In a small municipality in the Alentejo region of Portugal, the same group of families, defined by latifundia landownership or tenancy, dominated local political institutions for two centuries during which great changes occurred. Three revolutions resulted in regime transitions: the 1820 Liberal Revolution, the 1910 Republic and the 1926 Dictatorship, which led to Salazar's Estado Novo. Even though a few members of these families offered some resistance to each of these revolutions at an early stage, they all adapted their behaviour and kept local political control within their ranks. Local traditional institutions, such as the local council and mayor, charitable and welfare associations, and corporate institutions created in the 1930s and 1940s to direct economic activities, were all presided over and controlled by members of the same rural elite. This continued until 1974, when the Carnation Revolution and agrarian reform removed and replaced these old elites with new ones. The lords of the land remained lords of the village for as long as control over the main economic resource of the region was the major factor in the maintenance of political power. These land occupations were not permanent. The process was reversed as a result of political factors relating to Portugal's accession to the European Economic Community in 1986. Agrarian elites in Southern Portugal no longer control jobs or the economy and therefore they no longer control local politics as they had for several generations. The Carnation Revolution and agrarian reform removed the old elites and replaced them with new ones. Agriculture is no longer the main economic activity of the countryside. The rural environment has become a hiking ground or an all-terrain vehicles track. The future is elsewhere and the current economic situation and the absence of elites have transformed rural areas into depopulated regions.

Chartism, the first genuinely working-class mass political movement, has attracted numerous general, regional, and local histories. The overwhelming proportion of these works concentrate on Chartism's strongholds in London, provincial urban centres, and the theatres of industrialism — including those in Scotland and Wales. Yet despite these regional characteristics, the common assumption is that Chartism was a national movement. This assumption is implicit in works including J.T. Ward's Chartism, while Dorothy Thompson, the author of the most recent notionally national overview, suggests that countryside Chartism has been underestimated.

The daily lives of many rural workers were intertwined with animals: those they kept, those in the wild, and those they were employed to work with and care for. And yet despite the importance of this connection, work in rural history has tended, with some notable exceptions, to conceive of animals as fleshy capital, game, or pest. In part this is because the archive does not tend to describe the relationships between workers and animals. This paper contends, however, that the archive of animal maiming offers important detail for beginning to understand the connection. While animal maiming was necessarily rooted in violence, with its various forms essentially involving the mutilation and violation of animals, nonetheless episodes of animal maiming can tell us much about the politics of giving care to animals. Examining episodes of animal maiming also allows us to understand how the non-human helped to constitute the relationships between humans, especially the uneven bond between employer and worker, as well as the complex, and often contradictory, attitudes of rural workers to animals.

This paper examines the decline in the use of one Herefordshire common and how this is reflected in changes in the common's ecology. Direct field observation and biological evidence have been combined with oral histories and documentary sources, particularly the records of the Commoners Association and the National Farmers Union Branch Records, photographs, and maps in reconstructing these changes. The paper explores how the common has been recursively valued as its diminished productive use has been accompanied with increased recognition, although without formal designation, of its importance as a refuge for wildlife and as an amenity resource. These changes, however, present challenges for the traditional structures for the governance of the common as, in post-war years, the number of active graziers has declined and the community of commoners has become increasingly gentrified.

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.

During the first third of the twentieth century in France, negative and stigmatising stereotypes of rurality, inherited mainly from the previous century, were used as arguments to justify recourse to pedagogical innovations in physical education and sport for people living in the countryside. The invention of rural vulnerability led particularly to the setting up of ‘agricultural athletics’ meetings, ‘rural athletic trail runs’ and ‘rural horse events’ by vocational organisations and associations of educators. These initiatives, carried out mainly by economic and political interests, concerned mostly men and thus contributed to defining weakened rural masculinity.

This analysis is based on evidence from articles in regional, national and specialist press, official texts and physical education manuals dealing with bodily training for country people.

