This paper has two objectives. The first is to explore the creation of a Highland policy area in the 1880s. Emphasis will be placed on the use of historical arguments by the government in the course of the construction of the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886, especially in the attempt to justify confining the operation of that statute to the Highlands. The second theme, explored in the latter parts of the paper, concerns the strategies which succeeding governments have used to justify the perpetuation of a distinct Highland policy area. An element of continuity in Highland history in the twentieth century has been the special treatment of the area by governments. On the occasions when this has caused resentment in other rural areas of Britain, the Scottish Office response has been to argue that the Highlands are a special case because of the existence of the crofting counties with their special code of legislation. Clearly, this is a tautological argument and it is hoped that this paper, by exploring the period from the creation of the crofting legislation in the 1880s, to the late twentieth century, will shed some light on its origins. It will be argued that this has created a climate of fear in the Highlands and particularly the crofting community, but also, on occasion in the Lowlands. Further, there are occasions when the existence of a special Highland policy area has served to marginalise Highland policy. The paper falls into five main sections: the first will briefly review the literature about the Highland/Lowland division in Scotland, the second will look at the origins of the Crofters' Act of 1886, the third will examine the period from 1906 to 1911 when aspects of crofting legislation were extended to the rest of Scotland; the fourth section will identify the inter war period as an era when Highland policy became more diverse and the final section will scrutinise the impact of that more diverse approach in the years after the Second World War.

Between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, a large number of new markets were established in the Flemish countryside. The multiplication of rural markets tends to be seen as part of the process of market integration, with rural producers responding to the opportunities provided by increasing external demand, such as that from the growing towns. However, an analysis of the motivation behind new establishments, based on the files treating the requests for new markets, reveals that markets were more often established for entirely different reasons. In this period, markets were expected to permit households to intensify their activities in order to overcome increasing economic difficulties. Developments within rural society, particularly rising population pressure, the need to produce and sell more, and deteriorating informal exchange networks among countrymen, coupled to a decline in demand for rural industrial products, were the main drives behind the multiplication of markets. This contribution shows it is important to pay attention to how new markets and market integration in general fitted within the goals and strategies of the country dwellers themselves.

During the later sixteenth century, increasing competition for wood fuel supplies led to rising tension between Wealden cloth manufacturers and ironmasters and to a prolonged but unsuccessful campaign by clothiers seeking parliamentary legislation that would radically curtail iron production in the Cranbrook area. Remarkably revealing files among the papers of Sir John Leveson, one of Kent's late Elizabethan deputy lieutenants, show that during the winter of 1594–5, Cranbrook's frustrated clothiers and their allies among other chief inhabitants of the parish attempted to hijack plebeian distress over low wages and high food and fuel prices for their own ends. It is unlikely that those devising or encouraging industrial sabotage that winter included Cranbrook's richer clothiers, but they were certainly behind plans to mobilise a mass petition to the crown for the suppression of ironworks. In turn, two of Cranbrook's parish officials, deftly exploiting fears of a disorderly march on London, managed to persuade Sir John Leveson to lobby the privy councillor Lord Cobham on the clothiers’ behalf, although to no avail. Thereafter, Cranbrook clothiers vented their frustration against the Bakers of Sissinghurst, who owned the local iron forge and furnace, by frequently raiding the family's deer park, sometimes in conjunction with local gentry pursuing their passion for unlawful hunting.

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.

Long distance emigration of agriculture workers or farmers is usually associated with seasonal migration. Permanent migration of farmers on the other hand, is considered to be a non-European phenomenon and commonly linked to migration to the New World where capital costs were relatively low and institutional barriers limited. Interestingly, in the early modern period, in the wake of the mass migration from continental north-western Europe to the urban areas of the Dutch Republic, a contingent of German market gardeners and their descendants were slowly able to take over the production of farmed vegetable goods for the nation's capital, Amsterdam. In the middle of one of Europe's most densely populated areas, in a polder called Watergraafsmeer, a parish neighbouring, and subsequently part of, Amsterdam, Germans dominated the agricultural sector for over a century. This article will try to answer the question of how these German migrants were able to control a sector that is usually run by locally born producers, for such a long period of time.

In November 1855 the Conservative Party's electoral agent Philip Rose wrote to the Chief Whip Sir William Jolliffe, about a Cornish farmer William Snell:

Snell is one of the adventurers who go about endeavouring to persuade people that he is employed from headquarters. He called upon me the other day and stated that he knew Mr Triscott and had been in communication with him. I heard all he had to say but said as little in return as possible.

