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.

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.

While there has been some research on the parliamentary enclosure of upland waste in England and Wales during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this topic still receives little attention in some recent accounts of parliamentary enclosure. Many aspects of the processes involved, and their impact on the landscape, are also poorly understood. Much research has proceeded either at a very general level or on the basis of detailed individual case studies. This paper adopts an intermediate scale, focusing on the old county of Westmorland to examine the geographical and chronological patterns of enclosure before looking more closely at some of the problems involved in creating a new landscape.

The pollarding and shredding of trees were widespread and common practices in Britain until the eighteenth century. Trees were an important source of fodder and their branches were regularly lopped so that sheep and cattle could eat their twigs and leaves. The branches could be used for firewood and other purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the practice of pollarding was becoming increasingly rare, and it had virtually died out by the mid-twentieth century. In Europe, by contrast, pollarding remains common in several Mediterranean, Balkan and Scandinavian countries. Pollarding is still practised in many tropical areas for the production of fuel and fodder. In this paper we trace the development of ideas about pollarding in British agricultural, estate management and forestry literature c1600–1900. We examine how pollarding, which was a traditional management practice of long standing at the start of our period, was increasingly vilified so that by the end of the eighteenth century, many foresters and agriculturists saw it as a symbol of the profligate use of resources.

This paper enlarges our understanding about the Primitive Methodist Connexion by examining the denomination in a part of the country where it enjoyed considerable success during the nineteenth century. It takes as its starting point the relative lack of historical research on the Methodist circuit, which was an important innovation in religious provision. The circuit system gave Wesleyan Methodism and its break-away denominations considerable flexibility to co-ordinate their work in a highly effective way. The developing geography of Primitive Methodist circuits in the English-Welsh borderland is explored, as the denomination moved from enthusiastic evangelism towards consolidation. Particular attention is paid to the way in which changing missionary tactics, chapel building, local dissension, and the trend towards circuit sub-division shaped the geography and internal work of these circuits during the nineteenth century.

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.

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.

This article examines aspects of the relationship between the Norfolk poor and the Norfolk clergy between 1815 and 1914. It considers the potential impact clergymen could have upon a number of areas of secular life, especially with regard to the extirpation of popular culture and custom, the social and moral management inherent in charity and Poor Law administration, and the development of ‘power networks’ in the countryside that confronted the challenge posed by religious Nonconformity and political radicalism. The article is principally concerned with the importance of the Church of England as an instrument of secular authority in nineteenth-century rural life. Rival social structures and conflicting economic interests are subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analysis, while keys to cultural tension are sought in such iconic areas as the pageantry of parish entertainments; the re-casting of law to act against custom; the rise of the clergyman as antiquarian historian and amateur archaeologist; the symbolism and architecture of the restored church. In so doing an attempt is made to address questions that are at once broadly political and narrowly human in their scope. What did the Oxbridge scholar – perhaps having spent the preceding three years conversing in Greek and Latin with his peers – find to ‘say’ to the agricultural labourers now in his pastoral care? And why, when the clergyman (often justifiably) thought of himself as working unstintingly in his parishioners' interests, was he so often heartily despised by them?

This article seeks to explore cinematic representations of rural life during the Occupation and the immediate post-war period. Films about the countryside were not new as France had long enjoyed what could be called a ‘rural cinema’ largely through the highly successful film versions of Marcel Pagnol's novels and plays. During the Occupation, rural films continued to celebrate pastoral life despite considerable conflict between urban and rural. Film historians have argued that in doing so, they simply endorsed Vichy's ideology of le retour à la terre and its adulation of le paysan. Yet, as I will argue, in the context of a divided nation, these films were far more significant than existing research has acknowledged and indeed conveyed a profound longing for a unified France in their suggestion that there was an inextricable link between countryside and city. Post-war films with rural themes still articulated the tensions and contrasts between the two but more intensely, by presenting the city as eternally seductive but ultimately dangerous for the rural émigré. By this deliberate juxtaposition of conflicting images, these films sought to reunite a dispersed population by ‘relocating’ rural and urban dwellers in their natural and appropriate spheres.

In 1950 Iran and the United States signed the first Point Four agreement, establishing a program now known as USAID. It fulfilled President Harry S. Truman's desire to control the Soviet bloc and to share technology with third world countries. Utah State University contracted with the U.S. Point Four program to provide technicians in agriculture from 1951 to 1954. This paper examines the successes and the frustrations that the Utahns felt in transporting technology to Iran. While there were some successes, the cultural and economic difficulties were hard to overcome. As a result, the technicians in the 1960s experienced the same problems faced by those in the 1950s. These included a negative reaction to farm machinery in a land with many laborers, problems training machinery operators, and language barriers.