Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.

From the thirteenth until the 18th century, the county of Flanders knew a special citizen status for rural residents. Country dwellers, normally residing under the jurisdiction and fiscality of lordships, could register themselves as external citizens or ‘outburghers’. Outburghership has primarily been researched within the context of state building and urban studies. This contribution prioritizes the perspective of the countryside. Studies on premodern Flanders have shown that the counts and cities tried to undermine the power of local lords by providing as many seigneurial subjects as possible with fiscal and judicial exemptions to the lords’ justice and taxes. The accessibility of outburghership and its varying appeal along time and space has not been adequately researched. This study argues that the heyday of outburghership in Flanders was between 1300 and 1550. After 1600, outburghership endured as defence mechanism against seigneurial lordship until both institutions met their demise in 1795.

This article considers the relationship of two prominent leaders of British women’s temperance, Lady Henry Somerset and Lady Elizabeth Biddulph. They were noteworthy for taking opposing sides when the British Women’s Temperance Association divided on the question of the political reach of its work. Somerset and Biddulph were elite women, daughters of earls and near neighbours around Ledbury, a centre of cider apple and hop cultivation in Herefordshire. Both made their first temperance pledge in the area. We examine their geographical proximity and consider the importance of local agricultural labour and landscapes to their temperance work.

Based on extensive archival research encompassing over eighty rural authorities in Wales, this essay pieces together fragmentary evidence to reveal the main contours of rural responses to infectious outbreaks from the 1870s to the 1918/10 influenza pandemic. At the centre of the essay are those practical, short-term measures that have hitherto been overlooked in the historiography. While infectious outbreaks did have the capacity to extend sanitary initiatives over the medium and long term, looking at how rural authorities reacted to infectious disease helps us better understand how public health practices translated into action at a local level. In doing so, the essay untangles both the nature of rural responses and the challenges confronted by rural sanitary officials when confronted with infectious outbreaks and how they had to adapt public health orthodoxy to different rural environments.

This paper seeks to show that encroachments in the North-east resulted from a range of social and economic drivers. Encroachments were enacted by members of a wide social spectrum, resulting in both top-down and bottom-up manifestations of engrossment of holdings. In this respect, it may be argued, North-east encroachments have a distinctive nature compared to English enclosures. The factors effecting encroachment can be seen to relate to topographic opportunism, demographic fluctuation, and a socio-agricultural environment that was already well-attuned to utilising dynamic settlement fluctuations for social and economic benefits. Only after the enactment of the 1695 Division of the Commonties Act did the socially diverse nature of such encroachment become increasingly monopolised by the landed gentry and began to reflect more closely English enclosure.

Post-enclosure charity lands in the period before the establishment of the charity commission in 1818 pose some fundamental questions. The amount and types of payment that recipients received, how they shifted over the period, and how the spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro-level changes – particularly the improvement in poor labourers’ standards of living that occurred between c.1660 and c.1760 – are all of interest. By focusing on a dataset derived from an account book for a charity in Mere (Wiltshire) between 1656 and 1739, this paper reveals how the parish authorities coped with the developing economic polarities in rural society and made changes over time in the size and significance of the doles made from the funds arising from the charity lands, indicating the inextricably mixed nature of welfare – the balance between the different financial resources available both from formal relief and parish charities – in this period.

This paper examines the presence of Reeves’ pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii) in Britain. It investigates how encounters between British people and Reeves’ pheasant informed their imaginings of the species, from its first introduction into Britain from China in 1831 to 1913 when a serious decline in its numbers began. Drawing on natural history texts, records from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, technical literature on pheasant rearing, and extracts from periodicals, magazines, and generalist encyclopaedias, this paper shows how imagined and physical encounters with Reeves’ pheasant, by naturalists, acclimatisers, pheasant enthusiasts, and sportsmen, informed shifting constructions of the species, which influenced and shaped its presence in Britain.

This paper delves into the dynamics of popular revolt in early modern Castile, taking as a viewpoint a revealing feature of these disturbances, the bell-ringing widely known as rebato, an equivalent to the French tocsin. While alarm bells have long been recognised as a prevalent element of popular revolt in Europe from medieval times, they have received limited specific scholarly attention. This study provides an overview of the historical significance of this distinctive sound and examines its material aspects. Subsequently, the paper investigates several instances of bell-ringing during Castilian riots, as reflected in archival sources, and analyses its meaning both for townspeople and the authorities. In attempting to elucidate the reasons behind the aversion this sound provoked among the privileged classes and the authorities, the study explores the political, ritual, and sonic dimensions of the rebato.

This paper analyses the formation in Italy of a school system focused on the training of technical and managerial personnel in the agricultural sector. Drawing on a rich literature on the relationship between school training, social change, and economic modernisation, this study details an under-researched aspect of the formation of the national state. Italy constitutes an exemplary case study as for the reforming action of public institutions in the field of education as well as the modernising policies that concerned the rural sector of the country before the First World War. Schools of agriculture in Italy became a means of social advancement not only for a wide sector of rural society but also for the children of the artisan and commercial bourgeoisie of small urban centres. This study thereby makes a novel contribution to the ongoing debate on the development of agriculture-related professions in Italy between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of wheat quality in the formation of wheat prices in the early modern period, adopting eighteenth-century northern Italy as a case study. Wheat prices have been widely used by economic historians to calculate living standards, determine the degree of market integration, and date famines. Rarely, however, have economic historians focused on how wheat prices were determined. By looking at the wheat supply chain, we will try to make more visible the extent to which wheat quality was crucial in determining the value of wheat and, as a consequence, the final price of grain.

