One of the most important systems of sheep transhumance since the Middle Ages in Spain occurred between the mountains of northern Leon and the Extremadura Meadow lands – a 500-kilometre journey on foot. We analyse here an interesting collection of thirty letters, written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and sent by the shepherds responsible for the flock from the wintering land to the owner of the animals. The only connection with the owner for seven long months but also with their villages and families, were these letters.

In 1833 in a small village in the eastern Netherlands, a school opened for training weavers in using a new technology imported from England: the flying shuttle. The school began by training boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 16; when that proved successful it opened its doors to all weavers sent by manufacturers from the greater region, which soon necessitated several branch schools. By far the majority who came were home-based workers and after their training, a matter of a few weeks for those not new to the task, they could take a new loom with them on a payment plan. Once home, they in turn trained others, while local carpenters learned to build new looms. As a result, weaving in the rural textile regions of Twente and the Achterhoek (see figures 1 and 2) was transformed rapidly so that by 1836 no more new pupils came, and the schools were closed.

A range of discourses on rural life, gender, and work accompanied the parallel expansion of mass garment manufacture and handicraft industries in north-west Ireland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Proponents of each frequently claimed that these two forms of production were sharply distinguished by scale, organisation and the ‘skills’ they required. However, these strategies for rural industrial development require a more integrated analysis. A close examination of the technologies of production, workers' earnings and experiences, and the stability of rural industrial initiatives, drawing on Parliamentary Papers and the Baseline Reports of the Congested Districts Board, challenges assumptions about the structure and status of women's industrial work in rural Ireland.

The collective management of irrigation is an essential factor in agrarian development, both present and past. However, the relationship of irrigation associations with the state remains underexplored, despite the increasingly important role played by water policies in the modern world. The present article examines this relationship in Spain over the last two centuries. Our results suggest that, first, the state played a decisive part in the emergence and evolution of irrigation associations, and this belies the assumption of the traditional origin of these institutions; second, that farmers, despite being subject to the regulatory framework, enjoyed substantial autonomy in the management of water resources; and, third, that the relationship between local associations and the state changed over time, in response to political regime changes and the transformation of irrigation agriculture. When the state tried to impose authoritarian policies upon irrigation users, these reacted by developing unprecedented forms of organisation.

An evidence-based time series on agricultural growth prior to 1850 only exists for very few German territories. Except for Saxony, there is no series available for the pre-1815 period. Based on sharecropping contracts from the estate of Anholt, we reconstruct the development of crop production for western Westphalia and the lower Rhineland c. 1740–1860. Our results show that parallel to Saxony, agricultural growth in this north-west German region was driven entirely by demand from a growing number of households engaged in proto-industrial and early industrial manufacture production. Fully commercialised land tenure systems dominated in Anholt from the beginning of the early modern period, and manorial institutions had little relevance for rural property relations. Hence, the radical French and Prussian agrarian reforms at the beginning of the nineteenth century had no effect on agricultural production. In a north-west European comparison, Anholt's sharecroppers performed rather well during this decisive formation period culminating in early industrialisation.

The recent reappearance of wolves in many areas of Europe has stimulated an interest in the past relationships between the species and humans in various different geographical locations and historical epochs. The image of wolves approaching and entering human settlements is a potent image of the wild, ‘natural’ world encroaching on that of the domestic and ‘cultural’. This paper examines the existence of the wolf in the psychological and physical landscape through a micro-historical analysis of a vernacular manuscript from the mid sixteenth century in north-west Italy. The paper demonstrates that the wolf existed both as a ‘mythological beast’ and as a ‘biological animal’ that was a normal, frequently encountered component of the Ligurian faunal assemblage.

A recent article in Rural History illustrated how the Women's Institutes between the wars Were influenced by contemporary feminism. The argument of the article was that in seeking to change the material condition and status of countrywomen, and in effect, emulating craft trades union strategies, the WI movement sought to alter perceptions of women's labour in the home by enhancing their skills, encouraging co-operative endeavour and promoting an ‘active domesticity’. Furthermore, the domestic arena was extended to cover all aspects of rural life related to the home, garden, farm or allotment.

