On 22nd October 1830 Sir Edward Knatchbull passed sentence on seven men for threshing-machine breaking in the Elham Valley area of East Kent. The four day sentence enraged both local farmers and Home Secretary Peel alike, and was seized upon by other labourers and artisans hostile to threshing-machines who believed that Knatchbull had legitimised such acts of rural Luddism. The trial sparked an intensification of ‘Swing’ in East Kent and for the first time acts of overt protest beyond. Knatchbull, upon being pressed by George Maule, the Treasury Solicitor, admitted that the sentences could not have been otherwise under circumstances he was not at liberty to disclose. This paper examines these circumstances and uncovers a bizarre chain of events which shed new light on both the genesis of ‘Swing’ and also upon local-central government relations regarding policy implementation and creation.

With their climatic variability and low crop yields, the Highlands and Islands formed a risk-laden environment for traditional farming communities. Yet whilst the major or exceptional famines between 1600 and 1800 are well-recorded, there has been less comment about the more frequent low-order crises that afflicted communities on a regular, even routine basis, leaving them without sufficient meal for a month or so before the new harvest was ready. Evidence for the nature and frequency of these low-order crises is discussed. Continually threatened with the problems posed by them, it is argued that the typical farming community would have been skilled in their response. Two forms of response are explored. First, the paper reviews some of the different ways in which Highland and Hebridean husbandry would have been organised so as to minimise risks. Second, it is argued that when these risk aversion strategies failed, communities buffered themselves against shortage by resorting to a range of alternative famine foods, from seaweeds and shell foods to the edible weeds of arable and grassland. We need to see major famines as occurring not just when exceptional or bad conditions prevailed, but also, when both these risk aversion and risk buffering strategies failed.

The phenomenon of rural depopulation has been an intense and centuries-long process in the mountain areas of Aragon in Spain. Throughout the nineteenth century, the traditional economic model of these territories broke down due to the crisis suffered by seasonal sheep migration, the non-viability of the old forms of agricultural production based on self-sufficiency and the destruction of the scattered textile industry. The new scenario offered some possible alternatives in sectors such as livestock, timber, mining and energy production or the activities associated with tourism and second homes. However, it is only these latter activities that have demonstrated some capacity to alter significantly the demographic tendencies, and even then they have done so in a somewhat delayed fashion and in a way limited to a small proportion of the geographical areas under study.

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.

The woodlands, meadows and orchards of the Pays de Bray play an important part in the local survival strategy for this section of northern France where ‘green tourism’ occupies a major role. For centuries, the area contained extensive stretches of common heath and moorland, whose reclamation and replacement by enclosed pastures proved a long and contested process. The present essay exemplifies the ambiguity of the notion of usages (use-rights), with commoners claiming that they had legal rights and landowners arguing that these were simply privileges. Attention is directed to long-running conflicts between peasants and seigneurs, to the initiatives of entrepreneurs in the eighteenth century, and to the final resolution of disputes after the Revolution of 1789. Long recognised as an area ready for ‘improvement’, the Pays de Bray is now perceived as a cherished environment to be commodified and conserved.

The article will seek to plot the position of the Labour Party in relation to debates during the Second World War between rural preservationists and agricultural modernisers. It will review the recommendations of the Scott Report into land utilisation in rural areas, and outline recent research into popular attitudes to the countryside. It will then describe the way the Labour Party responded to these developments and draw some longer-term conclusions about their significance in relation to current debates about national identity and the countryside. It will be argued that while the Labour Party supported the need to protect the look of the landscape as part of the nation's heritage and national identity, in line with public opinion at the time, it also sought to encourage the physical planning of both town and country in a way that rejected some of the more anti-metropolitan tendencies of the rural preservationists.

First meeting in September 1941, the Kinship in Husbandry was a group of twelve men concerned for the future of English rural life in the post-war world and determined to communicate their vision of a revitalised countryside. Central to this vision were an agriculture based on organic principles and a rural culture which would encourage craftsmanship while drawing spiritual sustenance from a Christianity reconnected with nature. This paper traces the Kinship's origins in the pre-war activities of Gerard Wallop (Viscount Lymington) and Rolf Gardiner, and examines the names of those considered by the original twelve as possible associates. Archival evidence indicates tensions between Kinsmen over the group's strategy and the extent to which it should cooperate with other bodies. In particular, correspondance shows that H. J. Massingham was deeply unhappy about Gardiner's pro-German sympathies and mistrusted the influence within the Kinship of Gardiner and his fellow landowners Wallop and Lord Northbourne, who appear to have formed an inner circle. The article concludes by considering briefly the extent to which the Kinship succeeded in spreading its ideas, and suggests that, despite its failure to influence post-war developments, its longer-term impact can be seen in the current public interest in organic food and farming.

This article first examines the recent historiography of the Poor Law, notes the dearth of historical writing on this topic with respect to Wales and then uses an incident which took place in the rural Welsh town of Llantrisant in the early 1840s which clearly exemplifies both particularly Welsh characteristics and those of the medical services of the New Poor Law. It is contended that further study of the welfare regime in nineteenth-century Wales is important for both Welsh history and for the broader historical understanding of the Poor Laws in rural areas.

The paper relates the impact of the North American mink (Mustela vison), during the first half-century of its introduction, to the wider governance of the British countryside and, more particularly the agriculture departments, the Nature Conservancy, and their respective interest-groups. Even when evidence emerged of the mink's ability to breed in the wild, the departments strove both to avoid any impairment of the fur-breeding industry and to minimise their own responsibility for controlling the feral population. Such hesitancy and delay made it even less likely that the eventual campaign to eradicate the species in the 1960s would succeed. In pursuit of greater self-reliance of industry in raising agricultural productivity, the Conservative Government of the early 1970s relinquished even the desire to use the powers and resources uniquely available to government to coordinate and effect some measure of control, for example in safeguarding ‘the unique ecology’ of the Western Isles. The paper assesses the respective roles of ministers and officials, and their ‘expert’ advisers in permitting that failure in management to occur at a time when farming took such pride in its new-found ability to effect major improvements to ‘the rural workshop’.

Traditionally, historians have tended to accept the view that agricultural labourers in nineteenth-century England were subject to seasonal unemployment. In this article, however, it is argued that this is an over-simplification, and that there were in fact two coexisting labour markets. Using two sets of micro data, a wage book and the Census Enumerators' Books, it will be revealed (1) that there were two groups of agricultural labourers: those who were employed throughout the year (core workers) and those employed only in the busiest season (casual workers); (2) that the core workers and casual workers performed different tasks; (3) that they had different places of residence; and (4) that the casual workers' wages were more market-dependent. The movement of wages at the time of the arrival of Irish migrant labourers sheds further light on the different natures of the two markets. While core workers' wages appear to have been unaffected by this change in labour demand, English casual workers' and women's wages increased sensitively.