This article draws on a number of documents – mainly rent books, diaries, letters, and contracts – to investigate landlords whose estates came in at the lower end of the ‘Great Landowner’ category; a hitherto neglected area of investigation because most studies like those of David Howell and R. J. Moore-Colyer focus on larger estates. The materials examined allow tentative judgements about a group which has been vilified in the historiography of the subject. The three topics dealt with in the piece – touch on issues which transcend regional/national boundaries and encompass problems of wider economic and social significance, thus contributing to the broader historiography of landlord-tenant relations.

The land question concerned all classes in Ireland in the nineteenth century. A series of grassroots leaders played an important role in local politics that served as a major building block for future generations of politicians and nationalists. Yet the role of these regional personalities has generally been neglected in historiography as attention is paid to a ‘top-down’ approach to the Irish Land War. This article aims to address a lacuna in research by paying attention to one of the more significant regional personalities during the Irish Land War: Matt Harris. It will explore the ideas that he expressed on Land League platforms, pamphlets, newspapers and the Parnell Commission, as he sought a solution to the social malaise that was perpetuated thanks to an imbalance in land legislation that favoured stronger farmers while also giving a voice to the subaltern classes in the west of Ireland.

The archaeology of rural settlements is a comparatively new branch of history. Its genealogy is easy to trace. Spurred on by the growth of economic and social history in the inter-war years, Dutch archaeologists, like A.E. van Giffin, and younger Danish archaeologists, such as Gunther Hatt and Axel Steensburg, undertook large open-area excavations of North Sea Migration period settlements. Van Giffin's excavation of the terp at Ezinge during the ‘thirties is a typical example. Using open-area excavation, a controlled form of the clearance excavation being employed on the large classical sites in Mussolini's Italy, it became feasible to examine the Migration-period architecture (as an architectural historian might) and the evolution of the settlement (as a classical topographer might do it). Neither would have been possible if a site such as Ezinge had been trenched. As far as we can tell today, van Giffin et al. did not intend to rewrite history, so much as to use archaeology to confirm prevailing ethnically-oriented theses about Migration period peoples. In some ways this was also the case when W.G. Hoskins and Maurice Beresford began to undertake small excavations of deserted medieval villages in England in 1947. Both hoped that small excavation trenches might help them to date the desertion of some of these settlements. In practice, of course, what they discovered in the course of nineteen excavations merely proved to be confusing (cf. Hurst, 1971: 83). Hoskins turned to other matters, but Beresford pursued the possibilities of archaeology at Wharram Percy, a fine example of a so-called deserted medieval village.

For rural Americans, the debate over establishing a parcel post evoked all the hopes and anxieties associated with the expansion of mass society at the turn of the century. Parcel post, today an accepted and seemingly inconsequential government service, was originally seen as a linchpin in the emerging industry of mass culture. The media of mass communication advertised products and ran stories acclimating readers to a consumer society, thereby encouraging demand for mass-produced goods that were distributed, finally, by parcel post. Opponents of parcel post foresaw a decline of small towns, a centralization of production and distribution, a disruption of the ‘natural’ relations among labor, retailers, and consumers, and the aggrandizement of urban culture. At the other extreme, proponents claimed that parcel post would increase consumer choice, reduce the cost of living, and bridge the widening chasm between urban and rural life. Thus, the simple act of carrying a parcel from Chicago to a farmer's lane became freighted with a panoply of issues agitating the nation.

The poacher has been closely studied by historians of crime and protest in England. While much has been done to reveal the complex nature of poaching, this work has tended to concentrate on the nineteenth century and been largely concerned with practice. By shifting attention to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and by focusing instead on representation, this article explores the place of the Edwardian poacher in a rapidly expanding cultural landscape. Pointing to an inverse relationship between physical presence and representational weight and throw, the article shows how the idea of the poacher was not just a by-product of Edwardian ruralism, but was integral to a deeply felt ruralist sensibility that strongly informed contemporary debates on the control and use of land and related matters of national identity and wellbeing. In considering how this ostensibly marginal figure became so embedded in the popular imagination, the full extent of the poacher’s cultural usability is revealed. Like ruralism itself, the representational poacher had many facets and served many needs.

Neoliberals are known to oppose agricultural protectionism. In Switzerland, however, a member of the neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society was responsible for pushing forward the highly protectionist agricultural policy of the postwar years. Drawing on newly available archival sources, this article illustrates the endeavours of the director of the Swiss Business Federation Gerhard Winterberger (1922–93) in favour of agricultural protectionism. Winterberger, in his public talks or in his correspondence with Friedrich August von Hayek, selectively used neoliberal theory to justify his commitment to agriculture.

