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.

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.

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.

In 1846 a story entitled ‘Derevnia’ (The Village) appeared in the Russian press. It was the account of the life of a young peasant woman, from her birth, through her upbringing as an unwanted orphan, her unsuitable marriage staged to satisfy the whim of the landowner's wife, her sufferings at the hands of her husband's family, to her decline and early death. The story aroused the ire of Slavophil critics: ‘In it is assembled all the coarseness, outrage and harshness, that can be found in peasant customs. But what is striking is not specific details, but the profound lack of feeling and complete lack of moral sense in the whole way of life.’ It was praised by the radical Westernist critic V.G. Belinsky no less profusely than it was attacked by the Slavophil Yu. S. Samarin, not for its literary merits but for its truth to life: ‘[Grigorovich] displayed here much observation and knowledge of real life and succeeded in demonstrating both the former and the latter in simple, honest, true images, with remarkable talent.’

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 examines the role played by village schoolmasters in eighteenth-century rural France. Although schoolmasters were not supported or regulated by the state, as they would be a century later, they were able to navigate successfully the complex network of social relationships that existed within early modern rural society. Using the journal of one schoolmaster, Pierre Delahaye, the article demonstrates that in addition to teaching, schoolmasters also worked as record keepers for village notables, as clerks for the parish, and even cleaned the churches and belfries. The schoolmaster's position afforded him a much greater social position than might be assumed from knowledge of only his income and background, and even allowed him to serve as a mediator between the village and the curé. Thus it can be argued that schoolmasters of the eighteenth century were as important to rural society as their state supported counterparts of the nineteenth century.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The development of any particular society has to be understood in terms of the economic processes at work at the time, together with the cultural influences which permeate society, and the specific nature of the place in which these cultural and economic influences operate. The visible results of these influences and processes must be seen historically. That is to say, the entity being studied is a constantly changing sequence of processes both present and past. These processes need to be viewed dialectically.

In central and south-western Scotland, squads or groups of Irish migratory seasonal workers, largely comprised of women and teenagers from Mayo, Donegal and Galway, were employed by Scottish potato merchants to harvest the potato crop throughout the harvesting season which extended from June until late October or November. As migratory workers, they started their employment in Ayrshire and Wigtownshire, to deal with the first earlies, and then moved eastwards into the Lothians, and northwards into Fife, Perthshire and Angus, to harvest the later ripening first earlies, second earlies and maincrops. As they moved their employment from farm to farm, staying at each from a few days to as long as six weeks, they lived on or close to the farms where they worked. They were usually accommodated in ‘bothies’, farm buildings such as byres, stables, lofts, stores, barns, stables, potato sheds, disused farm cottages and farm houses, all of which were converted into temporary accommodation for the workers. This accommodation was subject to much criticism and many attempts were made to try to improve its condition, not only by legislative control, but through other action, for example by trade unions and specially appointed committees. Of these channels, the latter (non-legislative means) has received very little attention by scholars and much of it is little known.

Alastair Fowler has written, with reference to the time of Milton, of ‘Latin's special role in a bilingual culture’, and this was still true in the early eighteenth century. The education of the elite placed great emphasis on the art of writing Latin verse and modern, as well as ancient, writers of Latin continued to be widely read. Collections of Latin verse, by individual writers such as Vincent Bourne (c. 1694–1747) or by groups such as Westminster schoolboys or bachelors of Christ Church, Oxford, could run into multiple editions, and included poems on a wide range of contemporary topics, as well as reworkings of classical themes. This paper examines a number of eighteenth-century Latin poems dealing with beggars, several of which are here translated for the first time. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the Latin poems recycled well-worn tropes about beggary which were often at variance with the experience of real-life beggars, and to how the specificities of Latin verse might heighten negative representations of beggars in a genre which, as a manifestation of elite culture, appealed to the very class which was politically and legally responsible for controlling them.

The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project was a massive restructuring of the St. Lawrence River bordering Canada and the United States. The river had always been used for human transportation, and a shipping canal for commercial vehicles was constructed and enhanced throughout the nineteenth century. However, the river grew increasingly incapable of handling an international fleet composed of larger boats during the twentieth century. Proposals to undertake major renovations for shipping were debated at the highest levels of policy for several decades. Finally, the St. Lawrence River was substantially altered during the 1950s. These changes created a Seaway able to accommodate vessels with deeper drafts and permitted the development of hydro-electric generating facilities through the construction of dikes and dams. All of this activity involved numerous agencies in the governments of the United States, Canada, the Iroquois Confederacy, New York, Ontario, other states and provinces, as well as commercial and industrial entities in the private sector.

In Albanian village society, the main characteristic of the social status of women, and their only function that meets social approval, is their aptitude for procreation and motherhood. And the Albanian child is first and foremost a son, who will succeed his father, inherit from him, guarantee the everlastingness of his lineage and honour his ancestors. If the daughter is a future wife and a potential mother, polyvalent images make the boy child the symbol of radical transformation, renewal and regeneration. The beliefs, rites, practices, the multiple symbolic forms and collective representations surrounding birth and socialisation, in addition to their magic, divinatory or propitiatory roles, are also used to confer a symbolic value of recognition on the processes of construction and socialisation of the individual who has just been born.