However, as time passed between the wars, less interest was shown in agricultural work outside the home, and, as Morgan states elsewhere, the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement became ‘severely diminished’. Whilst one might not seriously quarrel with this statement with reference to some periods of WI history, it is, nevertheless, a somewhat reductive approach to have taken when considering the interwar period. During that time, there is evidence to suggest that in some regions at least, WI members maintained more than a passing interest in agriculture per se. This was not simply in relation to the production and preservation of food, but rather as a means of maintaining the influence of women in rural policy making. This interest can be best detected in the educational sphere, from the promotion of classes in a wide range of agricultural activities and demonstrations at agricultural and horticultural shows, to WI membership of local agricultural education committees. Furthermore, the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) fought in many ways to maintain the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement because it was an integral part of its wider mission to educate countrywomen, particularly those who were destined to live and work in the Empire

A cursory examination of publishers’ catalogues reveals a number of titles like Environmental History, Green History and An Environmental History of Britain which suggest an upsurge of interest in what has come to be called ‘environmental history’. This weight of scholarship suggests that demands for the ‘greening of history’, or for more studies of the impact of human actions on the countryside, which have been made throughout the present decade, have been answered. It is worth noting the shift of title from ‘Green’ to ‘Environmental’. ‘Green’ is increasingly attached to the political movements and social groups concerned with environmental issues and even, in the case of the German Greens, to political parties whose concerns include ecology as only one of a number of interests. ‘Environmental’ has a much broader range, but, as the titles below demonstrate, this is by no means an absolute distinction. Closer consideration of many of these works reveals that although ‘History’ appears in many titles, the books are actually written by archaeologists, by sociologists, by political theorists, by Green activists and, most frequently, by geographers - all with ‘historical’ appended to their discipline. The Social Construction of the Past is a collection of essays from the Second World Archaeological Conference; Environmentalism proves to be ‘the view from Anthropology’ but contains at least one essay which appears to be a model of what environmental history could be. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, rather confusingly, has chapters on historical transformations and a discussion of the ‘history’ in historical ecology. This is perhaps not surprising. History has always prided itself on interdisciplinarity and on its universal appeal. The usual justifications for undergraduate history begin from the premise that a knowledge of one's own history is necessary for any understanding of society, and that history has so many variations that there is bound to be some congenial corner for anyone interested in the past. What is still lacking, however, is British environmental history, written by historians.

In the writing on institutional organisation and collective strike action among agricultural workers in Lowland Scotland during the early twentieth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, Richard Anthony has provided an extensive discussion on farm servants.2 However, in general, little attention has been given to casually employed workers. One such group, known as the Achill workers or the Irish ‘tattie howkers’, employed to harvest the potato crop in south-western and central Scotland, attempted to organise themselves and pursued collective strike action on a number of occasions. That group, which comprised some 1,500 to 2,000 workers, undertook strike action in 1907. That action was followed by intensive campaigns in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1938; a further attempted strike was also reported in 1912. Much of their collective action was assisted by institutional support from unions which were already organising workers. But workers also attempted to organise themselves with the assistance of these existing unions in the years 1918 to 1921, 1925, 1926 and 1929, and to form their own union in 1909, 1910 and 1938. This paper will examine these attempts during this period.

A previous article in Rural History entitled ‘“Rustic and Rude”: Hiring Fairs and their Critics in East Yorkshire c. 1850–75’, examined a critique of hiring fairs and farm service mounted by the Church of England in the East Riding of Yorkshire during the mid-Victorian period. This discussion builds upon that article by offering a more detailed examination of the actual attempts to reform and abolish hiring fairs that emanated from that critique. The article examines three stages of reform and abolition stretching over the mid-Victorian period: a first stage that centred upon imposing a system of hiring based upon written characters; a second stage that focussed upon imposing segregated hiring for male and female servants, and a final abolitionist stage. The campaign's tactics and the various measures deployed against hiring fairs during each stage are detailed and their level of success evaluated and explained. The broader motivations of the campaign and the manner in which they signified deeper Church anxieties about the nature of the rural social order are also discussed in a concluding evaluation of the campaign's impact.

The theme of place guides much exploration in rural history and local history. Attempts have been made to create definitions and typologies of place, but these have had to contend with the diverse, complex and dynamic realities of historical pattern and process, local and regional. Nonetheless, historians and those in other disciplines have evolved different approaches to the concept. This study considers how these can inform the investigation of places existing in historical fact in particular periods in the past, and can do similarly for those places located contemporaneously in fictional constructions. Reference is made to various academic writings on place, including by the local historian, David Dymond. The analysis takes the work of the author of fiction, Bernard Samuel Gilbert. Gilbert, although relatively obscure now, incorporated a feature of special note into his later literary output, and one meriting greater attention. This was his personalised, reflective and explicitly articulated approach to forming and expressing place. Moreover, Gilbert’s ‘Old England’, with its imaginary district of 'Bly', can be recognised as corresponding to landscapes and communities existing more broadly in the years up to and through the First World War, and with creations by other authors of regional fiction.