This paper engages with debates over estate and empire during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars through a focus on park landscaping. Drawing on Colley's (1992) idea of a ‘cult of the elite hero’ and work on life geographies (Daniels and Nash, 2004), it examines landscape and monument design commemorating naval service. Unlike most other studies of this period, the paper examines naval monuments in the private setting of a landscape park and considers the ways in which this disrupts a neat division between public and private spheres. At Thoresby Park in Nottinghamshire, Charles Pierrepont, a naval veteran active in landscape improvement, created a ‘naval seascape’ which promoted a sense of a ‘service elite’ (Colley, 1992). The paper examines the contested meanings of this seascape and the ways in which they help revision the nature of landscape parks during the French Wars and their public and private roles.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time when many of the landed classes chose to be absent from their estates. However, this same period also saw the early stages of a so-called ‘revolution’ in agricultural methods and techniques. This article, therefore, evaluates the impact of non-residency on estate management structures and agricultural progress. Specific issues examined here include the role of the steward, leasing policy, the promotion of new farming techniques and estate investment by the landlord. In this context, comparisons will be made between absentee, semi-resident and resident estates for the region of Woodland High Suffolk.

In the early summer of 1588, twenty-seven inhabitants of the large parish of Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) presented a petition to two local Justices of the Peace complaining about disorder in Mill End, on the outskirts of the main town, caused by those frequenting Richard Heyward’s alehouse. Most recent work on alehouse sociability has considered attitudes towards drinking and its regulation after the early Jacobean legislation; in contrast, this article considers attitudes towards drunkenness in late sixteenth-century England, including the views expressed in the official ‘homily against drunkenness’ and in the Sabbatarian pamphlet published in 1572 by Humfrey Roberts. Similarly, most work on early modern protest considers complaints against the activities of the protestors’ social superiors; in this instance petitioners complained about the conduct of their inferiors. Although, due to archival attrition, it is impossible to determine what action the authorities took against Heyward and his clientele, thanks to the chance survival of a personal letter it is possible to reconstruct the reactions of the JPs to whom the petition was addressed, thus shedding light on how JPs might act outside the Quarter Sessions.

In the field of cultural studies, it is well established that no history comes to us innocently. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are laden with preferred myths and the gentlest of facts. The challenge facing those operating within the field is to develop critical practices which expose some of the nonsense that disempowers our understanding. This demands the strengthening of those practices which promote new forms of knowledge. The identification of appropriate questions, the constructive use of all forms of evidence, the adoption of relevant, analytical methods, and the formation of coherent conclusions are essential to the health and future of any academic discipline. Within the field of museum studies, such rethinking has been taking place since the early 1980s (for example, Cannizzo, 1987; Hooper-Greenhill, 1988; Jenkins, 1987; Jenkinson, 1988; Kavanagh, 1991; Pearce, 1988; Porter, 1988).

This case study focuses on East Riding hiring fairs both as labour markets and popular festivals and considers the vitality of their internal interactions in the mid Victorian years, a time that has been associated with the erosion of traditional practices by urban influences and their reshaping into more orderly and passive forms. The article suggests that mid Victorian rural popular culture proved to be not only adaptive to the forces of urban modernity but robustly dynamic and informed by rural social forces.

Over recent years much attention has been given to temporal trends between 1550 and 1900 in the proportions within English rural society of living-in servants in husbandry on the one hand and, on the other, cottage labourers. According to Ann Kussmaul there were two periods when the balance shifted towards labourers and away from servants: one took in the latter half of the sixteenth century and the first part of seventeenth; the other began in the latter part of the eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth. These were both periods when population was rising rapidly and when labour was not in short supply. Between the mid seventeenth century and the mid eighteenth, by contrast, there was a quite dramatic shift in the balance and a growing tendency among farmer-employers to hire farm servants on yearly terms. A relative shortage of labour as population declined, a shift towards pastoral farming (in which resident labour on the farm was all the more desirable to cope with the constant needs of animals as well as crises of birth and death which could occur at any time of the day and night), the falling costs of providing board: all of these encouraged farmers to begin to bind young people to annual contracts and to keep them on the farm.

The surge in writing by and about women in recent decades in Ireland is contributing to a good understanding of the place of women in Irish society. It is research which shows that women often had to be exceptionally good at their chosen or allotted role in life in order to be recognised and noted, or had to be capable and highly efficient at tasks ordinarily and traditionally done by men. This is especially true of the women who were the wives, sisters and mothers of the labourers and small farmers of nineteenth-century Ireland, with which this article is concerned. It is freely noted at this point that writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people – both men and women – in all centuries is difficult because of a lack of source material. Writing about women, without reference to male siblings, spouses and fathers is extremely problematic and one must seek out information by a very close examination of available facts and by a full understanding and awareness of the usefulness of the collected folk tradition.

