This paper seeks to show that encroachments in the North-east resulted from a range of social and economic drivers. Encroachments were enacted by members of a wide social spectrum, resulting in both top-down and bottom-up manifestations of engrossment of holdings. In this respect, it may be argued, North-east encroachments have a distinctive nature compared to English enclosures. The factors effecting encroachment can be seen to relate to topographic opportunism, demographic fluctuation, and a socio-agricultural environment that was already well-attuned to utilising dynamic settlement fluctuations for social and economic benefits. Only after the enactment of the 1695 Division of the Commonties Act did the socially diverse nature of such encroachment become increasingly monopolised by the landed gentry and began to reflect more closely English enclosure.

Post-enclosure charity lands in the period before the establishment of the charity commission in 1818 pose some fundamental questions. The amount and types of payment that recipients received, how they shifted over the period, and how the spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes – particularly the improvement in poor labourers’ standards of living that occurred between c.1660 and c.1760 – are all of interest. By focusing on a dataset derived from an account book for a charity in Mere (Wiltshire) between 1656 and 1739, this paper reveals how the parish authorities coped with the developing economic polarities in rural society and made changes over time in the size and significance of the doles made from the funds arising from the charity lands, indicating the inextricably mixed nature of welfare – the balance between the different financial resources available both from formal relief and parish charities – in this period.

This paper delves into the dynamics of popular revolt in early modern Castile, taking as a viewpoint a revealing feature of these disturbances, the bell-ringing widely known as rebato, an equivalent to the French tocsin. While alarm bells have long been recognised as a prevalent element of popular revolt in Europe from medieval times, they have received limited specific scholarly attention. This study provides an overview of the historical significance of this distinctive sound and examines its material aspects. Subsequently, the paper investigates several instances of bell-ringing during Castilian riots, as reflected in archival sources, and analyses its meaning both for townspeople and the authorities. In attempting to elucidate the reasons behind the aversion this sound provoked among the privileged classes and the authorities, the study explores the political, ritual, and sonic dimensions of the rebato.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of wheat quality in the formation of wheat prices in the early modern period, adopting eighteenth-century northern Italy as a case study. Wheat prices have been widely used by economic historians to calculate living standards, determine the degree of market integration, and date famines. Rarely, however, have economic historians focused on how wheat prices were determined. By looking at the wheat supply chain, we will try to make more visible the extent to which wheat quality was crucial in determining the value of wheat and, as a consequence, the final price of grain.

This article investigates the development of rural migration in northern Sweden (1850–1950). During this period, northern Sweden experienced a slower rate of urbanisation than the rest of the country. This study proposes that decentralised industrialisation (i.e., rural-industrial labour, predominantly in the timber industry) introduced inertia to the urbanisation process by lowering the rate of rural-to-urban migration. Using longitudinal, individual-level data from the county of Västerbotten, the development of migration rates and migrant characteristics is explored via descriptive statistics. The rural population’s development and migration patterns closely correlate to the development of decentralised industrialisation. The results, therefore, indicate that decentralised industrialisation is a viable model for explaining the slow rate of urbanisation in northern Sweden.

The gamekeeper played an important role in the development of modern gamebird shooting but has been peripheral in many analyses of the sport, which have tended to focus on the poacher, the landed elite, or the game laws. This study places the gamekeeper in a central position and, for a selection of counties, provides a detailed examination and comparison of changes in gamekeeper numbers between 1851 and 1921. The influence on gamekeeper numbers of population changes, estate area, landowner numbers and poaching prosecutions were also examined. Significant differences were found between the counties in gamekeeper numbers, and the magnitude and timing of changes in these. Average estate area varied greatly with no direct link to the area of the county, or to the number of gamekeepers on an estate. The type of quarry and interest of the landowner were important in determining the number of gamekeepers employed. In some counties, there may have been a link between the level of poaching and gamekeeper numbers, but there were significant differences between the counties. The results indicated a complex, regionally nuanced, picture in which factors such as the location, primary quarry and poaching pressure, as well as the interests of the landowner and the depth of his pockets, determined gamekeeper numbers.

This paper analyses the formation in Italy of a school system focused on the training of technical and managerial personnel in the agricultural sector. Drawing on a rich literature on the relationship between school training, social change, and economic modernisation, this study details an under-researched aspect of the formation of the national state. Italy constitutes an exemplary case study as for the reforming action of public institutions in the field of education as well as the modernising policies that concerned the rural sector of the country before the First World War. Schools of agriculture in Italy became a means of social advancement not only for a wide sector of rural society but also for the children of the artisan and commercial bourgeoisie of small urban centres. This study thereby makes a novel contribution to the ongoing debate on the development of agriculture-related professions in Italy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Sandringham Estate was purchased in 1862 by the Prince of Wales to be his home away from London. This article uses a variety of sources to chart the changes to the estate as the prince developed his new holding. The acquisition required staff at all levels and in many and varied roles, which gave opportunities to local people and to those who moved in from further away. The countryside changed dramatically too with new plantations of trees and significantly increased rearing of game birds. There were benefits for the local population in having a royal landlord but there was also tension related to the prince’s predilection for blood sports and his level of control. The hitherto nearly invisible lower ranks of staff on this royal estate come to the fore in this article, which is a striking example of ‘history from below’ set immediately beside the royal family.

Who chooses new technology? And how? In this article, we explore the diffusion of agricultural science and technology in Galicia (Spain), and the ways in which farmers adopted innovations in the period of 1880–1940 within the Atlantic Iberian agricultural context of small farms. To answer these questions, we adopt a socio-institutional approach and also an environmental one, changes in breeding techniques and the creation of the Galician Blond cow, as well as the widespread use of threshing machines, which were two closely related innovations in the context of mixed farming agriculture. These two examples illustrate the fusion of science-based and practice-based agriculture, and how technology did not threaten community or family equilibrium; instead, it empowered processes that were already operative in affirming small-scale farming.

The aim of this article is to investigate how the characteristics of the different types of human settlements explain their demographic dynamics and, therefore, which of these have been affected to a greater extent by depopulation processes. For this purpose, we analyse the evolution of the population of Aragón (north-east Spain) in the period 1900–2001, according to the different types of population settlements that exist. Our results show that access to public services has played an essential role, especially when the construction of the welfare state made the rural population feel that there was a penalty for residing in settlements with problems to access them. The main settlements, headquarters of the municipal administration, have had advantages over the secondary settlements. Finally, the scattered population was the most affected and, therefore, emigrated to a greater extent, until this form of residence practically disappeared.

In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the eighteenth century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This article challenges this argument. It discusses the formation of rural social engineering, that is, the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948–60), the argument is that we can understand rural social engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration. As such, rural social engineering constituted a central element in the postcolonial ‘art of the government of man’.