The emergence of factor markets during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was of crucial importance for long-term economic development. Despite Flanders and Brabant being situated in one of the most densely urbanised regions within Europe at the time, the current historiographical debate lacks a quantitative analysis of the market for land in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. This article focuses on the transmission of rural property in the southern Low Countries from the 1400s up until the end of the eighteenth century. Using time-series data on the rural land market for a selection of case studies within Inland Flanders and Brabant has enabled me to present a long-run analysis of the changes in the market value of land, the market activity and the overall nature of the rural peasant land market. My findings show a tendency towards fewer but larger holdings being transferred on the land market. The path-dependent nature of this process had a significant impact upon the changing proto-capitalistic nature of agriculture within the southern Low Countries. As per capita market activity declined and the average transfer size increased, the farmers’ dependency on the lease market grew effectively speeding up the pauperisation processes in Inland Flanders.

The literature about the nutrition transition has been discussing the existence of different paths. The case of Uruguay is introduced as a different case of transition. We focus on the period 1900–70 when the country shifted from an agricultural-based economy to industrialisation through import substitution. We estimate the annual historical time series of per capita consumption of the main food items in the Uruguayan diet using the commodity flow approach complemented by the FAO’s Food Balance Sheets methodology. We identify the major trends in food consumption and discuss the main explanatory factors. We find that Uruguay showed a transition from a very high animal food-based diet towards a more diversified pattern with more milk, cereals, and vegetables. On top of that, we sustain that not only income is important to explain the major shifts in food diet, but also preferences, changes in relative prices, and productivity.

The now extensive historiography of the ‘Captain Swing’ disturbances of 1830–1 contains two notable lacunae. Firstly, no thorough investigation has been undertaken of their first major episode, the ‘Sevenoaks Fires’ of summer 1830. Secondly, the overwhelming historiographical focus on Swing's perpetrators has ignored its victims almost entirely. This article therefore examines why particular farmers were singled out for incendiary attack in the area, what tactics they and the authorities employed in response and what that meant for social relations subsequently. The evidence reveals a trend towards greater accountability on the part of the elite and a growing confidence sometimes shown by the lower orders in challenging them. It does so, moreover, within an overarching framework of risk and risk transfer, since this provides an entirely new historiographical perspective on both the Fires and Swing generally. Finally, this approach is extended to suggest how it may have underpinned competing conceptions of Poor Law provision among the town's elite, post-Swing.

The research presented in this article concerns common rights to cattle grazing on common lands and manorial properties in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia. The findings – obtained by analysing sources from archives and libraries in what is now Ukraine – shed light on the right of peasants and townspeople to graze cattle, along with the circumstances and sources of mass social antagonisms. The rich archival resources permitted a representative group of sources concerning each type of existing conflict to be chosen. The key research problems addressed in this article are the sources for a variety of disputes and their impact on relations between the main social groups and people’s standard of living, the processes of pauperisation and modernisation, and the consequences of abolishing these common rights.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

In October 1994, the Environment Secretary and Agriculture Minister announced their intention to publish, for the first time, a joint White Paper, setting out Government policy for the economic, social and environmental well-being of the English countryside. It stimulated a further flurry of interest in how such policy agenda are drawn up and implemented. Although ostensibly, ministers sought fresh policies under the banner of sustainable development, some commentators discerned an even greater concern as to the growing sense of deprivation felt by the 12 million voters who lived in the countryside. Although there had been much rural debate and research in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Cloke and Little have contended it laboured under two deficiencies. Not only was there minimal Government interest, but it did little more than highlight the inadequacies of a simple positivist approach. This time round, much greater use might be made of a political-economy perspective, that took fuller cognisance of the connections that prevailed between economic change, restructuring of society, and the role of the state.

In the 1980s two vigorous debates commanded the attention of economic and feminist historians alike, and they played a key part in shaping the historiography concerning rural women in Australia. One debate revolved around the use of the nineteenth-century census in determining women's occupations, including those of farming women. The other debate, part of a wider feminist conversation about women's agency, focused on the question of the nature of white women's lives within colonial families and society. Despite the centrality of rural women to these debates, and the role colonial women's histories played in shaping the historiography, these debates did not impact upon the writing of rural history in Australia. This article revisits these debates in the light of new research into the lives of never-married women on Australia's family farms and uses their histories to question the conclusions arrived at by feminist and economic historians. It also questions the continuing invisibility of rural women in histories of rural Australia and hopes to provoke more discussion between rural and feminist historians.