Agricultural historians have long been aware that a major increase in productivity and output characterised the so-called ‘agricultural revolution’. Usually, however, this has been measured by indirect means: the fact, for example, that English farmers were able to feed some 3 million more people in 1700 than in 1540, and almost 20 million more in 1880 than in 1750. Since mouths were fed without recourse to massive imports -which would have had significant economic implications for the industrial revolution -and since these increases in output were achieved while the agricultural labour force was in steep relative decline, the obvious implication is that productivity was increasing. Measuring such changes has proved complex, partly because data were not collected in a systematic fashion prior to the 1870s, and partly because such evidence as we have relating to prices and rents hardly represents an adequate proxy for productivity. In general terms, the best material has been for the grain acreage, particularly for wheat and barley.

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such as The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

There are still comparatively few investigations which look, in detail, at who the rural English emigrants of the nineteenth century were, the villages and communities they came from, and the rural kinship and recruitment networks which supported their decision. Deficiencies in the published statistical returns, and the fact that good historical data about the English is mainly concerned with the first half of the nineteenth century, have not helped further emigration research. This has led to the situation whereby English emigration has been largely disregarded by some historians or, because British governments were initially preoccupied with emigration as a means of relieving distress, interpretations have tended to rest, precariously, on generalisations that English emigration was the product of economic dislocation. The dearth of historical studies is most striking if we note that, between 1853 and 1930, the English contributed over nine million emigrants to the European diaspora, that numerically they dominated Britain's non-Irish (English, Scottish and Welsh) emigration to most of the destinations available to them, and that the English have proved to be some of the most mobile and persistent of all international migrants.

In his book Green and Pleasant Land, Howard Newby used the term ‘occupational communities’ to describe the villages of rural England in the nineteenth century. By using this term he intended to convey simultaneously the notions that the populations of these villages were dependent upon a single economic activity, agriculture; that social and economic life within them therefore revolved around the agricultural cycle; and that social relations in such villages were defined and understood on the basis of occupational relationships within agriculture.

William Cobbett was, during his own lifetime, a highly controversial figure who often found it necessary to defend himself against supposed misrepresentation. His historical persona remains no less controversial. The complexities of Cobbett's career and character have supported a variety of interpretations, and many writers this century have felt the need to define ‘the real Cobbett’. Modern misrepresentations have arisen less from false stories invented to damn him than from the misleading emphases employed to praise him, with both Left and Right seeking in their different ways to appropriate what they see as his legacy. For conservatives, he has been an essentially timeless figure, standing for Old England and all that may have made such a place great. Writers on the Left have treated him rather as a figure of the past, rationalised to fit into the rise of working-class consciousness and organisation, and divested of some aspects unseemly in an early representative of ‘the cause’. Cobbett has been adopted as an important figure for the Left, but readings based on the assumptions about working-class radicalism held by the modern British Labour movement have often found it necessary to exclude aspects of his writings as inconsistent, or at least idiosyncratic.

Towards the end of his bittersweet novel Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh has his heroine Nina Blount flying across England en route for her disastrous honeymoon. Attempting to make what passed with him for conversation, her stupid and rather boorish husband managed lamentably to misquote John of Gaunt's ‘Sceptered isle’ speech from Richard II. Then, as Waugh wrote:

I was most interested in the article by John Beckett et al. which appeared in volume 9 of Rural History. It contained detail about the Enclosure Commissioners' handling of the transition from open to enclosed field farming based mainly on Midlands evidence of which I was unaware and which I have not come across in East Anglia. Continued research may produce comparable material in local record offices and estate and solicitors' collections in other regions.