The agricultural economy of eighteenth-century England exhibited many paradoxes, being in part progressive and even entrepreneurial, yet existing in a legal context which preserved many ancient customs, rights, duties and taxes. Within the one county of Northumberland we find the Culley brothers with their business-like attitudes and innovative and scientific farming methods and, in contrast, antique manorial regimes with courts, fines and heriots, such as prevailed in the manors of Hartleyburn and Bellister. We also find, as throughout England, the ‘contentious tithe’ and what must have been one of the most lucrative examples of tithe-farming, by which one of the North East's leading merchants and its first banker made a considerable part of his fortune out of a lease on this venerable tax from the appropriators, Merton College, Oxford.

The transition to modern, capitalist agriculture is usually marked by the replacement of traditional forms of farm service by a free labour market based on short-term contracts and cash payments. This process is often described in terms like ‘pauperisation’ and ‘proletarianisation’. But, of course, proletarianisation is not an inevitable consequence of the rise of day-labouring in capitalist agriculture; a point emphasized, for example, with particular reference to eighteenth-century Scotland by Alex Gibson and Alastair Orr. Contrary to much of southern England, where the forces of production developed rather fast, in Scotland traditional forms of farm service survived largely intact well into the nineteenth century despite the development of capitalist agriculture. As late as 1861 over 60 per cent of the total agricultural work-force in some Scottish regions were servants on long hires as opposed to day-labourers.

The two major censuses of religion that have most preoccupied historians and cultural geographers have, without question, been the Compton census of 1676 and the Census of Religious Worship of 1851. Over more than two centuries, probably indeed throughout British history, no other religious censuses were conducted to rival these two sources. The religious history of the intervening period has however, been researched by using other documentation, including the Evans list of 1715, the returns of Papists in 1767 and 1780, selected visitation returns, and the 1829 religious returns.

In a recent article Willem de Blécourt highlighted how little we really know about cunning-folk in the context of European witchcraft, and stressed the need for further substantial research. The study of English cunning-folk in the early modern period has been well served by the work of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, but their respective chapters are, nevertheless, tantalising rather than conclusive. Although in the last twenty-five years early-modern historians have continued to take a strong interest in the witch-trials, and the social dynamics of witch-accusations, cunning-folk have, by and large, been neglected. De Blécourt also remarked upon the paucity of relevant research on cunning-folk in the period after the trials. This observation is particularly applicable to British historiography, and it is the purpose of this present paper to begin to redress this imbalance. Most work on cunning-folk has tended to concentrate on what they did, rather than on who they were.

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between agencies of government and crofting tenantry in the Highlands of Scotland, as manifested in events of popular protest after 1914. These events seem to have received little attention when compared to disturbance of earlier periods, which have been extensively documented, and the period after 1918 in particular has been under represented in the literature. Furthermore the actions of agencies of government were significantly different in this later period. Where before the Great War government actions were wholly reactive, this paper will demonstrate that during the war and after, the Board of Agriculture made significant attempts to be proactive in the face of incipient protest. Yet, conflict, and the resultant acts of protest, continued to be a characteristic element of social relations in the Highlands in the post-war period. This paper seeks to show that whilst the actions of the land-working population were of central significance, this conflict was not solely between the tenantry and landowners or agencies of government but was also within those various groupings. Consequently, it is argued that protest attests to a complex nexus of conflict on both regional and national levels.

In 1956 in an international symposium at Princeton on the theme Man's role in changing the face of the Earth, one of the principal contributors, Carl Sauer, reflected that as much as anything it was a festival of remembrance to George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was perhaps the inspiration for viewing man within his natural world, within his ecological setting, but a setting which had evolved as much as anything by the actions of his own hand as it had been by natural agents. Marsh's great work Man and Nature, has been dubbed ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement.’ Thus Sauer suggests that this study is based on man's:

Raphael Samuel, who died tragically of cancer at the end of last year, was one of the outstanding social historians of post-war Britain. A founding figure of the History Workshop movement as a tutor at Ruskin College, he went on with others from that movement to found the History Workshop Journal in 1976. He was also series editor, as well as an editor and author, for the 30 or so books published in the History Workshop Series between 1975 and 1991.