatic case where the term and concept of the peasantry remains of lived importance. Cuban peasants had a significant role in the past as they did return to the political agenda after the Revolution with particular emphasis under Raul Castro’s administration. However, the Cuban case has not been significantly explored from a long-term perspective that connects the old debates and dimensions of land reforms under developmentalist states to the new agrarian questions in the global era. Based on secondary sources, semi-structured interviews and updated data on land structures, this article explores the long-term process of land reform in Cuba.

Despite the growing significance of the ideology of domesticity and changing farming practices, late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Irish farmwives continued to have an active economic role on the farm. The continuation of their economic role reflected wider cultural beliefs that saw work as central to claims to property ownership, reinforced by the growth in the language of economic and political rights during the nineteenth century, which shaped how men and women understood work, ownership and personal rights.