In this article I ask what it means for cartographical, social, economic and political understandings of poverty and mobility when the ‘geography of vagrancy’, as A. L. Beier termed it, is re-staged and reconfigured in specific acts of writing and even specific acts of walking. Invoking a range of public performances as well as print and manuscript publications by recognised literary figures of the day, including work by Ben Jonson and John Taylor, I concentrate on one particular literary remaking of the everyday experiences of the mobile poor in Taylor's 1618 published pamphlet The Pennyles Pilgrimage or The Money-lesse perambulation, of Iohn Taylor, Alias the Kings Majesties Water-Poet. What Taylor understood when engaging with the ‘geography of vagrancy’ in his challenging text was that the act of mapping the spatial world of the itinerant poor required considerable thought not only about the spaces inhabited, albeit temporarily, or travelled through, but also the ways in which the mobile poor performed such spaces. In turn, Taylor's own performance can be understood as a contradictory act of commercial enterprise and self-promotion as well as one that gives literary historians significant access to contemporary imaginings of the specific socioeconomic and spatial conditions of poverty and mobility.

In February 1897, villagers in the small Kentish town of Eynsford celebrated their first Arbor Day by planting a row of trees in acrostic form to spell out the proverb MY SON, BE WISE. By 1910 Arbor Day had featured in the discussions of a Parliamentary Select Committee and the House of Commons, and was enjoying national press coverage as the event spread under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Garden City Movement. Proponents positioned the ceremony as a prism through which to address the pressing social and economic concerns of rural depopulation, unemployment and deforestation, and by promoting the event as part of the educational experience of children, offered it up as a contribution towards the amelioration of these ills. Although the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919 ushered in the increasingly inflexible belief that the state rather than individuals was the only competent custodian of English woodland, Arbor Day can tell us much about how humankind's affective response to nature was conditioned, shored up and survived this increasingly scientific approach from the late nineteenth century.

A considerable amount of research has been undertaken on the decline in women's agricultural employment during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but very little has been written about the position of women farmers. During this period, women farmers remained more common throughout Wales than in England. This study explores the part played by women farmers in the agricultural community of Nantconwy, a hundred in the eastern part of Snowdonia, Caernarvonshire, where women comprised up to twenty-two per cent of farmers during the period 1750 to 1900. It examines how and why women became farmers, and the role they played in running the farm. Four factors are suggested to account for the high proportion of women farmers in Snowdonia: a system of virtually hereditary tenancies, the inheritance of farm stock, the traditional nature of Welsh farming, and women's desire to continue farming.

The study considers the economics of the oil palm (Elaeis guinensis) to rural farmers in a rural community in south-eastern Nigeria. It compares the economic benefits of all products of the oil palm industry – palm oil, palm kernel, timber, palm wine and brooms. It posits that the most important product of the oil palm to the Enugu Ezike farmer is oil palm wine. This contrasts with the view that holds palm oil and palm kernel as the chief products of the oil palm. In a study conducted in Enugu Ezike, findings reveal that annual revenue from palm wine surpasses the six-yearly income from palm oil, palm kernel and brooms together. The study employs an eclectic framework of data collection, involving oral interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and the use of secondary sources. The oil palm is by every standard the most economically important tree crop and proceeds from it have positively influenced the socio-economic life of the rural communities, and as a result it has improved their living conditions.

Based on conventional learning and supported in no small measure by stereotypes, agriculture as a vocation was not considered as part of the occupational profile of Jewish society in Eastern Europe until the Second World War. However, various studies show that in different regions in this area, primarily Lithuania, White Russia, north eastern Poland, and Bessarabia, tens of thousands of Jews made a living from direct engagement in various branches of agriculture, including field crops, orchards, lake fishing, etc. These Jews lived mainly in the rural areas and were a factor, and at times a highly significant one, in the local demographic and economic structure. The first part of this article examines the question whether these Jews, who were part of the general rural society living in the countryside, developed a certain type of rural cultural identity. This question is discussed by examining various aspects of their attitude towards nature. The second part of the article considers the possible influence of the agricultural occupation on the shaping of a unique peasant cultural identity among these rural Jews and the ways they coped with the accompanying religious, social and cultural implications.

