This article discusses the received image of free Swedish and Finnish peasants, charting parallels with peasants in the Baltic region. It draws upon the post-Cold War discussion of free and unfree rural labour in early modern Europe. The discussion maintains that the labour service by free Swedish and Finnish peasant landholders and peasant tenants at its heaviest point may have been on a par with the corvée in the early modern Baltic provinces. It is suggested that the Cold War mental map may have led to an overstatement of the East-West distinction between peasants’ circumstances in the Baltic Sea region.

The Marquis of Anglesey on his Dorset estate was an absentee landlord who maintained close relationships with his estate through extensive correspondence with his land agent William Castleman. The surviving letters are a very rich source by which to examine the minutiae of rural life and a way to reconstruct social and working relationships within the nineteenth-century English landed estate. By focusing on a range of customary and unwritten rights, this article will consider issues such as how tenants navigated renegotiation of their leases, sought rent abatements or compensation for damage to their crops from hunting. Working and social relationships on such an estate were closely interlinked, as is widely shown here. The article also raises more contentious estate issues such as who had the rights to fallen and standing timber, the customs affecting courts, the repair of churches, and the responsibilities for building and maintaining schools. Throughout, the issue of ‘social control’ is assessed. Together the range of documented work and social interactions provide a fuller picture of the functioning of a southern English great estate in the early nineteenth century, and allow us to examine this rural community beyond the remit of its agricultural history.

Over the course of the nineteenth century children increasingly became social, economic and scientific concerns. Their physical and mental well-being was deemed intrinsic to the future development of Britain and its Empire, and thus maintaining healthy youngsters was, by the turn of the twentieth century, considered a national priority. This article explores the interconnectivity between poverty and the child residents of pauper lunatic asylums in England. It draws on a corpus of extant patient case files from four pauper lunatic asylums between 1851 and 1907 and engages with detailed information about the children and their mental conditions. Additionally, there will be a focus on understanding family backgrounds, parental occupations, the correlation between diagnoses and class, and methods of ‘treatment’ designed to equip children for independent working lifestyles. The overarching objective is to consider the socio-economic ramifications of child mental illness for parents and families and better understand how Victorian institutions accommodated this specific class of patient.

Stan was born in 1911 in a small village near the north Somerset coast. When recalling his life in the countryside, he felt that ‘there wasn’t much to do in the evenings … at least not here’. Drawing upon evidence from personal accounts of growing up in the south-west of England in the early twentieth century, this article examines memories of youth in the countryside, with a particular focus on the leisure lives of young people and their experiences of rural space and place. In addition to adding to our knowledge on the lives of rural youth, this study also provides new insights into the complex relationship between people and their environment, and has implications for our understandings of the early formation of a distinct youthful identity in England. The countryside was not simply a backdrop in these recollections; rather, it was formative in how those that grew up in rural communities understood their experience of being young.

The part played by the public health movement in controlling epidemics in urban areas has received considerable attention from historians, as has the regulation of the milk and meat industries that commenced in the late nineteenth century. However, comparatively little work has been carried out on health in a rural context – and the role played by the horticultural sector in the spread of contagious diseases has barely been covered. Yet, as this article shows, it was a sector that had the potential to produce potent contaminants. By examining histories of the production of one horticultural crop, watercress, it reveals how issues around the provision of a clean urban water supply and idealised imaginings of the countryside as a pure space, played a part in exacerbating the extent of outbreaks of typhoid in the industrial city. It also shows that there was governmental reluctance to regulate an industry that grew a staple product, even when growers themselves were keen for guidance.

The theme of place guides much exploration in rural history and local history. Attempts have been made to create definitions and typologies of place, but these have had to contend with the diverse, complex and dynamic realities of historical pattern and process, local and regional. Nonetheless, historians and those in other disciplines have evolved different approaches to the concept. This study considers how these can inform the investigation of places existing in historical fact in particular periods in the past, and can do similarly for those places located contemporaneously in fictional constructions. Reference is made to various academic writings on place, including by the local historian, David Dymond. The analysis takes the work of the author of fiction, Bernard Samuel Gilbert. Gilbert, although relatively obscure now, incorporated a feature of special note into his later literary output, and one meriting greater attention. This was his personalised, reflective and explicitly articulated approach to forming and expressing place. Moreover, Gilbert’s ‘Old England’, with its imaginary district of 'Bly', can be recognised as corresponding to landscapes and communities existing more broadly in the years up to and through the First World War, and with creations by other authors of regional fiction.

After the crisis of the late nineteenth century, the role of the state in European agriculture expanded to many new areas: education and technical innovation; commercial policies and market regulations; farm support policies, and sometimes interventions in property rights. The development of these policies was a difficult and costly process, without the intervention of intermediary organisations like agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ associations. This article analyses the early agricultural policy in Catalonia (Spain) and the role of cooperatives in its implementation. It argues that this regional case was quite exceptional in the early twentieth-century Spanish context, where state intervention in agriculture was extremely limited. In 1914, an autonomous government was set up in Catalonia, and a modern agricultural policy was introduced in which technical education and cooperatives played a crucial role, as well as politics. The agricultural policy promoted and developed by the Catalan government was part of a state-building project based on a regionalist ideology.

This article explores the intellectual culture of Catholic architectural production in 1950s Ireland through the study of a church-building project in rural West Cork. It analyses the phenomenon of the Irish ‘church-building priest’ in terms of their socio-economic background, fundraising abilities, and position within rural communities – in the context of significant rural emigration and economic stagnation. It also considers the role that the Irish countryside played in conditioning clerical understandings of architectural style and taste, and priests’ political readings of the rural landscape. Furthermore, it explores the phenomenon of Marianism in church design and ornamentation around the time of the international ‘Marian Year’ of 1954, and the political meanings of the rhetoric employed by clerics at church consecration ceremonies. The article concludes with reflections on social and economic aspects of Irish rural life and religious expression in a decade primarily understood as one of cultural insularity and conservative Catholicism.