Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particular estate maps. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus on the consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producing enclosure. In particular, I emphasise the important work that hedges did, physically, symbolically and legally, in the dispossession of the commoner. Acting as an organic barbed wire, the hedge was increasingly put to work to protect the lands of the powerful. Disrupting the propertied spaces of the commoning economy, hedges were not surprisingly targeted by those who opposed privatisation. The hedge, as both a sign and material barrier, served complicated and sometimes opposing ends. It materialised private property's right to exclude, but thus came into conflict with common property's right not to be excluded. The hedge was both an edge to property and was itself property. Both the encloser and the commoner, however, had property interests in the hedge. If broken, the hedge could signal violence and riot, or the legitimate assertion of common right. The hedge served as an often formidable material barrier, yet this very materiality made it vulnerable to ‘breaking’ and ‘leveling’.

Heritage is a messy concept ill-defined, heterogeneous, changeable, chauvinist – and sometimes absurd. In a TV programmer's words, just as ‘lifestyle has replaced life, heritage is replacing history'. Rather than ‘history’, Philadelphia's tourist boss now ‘talk[s] about heritage – it sounds more lively’. It is also more equivocal; as Walter Benjamin put it, every cultural treasure that is a ‘document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism’. Yet for all its ambiguity, ‘the idea of “Heritage” [is] one of the most powerful imaginative complexes of our time’.

On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.

As recently as the first half of this century, leaf- and twig-fodder cut from trees played a major role in animal husbandry across most of Europe and, in many areas, stored leafy hay was of critical importance to the survival of stalled livestock over winter (e.g. Brockmann-Jerosch, 1936; Radley, 1961; Spray, 1981; Salvi, 1982; Sigaut, 1982; Haas and Rasmussen, 1993). In addition to its importance to livestock, leaf- and twig-foddering also played a major role in shaping the cultural landscapes of the continent, and in particular the structure and composition of vegetation cover (e.g. Moreno, 1982; Austad, 1988). During this century, the use of arboreal fodder has declined dramatically to the point of almost total abandonment and, in consequence, this once important practice is both poorly understood and largely ignored by historians, geographers and ecologists alike.

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 argues that the landscape dominated by olive groves that is now seen as characteristic of southern Spain is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, olives were not an industrial crop, grown on a large scale for the production of oil. Instead, olive trees were largely grown by small peasant farmers and used to produce timber and fodder as well as foodstuffs, forming one component of a diverse peasant economy. This article will analyse the changing role of the olive within the landscape of the Spanish Mediterranean, and explore the process by which production moved towards single crop cultivation by large industrial enterprises.

Cooperatives began contributing to the modernisation of European agriculture in the late nineteenth century but the rate at which they developed varied according to countries, regions, and crops. In Spain a large number were set up before the 1936−9 Civil War but few actually became consolidated entities. This paper analyses the Spanish case in an attempt to find the keys to the success or failure of cooperation. It focuses especially on the role played by the state and on the attitude shown by the different segments of farmers towards cooperatives.

The pollarding and shredding of trees were widespread and common practices in Britain until the eighteenth century. Trees were an important source of fodder and their branches were regularly lopped so that sheep and cattle could eat their twigs and leaves. The branches could be used for firewood and other purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the practice of pollarding was becoming increasingly rare, and it had virtually died out by the mid-twentieth century. In Europe, by contrast, pollarding remains common in several Mediterranean, Balkan and Scandinavian countries. Pollarding is still practised in many tropical areas for the production of fuel and fodder. In this paper we trace the development of ideas about pollarding in British agricultural, estate management and forestry literature c1600–1900. We examine how pollarding, which was a traditional management practice of long standing at the start of our period, was increasingly vilified so that by the end of the eighteenth century, many foresters and agriculturists saw it as a symbol of the profligate use of resources.

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.

The analyses and interpretations that the social sciences have been making in recent decades on the theme of common property call for a fresh look at the history of the commons. Such a vision no longer considers them as resources necessarily destined to disappear, but rather attempts to discover what forces have acted on their historical trajectory. From this perspective, this paper analyses the evolution of common lands in Spain over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To that end, it rests on an interpretative proposal that, over time, common lands in Spain have experienced an alteration in their economic usefulness and have had to transform themselves in order to adapt to changing situations. In this context, the various agricultural and, indeed, general economic conjunctures, the evolution of social forces, as well as the make-up of the political system, have all played a major part in the greater or lesser persistence of the commons, in their forms of use and in their more or less successful adaptation to new situations.

