Two questions will no doubt greet the arrival of this journal: why rural history? and why now? The current economic climate is hardly favourable for ventures of this kind. But recent developments in the numerous fields which touch on matters rural indicate a real academic need for a new forum for interdisciplinary exchange. Much exciting and innovative work has been carried out over the past decade – on the nature and structure of rural communities; on regional differences and identity; on how rural workers are defined and represented by others and by themselves; on the relationship between the urban and the rural. Yet this research has been scattered across a range of disciplines and subdisciplines, many of which tend to be regarded as marginal to the central thrust of historical investigation. In areas like folklore studies or art history, ideas of the rural have developed apace, and the terms of the analysis of the rural community have acquired considerable methodological complexity. Yet the study of ‘rural history’ continues to be rather narrowly defined, confined by an essentially economistic agenda that has excluded much of the most fascinating recent work. Rural history is often seen as synonymous with agricultural history, and although the latter has generated a great deal of valuable and interesting research, its privileging of the economic perspective has tended to preclude the methodological inclusiveness that now seems necessary to foster cross-fertilisation between the disparate areas in which the study of rural society is being pursued.

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human history. A major problem for landscape archaeologists – and indeed for prehistorians – is that as soon as they stray beyond routine archaeological description and analysis, they face the scepticism of anthropologists, historians and human geographers. I argue that we can learn from scholars from these other disciplines but should not try to ape them. We need to define more clearly our own field of operation. It has become fashionable to consider past landscapes as texts; comparisons between the contexts of ‘messages’ conveyed by documents and by landscapes lead me to suggest that ignorance of the nature of oral tradition and its articulation within material culture is one of the prehistorian's greatest blind spots. In choosing the most useful scale for analysis, the prehistorian should develop the concept of the small community, rather than the ‘site’ or the region, and consider the modification of such a community's ‘mental map’ of the landscape as a critical indicator of social process.

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.

More books and articles are being published about medieval rural history, archaeology and geography than ever before. This is not just because academics have been told to improve their productivity, but mainly reflects the enthusiasm of authors and the demand of a numerous reading public. Publishers find that books on medieval subjects have a steady sale, both among young students, who, despite gloomy predictions, are still attracted to the Middle Ages, and among the thousands of older people who attend adult education classes. There are more ideas in circulation, more stimulating differences of opinion, and more cross-fertilisation between disciplines. One might sometimes regret a certain narrowness of view which prevents some experts reading the works of others, even to the point when their footnotes consist almost entirely of citations of their own publications. And one wishes that British scholars had more contacts with their counterparts in continental Europe. But in general these are expansive and stirring times in which to be involved with the study of the medieval countryside, and we can look forward to more important advances in the next decade. The long term is a different matter, in view of the decline in the numbers of postgraduate students, the pursuit of a spurious ‘relevance’ by such funding bodies as the Economic and Social Research Council, the squeezing of economic and social history as a separate discipline out of many universities in the interests of ‘rationalisation’, and the continued financial uncertainties for public archaeology.

But to return to the 1990s.

In this paper my intention is to discuss the diversity of rural landscapes, still detectable in spite of two centuries and more of industrialisation, and to point to the roots of this diversity, in a time when local differences in habitat were bonded to contrasts in culture, economy and society. The stimulus, perhaps even the courage, to write this essay came from reading Braudel's The Identity of France: History and Environment, for his joyous exploration of that country generates an awareness of the need for a deep sense of place as a foundation for understanding rural history. For me one key to this is seen in figure 1, a new map of settlement in England and Wales in the middle years of the last century, a product of my work on rural settlements. Everitt, using the case of Kent as a basis for an evaluation of the use of landscapes as a historical source, has emphasised the importance of countrysides in understanding the evolution of the landscapes of field, forest, heath, fell, fen, marsh, down and wald (Everitt, 1986: 6–13, 338–40; for wald see Everitt, 1986: passim and Ekwall, 1970: 491–2). Figure 1 is one measure of the diversity and a source of this discussion.

It is now roughly a quarter of a century since the proponents of a new social history of early modern England offered students of the period a novel agenda and an unprecedented opportunity. Prior to the 1960s social history had been variously understood as the history of everyday life, of the lower classes and popular movements, or as a junior partner in the relatively recently-established firm of economic and social history (occupied in the main with the study of social institutions and social policy). As such, it had produced more than a few pioneering works of outstanding quality and lasting value (some of them about to enjoy a revived recognition after decades of relative neglect). But it was not a field close to the centre of historical preoccupation. It was at best contextual, at worst residual.