The Marquis of Anglesey on his Dorset estate was an absentee landlord who maintained close relationships with his estate through extensive correspondence with his land agent William Castleman. The surviving letters are a very rich source by which to examine the minutiae of rural life and a way to reconstruct social and working relationships within the nineteenth-century English landed estate. By focusing on a range of customary and unwritten rights, this article will consider issues such as how tenants navigated renegotiation of their leases, sought rent abatements or compensation for damage to their crops from hunting. Working and social relationships on such an estate were closely interlinked, as is widely shown here. The article also raises more contentious estate issues such as who had the rights to fallen and standing timber, the customs affecting courts, the repair of churches, and the responsibilities for building and maintaining schools. Throughout, the issue of ‘social control’ is assessed. Together the range of documented work and social interactions provide a fuller picture of the functioning of a southern English great estate in the early nineteenth century, and allow us to examine this rural community beyond the remit of its agricultural history.

R. G. Stapledon was one of the most profound of twentieth-century thinkers on rural and landscape issues. Scientist, philosopher and teacher, he was an unconventional figure who, with a dedicated team of loyal colleagues, established the basic biology and breeding systems of the Graminae at the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the 1920s and 1930s. They subsequently bred a range of grass and clover varieties which were to transform grazing lands throughout the British Empire. To Stapledon the grasslands of an island nation were of vital strategic importance and if Britain were to prepare for a future war, her grasslands would require dramatic improvement if they were to provide a reserve of fertility. In proposing and implementing a vast scheme of renovation of the uplands of Wales, against the fervent opposition of the economists, as a means of both improving agricultural output and stemming the haemorrhage of depopulation, he demonstrated the practical feasibility of land improvement. In so doing he provided a template for the massively subsidised post-war programme of land improvement which was so dramatically to change the face of Britain. This article describes the evolution and conduct of the Cahn Hill Improvement Scheme which was not only one of the most ambitious outdoor ‘experiments’ of the last century, but in a sense, a metaphor for nation-building itself.

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.

This article outlines the changing character of vagrant removal from the City of London during the 1780s, suggesting that the City largely abandoned its duty to ‘punish’ the vagrant poor in favour of a policy of simply moving them on as quickly and cheaply as possible. After describing the impact of the destruction of Newgate and the resulting overcrowding in London's other prisons, it provides evidence for a dramatic increase in vagrant numbers. The article suggests that this change was both a direct result of the crises of imprisonment, transportation and punishment that followed the Gordon Riots and American war; and a result of growing demand for the transportation provided to vagrants, on the part of the migratory poor. Having established the existence of a changing pattern of vagrant removal, it suggests that the poor increasingly made use of the City of London, and the system of removal, to access transportation in pursuit of seasonal migration, and more significantly, medical care in the hospitals of the capital as part of a wider ‘economy of makeshift’.

This article examines two opposing views on the role and presence of painters in post-Reformation rural England. The art historian William Gaunt concluded that painters simply ‘vanished’ from the local scene in their flight to London; the historical geographer John Patten saw non-agricultural workers in general flocking to the rural scene in the same era. Drawing on a database of over 2,600 working painters, the article explores the presence and role of the painters’ occupation in rural England between 1500 and 1640. It emphasises the painters’ accommodation to changing consumer demands; it offers a revised view of their geographic distribution over time; it shows that painters continued to serve the rural scene, albeit in somewhat different ways and from different locales than before.