This study identifies more than fifty previously unrecorded Elizabethan, East Anglian rural midwives. Their professional lives are discussed in terms of licensing and oaths, knowledge, skills, caseload, travel, networking and years of practice. In regard to their family life, matters examined include marital status, spousal occupation, children, social standing, age at death and testacy. Finding and researching these midwives involved examination of a large number of different kinds of archive documents, including sixteenth-century parish registers and quarter session records. As data were examined a clearer picture emerged of these early midwives and their practice.

This article considers the ways in which clothing is represented in selected work of Thomas Hardy in the context of wider social and economic change in nineteenth-century English rural society. While taking into account the difficulties of using fictional literature in this way, I suggest that it is precisely Hardy's subjectivity that makes his observations so compelling and that his perception of change lies at the heart of his representation of dress. I endeavour to show how in his writing, the perceived tension between an unchanging, idealised, countryside increasingly subjected to the influence of an urban culture is frequently expressed, either directly or metaphorically, in terms of clothing. The social and economic changes, including agricultural change, of which Hardy was so acutely aware, help to account for the disappearance of traditional features of rural dress, such as the smock-frock and the sun-bonnet. In their place were adopted styles influenced by notions of ‘fashion’ and made available through the process of mass production which Hardy associated primarily with towns. For Hardy, the influence of urban fashions alienated people from that individuality and speciality in dress which formed a link with their environment and ultimately their own past and history.

England has one of the longest histories of industrialisation and urbanisation of any West European country. This has inevitably had a formative influence in the structuring of its social science research. For political scientists it has involved an almost overwhelming concern with urban political systems and industrial cleavages. An analysis of class based voting has been a major focal point with its implicit assumption that any other cleavages based, for example, on religious or regional identities are marginal or atavistic. Certainly there has been little acknowledgement of any significant urban–rural divide. In consequence the study of rural politics has been something of an intellectual backwater and there has been no attempt to define or identify rural politics as an object of study. The blinkered vision of political scientists is disappointing. It unduly ignores a number of studies that have engaged with mainstream debates and frequently made worthwhile contributions, most notably, with reference to the case of agriculture, in the understanding of relations between government and industry (Cox et al, 1986; Grant, 1983). There are also signs that some political scientists are beginning to reject models of national (i.e. urban) voting behaviour and political systems in favour of more spatially sensitive work in which greater prominence is given to regional and local differences (Dunleavy, 1990; Johnston, 1985, 1987; Johnston et al, 1988).

While there has been some research on the parliamentary enclosure of upland waste in England and Wales during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this topic still receives little attention in some recent accounts of parliamentary enclosure. Many aspects of the processes involved, and their impact on the landscape, are also poorly understood. Much research has proceeded either at a very general level or on the basis of detailed individual case studies. This paper adopts an intermediate scale, focusing on the old county of Westmorland to examine the geographical and chronological patterns of enclosure before looking more closely at some of the problems involved in creating a new landscape.

This article is an examination of the value of the ‘open-closed’ settlement model. The model has endured as a helpful point of reference in historical investigations of local rural change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in particular in the study of property and class relations and their influence on the evolution of settlement form. The article is also a consideration of the significance of the work of a chief architect of the model, the historical geographer and local historian Dennis Mills. The model and the contribution of Mills are discussed in relation to initiatives seeking to develop local history of the twentieth century, including the promotion of engagement with interdisciplinary historiographies.

Brewing was an important part of the medieval peasant economy. There are different views, however, about the nature and position of those who brewed. It has been suggested that brewing was an integral part of the household economy, that is, at the fully developed stage of the household and family, whilst others have connected brewing with the early stages of the life-cycle of individuals, before household formation. Either as part of the household economy or before household formation, brewing may have supplemented income from agrarian activity, whether from the direct holding of land, or from wages for work on the land. Brewing may also have been a feature of the sexual division of labour within the household. Moreover, it has been proposed that brewing was more important for the household economy of cottagers and lesser landholders than for the tenants of standard holdings, who, perhaps, needed to supplement their income less than the smaller landholders. When related to the life-cycle of individuals, however, brewing may have been undertaken more consistently by those who would later acquire land and would then divest themselves of brewing as a major part of their income, although Chayanov believed brewing to relate more widely to the developmental cycle of all peasant households. His perception was that brewing would have been necessary at that stage of household development where there were many mouths to feed and many hands to perform the labour, whereas, when the siblings left the household, the supplementary income from brewing would no longer be required. There are thus a number of issues involved in the question of who, in the main, brewed, and at what stage of their life-cycle they did so.