The article addresses the issue of wealth accumulation by peasant farmers in the post-emancipation era in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia. The Baltic emancipation schemes stand out as the least beneficial for peasants as they set neither time limits nor land price levels, and the state government did not provide any credit to the purchasers of farms. However, in northern Livonia the nominal value of peasant farmers’ wealth grew as much as tenfold from 1850 to 1913. The study reveals that the advantages and disadvantages of high farm purchase prices should be considered in combination with other factors affecting agricultural growth. In the Baltic context, the large size of the farms, land consolidation, well-developed infrastructure, and the commercialisation of production helped the farm owners amass a relatively large amount of wealth within a generation. Technological improvement also contributed to the rise in productivity and wealth.

The Sandringham Estate was purchased in 1862 by the Prince of Wales to be his home away from London. This article uses a variety of sources to chart the changes to the estate as the prince developed his new holding. The acquisition required staff at all levels and in many and varied roles, which gave opportunities to local people and to those who moved in from further away. The countryside changed dramatically too with new plantations of trees and significantly increased rearing of game birds. There were benefits for the local population in having a royal landlord but there was also tension related to the prince’s predilection for blood sports and his level of control. The hitherto nearly invisible lower ranks of staff on this royal estate come to the fore in this article, which is a striking example of ‘history from below’ set immediately beside the royal family.

This article investigates the development of rural migration in northern Sweden (1850–1950). During this period, northern Sweden experienced a slower rate of urbanisation than the rest of the country. This study proposes that decentralised industrialisation (i.e., rural-industrial labour, predominantly in the timber industry) introduced inertia to the urbanisation process by lowering the rate of rural-to-urban migration. Using longitudinal, individual-level data from the county of Västerbotten, the development of migration rates and migrant characteristics is explored via descriptive statistics. The rural population’s development and migration patterns closely correlate to the development of decentralised industrialisation. The results, therefore, indicate that decentralised industrialisation is a viable model for explaining the slow rate of urbanisation in northern Sweden.

This article surveys a range of work on the later medieval English countryside published since 2000, and offers some predictions and suggestions about future research. It shows that the field of ‘rural history’ has rarely been closely defined, and indeed has tended to be treated as a broad church that can accommodate many different kinds of approach, themselves drawing on a variety of disciplinary traditions. The article identifies and discusses recent and current innovation and creativity in research within two such broad approaches, one mainly ‘economic’, the other ‘cultural’. It concludes by arguing for the gains that can be enjoyed through the combination of elements of the two approaches, and especially through a renewed emphasis on the illumination of the general through an intensive focus on the local.

In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the eighteenth century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This article challenges this argument. It discusses the formation of rural social engineering, that is, the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948–60), the argument is that we can understand rural social engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration. As such, rural social engineering constituted a central element in the postcolonial ‘art of the government of man’.

Who chooses new technology? And how? In this article, we explore the diffusion of agricultural science and technology in Galicia (Spain), and the ways in which farmers adopted innovations in the period of 1880–1940 within the Atlantic Iberian agricultural context of small farms. To answer these questions, we adopt a socio-institutional approach and also an environmental one, changes in breeding techniques and the creation of the Galician Blond cow, as well as the widespread use of threshing machines, which were two closely related innovations in the context of mixed farming agriculture. These two examples illustrate the fusion of science-based and practice-based agriculture, and how technology did not threaten community or family equilibrium; instead, it empowered processes that were already operative in affirming small-scale farming.

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.

The gamekeeper played an important role in the development of modern gamebird shooting but has been peripheral in many analyses of the sport, which have tended to focus on the poacher, the landed elite, or the game laws. This study places the gamekeeper in a central position and, for a selection of counties, provides a detailed examination and comparison of changes in gamekeeper numbers between 1851 and 1921. The influence on gamekeeper numbers of population changes, estate area, landowner numbers and poaching prosecutions were also examined. Significant differences were found between the counties in gamekeeper numbers, and the magnitude and timing of changes in these. Average estate area varied greatly with no direct link to the area of the county, or to the number of gamekeepers on an estate. The type of quarry and interest of the landowner were important in determining the number of gamekeepers employed. In some counties, there may have been a link between the level of poaching and gamekeeper numbers, but there were significant differences between the counties. The results indicated a complex, regionally nuanced, picture in which factors such as the location, primary quarry and poaching pressure, as well as the interests of the landowner and the depth of his pockets, determined gamekeeper numbers.

This article examines the various ways new wealth infiltrated the Welsh gentry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the behaviours and actions of new men, together with the processes they followed to assimilate into the world of the old families. This study emphasises a level of openness of landed society to new arrivals able to comport themselves according to the expectations of the existing social elite. It demonstrates that acquiring land and property, which served as a visible display of their wealth, was only one strategy deployed by new wealth to secure gentry status. Other approaches included building country houses, consuming fashionable goods, undertaking public duties, political representation, drawing on culture and living heritage by projecting an image of ancient lineage (Welsh gentry understanding of Welshness was heavily reliant on lineage) through name-changing, adopting coats of arms and family mottos.

The central and associated county or district chambers of agriculture have attracted little attention from historians. Their origins have been attributed to the perceived lack of a national coordinating body for agriculture highlighted by the 1865–7 cattle plague. This article based on the records of the Shropshire Chamber of Agriculture, newspapers and printed histories reconsiders their role. Members were initially drawn from landowning society and larger tenant farmers, although membership widened with the growth of rival organisations. Activities included lectures, talks and debates on agricultural subjects, visits to farms, factories and the county agricultural college and farm institute, dinners and social occasions at which those interested in agriculture could meet. By foregrounding the people and politics of the chambers of agriculture, it is argued they need to be incorporated more fully into the historiography of agricultural and rural politics of Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.