This article examines the local economy of a parish in south-east Essex during a period when economic, social and technological factors were transforming rural Britain. Record linkages are used to construct a microhistory of Hockley to analyse the exploitation of the landscape and rural livelihoods. Agricultural and occupational change reflected many national economic and social influences, but there are also counter examples to regional patterns of farming practice and large scale agrarian capitalist landownership. The agricultural depression of c.1875–96 effected a shift from arable to livestock farming and the development of market gardening facilitated by the railway. A reduction in agricultural employment opportunities, and the absence of a cottage industry for women, led to a significant out-migration of working-age people. The microhistory demonstrates that local factors, such as access to a tidal river, the timing of the arrival of the railway, the availability of brick-making clay and new trades provided livelihood opportunities and influenced the structure and operation of the rural economy.

The legal process of gaining an enclosure could be long, complicated and expensive …. It could take up to six years, during which time a farmer did not know what was happening or how to farm. (S. Wade Martins, Farms and Fields (1995), p. 81).

The impact of parliamentary enclosure in England has been a subject for debate since at least the 1870s. A series of issues has been identified and discussed including the costs of enclosure; the effect of enclosure on small farmers, small owners, and cottagers; the role of the commissioners; the implications for farm sizes; the impact on agricultural productivity and rents; and the significance for the landscape. Yet the quotation with which we open this paper suggests that there is a subject which has slipped through the historical net, the impact of enclosure on farming. In their work published early in the twentieth century the Hammonds noted of the enclosure of Stanwell in Middlesex (Act 1789) that the nominated commissioners were empowered to direct the course of husbandry ‘as well with respect to the stocking as to the Plowing, Tilling, Cropping, Sowing, and Laying down the same’. W.H.R. Curtler, in 1920, quoted the main substance of the clauses from the Cold Aston (Gloucestershire) enclosure act of 1795: ‘from the passing of the Act until the Award the Commissioners were to direct the course of husbandry in the open fields’. He noted also that earlier acts had stated that the existing course of husbandry should be retained until the award was completed. W.E. Tate wrote as recently as 1967 that during enclosure ‘the general course of agriculture in all the open fields was being carried out under directions laid down by the commissioners’.

The ‘land question’ occupies a central role in the history of Highland Scotland. The system of estate ownership and tenure introduced in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden (1746) commodified the land as private possession. In its wake came mass evictions of tenants in large-scale ‘Clearances’ designed to convert crofting-lands to other agrarian or sporting uses. During the main period of Clearances (1780–1855), protest by the crofters remained spontaneous and sporadic. It was not until the last part of the nineteenth century, especially during the so-called Crofters' War (1881–96), that a resurgent crofting community engaged in sustained protest. The threat of civil unrest prompted some ameliorative measures, most notably the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This stabilised the situation and gave protection from further mass evictions but did not restore lands to the landless population from which their ancestors had been displaced. The demand for restitution, therefore, remained a powerful rallying cry.

The nineteenth century saw an explosion in creativity and innovation, often applied to and motivated by an urge to improve, refine and make more efficient industrial and agricultural processes. There were many innovations in the field of agriculture, supported by the sponsorship of societies and associations and, in the 1850s and 1860s, by strong investment under High Farming. This article examines one of these innovations, the steam plough, with reference to its application in the Scottish Highlands in the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, it illuminates the social networks which lay behind the development and utilisation of the steam plough in the rural Highland context, delineating how aristocratic, religious and local networks combined to have a major impact on rural society in Scotland and beyond. It will examine how these networks interacted to promote the contemporary culture for agricultural and rural innovation through the development of the Fowler's steam plough. What makes this example of particular interest is the fact that agriculturally and financially, the Sutherland land reclamations were an unconditional failure. The environment was too challenging for the technology and despite vast financial resources, the landowner, the third Duke of Sutherland, was, after fifteen years, finally convinced by his advisors that further efforts were futile and irresponsible. This article will interrogate why, despite its essential unfeasibility, the project was pursued, and will argue that the momentum created by the dynamic between the three networks involved propelled it forward despite growing evidence of failure. This article therefore uses an inductive approach by examining a particular example of agricultural design innovation and analysing the pertinent social issues in what would have been termed by contemporaries ‘entrepreneurial spirit’.