The traditional idea of a landowner is inextricably bound up with concepts of maleness. The most frequently used word for a landowner is simply ‘landlord’, with the corresponding feminine form ‘landlady’ carrying quite different connotations. The law with regard to inheritance and marriage lends weight to this interpretation, since common law, until the mid-nineteenth century, decreed that married women could not own property or make contracts as individuals, in theory leaving only spinsters and widows as potential landowners. Yet scrutiny of manorial, enclosure, tithe and land tax documentation reveals that women commonly held land either as owners or occupiers.

Rural electrification is closely linked one way or another to rural development, and enables the understanding of the complexity of social and economic development paths. The objective of this work is to analyse rural electrification in a European peripherical country like Spain throughout the twentieth century, contributing to the international debate on the issue. The article studies the territorial expansion of electricity in the Spanish countryside, tracing different phases and explaining the delay in the construction of a national network. It also analyses the relationship that arose in the long term between electrification and the evolution of the agricultural sector. The article concludes that, in the Spanish case, rural electrification played a modest role in agricultural change until the 1980s and was, to a great extent, the consequence, rather than the cause, of the modernisation of the sector to these years.

The fighting in France and Belgium in May-June 1940 has generated a large literature. Mostly, however, this has concerned itself with military strategy, the triumph of the German operational methods popularly termed ‘Blitzkrieg’, the British evacuation at Dunkirk and the political consequences of defeat for the French. This article re-evaluates the mobilisation of 1939 and the conduct of combat operations in 1940 from a less conventional perspective: that of the animals in France. It explores what happened to the many domestic pets swept up, or left behind, in the flight of Belgian and French civilians southward to escape the invader; the livestock on the farmland of the Somme, Aisne, Oise and Meuse where the battles raged; and the horses which remained central to the transport of men, munitions and supplies on both the French and German sides. It argues that the recovery of the wartime experiences of the fauna of France should be part of a more holistic understanding of war's impact on the natural world and on all, non-humans as well as humans, who inhabit it.

The rich data provided by the 1851 Census of Religious Worship make clear that very different processes were governing churchgoing rates in rural parts of England compared with the more urban parts. The clear rural-urban differences provide important clues that help to explain the rise and fall of English churchgoing rates over the modern historical period, and are relevant to a major and ongoing sociological dispute. My conclusion is that, in rural areas, the additional ‘supply’ recently introduced by the dissenting denominations had boosted attendance rates. This was largely because distance between home and worship was a key check on regular observance and new chapels tended to reduce this distance. In urban parts of England a very different pattern emerges: the greater the degree of urbanisation, the lower the churchgoing rate, despite the great choice of religious alternatives on offer. These rural-urban differences offer some important observations regarding the sociological theorisation of religion and modernity. In the economic language increasingly employed by sociologists of religion, both ‘supply-side’ and ‘demand-side’ processes were influencing English churchgoing rates. However, the former were much more limited and transient in their effect, being restricted to geographically isolated rural areas, while in the more urban places, where most people lived, and to which many more were migrating, urbanisation was eroding demand as predicted by secularisation theory.

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

In the mainstream literature on the socio-political history of the German countryside in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the south-west areas of partible inheritance are often stereotypically contrasted with the regions of impartible inheritance in the north and north-west. While the latter were dominated by the antagonism between large peasants and tenant-labourers, it is claimed, the far more homogenous village societies in the south-west were primarily marked by conflicts with external powers such as the state and nobility. This dichotomic model, however, fails to account for major differences in political culture within the south-west, which in many cases cannot simply be explained with reference to divergent social structures, such as property distribution, either. In the following article it is argued that specific forms of agricultural market-integration and their effects on rural status groups had a crucial impact on collective solidarities and local cohesion. This hypothesis is empirically tested by comparatively analysing demographic development, access to land and, most extensively, modes of commercialisation in four exemplary regions on the northern upper Rhine. In the last section, these observations are tentatively related to distinctive forms of political mobilisation.

A variety of plants were distributed across Jamaica from the island's botanical gardens during the second half of the nineteenth century. This work became increasingly important over the period dating from 1846 to the end of the century when succeeding superintendents (subsequently directors) eagerly promoted the scheme. Yet, each head differed in their reasons to send out this ‘useful’ flora. In this article I consider the three men in charge of the public gardens from 1846 to 1886 and the context in which they decided that local plant distribution was important to pursue. Diversification of economic crops occurred, despite the plantocracy arguing that sugar and a few other plantation plants were the be all and end all of the Jamaican agricultural economy. By contextualising this activity we can tentatively start to unpick the role of minor officials in colonial life and the development of an aim to enrol the island's petty agriculturalist in particular economies calibrated around ideas of free trade, class and ‘race’.

