Through the use of tax assessments, parish registers, and accounts of overseers of the poor we have learned such about the growing problem of the poor in early modern rural England. What remains difficult is to get at the circumstances and thoughts of the rural poor themselves and their relationships with their better-off neighbors. The search engine and the nominal linkage features of the electronic Earls Colne archive can be employed to learn more about the depth of the late-Tudor and early-Stuart crisis through construction of ‘pauper biographies’. Even without poor relief accounts, the investigation into probate, court, parish, estate and private records confirms the alarming increase in numbers of impoverished people in rural communities, particularly after 1590, and the extent to which acute poverty was the fate of many more than those receiving parish relief. The study also reveals the life-long and multi-generational nature of poverty at the time, the increasing incidence of disorder among the poor after 1620, and the effect of leniency by the elite toward the disorderly poor leading up to the political crisis of the 1640s.

Lacking the glamour of poaching or the undertones of protest associated with incendiarism or animal maiming, the more petty rural crimes have been largely ignored. This paper examines the motivation, nature and criminal administration of two under-researched crimes, wood and crop theft. It will be suggested that while the theft of wood and crops was almost wholly the crime of the rural poor, it may have been committed within a wider realm of social protest.

The analyses and interpretations that the social sciences have been making in recent decades on the theme of common property call for a fresh look at the history of the commons. Such a vision no longer considers them as resources necessarily destined to disappear, but rather attempts to discover what forces have acted on their historical trajectory. From this perspective, this paper analyses the evolution of common lands in Spain over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To that end, it rests on an interpretative proposal that, over time, common lands in Spain have experienced an alteration in their economic usefulness and have had to transform themselves in order to adapt to changing situations. In this context, the various agricultural and, indeed, general economic conjunctures, the evolution of social forces, as well as the make-up of the political system, have all played a major part in the greater or lesser persistence of the commons, in their forms of use and in their more or less successful adaptation to new situations.

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.

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.

During the nineteenth century newly invented clayworking machinery offered potential solutions to production problems in the British brickmaking industry. Three different mechanical brickmaking processes were available, but a combination of design imperfections and restrictions imposed by the excise duties on bricks discouraged their adoption in ordinary brickyards for many decades. This posed a serious dilemma for machine inventors. Without an opportunity to test machinery in brickmaking situations, they were unable to correct defects and produce implements that were clearly superior to hand brickmaking methods. For as long as brickmakers rejected mechanisation, the technical development of machinery was effectively halted. A breakthrough occurred in the 1840s when a lucrative new market emerged for machines capable of manufacturing large quantities of drainage pipes and tiles in rural locations. The exhibitions and implement trials at meetings of the Royal Agricultural Society of England were a decisive factor in the continuing technical development of clayworking machinery. Agricultural consumers, through debate, evaluation and negotiation with machine makers, ultimately determined the success of one mechanical clayworking process over others, and established the direction of future technological change in the brickmaking industry.

A previous article in Rural History entitled ‘“Rustic and Rude”: Hiring Fairs and their Critics in East Yorkshire c. 1850–75’, examined a critique of hiring fairs and farm service mounted by the Church of England in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the mid-Victorian period. This discussion builds upon that article by offering a more detailed examination of the actual attempts to reform and abolish hiring fairs that emanated from that critique. The article examines three stages of reform and abolition stretching over the mid-Victorian period: a first stage that centred upon imposing a system of hiring based upon written characters; a second stage that focussed upon imposing segregated hiring for male and female servants, and a final abolitionist stage. The campaign's tactics and the various measures deployed against hiring fairs during each stage are detailed and their level of success evaluated and explained. The broader motivations of the campaign and the manner in which they signified deeper Church anxieties about the nature of the rural social order are also discussed in a concluding evaluation of the campaign's impact.

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.

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.

By the outbreak of the Second World War the ‘Land Question’ had lost its power to generate acute political controversy. Yet the issue of land reform did not disappear with the failure of the 1929–31 Labour Government to reintroduce Lloyd George's land taxes. Land reform after 1914 needs to be rescued from an over-identification with the decline of Radical Liberalism. This article will trace the way Labour Party policy developed after 1914. By 1939 it had adopted a set of policies based on the economic protection of agriculture, increased domestic production and marketing. At the same time it argued for the preservation of the countryside through land-use planning. After 1918 a long-term commitment to land nationalisation began to occupy a more important position in its land reform policies, particularly after 1931. In addition, new measures appeared on the party's political agenda for the first time, including the preservation of the countryside against urban intrusion, access to mountain and moorland, and the creation of national parks.

The early organic movement was closely connected with the crusade for monetary reform, since it was felt that Britain's agriculture and rural life could not be revived without challenging the vested interests of banking and the import-export trades. This paper focuses on the work of the Economic Reform Club and Institute (ERCI) from the 1930s to the 1950s, revealing the major part played in its activities by leading organicists. First, it identifies various strands that were drawn together in the ERCI: the monetary reform theories of Kitson and Douglas; the ideas of the Irish agricultural organiser ‘AE’ (G. W. Russell); and Montague Fordham's Rural Reconstruction Association. It then looks at various speeches and conferences arranged by the ERCI, particularly during the Second World War, to demonstrate the importance given to the organic school's proposed agricultural policies. In the post-war years Jorian Jenks, who also edited the Soil Association journal, ran the ERCI's journal Rural Economy as another platform for organic ideas, arguing for a conception of ‘economy’ based on natural resources rather than money. The paper concludes by suggesting that the anti-semitism sometimes found in early organic writings may be attributable to the organicists' dislike of the international finance system.

Volume VII of The Agrarian History of England and Wales completes a major publishing event. In 1956 R. H. Tawney chaired a meeting launching a series of eight volumes surveying the history of the English and Welsh countrysides from the Neolithic period to the beginning of the Second World War. The first, volume IV covering the years 1500 through 1640, appeared in 1967. This, the last and by far the largest book in the sequence, crowns the earlier achievements. Running to over 2,300 pages and published in two parts, volume VII is approximately twice the size – and price – of its immediate predecessors. If the physical presence of the book is impressive, the same comment applies to its content, elegantly edited by E. J. T. Collins, which covers a diverse range of topics, from King Edward potatoes to military underpants.