From the early 1960s, however, came a call for a social history of a new type, one conceived as the history of social relationships and of the culture which informs them and gives them meaning. The new agenda was deeply influenced by the social sciences and envisaged an ever closer relationship with sociology, social anthropology and demography. Peter Laslett wrote of ‘sociological history’ or ‘historical sociology’ and Keith Thomas of the need for a ‘more systematic indoctrination’ in the concepts and methodologies of the social sciences. As applied to history, all this was both radical and liberating. In the face of an established curriculum which appeared in many respects restrictive and in some dessicated, it proposed a massive and necessary broadening and deepening of historical concern: the creation of a range of historical enquiry appropriate to the preoccupations and understandings of the late twentieth century.

Markets are ubiquitous, dominant, integrating all production nationally: that is interlocking markets in a national purchase and sale network at money price, organised on an economy-wide basis, a market network essential to all industrial and agricultural lines of production… Practically all farm output was sold for cash. All factors of production, land, labour, tools, transport, artificial fertilisers, were available on national markets for purchase at money price… Here we have total market dependence, for livelihood and the ubiquitous use of cash.

A frequent complaint among English historians is that the farm workers were a ‘secret people’ who seldom interacted with the written or recorded word. If vaguely discernible in this or that statistic, or anonymous act of physical protest, the labourer's cultural and political consciousness was entombed (it is sometimes inferred) in that drudging physical pantomime which many nineteenth-century commentators assumed to be the primary attribute of ‘Hodge’. Even the labourers' contemporary friends harboured a ‘Hodge’ stereotype in their assumption that the labourers' aspirations, or ‘cottage charter’, were best represented and publicised by ‘articulate’ outsiders. William Cobbett, who for three decades argued that farm workers were capable of profound thought and articulation, implied as much in his observation that ‘Nobody (excepting himself) tells the tale of the labourer.’ In 1848, as a better known Charter was re-stated to the nation from the mass radical platform of the metropolis, Sidney Godolphin Osborne lamented that the labourer ‘has few to speak for him, few who care to face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him’. Five years later, with reference to the ‘peasant’ worker, Karl Marx made a similar assumption: ‘they must be represented’, he argued, and their representative ‘must appear as their master, as an authority over them.’ Even as late as 1880, shortly after the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, Richard Jefferies confidently proclaimed that ‘the country labourer possessed no clearly defined ‘Cottage Charter’ and no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not for him’.

The history of the labouring poor in the late nineteenth century has been shaped by different and often competing ‘ways of seeing’. Rural labourers occur in histories of social policy as clients or victims of the Poor Law; to the historian of crime they are social bandits or deviants; even to the historian of conventional politics they are the ‘objects’ of reform. All these ways of seeing are important, but I want to concentrate on one in particular, that ‘created’ by the discourse of ‘labour history’. This area laid down, and to a limited extent still continues to define, a structure which concentrates on the formal and quasi-formal organisations of labour. As such it still owes a good deal to the Webb's view of a kind of inevitable and desirable progress from ‘barbarianism’ or non-organisation, through struggle with unjust wages and hard masters, to the organised union with the general secretary and the enlightened employer sitting down together to fix a fair day's work and a fair day's pay.

As a ‘rural geographer’ it has been fascinating over the past few years to witness and participate in the rather ponderous lurch being made by the subject towards new theoretical approaches. In particular, ideas and concepts within the broader movement of critical social science, and under the umbrella of political economy, are now being widely discussed, but a fundamental and widespread adoption of new ideas has been both slothful and in some cases grudging. This is not to suggest that research in rural geography has remained unchanged through the 1980s. Indeed, a growth in the scale of rural research has been evident, and this research has become more applied and policy-oriented than ever before. Until quite recently, however, rural geography has lacked a vigorous push towards new theoretical ground and towards the analytical comparisons of these theories.

It is something of an irony that in many ways the rural tradition in English life was studied more intensively and systematically a century ago than is the case today. The burgeoning of scholarly interest in language, history, tradition and society at both local and national level in the late nineteenth century provided a wealth of data for modern researchers across a wide range of disciplines. While some of this material inevitably appears dated and indeed at times inaccurate or erroneous, there is a great deal of value in the records of rural life painstakingly set down by those pioneering chroniclers, notably in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and up to the time of the First World War. It has been fashionable in recent years to denigrate the work of these early writers and collectors, or indeed to dismiss them altogether. The label ‘antiquarian’, so glibly attached to several generations of nineteenth-century scholars, has become a pejorative, redolent of the amateur, the dilettante and the pedant. While it cannot be denied that a proportion of antiquarian writing is trivial, mundane or self-indulgent, it is manifestly incorrect to treat all such work with contempt. Indeed we are greatly indebted to these individuals, and especially to those whose methods and observations were as rigorous and scholarly as possible, given the criteria and standards of their day. Nor did they confine themselves within the constricting limits of our modern academic disciplines. Their interests were wide-ranging, and they closely observed the rural scene from many different perspectives, thus building up a much fuller picture of life and society in a given locality than would usually be the case today.