This paper draws on data collected for the author's doctoral thesis (Maclean, 1997), which examined migration and social change in remote rural areas. The research took place mainly in 1995–6, and consisted of tape-recorded interviews and 18 months' ethnographic fieldwork in a parish in the Scottish Highlands, and the use of data including the Census Small Area Statistics and Register of Sasines. Although informed by the research as a whole, the central focus of this paper is data drawn from twenty interviews with members of fifteen families, most of whom were born in the first three decades of the twentieth century. A further ten people provided supplementary data in interviews in which family migration patterns were not the main focus (see table 1 for details). Places and people involved in the research have been given pseudonyms to protect anonymity, privacy and confidentiality, in accordance with the British Sociological Association's Ethical Guidelines.

This article analyses the creation of unions and the evolution of protests (demonstrations, tractor blockades) instigated by farmers in the province of Burgos, in the interior of northern Spain, during the period following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco known as the Transition (1975–80). The study uses press articles, documentation from the Civil Government and information gathered through personal interviews. The aim of the article is to show that the farmers of the interior of northern Spain – an electorally conservative region – also participated in the citizens’ protests that were the driving force behind the democratisation process in the country during the 1970s.

Ducats were issued for the first time in the second half of the thirteenth century. Although practically invisible in Western Europe nowadays, they are still hoarded and used by the rural population of the Balkans. The wealth stored in them is considerable; its level does not show signs of structural decline yet, even in the age of the almighty euro. The history of the use of ducats in the Balkans can be divided into three distinctive periods. Using a descriptive economic-historical approach, the characteristics of these periods, their main evolutionary aspects and particularities are being observed and explained. An overview of countries issuing ducats in the Balkans is given and some economic comparisons used to illustrate the significance of ducats as an economic phenomenon. Finally, the very important question of the use of ducats in jewelry in the Balkans is considered.

This article explores the intellectual culture of Catholic architectural production in 1950s Ireland through the study of a church-building project in rural West Cork. It analyses the phenomenon of the Irish ‘church-building priest’ in terms of their socio-economic background, fundraising abilities, and position within rural communities – in the context of significant rural emigration and economic stagnation. It also considers the role that the Irish countryside played in conditioning clerical understandings of architectural style and taste, and priests’ political readings of the rural landscape. Furthermore, it explores the phenomenon of Marianism in church design and ornamentation around the time of the international ‘Marian Year’ of 1954, and the political meanings of the rhetoric employed by clerics at church consecration ceremonies. The article concludes with reflections on social and economic aspects of Irish rural life and religious expression in a decade primarily understood as one of cultural insularity and conservative Catholicism.

Within these pages you will find a ‘jovial crew’: rogues and vagabonds, the ‘mad’ and insane, gypsies, peddlers, poets, playwrights, pilgrims, rioters, convicts, constables, thieves, beggars, landed gentlemen, magistrates, and historians. When parliamentarians and projectors set out to proscribe mobility and legislate poverty in early modernity, a list of untrustworthy trades and professions not at all unlike this one frequently found its way into print and the statute book. The punishment for crimes of vagrancy could be severe, but thankfully ‘historians’ were not counted among the undeserving and mobile, nor would you find magistrates and landed gentlemen taken up, imprisoned, and whipped for a crime of movement. However, all three groups may well deserve some of John Locke's brand of draconian ‘improvement’; historians in particular have taken little account of the lived experiences of the mobile poor until relatively recently. Once we finally took a hard look at our inherited, literature-driven typologies of ‘rogues’ and ‘beggars’, they disappeared in ‘a storm of dust and lies.’ However, the literary, visualised vagabond still has much to tell us, and interdisciplinary approaches to vagrancy in the past have emerged as the strongest method yet of reconstructing the character, history, and cultural perception of the mobile poor. These are methods which the articles in this collection use to full effect.

This essay considers whether it is possible for landscape archaeologists, particularly those concerned with prehistory or with periods not significantly text-aided, to go beyond the pursuit of methodological virtuosity and the production of local studies, and make useful contributions to discussions on mainstream social and economic issues in human history. A major problem for landscape archaeologists – and indeed for prehistorians – is that as soon as they stray beyond routine archaeological description and analysis, they face the scepticism of anthropologists, historians and human geographers. I argue that we can learn from scholars from these other disciplines but should not try to ape them. We need to define more clearly our own field of operation. It has become fashionable to consider past landscapes as texts; comparisons between the contexts of ‘messages’ conveyed by documents and by landscapes lead me to suggest that ignorance of the nature of oral tradition and its articulation within material culture is one of the prehistorian's greatest blind spots. In choosing the most useful scale for analysis, the prehistorian should develop the concept of the small community, rather than the ‘site’ or the region, and consider the modification of such a community's ‘mental map’ of the landscape as a critical indicator of social process.