After reviewing the development of wire fencing in Great Britain and the United States of America in the early nineteenth century, I examine the introduction of wire into Australia using published sources only. Wire was available in the colonies from the early 1850s. The earliest published record of a wire fence was on Phillip Island near Melbourne (Victoria) in 1842. Almost a decade passed before wire was used elsewhere in Victoria and the other eastern colonies. Pastoralists either sought information on wire fences locally or from agents in Britain. Local agents of British companies advertised in colonial newspapers from the early 1850s, with one exceptional record in 1839. Once wire was adopted, pastoralists rejected iron posts used in Britain, preferring cheaper wood posts cut from the property. The most significant innovation was to increase post spacings with significant cost savings. Government and the iron industry played no part in these innovations, which were achieved through trial-and-error by pastoralists. The large tonnages of wire imported into Australia and the increasing demand did not stimulate local production of wire, and there were no local wire mills until 1911.

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.

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.

Poaching is commonly portrayed as the archetypal nineteenth-century ‘rural’ crime, particularly associated with agricultural districts of southern and eastern England. This study argues that this interpretation is misleading. Judicial statistics collected from the mid-nineteenth century suggest that poaching was much more widespread in the North and Midlands than has previously been acknowledged. These industrialising regions largely determined the national trends in poaching in the second half of the century which have usually been considered to be characteristics of rural society in the South. The South shared neither the national peak in prosecutions of the mid-1870s nor the dramatic decline in prosecutions thereafter. It considers a range of possible explanations for these different regional trends. These include a discussion of the potential motivation of so-called ‘steam age poachers’ but also the growing regional specialisation in game preservation during the period and the different opportunities, and obstacles, this presented for poaching.

Against the background of the economic and cultural environment of inter-war rural Britain, this article seeks to trace the history of the ‘Kinship in Husbandry’, a group of like-minded ruralists opposed to modernising tendencies in agricultural and the rural economy. Inspired largely by the thinking of the landowner, poet, forester and fold-danger Rolf Gardiner and chronicled by the writer H. J. Massingham, the ‘Kinship’ had little immediate influence, although its organicist, holistic and localist ideas form the basis of much current thinking on rural development. In considering the ‘Kinship’, the article also investigates the personal relationship between Gardiner and Massingham.

On May 12th, 1926 Stanley Baldwin announced the end of the General Strike in a radio broadcast to the nation. The announcement was followed by a choir singing Parry's now familiar Jerusalem with its resounding climactic affirmation of ‘England's green and pleasant Land’.1 It is hard to resist the speculation that this was Baldwin's choice as much as Reith's, since the Conservative Prime Minister had from the outset of his political career been identified as an ordinary man rooted deeply in the English countryside.2 Baldwin's private correspondence demonstrates that his attachment to ‘our eternal hills’ was entirely genuine, but there can be little doubt that this was also an image that he consciously cultivated, and which – via his mastery of the new instruments of mass communication – he was able to convey to a wide and popular audience. To this extent he might be thought of as a Tory populist: as J.C. Squire noted in the Observer review of Baldwin's 1926 collection of his speeches, entitled On England (released just before the General Strike), ‘this is the work of a thoroughly representative Englishman: not the common man, but one expressing what the common man feels and cannot say for himself’. These ‘common’ themes and sentiments ranged across a number of issues from Shakespeare to the topical ‘Peace in Industry’, but pride of place in the volume was granted to his definitive statement on national identity, given in May 1924 ‘to celebrate our country and our Patron Saint’ at the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St. George, and entitled plainly and unambiguously ‘England’.

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

This article addresses the way in which officials in the last decades of the Old Poor Law thought about and addressed the problems posed to the poor relief process by the migration of paupers. Focusing on the so called out-parish relief system, the article uses rich overseer correspondence and supplementary pauper letters from the northwest of England to explore several key themes in the period 1800–1840: the nature of money transmission where allowances had to be paid at a distance, issues of administrative competence and incompetence, the nature of relationships between parishes and between parishes and their distant poor under the out-parish relief system, and issues of trust and reputation between parishes and between parishes and paupers. The article will show that the out-parish system was vital to the stability of the Old Poor Law and that its apparent fragility and susceptibility to fraud and mistrust is to some extent belied by the fact that robust and long term relationships developed between parishes under the out-parish system.

‘I am persuaded that the Memorial Crosses, in the Churchyards, on the village greens, where the roads meet, will for many years to come cry eloquent but silent protest against all that divides and degrades village life.’ The Bishop of Hereford, 1920.

One characteristic of an affluent society is that wealthy individuals often seek a place in the country to spend weekends and summer vacations. In the United States second homes in rural areas first became popular in the Gilded Age when elites in the northeast tried to ape English patterns of leisured country living. Americans, however, had to contend with hot and humid summers. As a result, access to water became a vital ingredient in any choice of a country retreat. An alternative motivation for migration to the countryside in the late nineteenth century came when elites desired to take part in field sports, especially foxhunting. In New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and of course, Virginia, where reasonably mild winters permitted activities to continue with some frequency throughout the winter, foxhunting became part of the yearly ritual of small numbers of urban based elites. Horse ownership went hand in hand with livestock raising. By the twenties cattle breeding had become another hobby pursuit of the gentry in northeastern states; herds of Angus or other breeds grazed in paddocks on either side of a long driveway which led up to a large country home.